The Early Works of Orestes Brownson: The Transcendentalist Years, 1840-1841

THE EARLY WORKS OF ORESTES A. BROWNSON VOLUME V: THE transcendentalist years, 1840-41

Edited by

Patrick W. Carey

2004

MARQUETTE STUDIES IN THEOLOGY NO. 38 Andrew Tallon, Series Editor

Library of Congress Cataloguing in Publication Data Brownson, Orestes Augustus, 1803-1876. [Selections. 2004] The early works of Orestes A. Brownson: Volume V: The Transcendentalist Years, 1840-41 / edited by Patrick W. Carey. p. cm. — (Marquette studies in theology ; no. 38) Includes indexes. ISBN 0-87462-690-0 (v. 4: pbk. : alk. paper) 1. Philosophy. 2. Theology. I. Carey, Patrick W., 1940- II. Title. III. Marquette studies in theology ; #38. B908 .B612 2000 191—dc21 99-050779

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without prior permission of the publisher, except for quotation of brief passages in scholarly books, articles, and reviews.

Member, THE ASSOCIATION OF AMERICAN UNIVERSITY PRESSES

MARQUETTE UNIVERSITY PRESS MILWAUKEE WISCONSIN USA 2004

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TABLE OF CONTENTS I.

Acknowledgments................................................................iv

II.

Introduction...........................................................................1

III. Works 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9. 10. 11. 12. 13. 14. 15. 16. 17. 18.

Charles Elwood: or, The Infidel Converted, 1840...................46 Introductory Statement, January 1840.............................181 An Oration on American Literature, January 1840............197 The People’s Own Book, January 1840...........................215 An Oration Before the Democracy of Worcester, July 4, 1840...225 Two Articles from the Princeton Review, July 1840............251 The Laboring Classes, July 1840......................................298 The Laboring Classes—Responsibility to Party, October1840...............................................................328 Conversations With a Radical, January & April 1841.......402 Our Future Policy, January 1841.....................................470 To the Editors of the Lowell Offering, April 1841.............505 Social Evils and Their Remedy, July 1841........................509 Emerson’s Essays, July 1841..............................................530 Truth is Not a Lie, July 1841...........................................544 Executive Patronage, July 1841.....................................556 Oration of Orestes A. Brownson, July 5th, 1841.................570 Transient and Permanent in Christianity, October 1841..........580 Bancroft’s History, October 1841......................................612

IV. Index of Biblical References.................................................621 V. Index of Names and Subjects..............................................623

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ACKNOWLEDGMENTS No one edits a series of volumes without the assistance of many hands. I have the pleasure here of acknowledging a few of those who have aided me in this volume, but I leave unmentioned the many authors and scholars whose works have shaped my own understanding of Brownson and American religious and political life. First, I acknowledge the graduate research assistants for whose aid I am deeply grateful. Jeffrey Barbeau spent two years on this and previous volumes while he was my graduate research assistant. He helped format the texts and located a number of quotations. Constance Nielsen was primarily responsible for guiding this volume to its completion. She identified all the biblical texts and a good number of the classical, philosophical and theological citations, proofread the text, and gave sagacious advice on the introduction. Nathan Schmiedicke put together the indexes and helped proofread the galleys. I also want to thank the chairs of my department, Philip Rossi, S.J., and John Laurance, S.J., who have been gracious in assigning these graduate assistants to the project. During the final preparations of this volume, I spent the fall semester of 2002 at the University of Dayton. I would like to thank professor Terrence Tilley, chair of the Department of Religious Studies, and the faculty of the department who invited me as a visiting professor. I enjoyed the department’s hospitality and because of limited teaching responsibilities had the time and the assistance to work on this volume. While writing the introduction, I especially benefited from the research assistance I received from Matthew Shadle, a graduate assistant in the department. Those who have done projects like this know the value of good graduate assistants. For over twenty years I have been collecting sources for these volumes and therefore owe thanks to a number of libraries and their staffs for multiple kindnesses and general helpfulness. I am particularly grateful to the staffs of the Archives of the University of Notre Dame, where the Brownson papers are located; Harvard University; the American Antiquarian Society (Worcester, Mass.), the Boston Public Library, and the New York Historical Society. As ever, I appreciate the good cheer and responsiveness I have always received from Joan Sommers and the Reference and Interlibrary Loan staffs of Memorial Library at Marquette University. Numerous and almost constant requests over the past number of years have been met with iv

Acknowledgments

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competent and generous responses. While at the University of Dayton, moreover, I received generous assistance from William Sees and his staff at the Roesch Library Interlibrary Loan Department. Dr. Andrew Tallon, director of Marquette University Press, has continued to support this project. His associate Joan Skocir once again has provided competent technical assistance in preparing the manuscript for publication. The editorial principles and procedures followed in this volume are the same as those in previous volumes and are outlined in volume one of The Early Works of Orestes A. Brownson,1 which is referred to in the footnotes in this and subsequent volumes as EW.

1

The Universalist Years, 1826-29 (Milwaukee, Wis.: Marquette University Press, 2000), 30-34.

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INTRODUCTION The writings in this volume are from the last two years of Brownson’s identification with Transcendentalism. They continue to reflect his transcendentalist approach to philosophy, religion, literature, politics, and economics from the beginning of the 1840 political campaign for the presidency to his reading of the French socialist and religious humanitarian Pierre Leroux at the end of 1841. By October of 1841, as he told John C. Calhoun,1 he was already contemplating a new system of philosophy that would criticize Victor Cousin, whose eclectic philosophy Brownson had followed for much of the previous decade.2 Brownson’s changing philosophical perspective under the influence of Leroux, however, would not be evident in his essays until the beginning of 1842. During 1840 and 1841 Brownson defined and refined his understanding of Transcendentalism in reaction to the Old School Presbyterians of Princeton and Unitarian Lockeans like Andrews Norton of Harvard, and continued to distinguish his own understanding of the new school of thought from that of others like Ralph Waldo Emerson and Theodore Parker. Throughout the period Brownson oscillated back and forth between two different but complementary emphases in his Transcendentalism. In opposition to the Unitarian Lockeans and Princetonians he stressed the intuitive, subjective and idealist side of his philosophy and theology. In criticizing the Transcendentalism of Emerson and Parker, he focused on reflective reason, the objective, and the social and political dimensions of his idealist philosophy and theology. He associated his own form of social Transcendentalism with the radical hard-money wing of the Democratic party and during the course of the presidential campaign of 1840 he produced his most famous and remarkable essay, “The Laboring Classes,” a transcendentalist document that the Whigs used with great delight to vilify the Democrats as “infidels,” agrarian levelers, and revolutionary promoters of class conflict in society. Brownson spent much of his time in these two years trying to justify his own brand of Transcendentalism and his arguments for an equitable distribution of the joint product of labor and capital in American society. During these last two transcendentalist years Cousin’s 1 Brownson to Calhoun, 13 October 1841, in The Papers of John C. Calhoun, Vol. 15, 1839-1841, edited by Clyde N. Wilson (Columbia, S.C.: University of South Carolina Press, 1983), 790-92. 2 For Brownson’s previous understanding of Cousin’s system see EW, 2:17-20, 22, 30-33, 414-15; 3:7, 9-10, 16-17, 20-22, 79-108; 4:17-22, 153-91. 1

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philosophy, the rights of the laboring classes, the politics of the Democratic party, and the relationship of Christianity to philosophy, politics, and reform were uppermost in his Quarterly. Brownson’s brand of social Transcendentalism is reflected in almost everything he wrote or published in 1840 and 1841, from his half-disguised autobiographical novel Charles Elwood in 1840 to his assessment of Parker’s “Transient and Permanent in Christianity” in October of 1841. What I am calling “social Transcendentalism” was a combination of an idealist world known through intuition with a social world of the concrete and the particular known through the senses and reflective reason. The organic and social world in which he lived was an actualization of the ideal world, intuited prior to experience and the senses, but nonetheless verified or confirmed by the senses and reflective reason. He placed much more importance on the communal, social, and historical than some others within the American Transcendentalist movement. His experience in the workingmen’s movement and his education in the French philosophical and social tradition of Benjamin Constant, the Saint-Simonians, and Victor Cousin gave him an emphasis upon the concrete social circumstances of life that Ralph Waldo Emerson, Amos Bronson Alcott and a few other Transcendentalists did not share. From Constant he learned the value of religious forms and institutions; from the Saint-Simonians he learned the importance and shaping influences of organization and hierarchy upon the “poorer and more numerous classes” of society; from Cousin he learned of an objective impersonal reason as the primitive foundation of all experience and knowledge and the role of induction in psychology. All of these influences modified the subjective dimensions of his Transcendentalism and made him sensitive to social, political, and economic structures in society. Although they were secondary to intuition, the senses and reflective reason played a crucial and necessary role in understanding the phenomenal world, which actualized the world of the transcendental ideals of truth, justice, love, goodness, and beauty. Those ideals were realized concretely in the phenomenal world of religion, society, politics, literature, and economics. There was, in other words, a transcendental commitment to the social and concrete phenomenal world that only a few others in the Transcendental movement possessed. His starting point was the social, not the individual; or rather, the individual as a creation and synthesis of the transcendental and the social, the universal and the particular, the noumenal and the phenomenal, the ideal and the actual.

Introduction

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In the midst of his defense of the new school and his own social Transcendentalism, however, he admitted both at the beginning of 1840 and at the end of 1841 that he was beginning to appreciate a more conservative approach to Christianity than some in the new school. In his January 1840 “Introductory Statement” for the Quarterly, after speaking of the necessity of freedom and free inquiry, he admitted that “as we grow older, as we inquire more earnestly, and with a broader experience, into religious matters, we have a natural tendency to return to the simple faith of our childhood, and we become less and less inclined to depart from commonly received opinions.”3 At the end of his review of Parker’s “Transient,” moreover, he reminded his readers that one should “mistake not innovation for progress, and to bear in mind, that a departure from old beaten tracks is not necessarily to be on the road to truth.”4 Despite these cautions, however, and within the parameters of these years, he produced his most radical piece of social Transcendentalism, “The Laboring Classes” of July 1840. Before examining that essay and the reactions to it, we need to outline his mature definition and defense of Transcendentalism. Brownson had been a participant in the Transcendentalist Club in 1836 and 1837, but, for various reasons, which were discussed in a previous volume,5 he left the group. Nonetheless, he continued to support the new school and various reform movements in his Quarterly, which he saw as an organ for the advancement of Transcendentalist ideas. In the October 1839 issue, though, he announced that because of poor health he was going to cease publishing the Quarterly. Apparently he had second thoughts about doing so because during that same month, when members of the Transcendentalist Club were discussing the establishment of the Dial as a new Transcendentalist journal, Brownson proposed to Amos Bronson Alcott that instead of publishing a new journal the Transcendentalists write for his journal under their own signatures. Alcott took the proposal to Ralph Waldo Emerson and Margaret Fuller, the other prime movers for the Dial, who turned down the offer.6 As Joel Myerson has indicated, Brownson’s Quarterly was the only journal on friendly terms with the Transcendentalists, “but it was guided by an egotistical and 3

“Introductory Statement,” Boston Quarterly Review 3 (January 1840): 4. See also chapter 2 in this volume, p. 183. 4 “The Transient and the Permanent,” Boston Quarterly Review 4 (October 1841): 474. See also chapter 17 in this volume, p. 611. 5 EW, 3:15-25. 6 Thomas Wentworth Higginson, Margaret Fuller Ossoli (Boston: Houghton, Mifflin and Co., 1899), 148.

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self-righteous reformer, and was thus too ‘sectarian and exclusive’ to allow the Transcendentalists, who often disagreed with its editor, a free hand in its pages.”7 Brownson was indeed less than tolerant of dissenting opinions and he could be arrogant in his opposition to them, but he was not alone in that personality defect. Besides the personality issues, there were some fundamental philosophical differences that separated those Transcendentalists from Brownson. His penchant for philosophy over literature, his allegiance “to a party in politics” (as Alcott put it),8 his social as well as political activism, and his previous repeated criticisms of the extreme idealism, pantheism, and subjectivism of Emerson and Alcott in particular precluded the possibility of any joint effort among them. The Dial would be a separate enterprise, primarily devoted to literature; Brownson’s Quarterly was primarily dedicated to philosophy, theology and politics. Brownson failed to bring the Transcendentalists on board his Quarterly. But his attempt to create a joint effort demonstrated again that he still felt himself closer ideologically to the members of the Transcendentalist Club than he did to any other set of intellectuals in the Boston area. His proposal may also have been motivated by the fear of competition, but the Dial (July 1840 to April 1844) never really drew more than about 300 subscribers. In 1840, Brownson continued to attract twice as many subscribers as the Dial. In his January 1840 “Introductory Statement” Brownson tried to define his own brand of Transcendentalism and distinguished himself, as he had in the immediate past, not only from American Lockeans but also from some who belonged to the “new school.” Like other Transcendentalists he contended for the reality of an order of facts supplied by intuition, instinct or inspiration that transcended and conditioned the facts of the empirical order. That contention clearly separated the new school from the Lockeans and other empiricists. But, he also asserted, that some in the new school had a tendency to end their philosophical and religious orientations in what he called an “exclusive mysticism” or in a rigid idealism.9 He distinguished himself from them by naming himself an Eclectic Transcendentalist, meaning by that that he placed an emphasis upon the historical, social, and political that some in the new school did not. The reality of the historical, empirical, and social order of existence was necessary as an outgrowth of the transcendental order of existence. 7

The New England Transcendentalists and the Dial: A History of the Magazine and Its Contributors (Rutherford: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 1980), 35. 8 Ibid., 38. 9 “Introductory Statement,” 11. See also chapter 2 in this volume, p. 189.

Introduction

5

The real, in other words, did not end in the ideal but was realized in the empirical or actual order of existence. Brownson was, therefore, willing to put much more trust in the common consent of the human race over time and to give the presumption of truth to doctrines long held by the human race than he believed some in the new school were willing to admit. He accepted the Bible and common consent because they corresponded to the internal experience of the soul. But, ultimately, it was the internal experience or inspiration that was the bar for judging the truths that came to him from without.10 Brownson’s Charles Elwood was for all intents and purposes a Transcendental tract more than a novel. Octavius Brooks Frothingham, the first historian of American Transcendentalism, quoted a few passages of the text to classify Brownson with “Transcendentalists of the advanced school.”11 Brownson made no pretensions of writing a literary piece and was, as always, more interested in a discussion of ideas than he was in developing scenes and characters. The novel depicted the conversion of an infidel to Christianity, a slightly disguised story of his own intellectual and religious transformation under the guidance of the works of William Ellery Channing, Benjamin Constant, and Victor Cousin. The story is primarily a dialogue between characters who reflect the diversity of religious opinion in early nineteenth century America. The central character, Elwood, represents those unbelievers and skeptics who had intellectual or philosophical difficulties with Christianity and with the various experiential and evidentiary arguments given in favor of Christianity as a revealed religion. The Reverend Smith is a supernaturalist revivalist minister who argues with Elwood using warrants from the Bible. Pastor Wilson presents arguments out of the British evidentiary tradition of apologetics. Howard is a good Christian who invites Elwood into his home, never argues one way or the other with him, nor does he try to convert him; he lives a simple charitable life of service toward others. Howard represents the political and social side of a lived Christianity. Mr. Morton, a cleric, represents the philosophy of Constant and Cousin. Morton tries to show Elwood that divine inspiration, the source of all religion and all thought, is a natural phenomenon inherent in the human constitution. Through the combined influences of Howard and Morton, Elwood is eventually led to accept a Christianity that is in conformity with basic human needs 10

Ibid., 6-7. See also chapter 2 in this volume, p. 185. Transcendentalism in New England: A History (1876; New York: Harper and Brothers, 1959), 130. 11

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and is manifested in striving to implement truth, justice, goodness, and beauty in society. The story is really a justification of the Constant-Cousin approach to religion as a divine inspiration available to all who are attune to the depths of human consciousness, an argument against every other form of Christian apologetic that does not meet the intellectual struggles of the unbelieving class, and an apology for an idealist Christianity that needed to be actualized in social and political life. Brownson began writing this novel in the mid 1830s when he was most focused on the issue of unbelief and the ideas that led him and could lead other skeptics to an acceptance of a supernatural Christianity. He admitted in the first pages of the text that he had somewhat revised his earlier draft, “but I have not been able to make it harmonize with the present temper of my mind.”12 It is not at all clear precisely what he meant. Perhaps he was referring to the fact that unbelief was not the primary concern of his mind in 1840, or perhaps he meant that he was becoming, especially since the financial panic of 1837, increasingly more concerned with the external effects of Christianity upon social arrangements than with the more Romantic, idealist, and subjectivist concerns that were emphasized in Charles Elwood.13 When the Unitarian William Dexter Wilson reviewed Charles Elwood for the Christian Examiner he reminded his readers that Brownson had been brought to Boston by the Unitarians to counter the influence of atheism upon the working classes. In Wilson’s opinion Brownson’s task was specifically to unseat Abner Kneeland, and he had indeed done so.14 But, Wilson believed that only those unbelievers whose infidelity arose from their intellectual difficulties might find Brownson’s book a useful means of accepting a revealed religion. “Charles Elwood is an attempt to present Christianity so that it shall satisfy the philosophic element of our nature. In this consists its peculiar merit, and its distinctive characteristic. Such a book was certainly very much needed.” The book, Wilson suggested, would be 12

Charles Elwood: Or, The Infidel Converted (Boston: Charles C. Little and James Brown, 1840), 4. See also chapter 1 in this volume, p. 6. 13 After reading Pierre Leroux in the fall of 1841, Brownson criticized his novel in “Charles Elwood Reviewed,” Boston Quarterly Review 5 (April 1842): 12983, because it put the origin of religion in human nature, emphasized the impersonality of reason, and divided reason, as had Cousin, into spontaneous and reflective. Those criticisms represented an intellectual transformation that he was undergoing. On these developments, see the Introduction and chapter 4 in EW, 6. 14 “Charles Elwood,” Christian Examiner 28 (May 1840): 180-81.

Introduction

7

beneficial for this very limited class of intellectuals but it would not satisfy the great majority of unbelievers whose difficulties with Christianity were not philosophical. The book would not meet the needs of those persons “who have more affection than thought” and those particular people “would never ask their philosophy to legitimate their instincts and affections, because they have less confidence in their philosophy than they have in those affections and instincts, which it is called upon to legitimate.”15 That class of persons would wait to see if their deductions agreed with their instincts. Edgar Allan Poe agreed with Wilson in his estimate of Charles Elwood. For Poe Brownson’s reasoning was logical and comprehensive, but “however well a man may reason on the great topics of God and immortality, he will be forced to admit tacitly in the end, that God and immortality are things to be felt, rather than demonstrated.”16 Poe and Wilson pinpointed what some Transcendentalists found disagreeable in Brownson’s approach: his propensity to philosophical justification of basic intuitions. Evangelical Protestants, too, reviewed Charles Elwood. Francis Wayland, president of Brown University, critiqued the book from the perspective of his own Baptist background.17 He found Brownson’s notion of conversion to be novel indeed. People like Brownson, he asserted, were using traditional Christian language like conversion, regeneration, religious experience, and holiness in strange new ways that had nothing to do with the New Testament understanding of those terms. Elwood’s so-called conversion was his recognition that he had never really been an infidel. His conversion was simply an acknowledgment that he had been an anonymous Christian all along before being awakened to the depths of Christian life that was inherent in his own soul. According to Wayland, the novel ought to have been entitled “Charles Elwood, or Christianity Converted.”18 Wayland also criticized Brownson’s prejudiced and untrue view of New England clergy as revivalistic despots. Most of Wayland’s review, however, focused upon Brownson’s false characterization of the injustices and inequalities in American social and economic life. He libeled American society, as he had American clergymen, when he bitterly criticized the inequalities of wealth. His views reflected the radical French socialist critiques of society. They were anti-American be15

Ibid., 197-98. “A Chapter on Autography,” Graham’s Magazine 19 (November 1841): 230. 17 “Charles Elwood,” Christian Review 5 (September 1840): 419-42. 18 Ibid., 423. 16

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cause they did not focus on the republican principle that “every individual is a distinct and proper man,” endowed by the Creator with “powers necessary for self-government and self-improvement.” The American republican view meant that “society must not interfere with him in the just exercise of these powers.” Instead, Brownson made “society the parent, and he would have it hold precisely the same relation to the people as the despot holds.”19 Behind Wayland’s critique was an Evangelical and republican individualism that contrasted sharply with Brownson’s socialist views. Brownson’s characterization of the Presbyterian pastor Smith as a fanatical revivalist preacher drew a response from his former Presbyterian pastor Reuben Smith who thought that the unfavorable character was a direct reference to himself.20 If not, he wanted Brownson to acknowledge that the character was fictional. Brownson responded immediately saying that the events, persons and whole machinery of Charles Elwood was fictitious and that the Presbyterian pastor did not refer to Smith. Brownson then went on to record his “pleasant recollections” of his association with Smith, stating that Smith had left a “mark on my brain.” He admitted that he had departed from the faith Smith had delivered to him but for “some years my mind has been longing to my early faith, and I regard myself now as a believer in all the great actions contended for by the evangelical church, as I have been able to understand them.” He acknowledged, though, that he adopted “different words” to interpret Christianity but “if you and I should meet we would find ourselves by no means so far apart as you imagine.”21 Smith was happy with the clarification and had the hope that Brownson would eventually move in the “entirely right” direction. Brownson’s current philosophical and theological leaning was not in that direction. The long letter of response to Brownson attempted to recall Brownson to his early faith: “Go back, sir, to the days of your childhood.”22 Brownson, however, was not ready to abandon his transcendentalist theology. 19

Ibid., 435. Reuben Smith to Brownson, 8 August 1841, in the Archives of the University of Notre Dame, and on roll # 1 of the microfilm edition of the Brownson Papers. See also Henry F. Brownson, Orestes A. Brownson’s Early Life (Detroit: H. F. Brownson, 1898), 416-17. 21 Brownson to Reuben Smith, 12 August 1841. Letter in Simon Gratz Autograph Collection, Case 9, Box 4, of the Historical Society of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia. 22 Smith to Brownson, 22 August 1841, in the Archives of the University of Notre Dame, and on roll # 1 of the microfilm edition of the Brownson Papers. See also Henry F. Brownson, Early Life, 417-20. 20

Introduction

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The most thorough statement of Brownson’s understanding and defense of American Transcendentalism came in his review of Andrews Norton’s republication of Two Articles from the Princeton Review.23 Norton republished the two articles to add the Princeton artillery to his own battle against Boston’s “Latest Form of Infidelity.”24 The Unitarian Norton and the Old School Presbyterian Princetonians, though miles apart on basic theological issues, as William R. Hutchison has shown, were philosophical compatriots in their “common supernaturalist emphasis, their reliance upon Locke and the Scottish philosophers, and their partial concurrence on the faults of New England Calvinism.”25 They were certainly united in what they opposed. The Princetonians argued that after Jonathan Edwards real problems developed in New England’s New Divinity theology and what was needed was a native philosophical genius who could rise up within that tradition to point out its weaknesses and guide it in a new direction. Instead, Transcendentalism—borrowing from the German metaphysics of Kant, Fichte, Schelling, and Hegel via the French school of Cousin—rose up to rectify that theology. The idealist and pantheistic philosophical tradition, inherent in American Transcendentalism, subordinated religion to philosophy and gave the traditional Christian language of Trinity, Incarnation, Redemption and revelation a distorted meaning. Reason, apotheosized, rather than the Bible became the new rule of faith and action. Compared with the “newest theology from Germany,” American Unitarianism was “evangelical.”26 The new German philosophy, conveyed to Americans through the English translations of Cousin’s French, was a novel form of Christian Gnosticism or Oriental mysticism. The new philosophy reeked 23 Andrews Norton, ed., Two Articles from the “Princeton Review,” Concerning the Transcendental Philosophy of the Germans, and of Cousin, and Its Influence on Opinion in this Country (Cambridge: John Owen, 1840). Norton republished the following: [J. W. Alexander, A. B. Dod, Charles Hodge], “Transcendentalism,” Biblical Repertory and Princeton Review 11 (January 1839): 37-101; and [Charles Hodge] “The Latest Form of Infidelity,” Biblical Repertory and Princeton Review 12 (January 1840): 31-71. Although the Princetonians were critical of Norton’s theology, they shared some of his same reactions to the new school of thought that was emerging in Boston. Norton’s republication eliminated or excised some of the Princetonians’ more critical assessments of his own work. 24 For Brownson’s earlier controversies with Norton on the new school in Boston, see EW, 3:13-15; 4:12-17, 192-215. 25 The Transcendentalist Ministers: Church Reform in the New England Renaissance (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1959), 86 n.76. 26 Norton, Two Articles, 49.

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of pantheism. Emerson’s “Divinity School Address,” filled with Cousin’s mock-German metaphysics, “nonsense and impiety,” was the “first fruits of transcendentalism in our country.”27 In the United States the real danger was for young people in colleges who would be exposed to the German impiety through the English translations of Cousin’s work. The peril was multiplied because the young would be attracted to the “charm of novelty” and the parody of Christian language and doctrines.28 The system was seductive, too, because it reinterpreted the doctrine of the Incarnation as the deification of man and reason, robbing the Bible and the Christian tradition of any objective value.29 Such a philosophy was as alluring as Romanism for the vast majority because it had a “certain resemblance to the truth.”30 But in reality it was only the “latest form of infidelity.” It knows no intelligent or conscious God but man; it admits no incarnation, but the eternal incarnation of the universal spirit in the human race; the personality of men ceases with their present existence; they are but momentary manifestations of the infinite and unending; there is neither sin nor holiness; neither heaven nor hell.31 In the July issue of the Quarterly, the same issue in which he published his essay on the “Laboring Classes,” Brownson criticized Norton’s and the Princetonians’ views of Transcendentalism and tried to define the term and the two schools of Transcendentalism in the United States.32 First of all, he argued, American Transcendentalism was not foreign in origin; it had its own native sources that it found confirmed in some German, French and British philosophers. Second, Norton and the Princetonians had lumped all Transcendentalists together and did not properly distinguish between the French, German, and American varieties. The Germans differed from the French, and the Americans differed among themselves, depending on whether they agreed with the French or the German philosophies.33 As a term Transcendentalism applied to persons who differed greatly on philosophical, theological, political, and social thought. 27

Ibid., 69. Ibid., 64. 29 Ibid., 90. 30 Ibid., 92. 31 Ibid., 91. 32 “Two Articles from the Princeton Review,” Boston Quarterly Review 3 (July 1840): 265-323. See also chapter 6 in this volume. 33 On the two different American schools of Transcendentalism, as Brownson defined them, see EW, 3:14-25; 4:2-27. 28

Introduction

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Third, Brownson admitted that the term “Transcendentalism” was slippery, but he tried to define the common perspectives that united those in the new school of thought. The “real aim” of American Transcendentalism, he maintained, was “to ascertain a solid ground for faith in the reality of the spiritual world.”34 Transcendentalists agreed on a number of other issues. They all opposed, for example, Lockean empiricism and the evidentiary approach to Christianity. They agreed that the fundamental question for them was one of knowledge: what were the grounds and conditions of knowledge? An answer to that question, Transcendentalists believed, would provide a foundation for philosophy, theology, morality and politics. The empirical approach to knowledge and the evidentiary approach to Christianity made knowledge and religion depend upon the senses. If that were true, the Transcendentalists contended, human beings could have “no idea of anything which transcends” the senses. In opposition to this Lockean approach, the Transcendentalists re-examined the mind and human consciousness to discover there a power of intuition that recognized spiritual objects. They had discovered that human beings had a “direct and immediate knowledge” of God and that intuitive awareness provided grounds for revelation and a knowledge of Christianity.35 This intuitive, non-reflective, power of the mind conditioned all forms of knowledge, not just knowledge of spiritual realities. For Brownson the Transcendentalist emphasis on knowing provided a solid foundation for a new spiritual philosophy and for demonstrating the relationship between knowing and believing. Religious knowledge had its own certainty. With respect to truths of Christian revelation the Transcendentalist approach meant that though Transcendentalists continued to acknowledge “Jesus as the one who was divinely commissioned to reveal these truths, they would claim for themselves now, in the actual state of humanity, the ability to perceive them and to know immediately, by intuition, by a mere looking upon them that they are truths.”36 This did not mean that Transcendentalists had no place for revelation, Christ, or Christianity. They believed, Brownson continued, in the supernatural origin of revelation and Christ, but they did not appeal to the Bible, to Jesus, or to the miracles as external evidence to confirm their faith. Human beings possessed an inner power or light to see and understand the word of God in the Bible, in Jesus, 34 “Two Articles from the Princeton Review,” Ibid., 272. See also chapter 6 in this volume, p. 257. 35 Ibid., 275. See also chapter 6 in this volume, p. 259. 36 Ibid., 278. See also chapter 6 in this volume, p. 261.

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and in miracles. The truths of the Christian tradition need not be taken on the external authority of a teacher or external evidence because human beings had a direct perception of the truth. They knew the truth, in other words, independent of a teacher. This Transcendental approach was democratic to the core—that is, it was available to all and was not dependent upon intermediaries or external authorities. It placed the truths of Christianity within the reach of all. Individual Christians did not need the assistance of the learned elite, for example, to read the Bible. Brownson went on to defend the Transcendentalist approach by defending Cousin’s philosophy of knowledge, which had been particularly under attack in the two Princeton Review articles. All human beings, Cousin argued, possessed both a spontaneous or impersonal reason and a reflective reason. Reflective reason relied on the senses and upon what spontaneous reason revealed to human consciousness. But, reflective reason had not the capacity of itself to discover spiritual things because it depended upon the senses. Spontaneous reason was an inspiration within human consciousness—in fact, it was the voice of God in all human beings. That such an inner voice or divine light existed within all human beings prior to reflection, Brownson argued, was consistent with the Christian tradition. John’s Gospel proclaimed that there was a “true light, which enlightenth every man who cometh into the world” (1:9). Paul recorded that the “manifestation of the Spirit is given unto all men to profit withal” (l Cor 12:7). What Cousin had argued for differed only slightly from what Jonathan Edwards had spoken of in his sermon on the “Divine Light.” Brownson, of course, completely discounted the significance Edwards had placed upon regeneration as the source of the divine light. For Brownson all human beings had the spiritual light that allowed them to receive, understand, and appreciate God and the spiritual world. Brownson accepted the name Transcendentalism, although it was not the name that he approved. He considered himself a Transcendentalist, however, only if that term meant that he recognized a capacity “of knowing truth intuitively, or of attaining to a scientific knowledge of an order of existence transcending the reach of the senses, and of which we can have no sensible experience.” But he was not a Transcendentalist if that term meant “that feeling is to be placed above reason, dreaming above reflection, and instinctive intimation above scientific exposition”—in a word, when it meant “the substitution of a lawless fancy for an enlightened understanding.”37 37

Ibid., 322-23. See also chapter 6 in this volume, p. 297.

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To the end of 1841 Brownson continued to side with the Transcendentalists on the fundamental issues, even though he clearly distinguished himself from those “dreamy” ones whom he thought placed an excessive amount of reliance on the self, the soul, and the subjective intuitions of the divine. He placed primacy on what Cousin called “impersonal reason,” but he never identified that impersonal reason with the will and with the subject. Impersonal or spontaneous reason was an objective force outside the subject that provided the foundation for his intuitive approach to knowledge. Using Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s language, he insisted on the primacy of “reason,” but he also acknowledged, more than he thought Emerson and Alcott did, the necessity of “understanding.” In his views of religion in general and Christianity in particular, moreover, although he placed primacy on the universal and the permanent, he insisted on the necessity of the forms of religion and on the role of history in the development of the Christian tradition. Here, too, he believed he had separated himself from Emerson, Alcott, and Theodore Parker. In October of 1841, Brownson reviewed Parker’s published sermon, “The Transient and the Permanent in Christianity,”38 a text that was condemned a number of times before Brownson’s review. Evangelical Christians damned it as infidel and heretical and some Unitarians were disturbed by its negative tone. Ezra Stiles Gannett, William Ellery Channing’s associate pastor, thought the sermon somewhat heretical and that it came close to annihilating the permanent along with the transient in Christianity.39 Parker took his title from David F. Strauss whose critical and idealist or transcendentalist view of Christianity Parker shared. For the most part Brownson agreed with Parker’s idealist and transcendentalist theology. Brownson and George Ripley in fact had anticipated much of the sermon in 1834 38 A recent edition of Parker’s sermon can be found in Robert E. Collins, Theodore Parker: American Transcendentalist. A Critical Essay and a Collection of his Writings (Metuchen, N.J.: The Scarecrow Press, 1973), 77-102. For Brownson’s review, see “Transient and Permanent in Christianity” and chapter 17 in this volume. For an insightful interpretation of Parker’s sermon, one that does not emphasize as much as I do the idealist element, see Richard A. Grusin, Transcendentalist Hermeneutics: Institutional Authority and the Higher Criticism of the Bible (Durham: Duke University Press, 1991), 124-30. 39 On the opposition to the sermon, see Hutchison, The Transcendentalist Ministers, 109-15; see also John White Chadwick, Theodore Parker: Preacher and Reformer (Boston: Houghton, Mifflin, and Company, 1900), 97-103; Henry Steele Commager, Theodore Parker (Boston: Little, Brown, and Company, 1936), 74-77; Grusin, Transcendentalist Hermeneutics, 123; William Channing Gannett, Ezra Stiles Gannett: Unitarian Minister in Boston, 1824-1871 (Boston: Roberts Brothers, 1875), 219-20.

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when Brownson reviewed Benjamin Constant’s De la religion and Ripley preached his famous sermon “Jesus Christ, the Same Yesterday, Today, and Forever” for the first time.40 What was new in Parker’s sermon was not so much the content as a critical temper that upset some Unitarians, Brownson among them. Parker’s sermon focused, as the title suggests, on the truths and values that were eternal and unchanging in Christianity and on the forms that were flexible and passing. His idealist theology distinguished “real Christianity,” which was the permanent element of all pure or absolute religion and which “exists eternal in the constitution of the soul and the mind of God,”41 from “actual Christianity,” which contained both the transient and the permanent elements of religion.42 The word of truth, eternally in the mind of God, was unchangeable. Almost everything else in “actual Christianity” was transitory: human notions of that word, preaching and teaching, doctrines, popular theology, forms of worship, the Bible, and even the nature and authority of Christ. In fact, “real Christianity” rested on the eternal word of God, not on the “personal authority of Jesus.”43 Even Jesus’ words and message had been distorted in the Bible and the Christian tradition had been compromised by accretions from Judaism, heathenism, and the caprice of the philosophers. If it could be proved, Parker wrote in a sentence that disturbed many, “that Jesus of Nazareth had never lived, still Christianity would stand firm, and fear no evil.”44 It was the “heathen view” that made Jesus “a God in an exclusive sense” and such a view destroyed his humanity, making his death a mere “illusion” and his resurrection “but a show.”45 One could distinguish between the permanent and the transient in Christianity “by the oracle God places in the breast.”46 “Real Christianity” existed in the heart, and provided the ultimate criteria for judging Christian history, the Bible, and tradition. Christianity was true not because of any external authority (Bible, tradition, or Jesus) but because of the indwelling of the word of God in the heart. In effect, Parker was asserting in this sermon that one could subject “actual Christianity” to the most rigorous historical criticism and yet preserve its eternal truth because in fact “real Christianity” was im40

On Brownson’s review and Ripley’s sermon, see EW, 2:26-27, 361-73. Collins, Theodore Parker, 79, 95. 42 Ibid., 80. 43 Ibid., 88. 44 Ibid., 90. 45 Ibid., 93. 46 Ibid., 91. 41

Introduction

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pervious to rational criticism. Brownson gave Parker’s sermon a generally positive review. Parker was trying to defend an eternal Christianity against the deists and other scoffers who denied all revealed religion. Like Parker, Brownson viewed Christianity as an eternal idea (or word) in the mind of God, having no permanent and stable historical manifestations. The idea of Christianity was singular and permanent; only the manifestations were diverse and transitory. They both agreed, moreover, that the divine, being permanent and universal, was never perfectly comprehended by the human faculties, which were transient, nor perfectly realized in the concrete historical religious forms. Christian theological doctrines, therefore, were “necessarily evanescent.”47 Human beings, however, had an immediate grasp of the divine; that intuitive awareness of the divine, however, Brownson insisted, was not to be designated a religious sentiment, which was human and therefore ephemeral, but a divine light, an objective revelation from outside the self. The inshinning of this divine light provided the interior foundation for receiving and understanding a divine revelation from the Bible. The Bible did not have plenary inspiration, was not infallible, and by itself was insufficient to communicate the divine word; nonetheless, it was inspired (but no more than many other scriptures) and because its infusion of light was from a divine source foreign to the self, it was profitable for the improvement of the human soul. “By the interior inspiration, we detect that of the written word, and by that of the written word, we in part, determine and limit the interior inspiration.” The Bible needed to be received and interpreted, and if it were inspired it needed to be received and interpreted by a self equally inspired. Only the spiritual could know the spiritual. In Brownson’s words, “in the correspondence of the two, in their united testimony, which is the testimony of two independent witnesses, we have our highest degree of certainty.”48 In their understanding of the person, character, and authority of Christ, moreover, Brownson and Parker shared similar views. An eternal Christianity, in Parker’s view, did not need Christ, as it did not need a Bible. Brownson agreed: “Christianity is older than the cradle of Bethlehem.”49 Such a view could, Brownson argued, be given an orthodox interpretation and need not show any disrespect for the 47 See Brownson’s “Transient and Permanent,” 443. See also chapter 17 in this volume, p. 585. 48 Ibid., 458. See also chapter 17 in this volume, p. 599. 49 Ibid., 444. See also chapter 17 in this volume, p. 587.

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traditional language of the Bible and the church with respect to the Christ. Christians held Jesus to be the mediator between God and man, and, as such, he was the redeemer and savior of the world. The socalled Unitarian “heresy” with respect to Jesus was in “taking Jesus, in his character of a man to be the Redeemer and Savior of the world.” In his humanity, Brownson and Parker held, Jesus could not be considered the savior. It was only the divinity within the humanity of Christ that saved the world. Only when Jesus was considered as the mediator between God and man, as Christians had always believed, could Jesus be considered a savior—because only God saves. God, by virtue of his connection with humanity, was savior. There was no reason on this score, Brownson maintained, to be upset with Parker. Parker was articulating only what the Christian tradition had always maintained with respect to salvation. This union of the divine and the human in Jesus was true, as the Bible held, even though it manifested only what the entire human race was capable of achieving. Jesus was thus a “type of union, which exists between the two natures everywhere.” Human beings could all be sons of God, as Jesus was, and thus be the means of communicating salvation to the world. The traditional Christian language about Jesus, Brownson believed, needed to be reinterpreted and that was what Parker was doing in the sermon. Therefore Parker was not heretical “as far as he goes.”50 Where Brownson disagreed most with Parker was in his use of disrespectful language to speak of both the Bible and the Christ. Parker’s hypercritical attitude toward traditional Christian language on the inspiration and authority of the Bible, and his references to Jesus as that “Hebrew youth” or that “Galilean peasant” violated the Christian respect for Jesus as savior, a language that was itself consecrated by the ages and prayers of the people. “We cannot then approve of the manner in which Parker has spoken of Jesus.” His name was sacred and operated as a “NUMEN” within the Christian community. Brownson attributed Parker’s critical attitude and imprudent language to youthful (Parker was thirty-one years of age at the time) indiscretions. Brownson, however, was clearly uneasy with more than Parker’s disrespectful use of language. For Brownson traditional Christian language of Trinity, mediatorship, and redemption, consecrated by the ages, needed to be reinterpreted, not simply discarded, as he intimated Parker was doing. There was, in other words, something more permanent in language itself than a culturally or histori50

Ibid., 466. See also chapter 17 in this volume, p. 605.

Introduction

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cally conditioned meaning. But at this pointing in his Transcendentalist career Brownson could not finger exactly what it was that disturbed him about Parker’s iconoclastic use of language. He also asserted that he did not find in Parker’s sermon the “distinct recognition of certain views of Christian truth, which we hold to be essential,” but he did not specify what he meant.51 By the end of 1842, he would become much more critical of Parker’s and his own idealist theology. In 1841, however, he supported Parker because he believed that free inquiry, free speech, and free speculation, even if radical, were necessary to stimulate thought within the community. The social, rather than the subjectivist and individualist, side of Brownson’s Transcendentalism came out in his approach to literature. In a lecture before graduating seniors at Brown University and in a review of Emerson’s Essays (1841),52 Brownson focused more upon the social origins and effects of literature than he had in his earlier period.53 To the students at Brown he spoke on the emergence of a new American literature, a theme that was getting wide circulation particularly after Emerson’s address on “The American Scholar” (1837). He argued in obvious contrast to Emerson’s view that “men, who create a national literature, must be filled with the spirit of their nation, be the impersonation of its wishes, hopes, fears, sentiments.”54 Literature should reflect not just the genius of an individual author, but the characteristic spirit of an age and a nation. An American literature must be democratic—speaking to and for the people. That author served humanity best who could pour out his passion and his insight while simultaneously reflecting the spirit of the age and the society in which the author lived and moved and had his being. The creation of good literature, in other words was a social, not just an individual enterprise. The purpose of such a literature, moreover, was not just to uplift the individual reader but to raise up the masses and contribute to the growth and development of the entire human race. Good literature arose in times of social ferment and change, he 51

Ibid., 471, 472. See also chapter 17 in this volume, p. 610. An Oration, delivered before the United Brothers Society of Brown University, at Providence, R.I., September 3, 1839 (Cambridge: Metcalf, Torry and Ballou, 1839); see also “An Oration on American Literature,” Boston Quarterly Review 3 (January 1840): 57-79, and chapter 3 in this volume; “Emerson’s Essays,” Boston Quarterly Review 4 (July, 1841): 291-308, and chapter 13 in this volume. 53 I have already outlined in EW, 4:39-46, Brownson’s Jacksonian and Transcendentalist approach to literature. Here I focus solely on his views of the social dimensions of literature. 54 “An Oration on American Literature,” 65. See also chapter 3 in this volume, p. 202. 52

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continued, and the artist needed to address the major struggle of the times. In the United States that contest was between MAN and MONEY, between the laboring masses and the privileged capitalists. That was the great battle in which the democratic masses were searching for the transcendental values of justice, peace, truth, love, goodness, and beauty. A literature that attended to these issues would be a truly American literature, expressing simultaneously the times and the transcendentals. Such a literature would reveal and simultaneously regenerate (by revealing) the national spirit. Brownson also applied his social transcendentalism to Emerson’s Essays. The essays in that collection clearly met in part Brownson’s transcendental criteria for good American literature because they reflected Emerson’s social situation as a former clergyman, one dissatisfied with the spiritual famine in Unitarianism and the Puritan-Calvinist culture of New England. Essays, moreover, revealed a much larger movement in American society, a true search for that spiritual dimension of life that transcended the phenomenal order of existence and the misguided cultural preoccupation with getting rich quick. For Brownson Essays was a requiem for Unitarianism. It represented a transition to something new and more spiritual; it was the movement “of the Unitarian mind towards a higher, a broader, a more truly religious faith and life.”55 Although Essays met Brownson’s transcendental criterion, they did not meet his social criteria for good literature and that was so because of the philosophical idealism which was behind most of the essays. Emerson was so preoccupied with an immediate intuitive discovery of the noumenal world that he had no place for the phenomenal. He saw everything in terms of transcendental unity and identity, and even brought the phenomenal world of the particular and the diverse into a unity that destroyed their particularity. This metaphysical idealist presupposition behind his work had the benefit of focusing on the spiritual reality of the world beyond the senses, but it so united the material in the spiritual that it destroyed the distinction between the two worlds. Emerson’s brand of idealism tended to pantheism, and thus to a lack of concern for the world of the senses. Because of this Essays failed to examine the social and concrete order of human existence and to demonstrate the practical bearing of the transcendental world on everyday life and thought. Essays, furthermore, neglected to deal with the role of society and the state. Artists could not avoid these issues, Brownson asserted, because human be55

“Emerson’s Essays,” 297. See also chapter 13 in this volume, p. 534.

Introduction

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ings were perfected in society, and society was perfected by government. Brownson attributed Emerson’s neglect of society and political science to his belief that those phenomenal realities were less than real. The real was the noumenal. The phenomenal was only a pointer to the noumenal. Emerson had his priorities right, but his understanding of what was real in life was illusory if it did not focus on the ideal present in the actual, in the historical, in the concrete, and in the social circumstances in which human beings lived. Brownson’s review showed clearly where he separated himself philosophically from Emerson’s idealism and what he called in another essay “exclusive spiritualism.”56 What he did not notice was that even Emerson, particularly in the essay “Circles,” was already moving away from the idealism of his earlier days.57 During the presidential campaign of 1840 Brownson combined his Transcendentalism and his philosophical and theological idealism with some radical proposals for social reform. Since the financial panic of 1837 he had become more and more extreme and even apocalyptic on the debilitating effects of the long economic depression on the working class. Although as steward of the Chelsea Marine Hospital he was himself removed from the more crushing financial effects of the depression, he had always identified himself with the “poorer and most numerous classes” of society. The presidential campaign gave him numerous occasions to vent his frustrations. In December of 1839 the Whigs chose General William Henry Harrison, the war hero of Tippecanoe, and John Tyler to run for the presidency and vice presidency against the Democratic incumbent Martin Van Buren. “Tippecanoe and Tyler, Too,” the Whig politicians proclaimed. The race for the presidency was one of the most memorable in American history. It brought out the largest percentage (80%) of the electorate up to 1840, a trend of popular participation in presidential elections that would continue for the remainder of the nineteenth century. In the choice of an old war hero, the Whigs had imitated the Democrats who had put up General Jackson in 1828. The imitation, however, went much further than the selection 56 “Social Evils and Their Remedy,” Boston Quarterly Review 4 (July 1841): 275. See also chapter 12 in this volume, p. 516. 57 On Emerson’s gradual transformation, see Stephen Whicher, Freedom and Fate: An Inner Life of Ralph Waldo Emerson (1953; New York: A. S. Barnes, 1961), 103. On the nature of Emerson’s changes and his attention to the social after 1841, see also the introduction to The Collected Works of Ralph Waldo Emerson, ed. Alfred R. Ferguson et al., 5 vols. (Cambridge, Massachusetts: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1971-1994), 1:xxv-xxvi.

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of a candidate. The Whigs, the moneyed class, in Brownson’s view, ran a popular campaign, appealing to the common people, as had the Democrats during Jackson’s runs for the presidency. The Whig campaign identified Harrison with “log cabins” and “hard cider,” with heroism and leadership in war, and with common honesty and simplicity. The Whigs identified themselves as the real democrats in American society, those who favored the common and working class people. The Whigs presented Van Buren as a despotic elitist whose legislative and administrative measures had brought ruin to the economy. During political rallies the Whigs taught the crowds to sing the tunes the politicians had created: “Harrison and Prosperity or Van Buren and Ruin,” “Down with Martin Van Ruin,” “Van, Van, Van—Van’s a Used Up Man,” Farewell, dear Van, You’re not our man; To guide the ship We’ll try old Tip.

These and other slogans tipped the tide for “Old Tip.” The Whigs had learned how to appeal to the electorate. Jingles abounded, though, on both sides of the political divide. The race for the presidency appealed to the common man and added to the common language. A Philadelphia distiller, E. G. Booz, sold whiskey in log cabin bottles to promote “Old Tip” and ever since “booze” has entered American slang for whiskey itself. Not to be outdone in adding to the American lexicon, the Democrats produced “Old Kinderhook” (O.K.) to describe Van Buren. “Down with the Whigs, boys, O.K.,” the Democrats shouted. 58 Historians from Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr. onwards have interpreted the Whig campaign as one of the first of the many modern campaigns without a thorough discussion of real issues.59 It was a campaign of images created by competing newspapers and by sloganeering political pundits. There is much truth in that characterization, but, as Michael F. Holt and others have argued, there were 58 For the slogans listed in the text and for the information on Booz and O.K., I am indebted to Michael F. Holt, The Rise and Fall of the American Whig Party: Jacksonian Politics and the Onset of the Civil War (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999), 107, 109, 111. 59 See, e.g., Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr., et al. ed., History of American Presidential Elections 1789-1968, 4 vols. (New York: Chelsea House Publishers, 1971), 1:643-90. See also Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr., The Age of Jackson (Boston: Little, Brown and Company, 1945), 290-91.

Introduction

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substantive issues in the Whig campaign, particularly the “restoration of prosperity and the salvation of republicanism itself.”60 The economy was still in a depressed state and the Whigs believed they had the best chance of winning the election. They projected the issue even in their slogans. Brownson, the Unitarian minister, editor, political appointee, hard-money Democrat, Transcendentalist, and friend of the working men’s movement stumped and wrote for the Democratic campaign, trying to paint the Whigs into a corner by identifying their principles and practices with that of the privileged and wealthy classes of society. Thomas Dorr, the future rebel of Rhode Island fame, invited Brownson to Providence to lecture during the presidential campaign. He also campaigned in various other places in and around Boston throughout 1839 and 1840. Wherever he went he carried the same constant refrain. The great struggle of the day, he told students of Brown University in September of 1839, was “between the accumulator of wealth and the simple laborer who actually produces it; briefly, a struggle between MAN and MONEY.”61 In speech after speech and essay after essay he identified the Whigs with property, the Democrats with humanity; the Whigs with limited suffrage, the Democrats with universal suffrage; the Whigs with the capitalist class, the Democrats with the working class.62 For Brownson, the Whigs of 1840 threatened both democracy and Christianity. What alarmed him most and what was particularly pernicious was the Whigs’ attempts to identify their own capitalist class with democracy. Should the Whigs win the election, he worried, the privileged orders of society would gain control over American democracy, identifying their interests and that of the market place with the interests of the whole people. He feared what a later generation called the “Market Revolution.”63 The election of 1840, there60

The Rise and Fall of the American Whig Party, 105. “An Oration on American Literature,” 74. See also chapter 3 in this volume, p. 210. 62 See, for example, “The Whig Answer,” Boston Quarterly Review 3 (April 1840): 238-58. 63 Charles Sellers, The Market Revolution: Jacksonian America, 1815-1846 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1991). Sellers argued, p. 363, among other things, that the political battles surrounding the Bank War, culminating in the election of 1840, created a “bourgeois hegemony” in the two party political system and eventually endowed “American capitalism with unparalleled dynamism and legitimacy.” The state itself, therefore, became a major agent in the rise of the market economy. Such an eventuality is what Brownson dreaded, although he did not anticipate that both political parties would be influenced by a “bourgeois hegemony.” 61

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fore, was crucial. What was at stake, he believed, was the identification of politics and bourgeois capitalism, thus destroying not only the early promise of American republicanism but the Christian spirit that was at the heart of an emerging social, as it was of the earlier political, democracy. The Massachusetts Democrats invited him to give the 1840 Fourth of July address to the people of Worcester. That address presented the American Revolution as a providential event that benefited the entire human race, but had not yet realized its full promise. The democratic revolution still had to be actualized in the social and economic areas of American life if it was to fulfill its mission in the world. The purpose of the speech was to put the political campaign into the wider lens of an historical panorama in which the Democrats were presented as the modern providential emancipators of the people and the Whigs as the agents of the oppressive commercial class. The Whigs had indeed been important in the human race’s history of freedom, Brownson admitted, but their time had passed. The Whig revolution of 1688 was the first modern struggle for liberty. It was the uprising of the commercial class against the barons of feudalism; it aimed to free capital from the clutches of the landed barons. The American Revolution severed ties with that Whig revolution. The American revolution was a movement for man, not money, and it gave the United States a mission “to emancipate labor, and to raise up the individual laborer to the level of a man.”64 The Democratic party was the continuing agent of the American revolution. Its goal was to foster social as well as political equality and freedom in the United States. “America is freedom’s chosen land. It is to freedom what Palestine was to piety.”65 The Whigs had had their day in the providential mission of bringing freedom to the human race and their current attempts to disguise themselves as true democrats was all smoke and screens. Despite all his earlier protestations to the contrary, Brownson was a participant in the new partisan party politics of the day.66 64 An Oration Before the Democracy of Worcester and Vicinity, Delivered at Worcester, Mass., July 4, 1840 (Boston: E. Littlefield, 1840), 15. See also chapter 5 in this volume, p. 234. 65 Ibid., 34. See also chapter 5 in this volume, p. 248. 66 On partisan party politics in 1840, see Glenn C. Altschuler and Stuart M. Blumin, Rude Republic: Americans and Their Politics in the Nineteenth Century (Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 2000), 18: “Eighteen forty is the annus mirabilis of American partisan democracy.” See also pp. 36-37 for various historical interpretations of the presidential election of 1840. On the religious and particularly the Evangelical side of the presidential campaign of 1840, see Richard J. Carwardine, Evangelicals and Politics in Antebellum America (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1993), 50-70.

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Much that he wrote in the Quarterly pushed his own Democratic agenda in 1840, particularly focusing upon the needs and votes of the working class, many of whom probably did not read his essays. In his “Introductory Statement” he acknowledged that he had always stood as an advocate for the working classes, even when that was very unpopular in the community. But he now believed that he no longer stood alone in that regard. The journal was going to continue to support that cause and, despite the concerns of some of his readers, the cause of the Democratic party.67 In his review of Félicité de Lamennais’ The People’s Own Book, moreover, he reiterated his longheld view of the inherent connection between liberty and Christianity, arguing that Christians had the responsibility to help restore to people their rights and to correct all social abuses. Christianity, as Lamennais held, was particularly on the side of the poor and oppressed peoples of society. Christianity was at the root of Democracy, and Democracy stood for the people most in need. There was within Christianity a reforming and purifying spirit that worked progressively throughout history for the emancipation and liberation of the entire human race. That too was what the Democratic party was called to do if it was to realize its true mission. The political and reforming refrain came through even in Brownson’s conversion novel, Charles Elwood. In the chapter on “The Reformer,” he records Elwood’s sense of frustration with the injustices in society, especially as they affected the masses of workers. Elwood was disturbed with the insensitivity of the clergy and others in positions of power to the plight of the poor. In particular, they lacked an awareness of the structural causes of poverty in society. He saw an impending conflict between the privileged members of society and the oppressed masses unless some drastic reforms were forthcoming.68 Like other unbelievers Elwood saw the social and economic evils, and, Marxist-like, criticized those in Christianity who were more concerned with life after death than life in the present. Some, too, used their Christian belief in Providence to validate the injustices in 67

“Introductory Statement,” 2. See also chapter 2 in this volume, p. 190. In the past Brownson had written frequently of a future war between labor and capital unless changes were made in the distribution of the profits of industry. His warnings went unheeded because many saw his predictions as prescriptions for or enticements to class warfare. The multiple labor strikes and numerous violent uprisings of the laboring classes in the post Civil War period and the early part of the twentieth century indicate that Brownson’s predictions were not unrealistic. They reflected not only his sense of the structural problems inherent in the capitalist system but also his sensitivities to the frustrations and sensibilities of the working class. 68

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contemporary social arrangements. But at this point in the Elwood novel, Elwood himself had no solution to the problems and no way of motivating others to reform society. His whole rational approach to life could not engender the kind of sacrifice needed to accomplish the goals of social justice. Elwood was an unsuccessful reformer because he had not yet learned that one needed to appeal to the God within the human heart to motivate human beings to reform society. Once Elwood converted to Christianity, by acknowledging the God within, he realized that the only effective way to reform society was through religion. Charles Elwood demonstrated an inherent unity between the internal religious sentiment and the concern for justice and reform in society. Brownson’s novel, his political campaigning, his essays, and his lectures during 1839 and 1840 underlined his synthesis of Christianity and democracy, religion and social reform, the internal religious sentiment and politics. Those writings and speeches, moreover, continued to support reforms in American society that provided for a more equitable distribution of wealth especially for the working (or “productive”) class in American Society. None of them, however, had the sharpness, specificity, and evocative power of his classic “Laboring Classes”69 essay, the bombshell that landed on the politicians’ playground in July of 1840 during the high point of the presidential campaign. That essay manifested his penchant for sharp social and economic criticism, his biting denunciations of the church and the priesthood, his idealist-theological and Transcendentalist view of Christianity, his revolutionary religious and legislative proposals for economic opportunity in the United States, and his utter disdain for political expediency in the midst of a presidential campaign. “Laboring Classes” combined his Transcendentalist philosophical, religious, political and social views like no previous single piece of writing had. It attracted an enormous amount of national attention primarily because it was timely—published during the peak period of a hotly contested and rabble-rousing presidential campaign.70 Published outside of such a contest, it probably would not have re69 “The Laboring Classes,” Boston Quarterly Review 3 (July 1840):358-95. See also chapter 7 in this volume. 70 “Laboring Classes” was published not only in the Quarterly but also as a pamphlet. See The Laboring Classes, an Article from the Boston Quarterly Review(Boston: B. H. Greene, 1840), four Greene editions of which were published in 1840 and one in 1842. See also The Rich Against the Poor: The Labouring Classes (New York: n.p., 1840). Portions of the essay were also published in various newspapers and other pamphlets during the presidential campaign.

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ceived the attention it did. Much of what he wrote in that essay he had written before. The ideas in the essay would not have been new to his regular readers. The article, though, was insightful, forceful, and clearly written. In Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr.’s opinion it was “by far the best study of the workings of society written by an American before the Civil War, and probably for some time after.”71 But it also had the kind of specificity that Whig opponents could latch onto like blood suckers. Brownson was aware that some of his legislative proposals would be unpopular and he did not think the country was ready for them, but he also thought that the entire essay offered the country a social gospel that transcended time and space, and presidential elections. He had no idea, though, that the essay itself would become part of a Whig smear campaign against the Democratic party and Van Buren. Since the financial panic and depression of 1837 Brownson had focused on the capitalists’ exploitation of the working and productive classes. By “laboring classes” he meant the proletariat but he like a number of others who belonged to the laboring class movement were among a large segment of what Walter Hugins called the “bourgeoisie”72 (i.e., journeymen, mechanics of the building trades, small merchants, grocers, butchers, and a few physicians, lawyers, editors, and ministers). Brownson’s primary concerns, however, were for the proletariat. In 1840 and throughout the early 1840s, moreover, he underlined the systemic problems in the American business cycle. In 1843, for example, he analyzed the economic cycle of feast and famine with a freshness and original insight that professional economists would not detect for generations. The economy just could not keep up, he wrote in 1843, an “equilibrium between production and consumption.” We create a surplus—that is, a surplus, not when we consider the wants of the people, but when we consider the state of the market—and then must slacken our hands till the surplus is worked off. During this time, while we are working off this surplus, while the mills run short time, or stop altogether, the workmen must want employment. The evil is inherent in the system.73 71

“Orestes Brownson: An American Marxist Before Marx,” Sewanee Review 47 (July-September 1939): 321. 72 Walter Hugins, Jacksonian Democracy and the Working Class (Stanford, California: Stanford University Press, 1960), 220-21. 73 “The Present State of Society,” Democratic Review 13 (July 1843): 34. See also The Works of Orestes A. Brownson, ed. Henry F. Brownson, 20 vols. (Detroit: Thorndike Nourse, 1882-87), 4:453.

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He had lived through the depression of 1819, and now he was living in the continuing depression of the financial collapse of 1837. The problems were systemic, not just a matter of personal greed and willful exploitation of the laboring classes. “Laboring Classes” analyzed the systemic problem of the economy that had devastating effects on the lower classes the world over. The essay was suffused with a class-conscious analysis that foresaw an impeding crisis in the relations of wealth and labor that would eventually end in a battle between the productive laboring classes and the unproductive capitalist and industrial classes that had exploited labor. But it was more than a class-conscious analysis of a rising industrial capitalism; it was a prophetic blast against churchmen, lawyers, legislators, and other participants and benefactors of the industrial system who used the system to protect their vested interests. The real “enemy” of the laboring classes was not, he asserted, the aristocratic class, but the middle class managers and employers who pressed the laborers down to squeeze out of them every ounce of effort they could get to fill their own pockets with the fruits of that labor, and then, when they could no longer peddle their products, they let the laborers go to fend for themselves. But, the evil was not just personal greed or selfishness; it was in the system. The injustice revealed itself in an “unequal repartition of the fruits of industry.”74 The laborer did not get a fair share of the joint product of capital and labor. “Men are rewarded,” he wrote, “in an inverse ratio to the amount of actual service they perform.”75 The whole industrial system was complicated by the fact that all the power and resources were on the side of the capitalists and the industrials. The laborers had nothing but their hands to offer; they had no capital, no tools, no land, no resources by which they could have any real power in the system. By Brownson’s definition the laborer was a dependent, totally subservient to the employer. As dependents those in the “wage system” were no better off than those in the “slave system.” Using the rhetoric of the working class movement,76 Brownson argued that those in the wage slavery 74

“The Laboring Classes,” 365. See also chapter 7 in this volume, p. 304. Ibid., 367. See also chapter 7 in this volume, p. 306. 76 On the working class rhetoric, see, for example, Eric Foner, “Abolitionism and the Labor Movement in Antebellum America,” in Anti-Slavery, Religion, and Reform: Essays in Memory of Roger Anstey, edited by Christine Bolt and Seymour Drescher (Hamden, Conn.: Archon Books, 1980), 254-71. Foner ties the laboring class rhetoric of “wage slavery,” freedom and equality to the republican tradition of the American Revolution. He fails, in my view, to acknowledge those in the move75

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system who were subject to the business cycles were worse off in terms of the actual living conditions than were those slaves whose physical needs were cared for by Southern masters. Brownson did not approve of slavery, he reminded his readers, but he also pointed to the hypocrisy of those Northern industrialist abolitionists who opposed slavery in the South, but cared not a lick for slavery in their own backyards. The system of wage slavery must, he asserted, be replaced by “some other system.”77 Brownson’s analysis and critique of the rising industrialist and capitalist system in American society was radical for 1840, eight years before the Communist Manifesto (1848). A number of Boston social reformers and early American economists were aware of the unequal distribution of wealth and the pockets of poverty in seaport cities and industrial towns.78 But few had perceived the problem in terms of the rising economic system. For economists and reformers alike the problems of poverty in society were attributed to individual failures. For some Evangelical Protestants and Unitarians, too, poverty ment, like Brownson, who appealed to the Christian as well as the republican tradition in critiquing American religious as well as economic life. For other members of the movement who appealed to Christianity to protest against capitalist supporters in the church as well as the state, see Jama Lazerow, Religion and the Working Class in Antebellum America (Washington: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1995). 77 “The Laboring Classes,” 372. See also chapter 7 in this volume, p. 310. 78 On the Unitarian response to urban poverty and the initiation of ministerial social work among the working poor, see EW, 2:25. One prominent New England economist was Francis Wayland whose The Elements of Political Economy (1837; Boston: Gould and Lincoln, 1856) sold over 26,000 copies by the 1850s and was widely used as a college textbook. Wayland’s view of political economy differed radically from Brownson’s on a number of scores: (1) Wayland separated political economy from moral philosophy, maintaining that “economical questions” must be argued “on merely economical grounds,” and the question of ethics with respect to contracts had “nothing to do” with political economy (iv); (2) political economy was for Wayland purely a “science of wealth,” which systematically arranged the “laws which God has established, so far as they have been discovered, of any department of human knowledge” (15); there was a kind of iron necessity in economic systems that flowed from the structures of human nature and the divine constitution of society, and Wayland saw the business or economic cycles as matters of the constitution of things; (3) prosperity, too, depended on personal morality, and morality was fortified by religion, so that “where virtue, frugality, and respect for right exist, riches will, by natural consequence, accumulate” (131); (4) Wayland saw a necessary union between capital and labor, but the emphasis was on the need for capital, labor being a kind of vendible commodity that existed within a contractual arrangement with employers (passim); (5) the economy worked best when it was freed from government and all other external interferences (152). The popularity of Wayland’s text during the antebellum period indicates something of the theories of economics against which Brownson was struggling.

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and the inequities in society were ultimately a part of the Providential economy. Defining the problems in these ways determined the remedies reformers applied. Those who saw the problems in society as the result of a lack of skills, self-culture, or religious conversion focused on fostering education, conscience, and rightful religious dispositions as the solutions to the problems. From Brownson’s perspective these solutions were the false remedies of “priests and pedagogues,” those in society who were leagued “with the people’s masters.” Promoting education, self-culture, or religious conversion had “the advantage that kings, hierarchies, nobilities, in a word, all who fatten on the toil and blood of their fellows, will feel no difficulty in supporting”79 such solutions. Priests and pedagogues proposed generally beneficial approaches, but they sought to reform the individual “without disturbing the social arrangements” that protected their own vested interests.80 Strong medicine was needed to heal society’s ulcer. “The evil is inherent in all our social arrangements and cannot be cured without a radical change of those arrangements.”81 One needed to change the system, not the laborers or the managers. But the economic system was so organically linked to the religious and political structures that a wholesale reform of multiple institutions was necessary to achieve justice for the working classes. Brownson proposed, therefore, three radical systemic solutions to the problem he had identified: destroy the priesthood, resuscitate genuine Christianity, and reform government and legislation. The first remedy was to demolish the priestly caste. Brownson distinguished between the genuine Christianity of Christ, which was the invisible, universal and eternal word of God, from the Christianity of the church, which was the historically conditioned and visibly organized but changeable religious form. The priesthood as a corporation or a caste was a core part of the Christianity of the church. Applying biblical and republican and anti-clerical and deist-like language, which he had used since he was a Universalist minister, he mounted a major assault upon a corporate priesthood that had historically accumulated power and prestige, had confined the eternal word or spirit of Christianity to its own narrow forms, and had thereby prevented the emergence of the genuine Christianity of Christ. Priests acted as a caste or corporation, thinking that they had a monopoly 79

“The Laboring Classes,” 373. See also chapter 7 in this volume, p. 310. Ibid., 374. See also chapter 7 in this volume, p. 311. 81 Ibid., 375. See also chapter 7 in this volume, p. 312. 80

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on the spirit. Human beings were naturally religious, but in the Christianity of the church, the people, particularly the lower classes, were subjugated by priests who were in league with the masters of industry and therefore could not preach a message to liberate people from the unjust structures from which the priests themselves had profited. The essay indicted the clergy in general, but also the interlocking relationships between the wealthy Bostonian Unitarian capitalists and the Unitarian ministry. His generalizations were based on his own Boston experience. Like the Old Testament prophet Jeremiah and like some eighteenth century American revivalists Brownson spoke out against the abuses of the priesthood and an unconverted ministry. Genuine Christianity recognized no mediator between God and humanity but him who died on the cross. The priesthood had usurped that role. “The priest,” he roared, “is universally a tyrant, universally the enslaver of his brethren, and therefore it is Christianity condemns him.”82 He objected to “an outward visible church” and called therefore for the elimination of the Christianity of the church, and its prime supporter, the priestly caste, as one of the first means for elevating the laboring classes. His diatribe against the priesthood had deist language, but no deist agenda. Instead, he called for the resuscitation of genuine Christianity, the Christianity of Christ, as the second step in elevating the laboring classes and eliminating the social arrangements that imprisoned labor. Like some Protestants in the working class movement, Brownson used biblical concepts and language to protest against the sins of industrialism.83 But unlike the Protestant Evangelicals, he was a philosophical and theological idealist. He identified the Christianity of Christ with the transcendental ideas and ideals that existed eternally in the mind of God and needed to be actualized in human hearts, human history, and human institutions. It was that ideal 82

Ibid., 385. See also chapter 7 in this volume, p. 319. On Protestants in the movement, see Jama Lazerow, Religion and the Working Class. Lazerow argued that numbers of workers in some cities and towns used the Bible and the pietist and perfectionist traditions of Protestant Christianity to criticize industrial injustices. In the minds of these Protestant workers, Christianity was not the opium of the people, as it was for the unbelievers in the working class movement; nor was Christianity a matter of social control in the hands of the middle class industrial managers; the Protestant workers used their Christian tradition to attack the sins within industrialism. But the pietist and perfectionist and individualist tradition of these Protestant workers differed considerably from Brownson’s use of Christianity for his critique of economic systems not just degenerate or sinful individuals. 83

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Christianity that rose up in protest against the Christianity of the church. “One might as well undertake to dip the ocean dry with a clam-shell, as to undertake to cure the evils of the social state by converting men to the Christianity of the church.” The Christianity of Christ had no need for mediators, institutional arrangements, or religious specialists. Christ, the human embodiment of the transcendental ideals, had appealed to the natural religious spirit of all. The genuine Christian “forgets himself, buckles on his armor, and goes forth to war against principalities and powers, and against spiritual wickedness in high places.”84 According to Christ, no one could enter the Kingdom of God who did not labor to establish that Kingdom on earth, and his mission on earth was to bring down the high, and bring up the low; to break the fetters of the bound and set the captive free; to destroy all oppression, establish the reign of justice, which is the reign of equality, between man and man; to introduce new heavens and a new earth, wherein dwelleth righteousness, wherein all shall be as brothers, loving one another, and no one possessing what another lacketh.85

The genuine Christian was called to reform society. Only the Christianity of Christ could elevate the laboring class by an “exaltation of sentiment, the generous sympathy and the moral courage which Christianity alone is fitted to produce or quicken.”86 Reforming government and legislation was Brownson’s third remedy to eliminate the evil social structures. The evils were part of the constitution of society, and government was the agent of society. Government—influenced by the industrialists, capitalists, lawyers, ministers, educators, and others of the unproductive classes of society— had enacted laws that protected vested interests. To reform government meant that politicians had to repeal all laws against the laboring class, enact laws that would enable working people to maintain their equality, free the government from the control of banks, and destroy all monopolies and all privileges that were protected by current legislation. A first step in eliminating all privileges, he suggested, should be the elimination of all laws that shielded the hereditary descent of property, that is, the privilege of being born rich. Thomas Skidmore and a few others in the labor movement had previously called for the abolition of inheritance legislation. Brownson knew such a proposal was unpopular, but he insisted that it ought to be dis84

“The Laboring Classes,” 376. See also chapter 7 in this volume, p. 312. Ibid., 388. See also chapter 7 in this volume, p. 322. 86 Ibid., 390. See also chapter 7 in this volume, p. 323. 85

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cussed as a means of creating greater opportunities for all in society. Brownson admitted in the course of the essay that he was intentionally using strong language to convey his message about an equitable distribution of the goods of creation. Strong rhetoric would arrest attention, he predicted—correctly, as it turned out. The essay created an avalanche of reactions from across the nation. The Whigs in particular found in it confirmation of all that they suspected about the Democrats. Here was a prominent Democrat, the Whig papers proclaimed, and look at what he was proscribing, nothing short of a revolutionary overturn of church and society. The essay was filled with atheism or a Tom Paine like anti-religious spirit. Agrarianism, social radicalism, class warfare—all were evident in the piece. The sacred rights to property and the system of free labor and wages were destroyed by such Locofoco Democratic tirades.87 The titles of some Whig pamphlets tell something of the violent reactions: Calvin Colton’s American Jacobinism; Loco-Focoism; as Displayed in the Boston Magazine against Schools and Ministers, and in Favor of Robbing Children of the Property of their Parents; Conspiracy of the Office Holders Unmasked. The Whig newspapers excerpted large segments of the essay in the papers, and the Whig party reproduced the entire text by the tens of thousands and distributed it across the country to demonstrate better than anything else the dangers of continuing the Democrats in office. After the election, Charles Grandison Thomas (d. 1879), like a few others, published a pamphlet defending hereditary property in reply to Brownson’s essay.88 Horace Greeley, Daniel Webster, and Thurlow Weed were among those who attacked Brownson’s doctrines. Old John Quincy Adams in Boston wrote in his diary that “Brownson and the Marat-Democrats” along with the Transcendentalists, abolitionists, and phrenologists were rascals that disturbed the times.89 Even some of Brownson’s old friends, like George Bancroft, shied away from him and clearly 87 A small sample of the numerous newspaper reactions can be found in the Madisonian, August 4, 1840; Log Cabin, August 1, 1840; New York Review 1(October 1840): 512-22; Christian Review 5 (September, 1840): 419-42; Boston Atlas (July 21, 24, 29, 1840). For a listing of the newspaper and other reactions, see Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr., The Age of Jackson, 302-04. See also Schlesinger’s Orestes A. Brownson: A Pilgrim’s Progress (Boston: Little, Brown and Company, 1939), 10007. 88 Hereditary Property Justified. Reply to Brownson’s Article on the Laboring Classes (Cambridge, Mass.: Cambridge Press, Metcalf, Torry and Ballou, 1841). 89 See Memoirs of John Quincy Adams, comprising portions of his diary from 1795 to 1848, ed. Charles Francis Adams, 12 vols. (rpt. Freeport, New York: Books for Libraries Press, 1969), 10:345.

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wanted to separate the Democratic ticket from his harangue.90 Brownson had sinned against the Democratic party and some in the party questioned why he was not removed from his patronage position in the Chelsea Marine Hospital.91 William Ellery Channing, the elder dean of Unitarianism, also reacted to Brownson’s essay, but mostly through private correspondence. He did not support the public outcry against Brownson nor the Whig’s distribution of the document for vicious campaign purposes, but he did not approve of Brownson’s views either. In early 1840, Channing himself had delivered two talks, entitled “Lectures on the Elevation of the Laboring Portion of the Community.”92 The kind of elevation Channing spoke of was spiritual and cultural, not material. Elevation did not mean the emancipation from hard work, nor an imitation of upper-class consumerism, nor seeking power as a class through organized political processes. He acknowledged “but one elevation of the human being, and that is Elevation of Soul.” Such self-cultivation (temperance, industry, strict economy, hygienic habits, and education) would truly liberate the laborer as an individual. Channing, though, sought the aid of the state in providing improved housing and public health, and encouraged the laborers to use their vote to obtain these and other ends. He was quite sure, too, that these goals could be met in the progressive society in which Americans lived. Channing, therefore, was not about to accept Brownson’s assessment of the situation in which the laboring classes lived, nor to accept his radical political and religious solutions to the problem. He told Elizabeth Peabody that he was sympathetic with Brownson’s feelings for the masses (although he hated that word), but he had “little patience” with the whole spirit of the article. Brownson had exaggerated the conditions of the working class and overlooked the struggles of young professionals, lawyers and doctors, the difficulties of merchants, the sufferings of the literary class, and the hardships of widows and dependent women. Brownson was exaggerating the evils, setting class against class and dividing, not uniting, the nation. He was overlooking, moreover, the one thing necessary: soul-liberty. Brownson’s solutions, moreover, were “shocking” and “absurd.” His suggestion of an emerging war between the classes 90 On Bancroft’s views, see Lilian Handlin, George Bancroft: The Intellectual as Democrat (New York: Harper and Row, 1984), 180. See also Russel B. Nye, George Bancroft: Brahmin Rebel (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1945), 124. 91 The Age of Jackson, 303. 92 The Works of William Ellery Channing, 6 vols. (Boston: J. Monroe, 1848), 5:151-88, 189-230.

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and his proposal to eliminate legislation on inheritance would produced “universal poverty and woe.”93 Other Christians published their reactions to Brownson’s essay. Francis Wayland blasted the piece because it called for a bloody war to secure the “perfection of the social state,” which meant the equal distribution of wealth in the country.94 He would destroy the middle class in his French-born critique of the inequalities of wealth. His aim was “to sweep away with one fell swoop the whole middling interest, and then establish a government which should exercise despotic power over the ordinances of religion, the rights of conscience, and the possession of property; that is, which should permit the majority, for the time being, to ride rough shod over the minority, unchecked by any restraint but the law of the strongest.”95 Brownson played upon fears, but also tried to cover his French social radicalism with a coating of Christianity. It would not work in a Bible-reading society. One of the most measured Christian responses came from the Methodist Quarterly Review.96 Although the anonymous author thought Brownson’s essay contained “dangerous doctrines,” incendiary language, anarchistic and absurd proposals, he believed that it had to be taken seriously because the absurdities were not put forth by a novice but by “an enlightened mind, in great seriousness and earnestness; and in a style at once elegant and captivating.”97 Serious Christians, moreover, could not simply dismiss the social, economic, and ecclesiastical crimes and abuses Brownson fingered because they were in fact real abuses that should stir all Christians to action. There were evils in church and society that needed correction. Christians should not shoot the messenger of this bad news because such an action would rightly be perceived as callousness to the wrongs that indeed existed. Brownson’s message was compelling, and it had the potential of inflaming the “passions of the populace” and the poor and laboring classes who were always the majority in society. Brownson’s revolutionary rhetoric could raise these classes up against the rich, the ruling class, and the clergy. Unlike Brownson, though, Christians had to admit the abuses while asserting that they were 93

Channing to Peabody, September 1840, in Elizabeth P. Peabody, Reminiscences of Rev. Wm. Ellery Channing, D.D. (Boston: Roberts Brothers, 1880), 415-16. 94 “Charles Elwood,” 437-42. 95 Ibid., 438. 96 “The Rich Against the Poor. The Laboring Classes,” 23 (January, 1841): 92-122. 97 Ibid., 119.

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abuses of a system that was basically good. The abuses stemmed from moral failings and those could be overcome, not by systemic changes, but only by religious and moral reforms—remedies, the author admitted, that Brownson sneered at,98 but remedies that got to the heart of the problems he had identified. Brownson’s designation of the problem as systemic was wrong-headed, his solutions were preposterous, and his rhetoric was inflammatory. The essay, though, was part of a “ceaseless war of recrimination”99 that was an increasing tendency among all political parties in the country. He ended his review by calling upon all writers in the religious and secular press to join in the protests against the evils of injustice, fraud, and falsehood in high places and to acknowledge the good that did exist in society. He pleaded with the American press to join him in the common cause of justice in society in place of the mutual partisan political diatribes and sectarian religious rivalries that had come to characterize the country. Brownson noted in The Convert, his 1857 apology for his conversion to Catholicism, that the “Laboring Classes” solutions, which he then designated as those “horrible doctrines,” produced “one universal scream of horror.”100 The reactions were indeed predominantly negative, but Brownson exaggerated the impact. A number of Democratic papers defended him and his right to his opinion even though some of them did not agree with his notions of inheritance.101 Some Transcendentalists, too, found the essay part of the progressive movement in society. Theodore Parker wrote in his journal that it made “a great noise. The Whigs, finding their sacramental idea—money—in danger, have come to the rescue with fire-brands and the like weapons. . . . I like much of his article, though his property notions agree not with my view.”102 Ralph Waldo Emerson also appreciated its radical nature, writing to Margaret Fuller, “the hero wields a sturdy pen which I am very glad to see. I had judged him from some old things & did not know that he was such a Cobbett of a scribe. Let him wash himself & write for the immortal Dial.”103 98

Ibid., 117, 118. Ibid., 118. 100 Works of Orestes A. Brownson, 5:99, 103. 101 For examples of support, see the New York Evening Post (July 17, 1840; August 8, 1840; October 2, 7, 1840), Boston Post (July 7, 28, 1840; September 30, 1840; October 6, 12, 22, 23, 31, 1840), Bay State Democrat (July 25, 28, 1840). See also Schlesinger, Age of Jackson, 303-04. 102 The Collected Works of Theodore Parker, ed. Frances Cobbe, 14 vols. (London, 1863-74), 8:31. 103 December 21, 1840, in The Letters of Ralph Waldo Emerson, ed. Ralph L. Rusk, 6 vols. (New York: Columbia University Press, 1939), 2:373. 99

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Brownson was well aware of the criticisms, and spent much of the next year and a half defending himself in published essays and public lectures around the state and in Philadelphia and New York City. For the remainder of the campaign season, he was still a hot ticket. He attracted the Democratic faithful. Even after the campaign was over and Harrison had won, he continued to receive calls for lectures on matters of public interests. Most of what he published from October of 1840 to October of 1841 could be considered a defense of the “Laboring Classes.”104 The most extensive defense, more than twice as long as the original article, was “Laboring Classes—Responsibility to Party,” published in October during the last days of the campaign.105 Brownson backed down from nothing he asserted in the original essay; in fact, he presented more support for his positions. He tackled five major objections that had been leveled against his position: (1) that the essay was poorly timed, coming in the midst of a serious political campaign; he had a responsibility to the party to withhold such radical notions; (2) that it called for the abolition of Christianity; (3) that it eliminated worship and religious instruction as well as the priesthood; (4) that it exaggerated or falsified the conditions of the working class; and (5) that its proposal on inheritance would topple the natural right to property and break up family relations. Brownson responded to each of these accusations with denials that added not much new to his original essay. He disclaimed any responsibility to the party when the truth was at stake.106 He did not call for the abolition of Christianity, moreover, but the abolition of the current outward, visible church.107 The state, if Christianized, could serve the function of an organized church. He went on to say that he believed in the establishment of Christ’s kingdom on earth, but that kingdom was not an outward, visible church distinct or separated from the body politic, civil society, or the state. In a genuine Christianity no split existed between church and state, between the spiritual and the material interests of humanity. Christianity and the kingdom of God on earth did not need a double organization; hu104 The following essays, published in this volume, are primarily defenses of his economic and political views: “Conversations with a Radical,” “Our Future Policy,” “Social Evils and their Remedy,” “Executive Patronage,” and his Oration of Orestes A. Brownson Delivered at Washington Hall, July 5th, 1841 [New York, 1841]. 105 Boston Quarterly Review 3 (October 1840): 420-512. See also chapter 8 in this volume. 106 Ibid., 421-28. See also chapter 8 in this volume, p. 329. 107 Ibid., 428-36. See also chapter 8 in this volume, p. 334.

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manity needed only the single organization of the state, where the church and state would be identified in one institution. His aim, he reiterated, was to Christianize democracy, which was nothing other than the application of the “principles of the gospel to man’s social and political relations.”108 Such theological idealism carried him well beyond his earlier proposals for a new church of the future.109 Brownson admitted that he did indeed advocate the abolition of the priesthood as an organized caste in society, but he did not, as some asserted, dispense with the need for religious instruction or religious worship.110 His defense of his proposal to destroy the priesthood rubbed salt on the wounds he had already opened up in “Laboring Classes.” It was a devastating critique, a real Jeremiad, on the ministry in all the churches. All Protestants would agree, he maintained, that there was no need for a priestly mediator between God and humanity. What most upset the clerical establishment, he noted, was his lamentation on the state of a hired and authoritative ministry. He took the “risk of being crucified between two thieves” on this score.111 He was not against teachers of religion or preachers of the gospel, but against a corporate priesthood that had made of ministry “a separate profession” or “a sort of trade.”112 The New Testament provided no grounds for such hirelings. All Christians with the gospel in their hearts had the authority to preach and teach. He called for a universal priesthood of the soul. Instead of this, the churches had produced ministerial mercenaries, those who had been bought off by the capitalist captains of industry. The hired ministry, too, was not just a matter of individual, personal greed; the ministerial corporation had its roots in the whole voluntary system of pastoral support. He who holds the purse holds the pastor, making the pastor subservient to the needs and economic interests of the established class. Thus, the ministry, as currently constituted, could not in fact preach against the prevailing evils in the society in which they lived, or they would lose their jobs. Such a system imprisoned the word of God. Much better was the whole Quaker religious system, because it had no organized clergy and relied solely on the light within, and only the enlightened preached and taught. The Quaker system was truly religious as well as democratic. That was the Christian system he now preferred. 108

Ibid., 429. See also chapter 8 in this volume, p. 335. For his earlier position, see EW, 3:17-19, 109-63. 110 “Laboring Classes—Responsibility to Party,” 436-60. See also chapter 8 in this volume, p. 340. 111 Ibid., 440. See also chapter 8 in this volume, p. 343. 112 Ibid., 441. See also chapter 8 in this volume, p. 344. 109

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Brownson dismissed the fourth objection that he falsified the conditions of the laboring classes. The source of that objection was the bourgeois mind.113 He protested that he did not prefer the slave system over free labor, as some charged. Such a charge was the “device of the Devil”114 and intended to draw attention away from the culprits who profited from the wage system and made their own wealth on the backs of the proletariat. Those under the free labor system were better off than the slaves with respect to human dignity, legal freedoms, and the franchise, but with respect to actual freedom and access to the goods of creation, which God had given to all equally, they were imprisoned in the new economic slavery. Like Michael Harrington’s The Other America (1962), Brownson’s essay reminded his own generation of the debilitating effects of the economic system on the poor and the class of the “proletaries,” people with whom he identified more than any other class in American society. To the last objection on inheritance, the longest section by far of his defense, he responded by saying that the separation of the capitalist from the laborer was the “great evil of all modern society” because it created a new class society that was based exclusively on wealth.115 The new capitalist system produced a state of privilege in modern society that had to be nipped in the bud or there would indeed be a revolutionary war between labor and capital. The capitalists and the industrialists were the new nobility, and they destroyed the democratic promise of American society as much as the old landed nobles had tried to prevent it from emerging. His own proposal to eliminate inheritance was consistent with the élan of American society and with the Democratic party’s definition of itself as the party of “equality against privilege.” Political reformers who called for free trade and universal suffrage and moral reformers who called for universal education and religious culture left intact the real problem of the identification of property and power in American society. His own proposal got to the heart of the problem of unequal distribution of power and wealth in modern social relations. He did not deny the fact that the right to property was a natural right, but the extent of that right, he insisted, citing a host of legal experts, came under civil legislation, which could legitimately abolish laws on the descent of property. In defense of his position, unlike his original essay, he made a few practical suggestions on how the state could eliminate inherit113

Ibid., 460-72. See also chapter 8 in this volume, p. 359. Ibid., 467. See also chapter 8 in this volume, p. 364. 115 Ibid., 472-512, quote on p. 472. See also chapter 8 in this volume, p. 367. 114

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ance and make necessary provisions for a just and equitable distribution of accumulated property after death without injuring the lives of the widows and children of the deceased. The whole intent of the elimination of inheritance was to prevent the perpetuation of a wealthy caste in American society that would eventually destroy equal opportunity. Brownson defended himself not only against his political opponents and his fellow Democrats who considered him imprudent, but also against some working women in Lowell, Massachusetts, who rejected his characterization of them. In “The Laboring Classes” Brownson objected to the bright picture that some industrialists were painting of the rising manufacturing towns of New England, claiming that their factory operatives were well paid, healthy, and happy. The factory workers, Brownson asserted, were not as well off morally and physically as the town promoters pretended. As an example he mentioned the textile “factory girls” of Lowell, who, he claimed, had a high mortality rate, a short three-year average working life, a low rate of marriages, and reputations ruined by the factory life. “She has worked in a factory is enough to damn to infamy the most worthy and virtuous girls,” Brownson wrote, expressing what he considered to be the common estimate of the “factory girl.” The young women in the Lowell textile industry, moreover, worked like slaves while the owners and city “nabobs,” reveling in luxury, passed themselves off as Christians and republicans.116 By these references Brownson intended to condemn the employers not the workers, but his reference to the “factory girls’” reputations evoked an angry response from the working women of Lowell. Since about 1820, numerous women from New England towns had been hired at Lowell to work the looms and spindles of the town’s emerging textile industry. The factories, as one of the operatives claimed,117 were a benefit to the young women who had no other employment options on the New England farms and small towns from which they came. These women were pioneers in bringing women into the market place, even though, as historians Hannah 116

“The Laboring Classes,” 370. See also chapter 7 in this volume, p. 308. Sixty years after working in the mills of Lowell, Harriet H. Robinson, Loom and Spindle, Or Life Among the Early Mill Girls (New York: Thomas Y. Crowell, 1898), wrote to reveal the “bright side” (p. 96) of the story of the working women of Lowell. She was particularly anxious to demonstrate how women’s labor in Lowell was not degrading, but uplifting. It made possible women’s growth in religion, virtue, and self-cultivation (p. 61) in addition to providing women with a source of income that could sustain them. Women’s work had a “money-value” (p. 69). 117

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Josephson and Thomas Dublin have demonstrated, they were anomalies in the early history of American industrial life.118 These historians have also demonstrated, as Brownson claimed, that these young women worked in the mills for only a short period before they returned to their homes or married. But Brownson’s charge that mill employment disqualified women for marriage, according to Dublin, was not true. The Lowell women married at about the same rate as did other New England rural women.119 The Lowell mill workers reflected many of the New England Puritan and republican values. Many of them, too, were educated and had literary interests. With the assistance of the town’s laborsupporting Universalist ministers, Abel C. Thomas and Thomas B. Thayer, some of these women established “improvement circles” where they read and discussed good literature (e.g. Shakespeare, Milton, Bunyan, Locke, Emerson, and, as will be evident below, the Boston Quarterly Review and other literary magazines) and presented some of their own literary productions. Out of these improvement circles emerged in October of 1840 the Lowell Offering, a literary magazine, founded by the Universalist Abel C. Thomas who solicited members of the improvement circles to write for it. After two years the magazine was owned and edited by the women themselves. The journal published the working women’s essays, short stories, and reviews. Harriet Farley, one of the earliest writers and a future editor, used her pen, as the historians of the Offering have demonstrated,120 to defend working women and factory owners against the periodic assaults upon the entire Lowell enterprise. Farley focused more on gender issues, self-improvement, and literary concerns than on political or social justice issues for the workers. Nonetheless, as editor she published stories by other women that contained mild religious and republican protests against sexism and other injustices of factory life. But they criticized moral failings (acquisitiveness, pretentiousness, pride, and an excessive emphasis on wealth over personal dignity and worth) rather than systematic structures of factory life. The women workers 118

Hannah Josephson, The Golden Threads: New England’s Mill Girls and Magnates (New York: Duell, Sloan and Pearce, 1949), Thomas Dublin, Women at Work: The Transformation of Work and Community in Lowell, Massachusetts, 1826-1860 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1979). 119 Dublin, Women at Work, 260, n. 21. 120 Maureen K. Conklin, “Redefining Womanhood: The Women of The Lowell Offering (M.A. thesis, University of Wisconsin-Madison, 1989). See also the introduction in Benita Eisler, ed., The Lowell Offering: Writings by New England Mill Women (1840-1845) (New York: J. B. Lippincott, 1977), 13-41.

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had not acquiesced in the injustices, because periodically since 1836 they had organized strikes against their employers for cutting wages and increasing the speed of the machines, but the Offering rarely took explicit notice of the workers’ complaints against their employers. Almost from the beginning, the Offering directly came to the defense of the dignity and value of women’s work in the factories and protested against a common complaint that such work outside the home was undignified or that such work produced immoral and destitute women. In the Offering’s second issue, Farley anonymously (as a “Factory Girl”) took up the cause and blasted Brownson’s “slanderous” characterization of Lowell’s working women. The young women lived under necessary restraints and worked long hours, but they voluntarily accepted such circumstances so that they could “get money, as much of it and as fast as we can.” By 1840, as Benita Eisler has shown, the mill women worked about seventy-five hours a week from dawn to dusk, had four holidays a year, had their wages cut periodically, and some were forced to tend to three or four machines simultaneously.121 Farley noted that Brownson could justifiably rail against “the real injustices of capitalists against operatives”; nonetheless, the mill women earned wages that were far higher than “females engaged in most other occupations” like domestics, seamstresses, and school teachers. Lowell, furthermore, attracted “worthy, virtuous, intelligent and well-educated girls” who cherished their freedoms and independence as much as any other American. They were not the slaves of ruthless factory masters. “I presume,” she wrote, that there were “girls here who are a disgrace to the city, to their sex, and to humanity” but they were a small minority. Most operatives were New England women of intellect and education.122 In response to Farley’s article, Brownson wrote a letter “To the Editors of the Lowell Offering,” which he published in his own Quarterly.123 Although he asserted that he was on the working women’s side and supported their causes and their rights, he was uncharacteristically apologetic for the impression his language had conveyed. He had not intended to attack or slander the women; he wanted to underscore the unjust structures in the manufacturing towns and the hypocrisy of the so-called Christian and republican factory managers. He asserted, too, that there was an “unjust prejudice” in the community against “girls employed in factories.” Brownson’s con121

The Lowell Offering: Writings, 36. “Factory Girls,” The Lowell Offering 1 (December, 1840): 17-19. 123 Boston Quarterly Review 4 (April 1841): 261-64. See also chapter 11 in this volume. 122

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cern was with the system that produced the injustices in the factory towns. He knew of the so-called “turn-outs” in the mills, when the women themselves protested against the lowering of wages, and believed he was siding with that cause when he wrote his essay. But he had used unguarded language in his original essay that seemed to slander the women workers. “Laboring Classes” and Brownson’s defense of it was a radical critique of existing social and economic structures and contained some revolutionary religious and legislative proposals, but it was basically conservative in its method of reform and in what it proposed to replace the rising industrialist-capitalist system. Brownson was not, like some of the Boston abolitionists, a higher law advocate who said to hell with the Constitution and the laws; he wanted reform within the limits of the law and the Constitution. In reaction to the abolitionists in 1838, he laid down his principle of reform, which he implemented in the “Laboring Classes” essay: “We demand reform only for the purpose of preserving American institutions in their real character.”124 Real, practical freedom could not be had for the laboring classes or for any other class if one proposed to scuttle the Constitution. He proposed to change the laws, not violate them. It was a conservative reform project in terms of its method. The Constitution and the laws were absolutely necessary in society to protect liberty itself. The “new system” that he suggested to replace the systematic separation of labor and capital, moreover, was in fact a return to an earlier economic system in which the laborer worked with his own capital, had his own farm, or worked in his own shop, and not for hire. That new system would acknowledge the God-given equality of all human beings, thereby emancipating the “proletaries.”125 Such a system would have to make the laborer independent of the capitalists and industrialists. Brownson did not say how he proposed to develop a new system. He wanted to restore the union of capital and labor, but he never proposed precisely how to do that, nor did he demonstrate how destroying the priesthood, resuscitating the Christianity of Christ, or reforming government and revising inheritance legislation would create the new system he envisioned. The essay and its multiple defenses were long on criticism and short on construction; they were more valuable as a critique of the failings of American religious, political, social, and economic life than as a concrete plan for new directions in society. Throughout his life, 124

“Abolitionist Proceedings,” (October 1838), EW, 4:116. On his proposed new system, see “The Laboring Classes,” 372. See also chapter 7 in this volume, p. 310. 125

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despite the fact that he later called the doctrines of the essay “horrible,” he continued to uphold his critique of the modern industrial system, saying in The Convert that he still believed “that the rights of labor are not sufficiently protected, and that the modern system of large industries, which requires for its prosecution heavy outlays of capital, or credit, makes the great mass of operatives virtually slaves— slaves, in all except the name, as much so as are the negroes on one of our southern plantations.”126 His critique is still a classic in the sense that it not only represented the time in which it was written but reflected transcendental judgments on American society that have recurred from time to time in American history. The arguments of the essay reappeared in other essays, lectures, and political campaign speeches. After the election he was invited to Philadelphia, New York City, and other places to lecture on the current political situation in the country with the Whigs in power in the presidency—first under Harrison, and then after his death in April 1841, under John Tyler. In February and March of 1841, after he had finished the January issue of his Quarterly, he spoke in Philadelphia and New York City on “The Reform Spirit of the Age” and the “Democracy of Christianity,” as we learn from the New York Evening Post, which reported that the talks in Philadelphia were well received, and then advertised and commented on the New York lectures.127 On March 4 and 5 Brownson delivered the talks and the Post recorded the familiar Brownsonian themes, showing how the object of both Christianity and democracy “had been to elevate the individual man. It was man, in his native and inherent dignity, with his sublime origin and immortal capacities, Christianity designed to redeem, and Democracy came to develop and bless.” The editor remarked that Brownson spoke with “great originality and aptness of illustration, and great earnestness and force of manner.” He lectured without note, as was his custom, and with “considerable fluency and ease. His style is plain and direct, while his language is nervous and pointed.”128 Locofoco Democrats invited Brownson to return to New York City to give the 1841 Fourth of July address to the public. He gave the address and the committee in charge of the event published it.129 This was an address that Brownson had frequently given, and it was similar to Brownsonian themes in his 1840 Oration Before the De126

Works of Orestes A. Brownson, 5:63. See “Mr. Brownson,” New York Evening Post (February 27, 1841): 2; “Brownson’s Lectures,” New York Evening Post (March 4, 1841): 2. 128 “Mr. Brownson’s Lecture,” New York Evening Post (March 5, 1841): 2. 127

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mocracy of Worcester. The New York talk continued to present the Democratic party as the agent of the nation’s divine mission, a mission temporarily threatened by the “enemies of liberty” who were currently “in power.” This and other speeches Brownson gave after the Democratic failure at the polls were not the addresses of a chastened Democrat. The Democratic defeat at the polls did not, as has been so frequently charged by contemporaries and subsequent historians, dampen Brownson’s political spirit or destroy his faith in democracy (as he understood that term)—as this address and his other optimistic speeches and essays of 1841 demonstrate. Earlier, in December of 1840, shortly after the Whig win, he wrote the editors of the New York Evening Post and with an undaunted spirit called for a fresh start for the Democratic party. “What should you say to flinging to the breeze a genuine loco foco flag, that is, the flag of social democracy in distinction from mere political democracy?” The party and the country needed to “busy themselves” about this new direction.130 While in New York City Brownson met the Hecker brothers, John and George, who were owners of a flour mill and involved in Locofoco Democratic politics, and their younger brother Isaac who was twenty-two years old. Brownson began a long-lasting relationship with the Heckers, especially the young Isaac. During the early 1840s the older Hecker brothers became one of Brownson’s primary advocates and supporters in New York, and the source of many of his invitations to lecture and campaign in the city. He frequently stayed at the Hecker household when he was in New York or when he was passing through New York on his lecturing tours to Philadelphia, Baltimore and other places further south. Isaac, though, was the one most enamored with Brownson and within a year Isaac would become one of Brownson’s intellectual disciples.131 Throughout 1841 Brownson continued to speak out on significant political issues and to prepare his readers for the next presidential election. In “Our Future Policy” (January 1841) he took a waitand-see attitude toward the new administration—wait to see if the Whigs were as truly democratic as they pretended during the cam129

Oration of Orestes A. Brownson, Delivered at Washington Hall, July 5th, 1841 (New York: n.p., 1841). 130 “The Duty of the Democracy,” New York Evening Post (December 7, 1840): 2. The Post was quoting an anonymous letter, but the text is obviously Brownson’s. It was dated Chelsea, Massachusetts, December 5, 1840. 131 The analysis of Brownson’s relationship with Isaac belongs to the years 1842 to 1844, years covered by volumes 6 and 7 of this series.

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paign. The future policy for the Democratic party, Brownson wrote, was to develop bold and new measures to bring about liberty and equality in society, but the political platform was still the same: opposition to the banks and paper money, and assertion of the rights of the laboring classes. He hinted, too, that the Democrats would be well served if they chose John C. Calhoun for the next presidential election.132 He also spoke out on the disposition of proceeds from the sale of public lands, an issue that was hotly debated in Congress;133 reviewed President John Tyler’s April “Address to the People of the United States,”arguing in favor of Calhoun’s state rights doctrine and maintaining that the real danger to the Republic did not come from a concentration of power in the executive, but in a legislative usurpation of power and in the power of majorities over minorities;134 and addressed the issue the federal government’s policies on banking.135 He continued to toot the Democratic states rights horn. There were no signs that his political philosophy was in any state of crisis. Brownson’s last essay for 1841 was a review of Bancroft’s abridged History.136 By October of 1841 the relationship between the two men had cooled somewhat, primarily because of Brownson’s rash judgment, as Bancroft thought, in publishing the “Laboring Classes” during an important presidential election. Nonetheless, Brownson gave a generally favorable review of Bancroft’s work, but he was not nearly as enthusiastic as he had been earlier when he first read Bancroft’s first two volumes. He agreed with Bancroft’s “providential” and idealist approach to American history, seeing freedom as the originating idea and the continuing ideal of the country. But he criticized Bancroft for three things. First, he believed Bancroft had identified the freedom of the individual with freedom in the body politic. Freedom in the body politic was a limited freedom, as American democracy was a limited, not an absolute democracy. Brownson reiterated a theme that had become a constant in his approach to

132

Boston Quarterly Review 4 (January 1841): 68-112. See also chapter 10 in this volume. 133 “Distribution and the Public Lands,” Boston Quarterly Review 4 (April 1841): 230-56. 134 “Executive Patronage,” Boston Quarterly Review 4 (July 1841): 353-70. See also chapter 15 in this volume. 135 “The President’s Message,” Boston Quarterly Review 4 (July 1841): 371-90. 136 “Bancroft’s History,” Boston Quarterly Review 4 (October 1841): 512-18. See also chapter 18 in this volume.

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democracy since 1836: namely, that the people were not absolute as the body politic; their voice was not the voice of God. He feared that Bancroft had capitulated to the popular political shibboleths of the day in his history. An absolute democracy was as tyrannical as an absolute monarchy. Such a view of government could not protect the rights of minorities within society. Second, he took issue with Bancroft’s view that the Quakers’ emphasis on the divine light within was a source of democracy in the United States. In the past, as in this review, Brownson pointed out that the Quaker emphasis on the divine light within was not to be identified with the faculty of human reason, as he thought Bancroft had done. That light was reason as the “WORD” of God, the very reason of God.137 Third, Brownson took issue with Bancroft’s presentation of the Salem witchcraft trials. Bancroft had correctly interpreted all events in American history in terms of their bearing upon the evolution of freedom. But he went too far with the Salem case. He blamed the Salem trial and hysteria upon a kind of residual aristocracy of the politicians and churchmen, something that opposed the virtue and good sense of the people. But, Brownson claimed, the people believed in witches as much as their politicians and ministers—and, in fact, many in some parts of the United States still believed in witches. Brownson was very leery of attributing wisdom and virtue to the multitudes. America’s most recent experiences with mobs, of aristocrats as well as of the masses, should have been sufficient warning against the supposed good sense of the public. In any society and any government, the sovereignty of the people, like the sovereignty of the king, needed to be checked. When he finished the last issue of the Quarterly for 1841, Brownson sat down to read two books by the French ex SaintSimonian Pierre Leroux, L’Réfutation d’éclectisme (1839) and De l’humanité (1840). That reading and a profound religious conversion would have a fundamentally transforming effect on the direction of his life and thought. But that story is for volume six.

137 For Brownson’s earlier fascination with and interpretation of the Quakers and the inner light, see EW, 4:184.

1. CHARLES ELWOOD: OR, THE INFIDEL CONVERTED1 PREFACE I have not much to say by way of preface to this little volume. It explains itself and contains in itself the grounds of its own justification or condemnation. I do not send it forth as a work of art and I have not studied to conform to the established laws of the species of composition to which it may seem to belong. It has the air of being a work of fiction; but it has been written in an earnest spirit for a serious purpose. The form in which I have chosen to send out the ideas and discussions embodied in this work has been adopted to please myself, and because it was the most convenient form I could adopt for presenting my ideas clearly and in a moderate space. A regular treatise on the subject here discussed, I have not had the patience, if the ability, to prepare, and nobody would read it if I had. It may be objected that I have introduced too much fiction for a serious work, and too little, if I intended a regular-built novel. All I have to say is the public must take the work as they find it. In order to have introduced a greater variety of characters and events, I wanted a fertility of imagination to which I lay no claim, and a different purpose in writing from the one I really had. I have introduced as much variety of character and action, as my imagination furnished, or my judgment approved. If novel readers are not satisfied with this explanation, why, they must apply to somebody else, I can give them no satisfaction. The characters introduced are of course fictitious, yet I may say that I have myself had an intellectual experience similar to that which Mr. Elwood records, and what he has said of himself would perhaps apply in some degree to me. I am willing the public should take the book as an account which I have thought proper to give of my own 1

[Ed. Boston: Charles C. Little and James Brown, 1840.] 46

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former unbelief and present belief. So far as it can be of any use, I am willing that what is here recorded should have the authority of my own experience. Those who are acquainted with the philosophical writers of the modern eclectic school of philosophy in France, will perceive that Mr. Morton has anticipated many of their results, and perhaps given them an original application. He seems to be somewhat of a kindred spirit with M. Victor Cousin, though perhaps more of a theologian, and therefore more disposed to consider philosophy in its connection with religion.2 With these remarks I dismiss this little book to its fate. I have taken much pleasure in its composition; I have embodied in it the results of years of inquiry and reflection; and I have thought it not ill-adapted to the present state of the public mind in this community. It deals with the weightiest problems of philosophy and theology, and perhaps some minds may find it not altogether worthless. Boston, February 15, 1840.

CONTENTS INTRODUCTION...................................................................48 CHAPTER I. A VISITOR...................................................51 CHAPTER II. DIVINE REVELATION .......................... 53 CHAPTER III. MIRACLES ............................................... 57 CHAPTER IV. AN INTERVIEW ...................................... 61 CHAPTER V. THE INQUIRY MEETING ..................... 64 CHAPTER VI. STRUGGLES ............................................ 68 CHAPTER VII. AUTHORITY ........................................... 70 CHAPTER VIII. ARGUMENT FROM NATURE .............. 73 CHAPTER IX. THE SACRIFICE .................................... 78 CHAPTER X. THE DISMISSAL ..................................... 82 2 [Ed. The Eclectic school of philosophy was headed by Victor Cousin (17921867). Using an historical and deductive method members of this school tried to bring into creative synthesis the philosophical schools of idealism, empiricism, skepticism and mysticism. Brownson believed that he, like his fictional Mr. Morton, had applied Cousin’s philosophy to theology in ways that Cousin had not considered.]

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CHAPTER XI. CHAPTER XII. CHAPTER XIII. CHAPTER XIV. CHAPTER XV. CHAPTER XVI. CHAPTER XVII. CHAPTER XVIII. CHAPTER XIX. CHAPTER XX. CHAPTER XXI. CHAPTER XXII. CHAPTER XXIII. CHAPTER XXIV. CHAPTER XXV. CHAPTER XXVI. CHAPTER XXVII.

PRIESTCRAFT ......................................... 88 IMMORTALITY ....................................... 91 THE REFORMER .................................... 94 THE CHRISTIAN .................................... 97 CONVALESCENCE .............................. 108 A PARADOX ............................. .............111 RATIONALISM ..................................... 115 THE PREACHER ................................... 120 SOME PROGRESS ................................ 131 GOD...................................... ................. 137 THE DEMONSTRATION .................... 140 CREATION ............................................ 147 RESULTS.................................................150 SUPERNATURALISM .......................... 154 THE BIBLE ............................................ 163 THE CHURCH ...................................... 170 CONCLUSION ...................................... 178

INTRODUCTION You ask me, my dear K—, to give you the history of my life. I am flattered by the request which your often-tried friendship for me has prompted, but I can bring myself to comply with it only in part. Perhaps the history of my life would not be altogether barren of interest, but I have resolved that it shall never be written. I have lived in the world from my childhood; I have acted even a conspicuous part with the men of my generation in its busy scenes; my name has been known far and wide; and yet are there none living who can bring together the scattered fragments of my story and furnish any tolerable account of my life. They who knew me in childhood are not they who have known me in the prime of manhood or in old age; and they who have known me at one period of my life, or under one relation, have had and can have no access to those who have known me at another period or under another relation. But why ask for the story of my outward life? It can tell you little of myself and furnish you no sure index to my real character. The

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man lies beneath his deeds, far beneath the outward events of his life. Would you become acquainted with the man you must read the history of his soul—make yourself familiar with his spiritual experience, his inward struggles, defeats, victories, doubts, convictions, aims, ideals. These constitute the man and you become acquainted with him only in proportion as you become acquainted with them. Moreover, arrived as I am at the last stage in my earthly pilgrimage and wasting away under a disease which, though gentle in its operations, must ere long lay me asleep with my fathers, my past deeds shrink into insignificance, as does the world to which they belonged. I find now solace and support only in turning in upon myself, in retracing my inward experience, and ascertaining what I have garnered up in my soul, that I may be able to carry with me whither I am going. But even this experience has little value except for myself. It can stand others in no stead, or if it can, they may find all that is essential in it, by recurring to what has passed in themselves. After all, my dear K—, what are individuals that their history should be written? Biography is the fruit of vanity, or of a false philosophy. What is purely individual is of no value; it must needs pass away with the individual and leave no trace; what there is in an individual, which belongs to the race, necessarily inscribes itself on his age, its institutions, laws, morals, or manners. The memory of the good man lives in the virtue which went forth from him—that of the great man in the results humanity obtains from the victories he has helped her achieve. The man’s biography, if he have manifested aught of the manly nature, has become an integral part of the life of humanity and therefore needs not to be written in a book and laid up in the scholar’s library. The book preserves nothing; for nothing ever dies that ought to live; nothing is ever forgotten that should be remembered; and all is known of every man that is worth knowing. You see then, my dear K—, why I cannot comply with your request. If I have done aught for my race it will not be forgotten; if my fellow men are the wiser or the better for my having lived, I am immortal. We should study to be men, heroes, and think not whether our names shall or shall not be remembered. Nevertheless, I understand the feeling which prompts us to inquire how it has been with those in this world whom we have loved, or whose memories we would cherish. I know the love which you feel for me, and which gives me an importance in your eyes which I have not in my own, makes you desirous of knowing what befell me during that long period of my life which passed away before we met; I know every incident in my

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eventful life, every3 the minutest fact in my experience, would be precious to you for my sake, that you would prize it and preserve it; and to gratify you, and to show how deeply I value the love which has come to shed a glory around the winter of my life, I would willingly recall and relate all that I have been, have done, or have suffered. But I have not now the strength to do it. The time allotted me here is too limited; and my last moments should rather be employed in making what preparation I can for the new world into which I am so soon to enter. I have however by me a short account of a period of my life, least known to the public, which I drew up some years ago at the solicitation of one, now, alas, no more! It will tell you not much of my exterior relations, nor of the scenes in which I have taken an active part; but it may tell you somewhat of my inward conflicts, and perhaps disclose to you some of the causes which have made me what I am. When I drew it up, I had the folly to think that it might serve as a guide to those who should find themselves, as I did myself, at an early age, lost in that wilderness of doubt, where a man cannot live, and from which there seems to be no issue; but I have lived long enough to learn that the experience which profits, is our own and not another’s. I have looked it over and added a few notes which were needed to make some parts of it intelligible; I have revised some portions; but I have not been able to make it harmonize with the present temper of my mind. We are rarely in old age satisfied with the performances of our youth. The imperfections I see in it, however, render it but a more faithful picture of my mind and character at the period to which it relates. I place it in your hands, and you may do with it as you please. As coming from me, and as concerning me, I doubt not that you will prize it. You will find nothing in it to make you love me less; and that is all I ask. Of the many whose hearts I have felt were my own, you alone remain. I will not say that any have been false, but all have left me, perhaps through my own fault. I have none who can talk with me over life’s early trials, temptations, and struggles. With you I chanced to meet, only long after I had persuaded myself that friendship and love were not for such as I. You have taught me what all who reach old age know but too well, however otherwise youth may fear, that the heart never grows old, that the affections are always young. I cannot consent that you should leave me as others have left me. I would go down to the grave feeling that one warm heart loved me still, and had no cause to regret the wealth of affection it had lavished upon me. C[harles] E[lwood] 3

[Ed. Perhaps Brownson means “even.”]

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CHAPTER I: A VISITOR I was surprised at my breakfast by a visit from Mr. Smith,4 the young clergyman I had heard preach the preceding evening. This was hardly in the ordinary course of things. I was generally regarded in the village as an infidel; and to be an infidel—that is, an open, avowed infidel—is to exclude one’s self from the common courtesies of civilized life, and almost from the pale of humanity. Pious people beheld me with a most righteous horror, and not infrequently, I have good reason to believe, made use of my name to restore quiet or preserve submission in the nursery. Of course I was generally avoided by the elect, probably lest I should cause them to become castaways. The wisdom or the policy, to say nothing of the justice, of this manner of treating the infidel, is somewhat questionable, and in my own case was decidedly bad. I had a deep yearning for communion with my kind, and was ever ready to sympathize with them in their joy or their sorrow. I was unconscious of guilt; I had a strong craving to know the truth, and I felt that I had done my best to ascertain it, and that if I was in error I was not in fault. The conduct of religious people, therefore, struck me as unjust, and could not fail to prejudice me against them, and through them against religion itself. Had they treated me as a man, and shown me that respect for my honest convictions which I was willing to show them for theirs, I have no doubt that I should have been saved from dogmatic infidelity. But they were not wise enough—very likely not Christian enough—for this. I have since thought, however, that these religious people did respect me to a certain extent. We always consciously or unconsciously do homage to the man of true moral independence, who unflinchingly adheres to what he believes to be the truth. No man who is true to his own convictions, who follows faithfully his own conscience, and proclaims calmly but fearlessly unpopular doctrines, regardless of personal consequences, but does in reality gain the respect of the community in which he lives, however great may be its repugnance to the views he sets forth. Everybody despises the time-server, the moral coward, who wants the manliness to speak out his honest convictions, and who says “Good Lord,” and “Good Devil,” doubtful 4 [Ed. Smith has a strong resemblance to Reuben Smith (1789-1860), Brownson’s former pastor of the Presbyterian Church in Ballston Spa, New York. On Smith, see EW, 1:5-7, and for Smith’s reactions to Brownson’s depictions of Presbyterianism in Brownson’s autobiography, see “Orestes A. Brownson’s Development of Himself,” Princeton Review 30 (April 1858): 890-92.]

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into the hands of which he may ultimately fall. But my religious friends had their religious character to maintain with one another, and no one among them had the moral courage to make the first advances. Everyone felt that if he were intimate with me, all his brethren might suspect his orthodoxy and perhaps accuse him of encouraging infidelity. It is possible, also, that some did honestly fear that if they treated me as a man and a brother, they would be giving countenance to my heresies and encouraging me in errors which would prove not only dangerous to society, but fatal to my own soul. They felt it to be their duty to make me dissatisfied with my infidelity, and to do what they could to deprive me of all personal influence. This they supposed could be done most effectually by bringing the whole force of public opinion to bear against me. But in this, their zeal for religion out ran their knowledge of human nature. Public opinion is the poorest argument in the world to convince a man of his errors. Every man, if there be anything of the man about him, adheres but the firmer to his opinions the more unpopular they render him. We value those opinions the most for which we pay the dearest, and hold on as with a death-grasp to the faith, or the want of faith, for which we have been made outcasts from society. But this is a truth religious people have been slow to learn, and learn it perfectly they cannot without just observation and profound reflection—two things which they eschew almost as devoutly as they do infidelity itself. It may be easily inferred from what I have said that I was left pretty much alone, that my intercourse with my fellow men was exceedingly restricted. My friends were few in number and rarely such as I would have chosen. They who had reputation to gain or to lose took good care not to be thought acquaintances of mine. And the friendship of those who called themselves my friends, grew cool in nearly the same proportion in which the warmth of the revival increased. One and only one, I had trusted, might remain firm, but him I had left on the anxious seats,5 and could therefore hardly hope to meet him again as a friend. Under these circumstances, a visit early in the morning from a clergyman, and such a clergyman as I supposed Mr. Smith to be, was an event in my life as unlooked for as it was apparently inexplicable. 5 [Ed. The so-called anxious or mourner’s bench was one of the “new measures” early nineteenth century revivalists used to enhance personal reformation. The anxious bench was an area in the front of the church where those who were troubled about the sinful condition of their souls could struggle to make a decision for Christ.]

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But Mr. Smith, to do him justice, was in the main an honest, well-meaning man. Early drawn to the contemplation of religious subjects, and impressed with the importance of saving his soul, he had failed to take enlarged views of men and things, or to acquire much of that kind of knowledge which expands the affections and liberalizes the mind. Educated too by charity, as a poor and pious youth, gratitude to the sect which had taken him up, and to which he had pledged his faith before he had begun his inquiries after the truth, had come to quicken his zeal and narrow his sympathies. But he was sincere and really desirous of saving souls. He was fresh from the theological school, full of the ardor of undamped youth, and burning with all the zeal to make proselytes that could be inspired by a creed which dented the possibility of salvation to any who doubted it. He had heard of me as an atheist, his attention had been directed to me at his evening meeting, and he had now just stepped in to convert me to Christianity. Having never measured himself with an intelligent unbeliever, he counted on an easy and speedy victory.

CHAPTER II: DIVINE REVELATION “I have called on you, Mr. Elwood,” said Mr. Smith, after a few common-place remarks, “with a message from God.” “Indeed!” said I: “And when, sir, did you receive it?” “Last night. When you left the meeting without taking your place on the anxious seats, God told me to come and deliver you a message.” “Are you certain it was God?” “I am.” “And how will you make me certain?” “Do you think I would tell you a falsehood?” “Perhaps not, intentionally; but what evidence have I that you are not yourself deceived?” “I feel certain, and do I not know what I feel?” “Doubtless, what you feel; but how do you know that your feeling is worthy of trust?” “Could not God give me, when he spoke to me, sufficient evidence that it was really He who spoke to me?” “Of that you are probably the best judge. But admit that he could give it, and has actually given it; still you alone have it, not I. If then you come to me with the authority of God to vouch for the trustworthiness of your feeling, you must be aware that I have not that authority; I have only your word, the word of a man, who for aught I

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know, is as fallible as myself. You come to me as an ambassador from God; produce your credentials, and I will listen to your despatches.” “My credentials are the Bible.” “But, pray, sir, how can a book written many ages ago, by nobody knows whom, be a proof to me that God told you last night to come and deliver me a message this morning?” “I bring you just such a message as the Bible dictates.” “And what then?” “The Bible is the Word of God.” “That is easily said, but I fancy not quite so easily proved. The Bible is in the same category with your feeling of certainty, of which you have spoken. Certain men, it is said, in old times, had certain dreams, visions, inward impressions, which they called, or somebody in their name, the Word of God. That they had the dreams, visions, inward impressions, is possible, but how could they know that they came from God?” “Their impressions bore the mark of God’s seal. The men who received them were honest men, holy men, who could have no motive to deceive others, and who could not be deceived themselves.” “And how know you all that?” “I am sure of it.” “I am glad you are. But I should hardly dare make so broad an assertion concerning individuals with whom I am intimately acquainted, much less of individuals of whom I know nothing at all, not even the time when they lived, the nation to which they belonged, the language in which they wrote, nor even the names which they bore. How know I that the Bible-writers were honest men? What do I, or can I know of their motives? Before you insist on my relying upon a man’s testimony, it would seem no more than fair that you should make me acquainted with him; that you should tell me his name, his place of residence, the nation to which he belongs; and in case of an ancient writer, that you should tell me when he wrote, in what language; in a word, you should give me his whole character and the entire history of his life. This I suspect you are not able to do in the instance of a single one of your Bible-writers.” “You misstate the case. The historical evidence is complete; at least, it is much stronger in proof of the genuineness and authenticity of the several books of the Bible than it is of any other ancient writing whatever.” “I am speaking, sir, of the character and motives of the Biblewriters, of which, so far as I have been able to ascertain, we know next to nothing at all. But admit that we know as much of these

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writers as we do of any other ancient writers, how does that help the matter? Because I know nothing of one class of writers, does it follow that I have no need of knowing anything of another class? Besides, the cases are not parallel. The facts and doctrines of the Bible are to be taken on the personal authority of its writers. If I cannot prove these writers worthy of implicit confidence, I can offer no good reason for believing the facts they relate, or the doctrines they teach. But it is different with what are called profane writers. We have their books and these speak for themselves. Their worth would be but slightly impaired were their authors wholly unknown. The works ascribed to Homer, to Plato, Cicero, Virgil and Horace, would be precisely what they are and have exactly the same authority they now have, had they been written by any other individuals than those to whom they are attributed. This is because the truth or falsity of their subject-matter does in nowise depend on the personal authority of their authors. But with the Bible it is not so. You do not allow me to take the Bible as I do one of the works of Homer or Cicero, and judge for myself of its contents. You do not allow me the liberty to be my own judge of what is true or false in the Bible; but you require me to take the whole of it as true, and not only as true but as the measure and test of truth; and this, too, not because I have by the exercise of my own reason found it to be true, but on the bare word of its authors. This makes an essential difference, and requires you to furnish me with as much stronger proof in the case of the Bible-writers than is necessary in the case of profane writers, as the implicit faith you demand in the statements of the first surpasses the assent which I yield to the statements of the last. But waiving this, and much more to the same purpose, admitting that you can come to some tolerable conclusions concerning the characters and motives of the alleged authors of the Bible, how will you ascertain the purity and genuineness of the writings which have come down to us in their name?” “That has been done over and over again, by some of the ablest, the most learned, and pious men that ever lived.” “So I have heard it said, but so have I not seen it proved. I have looked over most of your celebrated apologies for the Bible and Christianity, but with little other emotion than astonishment at the much which is asserted, and the little which is proved. All these celebrated apologies seem to me to proceed on the supposition that the Bible was written in an enlightened age, and published and extensively, I may almost say, universally circulated and read in a nation of critics, all of whom were interested in detecting its errors, and would most certainly have detected and exposed them had there been any. Now,

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sir, I need not tell you, a theologian, that such is not the fact. They were produced in a semi-barbarous age, or among a half-civilized people. They were never published, as we understand the term. They were never open to criticism, as books are now-a-days; partly because at first they were considered too insignificant to be refuted, but mainly because they were, by the people who submitted to them, regarded as sacred books. They were accounted sacred books not because their superior worth was seen and felt, but because they were the productions of the sacerdocy, or such books as the Jewish or Christian priesthood approved and authorized to be read. All books written or approved by the sacerdotal caste, were always accounted sacred, holy, in opposition to profane books, or books written or kept not in the fane6 or temple. Being sacred books it was never lawful to criticize them, and they never were criticized when the priesthood had power to prevent it. And you, sir, are well aware, that whenever the priesthood has attained to power it has always taken good care to destroy the criticisms which it had not been able to prevent. Moreover, the books have always been in the keeping of the priesthood, and of a priesthood too which obtained its living, rank, and consideration from expounding them to a laity which had them not, and could not have read them, if it had had them. I own, sir, that I have a distrust of all books which have come to us through the hands of the priesthood, of whom it is no lack of charity to say, that in no age or country have they proved themselves too virtuous to interpolate, alter, or fabricate any work when required by the interests of their order.” “That is a statement you cannot sustain. The very fact that the sacred books have always been in the keeping of the Jewish priesthood and the Christian clergy, is a sure guaranty of their genuineness and purity.” “Your assertion, it strikes me, betrays rather a superficial acquaintance with priesthoods in general, and the Jewish and Christian priesthoods in particular; or else that you have studied them with the partialities of a friend who deems it the greatest merit to be blind to a friend’s faults. But I am not disposed to insist on this. I will merely add that once open the door to the admission of such testimony as you seem to judge unexceptionable, once lay it down as a principle of evidence that a man’s word, if he have but a tolerable character for honesty and truth, is sufficient proof of any statement he may make, whatever be its subject-matter, and I see not what end you will have to impostors and impositions. Anyone who can conceal a nefarious design beneath the cloak of external sanctity, may proclaim himself 6

[Ed. “Fane” is a temple.]

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divinely inspired, command whatever he pleases, and denounce you in the name of God, if you refuse him obedience. You must own him as a prophet of the Lord, and accept his prophecies, be they what they may. The past and the present have a thousand voices to condemn in advance the principle of evidence you would establish. I would not treat you, sir, with disrespect, but knowing as I do from past history and from my own experience, how easy it is for a man to be deceived, I must believe that it is more likely that your zeal has betrayed you, than it is that God has given you a special message to me.”

CHAPTER III: MIRACLES “But you forget,” replied Mr. Smith, after a short pause, “that the communications received by the sacred writers bore the impress of God’s seal. God gave them all needed assurance that it was he himself who spoke to them. If then they were honest men, we ought to believe them. That they were honest men, worthy of all credit as speaking by divine authority, I infer from the fact that they could work miracles.” “All that is easily said. Whether God keeps a seal or not is more than I know; but supposing he does, are mortals well enough acquainted with it to recognize it the moment it is presented? How do they know its impress? Has God lodged with them a fac-simile of it?” “God told them that it was his seal.” “But how did they know it was God who said so? Had they had any previous acquaintance with him? Who introduced him to them, assured them it was verily the Almighty? But this leads us back to where we were a moment ago. I suppose you hold a supernatural revelation from God to be necessary?” “Certainly.” “And without a supernatural revelation we can know nothing of God?” “Nothing.” “Deprive us of the Bible and we should be in total ignorance of God?” “Assuredly.” “It is necessary to prove that the revelation said to be from God is actually from him?” “Undoubtedly.” “The revelation is proved to be from God by the miracles performed by the men who professed to speak by divine authority?” “Yes.”

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“Miracles prove this because they are performed by the power of God, and because God will not confer the power of working miracles on wicked men or men who will tell lies?” “So I believe.” “It requires some knowledge of God to be able to say of any given act that it is performed by God. We say of what you term a miracle, that it is wrought by the Almighty because we seem to ourselves to detect his presence in it. Now if we were totally unacquainted with his presence, should we be able to detect it? It therefore requires some knowledge of God to be able to assert that what is termed a miracle is actually effected by divine power. Also it requires some knowledge of God to be able to affirm that he will give the power of working miracles to good men only. You start at the idea that he would give this power to wicked men, because to do so would be inconsistent with the character you believe him to possess. In saying that he will not do it, you assume to be acquainted with his character; and from your assumed acquaintance with his character, you infer what he will or will not do. In both of these instances, no inconsiderable knowledge of God is presupposed. Whence do we obtain this knowledge?” “Everybody knows enough of God to know when a miracle is performed that it is God who performs it, and to know that God will not give the power of working miracles to bad men.” “Perhaps so. You at least may know enough to know this. But suppose you were deprived of all the light of revelation, would you know enough of God to know this? Did I not understand you to say that were it not for revelation we should be totally ignorant of God?” “I said so, and say so still.” “I presume, sir, that there is a point here which has in part escaped your attention. I have observed that you religious people, in defending miracles, assume to be in possession of all the knowledge of God communicated by the supernatural revelation miracles are brought forward to authenticate. You assume the truth of the revelation and by that verify your miracles; and then adduce your miracles to authenticate the revelation. But I need not say to you that before you have authenticated your revelation you have no right to use it; and before you can authenticate it, on your own showing, you must verify your miracles—a thing you cannot do without that knowledge of God which you say is to be obtained from the revelation only.” “I do no such thing.” “Not intentionally, consciously, I admit. You have not a doubt of the truth of revelation. Your whole intellectual being is penetrated in

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all directions with its teachings, and you never make in your own mind an abstraction of what you have received from the Bible, and thus ascertain what would be your precise condition were you left to the light of nature. You fall therefore unconsciously into the practice of reasoning in support of your faith from premises which that faith itself supplies, and which would be of no validity if that faith were proved to be false; and are of no validity when reasoning with one who questions it. But, sir, this whole matter of miracles may be cut short. What is a miracle? You must know as much of God and the universe to be able to define a miracle, as a miracle on any supposition can teach you. Therefore miracles are at best useless. Then the evidence of the extraordinary feats you term miracles is not altogether satisfactory. All ancient history, profane as well as sacred, is full of marvelous stories which no sound mind can for one moment entertain. They serve to discredit history. The ancient historian who should fill his history with marvels would by no means be held in so high respect even by yourself as one who confined his faith to the simple, the ordinary, the natural. His faith in marvels, omens, oracles, prodigies, you would regard as an impeachment of his judgment. Why not do the same in regard to the Bible historians? You allege miracles as a proof of revelation, when in fact nothing about your revelation, or in it, is more in need of proof than your miracles themselves. Then again, miracles can prove nothing but our ignorance. No event that can be traced to a known cause is ever termed a miracle. A miracle is merely an event which can be traced to no known law of nature. To say an event is miraculous, is merely saying that it is an anomaly in our experience, and not provided for in our systems of science. The miraculous events recorded in the Bible may have occurred, for aught I know, but they are of no value as evidences of Christianity.” “Why not?” “I supposed I had already shown why not. You cannot know enough of God and the universe to know, in the first place, that what you term miracles are actually wrought by God. For aught you know to the contrary there may be thousands of beings superior to man capable of performing them. And in the second place, you can never infer from the fact that a man opens the eyes of the blind, or restores a dead body to life, that he cannot tell a lie. The fact that the miracle is performed does not necessarily involve the truth of the doctrine taught, nor the veracity of the miracle-worker. So far as you or I know a man may perform what is termed a miracle and yet be a teacher of false doctrines.”

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“But if you should see a man raise a dead body to life, attestation of his divine commission, would you not believe him?” “If your history be correct, there were men who actually saw Jesus raise Lazarus from the dead, and yet neither recognized his claims as the Son of God nor as a teacher of truth, but went away and took counsel how they might put him to death. Before the raising of a man from the dead could be a sufficient warrant for me to receive any doctrine, I must know positively that no being not commissioned by God, can raise a dead body to life, or that no being capable of raising a dead body to life, can possibly tell a falsehood. Now this knowledge I have not, and cannot have.” Mr. Smith made no reply. He remarked that he had overstayed his time, that an imperious engagement required him to leave me; but he would call upon me again, and continue the discussion—a promise, by-the-by, which he forgot to keep, or which circumstances prevented him from fulfilling. Many years have elapsed since this conversation took place. I have reviewed it often in various and diverse moods of mind, but I have not been able to detect any fallacy in my reasoning. It is true that reasoning, if admitted, goes to show that a revelation from God to man is impossible. If the premises from which both Mr. Smith and I started be correct, all supernatural revelation must be given up. They who deny to man all inherent capacity to know God, all immediate perception of spiritual truth, place man out of the condition of ever knowing anything of God. Man can know only what he has a capacity to know. God may speak to him, and utter truths which he could not of himself have found out, but unless there be in him something which recognizes the voice of God, and bears witness for God, it is all in vain. If there be not this something in man, then can man receive no revelation from God. There must be a God within to recognize and vouch for the God who speaks to us from without. Now this inherent capacity to recognize God, this power to detect his presence wherever he is, and of course everywhere, I did not admit, and not admitting this my conclusions followed legitimately from my premises. Mr. Smith admitted it no more than I did, and therefore could not refute me. Denying this capacity, he admitted nothing by which a supernatural revelation could be authenticated, for it required this capacity to detect the presence of God in the miracles, not less than to detect it in the revelation itself. Not having this capacity, man could have no standard by which to try the revelation alleged to be from God. This was what I labored to make Mr. Smith comprehend;

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I demanded of him this standard, the criterion of spiritual truth, the fac-simile of God’s seal with which to compare the impress on the despatches sent us in his name; but he could not answer my demand. Many able apologists of Christianity fail to perceive the point they must establish in the very outset of this controversy with unbelievers. This point is that man is endowed with an intelligence that knows God immediately by intuition. They who deny this, may be religious, but only at the expense of their logic. We can rationally and scientifically sustain religion only by recognizing the mystic element of human nature, an element, which though in man, is yet in relation with God, and serves as the mediator between God and man. If we cannot establish the reality of this element, which is sometimes termed the divine in man, and which though in nature is supernatural, it is in vain to seek for any scientific basis for theology, and unbelief in God is the only conclusion to which we can legitimately come.

CHAPTER IV: AN INTERVIEW After Mr. Smith had taken his leave, I called on my friend George Wyman, whom I had left the preceding evening on the anxious seats. He was not at home, but instead of him I found his sister Elizabeth. Of this sister, I must say something, and yet I would not; her name calls up much I would forget, as well as much I would remember; but little that I am willing to relate. The heart has secrets which it is sacrilege to reveal. Elizabeth and I had been acquainted for some time, and we had formed a strong mutual attachment; we had opened the state of our hearts to each other, and were now waiting for a few weeks to pass away, to be declared in due form “husband and wife.” “O Charles, I am so glad to see you,” exclaimed she, rising to meet me, as I entered the room. “O there is a God! He has spoken peace to my soul, and I wanted to see you that we might sing his praise together.” “O there is a God,” spoken by the sweet lips of eighteen, by her we love and hope in a few days to call our own by the most intimate and sacred of ties—it goes well nigh to melt even the atheist. It comes to us as a voice from another world, and wins the heart though it fail to convince the understanding. It is no easy thing to be an atheist when one loves, is in presence of the one he loves, and hears her, in the simple, confiding tones of the child, exclaim, “O there is a God.” For a moment I gazed on the beautiful being before me, as upon one inspired. Could I see her, hear her, love her with all my heart, and not believe in the Divinity? She seemed sent to me from a fairer

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world, to bear witness to the reality of brighter beings than the dull inhabitants of earth. I ought to explain the occasion of this exclamation on the part of Elizabeth, and I have done it, when I have said that she had been recently converted, and this was our first meeting since. Her manner affected me not a little, and, strange as it may seem, went much farther than all Mr. Smith’s logic towards making me a Christian. But recovering myself, and making an effort to reply calmly, I replied, as is not uncommon in such cases, even coldly. “I perceive, Elizabeth, that you have become a subject of the Revival,” said I. “Women are easily affected in revival seasons. They are creatures of sentiment rather than of reason, and are therefore much addicted to piety. That may all be well enough. God, you say, has spoken peace to your soul. Very well. He has not spoken to me.” “Charles, Charles, have you no feeling? The whole creation is radiant with God’s glory: all creatures, even beasts, birds and insects, join in a hymn of praise to his mercy; and are you silent, you, whom I have heard so often and so eloquently plead for the oppressed, and so warmly vindicate the rights and dignity of man? Have you no word for God; the exhaustless source of all goodness, life and love? Is your heart cold and dead?” “No, Elizabeth, no. My heart is not dead. I want not sensibility, but I want faith. I see all things with the eyes of the unbeliever. I hear not the hymn which so enraptures you. All nature is silent to me. I cannot sympathize with your present feelings. I am an unbeliever, but I do not ask you to be one. Indulge your piety, but think not unkindly of me if I cannot share it.” “Charles, you might be a believer if you would.” “No, I could not. I am not an unbeliever from choice, but necessity.” “I doubt it. You are too proud to be a Christian. You are ashamed of the humility of the cross. You would be a philosopher, and follow your own reason. You will not submit to God.” “Nay, Elizabeth, you wrong me, wrong me grievously. I am not ashamed of the humility of the cross. I have tried hard to be a Christian.” “You have?” “Ay, by day and by night. I have sought God with my whole heart, with tears, entreaties, fastings, watchings, but it has availed me nothing; I am an atheist.” “O say not so.” “Why should I deceive myself or others? If I know the state of my own mind, I do not believe in the existence of God. But do not

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fancy that I have become what I am without a struggle. I am not ignorant of what men call religion. It has been the study of my life. My first lesson was the catechism, and my earliest delight was in reading religious books, conversing with religious people, and thinking of God and heaven. I was not yet thirteen when I was affected as you have been—had deep and pungent conviction for sin—heard, as I fancied, the Son of God declare my sins forgiven and felt all the ecstatic joy you now feel.”7 “And yet have become an unbeliever!” “‘Tis true. But I have not labored to make others unbelievers. Unbelief has few attractions. It adds no glory to the universe, no warmth to the heart, no freshness to life. It is a sad creed; the wise endure it, but none love it.” “Why then cling to it? Why live without God in the world? Why not believe, and be filled with joy and peace unspeakable?” “Because it depends not on us what we shall believe or disbelieve; because our belief or disbelief alters not the fact. Truth and falsehood depend not on us. We have not made the world. We must take it as we find it. No wise man values it very highly. It is full of cares and vexations, crosses and disappointments, trials and sorrows. The only course which wisdom leaves us is to make the most of the few fair days allotted us, to recline on the few sunny spots which may lie in life’s pathway, endure without a murmur the evils we cannot cure, and welcome the end of our journey when we may lie down in the grave, ‘Where the wicked cease from troubling and the weary are at rest’” [Job 3:16]. “So young, and yet so gloomy! So soon is the light of hope extinguished, your affections blighted, and your soul darkened! O Charles, see the fruits of your boasted philosophy. Let me pray you to rekindle the light of hope at religion’s torch, and your heart shall resume its early freshness. Your path shall be bright again, and you may walk through life praising God, and loving all his works; and when our journey is ended we will not lie down in the cold grave, but uprise in a fairer and better world, where we shall re-youth ourselves, and enter into joys which ‘eye hath not seen, ear hath not heard, and which it hath not entered into the heart of man to conceive’” [1 Cor 2:9]. “It is a brave dream. It were pleasant to recline in the bowers of Elysium,8 to ramble over its green fields, and gather its wild flowers. 7

[Ed. On Brownson’s conversion experience at about the age of thirteen, see EW, 1:4.] 8 [Ed. In Greek mythology, Elysium was the dwelling place of a privileged few after death.]

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It were pleasant, after having been so long tossed and torn on the stormy voyage of life, to find at last a secure haven in which our shattered bark may be refitted, and prepared to ride the ocean again in pride and safety. It may be that there is that haven. It may be that those green fields await us, and that we shall ramble over them together, and enjoy their beauty. It may be that we shall recline in those bowers and recount all that we thought, hoped, joyed, or sorrowed, amidst the trials and struggles, alas, successes and defeats of our earthly pilgrimage. It is a blissful dream. I may sometimes wish to awake and find it a reality. Dream on then, dearest Elizabeth. I will not awake you. Who knows but your dreams may turn out to be truer than my waking wisdom? No: I will be no cloud over the sunlight of your soul. If there be a God, perhaps he may one day reveal himself to me also, and I may hope as well as you.”

CHAPTER V: THE INQUIRY MEETING Elizabeth took my last remarks for more than they were worth, and imagined me much nearer the kingdom of heaven than I really was. She was far from foreseeing the long and severe battle I had yet to fight with doubt and unbelief. She therefore requested me to accompany her to an inquiry meeting, and unwilling to grieve her by a refusal, I consented, and we departed. Inquiry meetings were not, as the name would seem to indicate, meetings for the investigation of any points of doctrine or practice; but simply for the purpose of ascertaining the state of the souls of such as were seeking or had recently “obtained a hope.”9 They were, at the time of which I speak, very frequent, and held among the most efficient means of pulling down the kingdom of Satan and building up that of God’s dear Son. They are, if I am rightly informed, less frequent now, and held in altogether less repute. Whether this be owing to the fact that other and more efficient means for converting the soul have been found out, or that men care less about the soul’s salvation than they did, I am unable to say. I should, however, be sorry to believe that any part of the revival machinery formerly so much in use had been abandoned through indifference to religion, or to the welfare of man either for time or eternity. 9

[Ed. The phrase refers to a stage in the conversion process. For background on the Methodist stages of conversion in the early nineteenth century, see Richard J. Gilmore, “Orestes Brownson and New England Religious Culture, 1803-1827,” (Ph.D. diss., University of Virginia, 1971), 60-67, 102-09.]

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There was unquestionably much in the revival measures which no enlightened friend of religion can approve, but I have been prone of late to question the perfect wisdom of those who condemned them indiscriminately. The religious world had become all but dead, the church had lost nearly all sense of its mission, and men’s indifference to their duties both as religious beings and as social, had become frightful. This world engrossed all minds and hearts, and the whole community seemed lost to all worship but that of Mammon. Something was necessary to awaken the slumbering conscience, to rescue men from the all-absorbing selfishness and worldly-mindedness which had become so universal; to make them conscious of their higher and better nature; to make them feel that they were created for a nobler end than that of amassing an estate, continuing the race, and rotting in the grave. Some few there were who felt this. They saw the gross wickedness and sensuality of the times; they roused themselves and set themselves at work to effect a reform. Their zeal was far from being always according to knowledge; their efforts from resulting in the production of unmixed good; but they succeeded in shaking the dry bones, in reviving a good work, in preparing—unless I am greatly mistaken—a more advanced state of the church and of society. Though once one of their most violent and indefatigable opponents, I have long since regarded them with a friendly eye. They undoubtedly engendered much fanaticism, much bigotry and sectarian animosity; but these, after all, disastrous as they may be, are less to be deprecated than the selfishness and indifference they aimed to remove. On our arrival at the place of meeting, we were separated—Elizabeth, as having found religion, was conducted to the saints’ apartment, and I, as being at best nothing more than a seeker, was ushered into the room occupied by the sinners. This was a large room in a private dwelling, much crowded as sinners’ apartments always are. It presented to my eye on entering a varied and even a touching aspect. In it, as in the tomb, were brought together the representatives of both sexes, all ages and all conditions. Here was the old man of threescore and ten, with whitened head, palsied arm, and broken frame, bewailing a misspent life, and trembling with fearful apprehension of a judgment to come. By his side was the boy with chubby face and flaxen locks, his bright blue eyes swollen with weeping for sins he had not yet learned even by name. A little further on was a middle aged man, his strong athletic frame writhing and contorting under a guilty conscience. I turned with horror from his countenance, which bore witness that the fires of hell were doing their strange work within. My eyes rested a moment on a conspicuous seat, where sat the village

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trader, and the village lawyer, trying in vain to look sad and penitent. Not for their sins were they there. They were there, the one because he wanted more customers and better bargains, the other because he wanted more fees and more votes. I set them down as incorrigible, and turned towards a distant corner of the room to observe the subdued mien of a young maiden I had known as the gayest among the gay, and the loveliest among the lovely. Yet she was pure and fit for heaven. She was there to find, not forgiveness for sins, but a soothing balm for a heart which a false wretch had betrayed and broken. But a truce with description. I was allowed but a moment to look around and collect myself after I had taken a seat to which someone had motioned me, before I was accosted by Mr. Wilson, the clergyman in whose parish the revival had at first broken out.10 Mr. Wilson and myself were but barely known to each other. He was one of those men from whom I have through life instinctively recoiled. He was about forty-five years of age, well made, a commanding figure, and of gentlemanly and to most people an engaging person and address. He had been originally a lawyer, but had some time since abandoned the bar for the pulpit. He had seen much of the world—was familiar with men, acquainted with human nature—on its dark side—and had of course a sovereign contempt of man and his capabilities. His intellectual powers were respectable, his religious feelings strong and active, and his moral sentiments weak and sluggish. He would never enter a church without taking off his hat, but he could pass a poor widow without thinking of her wants; he would do much for evangelizing the world and converting it to his creed, but very little for civilizing it, and making the earth the abode of love and peace. But whatever he was, he contrived to throw a veil of sanctity over the unseemly features of his character, and to pass himself off with the multitude as a saint of the first water. “Mr. Elwood,” said he, in a low and respectful tone, “I am glad to see you here. Religion is worthy of the homage of the mind in its dawn, and in its noonday glory. It is truly refreshing to the friends of Jesus, to see young men of talents and education coming forward to inquire the way to Zion. Have you long been concerned for the salvation of your soul?” “No, sir,” I replied. “But I have thought long and anxiously on the subject of religion.” 10 [Ed. This may be a reference to Charles Grandison Finney (1792-1875), a revivalist who got his start in upstate New York where Brownson began his career as a Universalist minister and where he first attacked revivalism.]

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“He who has done that will not long remain indifferent to his soul’s salvation.” “Perhaps not, in general; but for myself, I care little about my soul or anything else that belongs to me. I am not worth caring for. But I would know if I ought to regard this miserable life as the term of man’s existence—if there be indeed a God who holds the destinies of the universe, and to whom vice and virtue are not indifferent.” “I fear, my dear sir, that you have indulged in some unprofitable, not to say presumptuous speculations. We must not strive to be wise above what is written. The world is full of mysteries and we cannot hope to unravel them all. We should seek to believe rather than to comprehend.” “I am not so vain as to hope to clear up all mysteries; but I must know what and wherefore I believe, what and wherefore I worship. Even your master reproves those who worship they ‘know not what,’ and I must have a reason for the faith I avow.”11 “Take care that you do not rely too much on reason. Reason is a feeble and a false light that dazzles but to blind. We should submit our reason to the word of God.” “Be my reason feeble and false as it may, it is my only light; and should I extinguish that I should be in total darkness. It is reason that distinguishes me from the brutes, and till I am willing to become a brute, I must insist on using it.” “Certainly, my dear sir. Use your reason, but bear in mind that it is reason’s highest glory to listen to the voice of God. But I perceive that you are laboring under difficulties which this is neither the time nor the place to discuss. Do me the favor to call at my house tomorrow at ten o’clock, and I will try and relieve your mind of its embarrassments.” So saying, he turned away to address himself to his several subjects according to their several conditions. To one he whispered hope; in this ear he breathed consolation; in that he thundered rebuke and the startling terrors of the law. I remained till the meeting broke up, accompanied Elizabeth to her home almost in silence, and hurried to my own lodgings to meditate on the occurrences of the day, and the various topics which had come up. My mind was in no enviable state. Love, doubt, desire to believe, and inability to believe, operating each by turns and all together, made me anything but comfortable. I looked forward with some eagerness to the proposed interview with Mr. Wilson, but with little hope, it must be confessed, of any satisfactory result. 11

[Ed. An allusion to 1 Pet 3:15.]

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CHAPTER VI: STRUGGLES We do not pass from belief to doubt nor from doubt to disbelief without a long and severe struggle. Even after we have become confirmed unbelievers, there are many remembrances which rise up to make us weep that we are not what we were. In most cases, religion has been inwoven with all our earlier life. It has hallowed all the affections and associations which gather round the home of our childhood. Each spot, each object, each event dear to the memory has its tale of religion. The sister who played with us, smiled when we were pleased, wept when we were grieved—above all the mother who stood between us and danger, and knelt with us in prayer, speak to us of religion, and endear it to our hearts. Whenever we break away from it, we seem to ourselves to be breaking away from the whole past— from all that we have loved, have hoped, feared, thought, enjoyed or suffered, and to be rushing upon a new and untried existence. It is a fearful change which then comes over us. To be no longer what we have been, to lose sight of all that has been familiar to us, to enter upon we know not what, upon a state of being the issues of which we see not, and of which we can foretell nothing—what is this different in reality from that event which men call death? Over everyone who once doubts the creed in which he has been reared does this change come. The doubt once raised, the man has undergone a radical change. He can never be again what he has been. The simple faith of his childhood never returns. He may attain to conviction, but the childlike confidence, the warm trustfulness is gone forever. From that time henceforth, he must battle his way in the dark, with doubts, perplexities, insolvable problems as best he may. And to all this, of which we have at first a forefeeling, think not, that we bring ourselves to consent without a struggle. Religion is life’s poesy. It breathes a living soul into the universe and gives us everywhere a bright and loving spirit with which to hold sweet and mystic communings. On every object around us it sheds a mellow light, and throws a veil over all the stern and forbidding features of reality. Bitter is the day which raises that veil, and bids that mellowing light be withdrawn; when for the first time we look into the heavens, and see no spirit shining there, over the rich and flowering earth and see no spirit blooming there, abroad over a world of silent, senseless matter, and feel that we are alone. I shall never forget that day; and I have no doubt that I shall see all the objects of sense, one after another, fade away and lose themselves in the darkness of death, with far less shrinking of soul, than I saw my childhood’s faith

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depart, and felt the terrible conviction fastening itself upon me that all must go—God, Christ, immortality, that which my fathers had believed, for which they had toiled, lived, suffered, died, which my mother had cherished and infused into my being with the milk from her breast—all, all, even to the last and dearest article must vanish and be to me henceforth but as a dream which cannot be recalled. The world may not give me credit for feeling so much, for the world may have misconceived my real character. It has allowed me the stronger, the harsher, but denied me the softer and more amiable qualities of our nature. It has supposed me incapable of generous sympathies and firm attachments. But the world has not known me: at least as I should have been, had it not been for the unfriendly circumstances of my earlier life which forced into notice much which in ordinary cases is concealed, and gave a disproportionate development to qualities, of which nature gave me indeed the germ, but which she never intended should form the prominent traits of my character. My youth was one of hardship, privation and suffering. My life has been a continual warfare with principles and doctrines which I have found in power, but which have appeared to me false and mischievous. I have almost always stood alone, battling singlehanded for the unpopular cause, the unfashionable party, the heretical truth. My hand has been against every man, and every man’s hand has been against me. Yet have I ever yearned towards my race, and separated from them only with the keenest regret. I have ever been found on the side of the future, the first to seek out and recognize the sheep-skin and goat-skin-clad prophets of God; and yet have I ever stood in awe before the weird past, and beheld with reverence all that over which the stream of ages has rolled, over which has ebbed and flowed the tide of human life through many generations. We know little of what passes in the hearts of our most intimate friends, what concealed wells of deep feeling, and holy sentiment, and gushing sympathy there are in those even who appear to us careless, cold and superficial. We all wear masks to one another and it is not in our power to unmask ourselves even if we would. We are all better than our best friends believe us. Could we but lay open our hearts to one another, and be seen by each other as we really are, hatred would cease, contempt of man by man would find no place, brother would bring no railing accusation against brother, unholy strife would end, discord die away, and love, joy and peace would reign. O we know not what treasures of rich and holy feeling our ignorance of each other’s better nature leads us to throw away, or to trample under our feet. He had a deep insight into human nature

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who made it the law of his morality that we should love our neighbors as ourselves. I know that in all this I shall but excite a smile in the men of the world, who fancy that to sneer at human nature, and to distrust the capacities of the human soul, is a mark of superior wisdom, and especially in those who deem abhorrence of the infidel the most grateful incense to God; but I can assure these men of the world that I too have lived in the world, and have studied men not less than I have man; and can speak from experience as well as they. They may laugh at what they may please to call my folly, but for myself, I can bear to be laughed at without losing my temper, and I am able in most cases to find something to commend, to love and reverence, even in those who deride me. They are better than they think themselves. Religion I had loved from my infancy. In my loneliness, in my solitary wanderings, it had been my companion and my support. It had been my pleasure to feel that wherever I went the eye of my Father watched over me, and his infinite love embraced me. I was never in reality alone. A glorious presence went always with me. When I was thrown upon the world at a tender age without a friend, and left to buffet my way unaided, unencouraged, and felt myself cut off from all communion with my kind, I could hold sweet and mysterious communion with the Father of men; and when I smarted under a sense of wrong done me, I could find relief in believing that God sympathized with me, and made my cause his own. God had been to me a reality, and though I had been nurtured in the tenets of the gloomiest and most chilling of Christian creeds, I had always seen him as a father, and as a father whose face ever beamed with paternal love. I could not then lose my faith, and see all my religious hopes and consolations escape in the darkness of unbelief, without feeling that I was giving up all that had hitherto sustained me, all that it was pleasant to remember, that could soothe in sorrow, strengthen under trial, inspire love, and give the wish or the courage to live.

CHAPTER VII: AUTHORITY I called on Mr. Wilson at the hour appointed. I found him alone in his library looking over the Systême de la Nature.12 “I was trying to ascertain,” he remarked, after the usual salutations, “what it is atheists find to allege against the existence of God. But here is merely the 12 [Ed. A reference to Paul-Henri Thiry, Baron d’Holbach’s (1723-89) Systême de la nature, ou des Lois du monde physique et du monde moral (1770), a comprehensive defense of atheistic materialism.]

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blind rage of an old man against an authority that should have sent him to the Bastille.” “But you would not,” I interrupted, “rely on such arguments as are drawn from the Bastille, I presume?” “No. Such arguments no longer comport with the spirit of the age. But I do wish men to feel that there is an authority to which they are accountable for their opinions not less than for their actions.” “Men are doubtless accountable to the truth for the opinions they entertain; but not, I take it, to one another.” “I allow no man to dictate to me what I shall believe or disbelieve; but I own that I feel myself bound to believe what God commands, and that I am guilty of rebellion if I do not.” “Not unless what he commands be true?” “His commands are the highest conceivable evidence of truth.” “I do not perceive that.” “God is the God of truth, and what he commands to be believed must needs therefore be true.” “If he commands me to commit murder, am I to believe that murder is right?” “Whatever he commands is right.” “Right because he commands it; or does he command it because it is right?” “It is right because he commands it.” “Does the command make the right, or only evidence it?” “Makes it.” “Whatever is commanded then must be right.” “Whatever is commanded by God.” “Why what is commanded by him rather than by some other being?” “Because he is absolute sovereign, and an absolute sovereign has the right to command what he pleases, and what he has the right to command it cannot in the nature of things be wrong for us to do.” “But in what does God’s sovereignty consist, in his power or in his justice?” “It consists in the fact that he is God.” “But is not justice essential to sovereignty?” “We say so, in regard to earthly sovereigns, because their sovereignty is not absolute, but derived. God is an absolute sovereign, and is therefore the supreme, the highest, the ultimate. You cannot therefore conceive him bound to conform to justice or right, or something above him, unless you can conceive of something higher than the highest, more ultimate than the ultimate itself.”

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“You hold yourself then always bound to do the will of God.” “Most certainly.” “The will of God, you hold, makes the right?” “Yes.” “Then you deny that right is something eternal, and of course all necessary distinctions between right and wrong.” “Not at all. Perhaps in strictness I should say, God does not make the right in itself, for he is it. The highest conception we can form of right for us human beings is conformity to the will of God. And this is right for us because God is absolute and eternal and immutable right, and what he wills is willed by right.” “But if your God had chanced to have possessed the character you Christians ascribe to the Devil, then right would have been what is now wrong, and what is now termed devilish would have been termed godly.” “As to that I know nothing. God is what he is; and being what he is, right is what it is. If the highest could have been different from what it is, and have issued different commands from what it now does, no doubt right, good and evil, just and unjust would have been different from what they now are. But what of that? If there had been nothing, nothing would have been. The Divine Being is what he is, not from an external necessity, but an eternal and invincible indwelling necessity.” “Well, be it so. But admitting his commands are obligatory upon us, that we are bound to believe what he has commanded, I suppose you allow me the free exercise of my reason in judging whether what is alleged to be his command, be in reality his command, and also in ascertaining its purport?” “Hardly. Reason before the Fall might have been competent to judge of these matters; but is not now unless it have been regenerated by the Holy Ghost.” “Then you prohibit the exercise of reason?” “Not at all. Reason is the power or faculty of deducing from certain data certain conclusions. When limited to the work of deduction, I approve it. But when it aspires to fix its premises, determine the data from which it should draw its inferences, it leaves its province, attempts what must ever exceed its powers, and should of course be rebuked.” “I thank you for your definition of reason. It is simply the power of drawing inferences. But aside from reason in this sense, you recognize in man, I presume, a power of perceiving, taking cognizance of the premises or data from which the reason makes its deduction?”

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“No power or faculty capable of recognizing God, or divine things; at least not till after regeneration.” “But if we have no faculty by which we can take cognizance of the data, and even judge whether they are well grounded or not, what confidence can we place in the deductions of reason?” “None, except when we have the authority of God for our data. It is only when we reason from the revealed word of God that we can rely with any certainty on reason.” “But, suppose I chance to doubt that what you call the revealed word of God is his word, how am I to satisfy myself that it is his word? If reason cannot determine that question, it must always work with uncertain premises, and never give us anything more than skepticism. But it is idle to discuss this question. If our reason is below it, it is above us, and therefore not for us. If the alleged word of God be above my reason, it can be of no use to me. That which I cannot comprehend, which I cannot ascertain to be true, is for me as though it were not. A revelation is no revelation at all if I cannot comprehend its purport, and know that it is from God. But if I have no power or faculty by which I can attain to the cognition of divine things, no divine revelation can be made to me.” “You can attain to the cognition of divine things when you shall have been regenerated, not before.” “I will wait till then. For, if I cannot understand aught of God till then I can have till then no evidence that I ought to be regenerated. But, sir, all this is wide of the mark. What is the use of talking to me of the authority of God, of the word of God, when I do not even believe that there is a God?” “Not believe there is a God! Of that there is abundance of evidence.” “For you doubtless, who have been regenerated; but for me who have only my natural faculties, and who according to you have no faculty by which I can take cognizance of divine things, I should like to know what evidence there is?”

CHAPTER VIII: ARGUMENT FROM NATURE “I forgive your sneer; but that there is a God, it appears to me, no man can really doubt, who has eyes to look abroad on nature. Every object I see from the spire of grass to the heavenly bodies proclaims to me the existence of God.” “Because you see them only with the eyes of the believer. You believe in God, and therefore do not want any proof. You transport

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God from your own mind into nature, and therefore find him there. But, if you had not a real or imaginary God within you, I much question whether you would discover one in nature. To me nature indicates merely its own existence, and says nothing of any existence beyond itself.” “Nature is an effect and every effect implies a cause.” “When you call nature an effect, you assume the point in question. Is nature an effect?” “Nature is. It did not make itself. It must then have been made. If made, it is an effect.” “This is a mere change of terms without any progress in the argument. I ask your proof that nature was made.” “Its simple existence is a proof that it was made, unless you are prepared to say that it came by chance.” “I know nothing of chance: no atheist believes in chance. But I am not driven to the alternative you suppose. Before I shall be under the necessity of admitting the world came by chance, you must prove that it ever did come at all.” “But it is here, and of course must have come, either by chance or a maker.” “You say nature is here; I might ask you, where? but let that pass. The world is, that I grant; but I pray you to inform me how from simple existence you infer a maker? Can nothing exist without a maker?” “Nothing, except Him who makes all things.” “Your exception is fatal to your argument. If there can be one existence without a maker, then simple existence does not imply a maker. You have told me the world must have had a maker, simply because it is. This reasoning rests for its legitimacy on the assumption that nothing can exist without a cause. But you now tell me of an existence which is uncaused, that is, the existence of him who caused all things.” “I mean merely to assert that nothing can begin to exist without a cause.” “According to the principles of reasoning you have adopted, you cannot maintain even this position; but I will for the present accede to it. Nothing can begin to exist without a cause. You will now, I presume, give me your proofs, that the world had a beginning.” “That this world had a beginning is not difficult to prove. Look around you. Does not everything change under the eye of the spectator? Fix your eyes, if you can, on a single object which is the same that it was, or that does not bear the traces of having begun to exist.”

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“Apparently there are changes and transformations going on continually around us. You see that flower. A short time since it was a mere bud upon its stalk. You may have watched it grow and develop itself. But after all what have you seen? Simply certain facts of the plant itself. Had your eyes been stronger you might have seen all these facts when you first looked as well as now; for they all existed then. These facts which we learn one after another, we call changes, because they are presented to our inspection successively, in what we name time. But what is time? It is nothing. It but marks the order in which we become acquainted with the phenomena of the universe, whether it be the universe without or within us. We study the universe by parcels, and hence the idea of succession. But to an eye that could take in the whole at once, nature would doubtless appear as one vast whole. You theologians tell us that with God there is no time. He inhabiteth eternity. With him all is an eternal NOW. To him there can be nothing new, nothing old, no succession of events, and consequently no change. What then we short-sighted mortals call changes, would, could we but see the whole at one glance, appear but contemporary parts of one immutable and indissoluble whole. The more we study nature the greater is the number, the variety of the phenomena which present themselves to our inspection; and though these phenomena present themselves, as we say, successively, still all we can say of them is that they are parts of the universe itself, and from which nothing is to be inferred beyond the universe of which they are contemporary and constituent parts.” “Your remarks are quite too metaphysical for my understanding. But nobody can really doubt that this world began to exist. If any farther evidence of this fact were wanted we could find it in the marks of design which we everywhere see around us. Now design necessarily establishes the existence of a designer. If the universe be proved to be the product of a designer, you will not question but it had a beginning.” “Of course not. But I am inclined to think you will hardly succeed in establishing design, till you have established the fact that the universe began to exist.” “Can you mark the order, the regularity, the adaptation of one thing to another, everywhere obvious in nature, and not regard it as the work of design?” “There is, sir, in the whole of your argument, and in the arguments of all natural theologians I am acquainted with, an assumption of the very point I want proved. You assume everywhere that simple existence is the proof of a maker. The existence of nature, you

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tell me, is a proof that it was made. The existence of certain phenomena in nature, you tell me, is a proof that they are the effect of design. Now, in all this argumentation there is this grand defect; your inferences require that your premises should be universally true. If it were true that nothing could exist without a cause, your inferences would be just. But you deny the universality of the proposition, because, were it admitted, it would follow that nothing does or can exist. Your God, inasmuch as he is supposed to exist, would require a maker as well as the universe. Now I see nature as it is. When I examine it, I find what from their analogy to the same things in art, I call order, regularity, adaptation of one thing to another; but these words, order, regularity, adaptation, only name certain facts which exist in nature. These facts prove nothing more than the simple character of nature as it appears to my observation. At least, unless you are prepared to say that they cannot exist without a creator.” “I am prepared to say that.” “And I, sir, am prepared to deny it. I assert that they can exist without a creator; and for proof I refer you to nature. You see in nature, order, regularity, adaptation. Now prove to me that nature was created, or else admit that these can exist without a creator.” “Your argument is defective. You assume the world was not made, a point you cannot prove.” “And you, sir, assume that it was made, a point you cannot prove. I have as good a right to assume the existence in nature of the facts to which you refer me as a proof that no creator was necessary, as you have to assume that existence as a proof of the contrary proposition.” “I point you to order, regularity, adaptation, as proofs of design, and from the fact of design I conclude very legitimately to a designer.” “You point to what you call order, regularity, adaptation; that is, to certain facts of nature, and because these facts exist there you infer that nature is the product of a designer. You assume here, as I have before told you, that these facts could not exist unless they were created. Are you prepared to lay it down as a universal proposition that the facts you choose to name order, regularity, adaptation, can never exist without being created?” “I have hardly reflected on that point, but I think I am.” “Can there be anything in the effect which is not in the cause?” “Explain yourself.” “Some of you theologians have inferred the existence of an intelligent cause of nature, because intelligence, to wit, in man, is one of its phenomena. But, say they, if there were no intelligence in the

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cause there could be none in the effect. But there is intelligence in the effect. Therefore there is intelligence in the cause. Thus Paley, from the benevolent tendency of creation, concludes to the benevolence of its creator.13 If there be benevolence in the effect, he infers there must be in the cause. So if there be order, regularity, adaptation in the effect, why not in the cause? Now if there were no order, no regularity, no fitness, (for this is what we mean by adaptation) in God, could there be any in his works?” “Of course not.” “And in him these must exist uncaused. You will not contend now, I presume, that these cannot exist without being created, since you are forced to admit that they exist in God. The bare existence then of the facts termed order, regularity, fitness, is not a proof that they are created, or the product of a designer. If they exist in one instance, as you must admit they can, without a maker, I ask you how then simple existence proves that they cannot in another? In order to make out your case, it is necessary that you should point these out to me, in a world which you have proved to have had a beginning. If you could prove the world had a beginning in time, your argumentation would be conclusive. Design doubtless implies a designer, and a work of design doubtless has a beginning; but you must first prove that the universe had a beginning before you can establish the fact of design. This you have not done, and I see not how you can do it. The world is; this is all I know. Its existence is to me an enigma I cannot solve. If you undertake to solve it by referring to another existence beyond it as its cause, you merely place the difficulty a step farther back, but do not obviate it. I should find the same enigma in the existence of its cause, for how could that existence be without a cause? No matter how far you extend the chain of sequences, the same problem ever recurs. I have sought in vain to solve it.” “Well, Mr. Elwood, we have hardly come to any result, and I am sorry to say that I am unable to continue the discussion longer at present. You have taken a somewhat different ground from what I anticipated, and some of your arguments are ingenious, and show a mind which I am sorry to see thrown away on the barren waste of atheism. You were made for better things, for a nobler destiny. Call 13 [Ed. William Paley (1743-1805) was an Enlightenment defender of Christianity. His Natural Theology (1802), which was a popular text in many nineteenthcentury American colleges, emphasized an evidentiary approach to Christian apologetics.]

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on me again day after tomorrow, and I shall be at leisure, to continue the discussion; and I hope with a happier issue. Good day, my friend.” This conversation merely shows the insufficiency of the common argument from nature, an argument much insisted on by those who seek arguments for others not for themselves; but which is quite too easily set aside. Perhaps no man has stated this argument better than Paley in his Natural Theology, and yet it was that work which first raised my doubts of the existence of God. If Paley had really felt the need of convincing himself of the being of a God, he never could have written that book. No man is ever converted to Theism by the argument from nature. And the reason why that argument is relied on is because it is the most easily adduced, and those who use it, feeling no need of any argument for themselves, think it ought to silence the atheist. I shall have occasion to show, before I get through, that no man does ever really deny the existence of God. Men may reject the term, but never the reality. The existence of God is never proved, and never needs to be proved. All the atheist wants is to analyze his own faith and whenever he does that he will find God at the bottom. But to analyze one’s own faith is a matter which requires some close thinking, and the natural theologians would fain get along without thinking. CHAPTER IX: THE SACRIFICE While the conversation I have just detailed was going on, there was another conversation held between very different parties, and in which I also was interested. Mr. Smith, my morning visitor, of whom I have given some account, early sought out Elizabeth, apparently for the purpose of congratulating her on her recent conversion. He found her alone, with the Bible open before her, absorbed in deep meditation. I have said Mr. Smith was in the main an honest, well-meaning man. Nobody could really doubt his sincerity or his ardent desire to save souls; but he had been so accustomed to dwell on another world, to see a material and burning hell before him, that this world and all the social feelings and duties which belong to it, had lost nearly all hold upon his conscience and his heart. His whole mind seemed contracted to one burning thought—hell, and his whole soul to one all-absorbing desire—escape from hell for himself and others. To this end he counted no sacrifice, valued kind feeling, social harmony, domestic peace or love. So intent was he upon gaining this end, so eager was he after it, that he rudely dashed against the most sacred

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relations of private life, hurled husband against wife, wife against husband, parent against child, and child against parent, brother against sister, and sister against brother. In his heart he would be and doubtless thought himself little less than an angel of God; but he passed through society, over the domestic hearth, a minister of wrath, scattering blight and death. He had now come to dash with poison the cup of life for Elizabeth, and to exert the influence he had accidentally acquired over her, to blast her brightest prospects and wither her purest and holiest affections. “In deep meditation!” said he, approaching her, and speaking in as gentle and respectful a tone as such a being could; “In deep meditation! Thinking, I presume, on your happy escape from the pit of burning. You have great reason to bless God for the work of grace he has done for your soul.” “I do bless God; but I was not thinking of what he had done for me.” “Is it possible that you can for one moment be thinking of anything else?” “I hope I shall never forget what God has done for me, but I had for one moment forgotten myself. And is there not danger that those who have been recently converted may think too much of what God has done for them, merely because it is for them rather than for others that he has done it?” “O you were thinking of another!” “I hope there is no harm in escaping sometimes from ourselves to think of our friends.” “Perhaps not. But of whom were you thinking?” “O sir, your profession is too grave to concern itself with the idle thoughts of a silly girl.” “If your thoughts are idle, you should not indulge them, for you must one day account for every idle thought to God. If they are serious thoughts you need not blush to disclose them to one of God’s ministers.” “Sir, there may be subjects strictly our own, and with which no stranger, whatever his profession, has a right, or should be suffered to intermeddle. Some spot is there in every heart, which should be sacred from the stranger’s foot.” “God knows those subjects; you cannot conceal them from him; and why seek to conceal them from his ministers?” “The heart, sir, hath joys and sorrows to be shared only with those whom the heart selects.” “I understand you. I am not to have your confidence in a matter

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which intimately concerns your everlasting welfare. When I saw you sinking down to irretrievable wo, I warned you of your danger; and now when I see you about rushing into a connection which can end only in your eternal ruin, I am not to be deterred from telling you of the awful peril you run.” “Mr. Smith, this is a subject on which you and I cannot converse; and I entreat you to say no more.” “I will speak, and you shall hear; I have come to you from God, commanded to talk to you on this very topic. It may pain you, but better that you suffer now than hereafter.” “I beseech you, say no more.” “Stay; I must do my duty. I have a message from God and I must deliver it. God forbids this union which you contemplate. The Holy Ghost says ‘be ye not unequally yoked with unbelievers, for what concord hath Christ with Belial, or he that believeth with an infidel? and what agreement hath God with idols?’14 You by your conversion have become a temple of the living God, and dare you suffer yourself to be desecrated by an atheist?” “Surely, sir, you do not suppose that passage alludes to marriage, or that if it does it is to be taken literally?” “I suppose the Holy Ghost means what he says. I am not wise enough to correct either his language or his meaning.” “But Paul says the unbelieving wife shall be sanctified by the believing husband, and the unbelieving husband by the believing wife.”15 “True; but he said that in reference to those who had been married before either became a believer, in order to satisfy any scruples of conscience they might feel about living together as man and wife after one or the other had been converted to Christianity.” “That suits my case. Charles and I were contracted before I was converted. Before that event, we had pledged our faith, and were married in the eyes of heaven, as much as we shall be after man has performed the customary legal ceremony.” “That is a dangerous doctrine, and one which I never expected to hear from a young lady, unless of avowed licentious principles. You are not married. You have only given your consent to be married on some future day. But when you gave that consent you were in nature’s darkness; you knew not what you did. Your eyes are now opened; you now see the wickedness of denying God. The Holy Ghost 14 15

[Ed. Brownson here paraphrases 2 Cor 6:14-15.] [Ed. Reference to 1 Cor 7:14.]

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commands you to recall that consent, or yours must be the peril.” “I fear no other danger than that of doing wrong. But you do not know Charles. He would gladly be a Christian, and when he left me yesterday, I could not but hope that he was not far from the kingdom of heaven.” “Delusion all! No man can be further from the kingdom of heaven than he who denies both God and heaven. I tell you he is a hardened infidel.” And then as if half suspecting that he had said too much, he added, “Still I do not know but you may be the chosen instrument of bringing him into the church. You need not reject him at once; but let him understand that he must give his heart to God before you can consent to be his.” So saying, he left the trembling, nearly distracted girl, to go and do his master’s work elsewhere.16 The agony which Elizabeth suffered during this whole conversation may be more easily imagined than described. She had lavished upon me all the wealth of her heart. She had loved me with a sincerity and depth of affection, enhanced by the apparently unfriendliness of my condition. Like a true woman she had clung to me the closer for the reason that all else seemed to have abandoned me. It is not woman that leaves us when most we need her presence. I have had my share of adversity; I have suffered from the world more than I care to tell; but I have ever found in woman a kind and succoring spirit. Her love has ever shed a hallowed light along my pathway, cheered me in my darkest hours, and given me ever the courage and the strength to battle with my enemies, and regain the mastery of myself. There are those who speak lightly of woman; I have learned to reverence her as the brightest earthly manifestation of the Divinity. Elizabeth had loved me, and in all her visions of the future I of course held a prominent place, and it were a foolish affectation to doubt that I constituted their principal charm. To banish me now, to strike my image from her heart, to break with me the faith she had plighted—the thought of it was not to be endured. And yet what a 16

This must seem to my readers a mere fancy sketch, for I presume such conversations do not take place in these days; but they were very common when I was a young man. One of the most common methods resorted to by revivalists was to make the love which a young man had for a young woman, and the love he hoped for in return, the means of his conversion to the church. My own case was not a singular one. The girl was instructed to throw her arms around her lover’s neck, and entreat him, by all his affection for her, to join the church; but at the same time to assure him, that she could never consent to be his unless he gave evidences of conversion. There was some knowledge of human nature in this, and these fair apostles were not infrequently successful as well as eloquent pleaders for God, especially when seconded by the burning passions of their youthful admirers.

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mysterious nature is this of ours! The very intensity of her love for me alarmed her conscience. She had been but recently converted, and was still laboring under strong excitement. She had just dedicated herself to God. She must be his and his only. Did she not owe everything to God? Should she not love him with her whole heart, and ought she not to sacrifice everything to him? Was not religion, in its very nature, a sacrifice? Would she not be violating its most solemn injunctions, if she retained anything which she loved more than God? Did she not in fact love me more than him? I was dearer to her than all the world beside; but then would not the sacrifice of me to God be so much the more meritorious? If she retained me would it not be a proof that she counted one treasure too precious to be surrendered? Was she not commanded to forsake father, mother, sister, brother, for God, to give up everything for God, which should come between her and him, though it should be like plucking out a right eye or cutting off a right hand? Must she not now choose between God and man, between religion and love? She must. I mean not to say that this was sound reasoning; but I apprehend that it requires no deep insight into human nature to be made aware that in many individuals religion is a much stronger passion than love, and that in certain states of mind, and if the religious affection takes that turn, the more costly the sacrifice, the more resolute are we to make it. In her calm and rational moments, I do not believe Elizabeth would have come to the conclusion she did; but as she was wrought up to a state of pious exaltation, the idea of being able to achieve so great a victory over herself as that of sacrificing her love on the altar of religion operated as a powerful spell on her whole nature, and blinded her to everything else. It almost instantly became as it were a fixed idea, to which everything must henceforth be subordinated. Religion therefore triumphed, and with a martyr-like spirit, she resolved to give me up. Blame her not. If she had not possessed a noble nature, such a sacrifice she had never resolved to make.

CHAPTER X: THE DISMISSAL As the fates would have it, I called on Elizabeth at the very moment when she had finally taken her resolution to sacrifice her love for me to prove that her love for God was supreme. My visit was inopportune—she was embarrassed, and as women do sometimes, burst into tears. I was not a little astonished, and perhaps not altogether pleased; for I confess I could never yet discover that beauty in tears was at all improved—unless they were tears of welcome or of

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sympathy. “Elizabeth,” said I, addressing her as gently as I could, “what is this? why do I see you in tears?” “It is but a passing weakness,” said she, making an effort to command herself, “my first, as I trust it will be my last.” “But why do I find you so agitated?” “Charles,” said she, rising and speaking with great solemnity, “you and I can henceforth be to each other only as friends.” “Elizabeth, I do not hear you; I have no ears for such words.” “You must hear me, and believe me. I have taken my resolution.” “Unsay what you have said, and be yourself again. Some strange infatuation has seized you for the moment, or you are merely trying my feelings. You need not doubt my love for you. I have given you already all the proofs you can ask, or man can give. I must also say, it is hardly in character for you to trifle with anyone’s affections, much less with mine.” “Charles, I am not trifling with your affections, nor has any strange infatuation seized me. I speak seriously and solemnly. I doubt not that you love me as well as man usually loves woman; and I have never disguised from myself nor from you, the strong affection I have for you. I have loved you as truly, as sincerely as you yourself could desire. I may to a certain extent subdue my love; but I shall never forget it. You have been too much to me, have played too conspicuous a part in all my dreams of the future, to be ever otherwise than a dear friend. Woman’s heart never forgets. The flower of her love may be trampled on, but retains ever its fragrance and freshness. It blooms immortal. But, Charles, I must be the bride of heaven: I have given myself to God, and I must be his alone.” “A formidable rival you have given me! Pray, has your ghostly adviser, whom I saw stealing away as I came in, been tutoring you on this subject? He has doubtless told you not to be unequally yoked together with an unbeliever.” “And if he has, has he not given me good advice, not for me, but for you? To you, do my best, I must, unless you should be converted to religion, soon appear a weak and silly woman. My religious zeal will be in your estimation mere fanaticism, and my love to God will seem so much abstracted from that which you will claim as due to yourself. Difference of belief will lead to difference of feeling, to a difference of tastes, and aims, and then to coldness, neglect, perhaps disgust and mutual wretchedness. With views on religion, so widely different as ours are, we can never enjoy that union of soul which we should both crave, and without which we could not be happy.”

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“I understand nothing of all this. Because you love God more, I see not why you need love me less. I see no reason why God and I should be rivals for your affections. Is the love which you have for God of the same kind with the love you have heretofore avowed for me? Can you not love God, do your duty to him, and also have a heart and a hand for the duties of a wife? According to your sacred books, God himself declared that it was not good for man to be alone, and therefore made woman to be his help-meet. Can she be wanting in her duty to her God, when she lives to the end for which he made her? Woman was made to be man’s help-meet if your religion be true, and it is her glory to be a wife and a mother.” “No. I must live for God alone.” “Some of your divines pretend that we live for God, when we live for his children. You talk of consecrating yourself to God. Do you intend to become a nun? Does your God ask you to live in a cloister and waste your life in singing psalms and repeating pater nosters?” “Charles, your questions do but confirm me in my resolution. You have no sympathy with that religious state of the affections, which I believe myself commanded to cultivate. You even now think me very foolish and are half angry at me.” “True. I regard your piety as a weakness; but I see enough else in your character, which is not weakness, to enable me to overlook that. On the single subject of religion, I of course do not and cannot sympathize with you; but in all else, I am unconscious of any want of sympathy. When we come to live together, to have the same joys and sorrows, the same cares and perplexities, the same hopes and fears, in all other respects, I doubt not that we shall find that oneness of heart and soul, which will secure us as much happiness as mortals have any reason to expect.” “No. Religion must pervade my whole being; it must be inwoven with all my thoughts and feelings, words and actions. You must meet it everywhere and at all times, and wherever and whenever you meet it, I see from the present interview, it must offend you.” “I see no necessity of making your piety everywhere obtrusive.” “I must love God with all my heart, mind, soul and strength.” “And your neighbor as yourself, which means, I take it, your husband. But why not follow the direction of your Saint Paul? ‘Hast thou faith? have it to thyself?’17 If you have pious feelings indulge them. Surely, you must have room enough left for the proper affections of the wife. It must be a strange God in whom you believe, if he 17

[Ed. A reference to Rom 14:22.]

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should be offended to see you studying to make the man happy to whom you confess yourself not indifferent, and to whom you have solemnly plighted your faith. Though on this last point I do not insist. I ask no one to keep faith with me longer than it is agreeable. I absolve you from all obligation to fulfil a promise you rashly, inconsiderately made. You can dismiss me if you please. I am not a man likely to complain. I was not born to go whining through life. I have already learned the lesson to bear. Still you have had much influence over me, and, until now, I have never conversed with you without wishing myself a Christian. The road to the understanding lies through the heart. Who can tell but through love you may lead me to God, be the means of my conversion?” “I know not how that would be; but weak, imperfect as I am and always must be, I fear I shall be more likely to expose my faith to your contempt than to commend it to your love and reverence.” “I know of nothing in the past to warrant your fears; you have not changed half so much as you fancy. You have always been religious since I have been acquainted with you. I have rarely witnessed your sensibility to religion, without regretting the loss of my early faith. I am not certain but it was the religious turn of your mind which first attracted my love, and I know that it has tended not a little to strengthen and purify it. Hopeless myself, a child without a father, I have not been displeased to see hope beaming from your eyes, and to hear from your lips the words, ‘My Father.’ I have never had an earthly father to whom I could apply those words, and it is long since I have had one in heaven. As much opposed as I am to the nonsense and mischief which pass with the multitude under the name of religion, yet ever have I felt that I would give worlds did I possess them, could I once more feel assured that there is another and a better world; could I look up with confidence and say, ‘My Father.’” “Charles, I cannot comprehend you. Can it be that you are in reality an infidel, in love as you are with all beautiful things and good? You seem to me at times all but devout. You are gentle and forgiving. I have often known you to risk your life for even your enemies. How is this? Is not Christ in you, though you know it not? Own him, I beseech you.” “And be a hypocrite? Never. I have lost my faith as a Christian, but as long as I live I will hold fast to my integrity. I have not the Christian’s hopes nor his fears; but I should think meanly of myself, had I only the Christian’s virtues.” “I do not understand this. I have always identified all moral excellence with belief in Christ, and been unable to conceive of any virtue separate from Christianity. I have believed that one must be

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born again, and then he would know the truth; and here you are professing to have experienced all that others do in the new birth, and at the same time denying the existence of God. Is it all a delusion? Can I be certain of nothing? O Charles do not drive me to skepticism, to madness!” “Fear me not. To me, I own, religion appears all a delusion. I neither do nor can know anything about it. But after all you may be right. I never set up my own opinions as the measure of truth.” “It is gone. It was but a passing cloud. Religion must be true. I have the witness within. I feel its truth, and even you own that you at times feel the need of it.” “It is hard to efface early impressions. Reminiscences of my childhood and youth sometimes come up, and I dream; but I awake as soon as reason dawns.” “Reason! Reason! That is the real soul-destroyer! I cannot reason on religion; I hold it too sacred, and I dare not so profane it. I must believe. I have always loved religion. It has ever shed a hallowed light over the world in which I have lived, and made all things around me beautiful and lovely. Within a few days I have felt as I never did before. God has manifested himself to me as he does not to the world. It must be so. I cannot mistake my feelings.” “But they may mislead you.” “And why more than your logic? May we not err by distrusting our feelings too much? These reminiscences of your early life, as you call them, what may they be after all but an outcry from the depth of your being for God—the strivings of God’s spirit with yours to lead you back to himself?” “So I have sometimes fancied it might be. This is a mysterious nature of ours, and I pretend not to be able to unravel it. It is all dark and inscrutable to me. Thought, which now penetrates the solid marble, pierces through the earth, soars into the heavens, and sooner than I can utter the words, makes the circuit of the universe, is to me a mystery. Love, sympathy—all the emotions are inexplicable; and not the least so that mystic communion of which we are all at times conscious, that something which often without external medium advertises us of the presence of the beloved object, and enables us to know before hand the emotions swelling in another’s breast. Then this void I am conscious of within, which I am ever trying to fill, and which nothing but infinity seems capable of filling—this eternal craving of ours to break through the narrow bounds of the universe and breathe at our ease the free air beyond—I know not what all this means. There are times when this world is too small for me, when I

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seem to have that within me which is greater than the universe, thoughts and desires which seem inhabitants of eternity. At times they startle me; but they are the freaks of a wanton imagination; they are fantasy all.” “I know not that. May they not be the soul’s reminiscences of God, its native land? Are we not exiles from our home? and are not these thoughts and desires our sighs and yearnings for a return?” “So perhaps old Plato would have said. But I dare not trust myself in a region so unsubstantial. I leave these matters to the mystics, and confine myself to my five senses and the operations of my understanding. These vague longings are to me only the feverish dreams of a perturbed sleep.” What would have been the result of our interview, I know not, had it not been suddenly and unexpectedly interrupted. I think I should have shaken Elizabeth’s resolution, and she perhaps would have soothed my unbelief with visions of that mystic land, upon which, unknown to herself, she was entering. The natural cure for skepticism is mysticism, and had we been left to ourselves, I think it very possible I should have lost my atheism, and lived with Elizabeth a sort of theosophic life. But it was otherwise ordered. I have already mentioned Elizabeth’s brother George. With him I had been longer acquainted, than with her I had been able, on my first coming to reside in the neighborhood, to render him some essential service, which became the prelude to an intimacy with him, and, what I had valued somewhat more, with his sister. George would never have been selected by me as a friend had I not served him. He had respectable talents, was well educated, but not precisely a man to my taste. The last time I had seen him, he was on the anxious seats, where he succeeded in becoming converted. He was now a saint, and could address his former friends and associates as sinners. Conversion operates differently on different subjects. Some it makes better, manward as well as Godward, sweetening their dispositions, elevating their feelings and aims; others it makes decidedly worse. By persuading them that they are saints, it permits them to fancy that they can do no wrong because they are saints. Of this latter class was my friend George. Religion had in him, combined with a harsh, haughty and vindictive temper, and had given him the courage to display what he had previously studied to conceal. In a social point of view, he was evidently my superior. His parents had been notable people in their day, and to him and his sister who resided with their widowed mother, had descended an ample fortune. But I was somewhat of an adventurer. Nobody knew whence

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I came, or what was my profession or occupation. I could not be absolutely poor, but I had evidently not been accustomed to refined society, and it was most likely that I was of obscure origin. On these points I kept my own counsel. I had perhaps a tale to tell, had I chosen; but I had never learned that a man suffered by knowing more of himself than others knew of him. I shall not tell the tale now, for it would not be credited if I should. But evidently, although George had even suggested and encouraged my suit to his sister, he did not now regard me as the most desirable suitor. Mr. Smith and a few other pious friends had conversed with him, and given him some advice. Entering the room where we were conversing, and hastily approaching me, and addressing me in a rude and haughty manner, “Sir,” said he, “you and I have been much together for some time past; I have permitted you to come and go as if this house were your home; I have borne with you in the hope that your pernicious principles might be corrected. It is in vain to indulge that hope any longer; and as I do not choose to associate with an atheist, you will have the goodness henceforth to spare my sister and myself the pleasure of your company. You will find neither of us at home to you hereafter.” “Say not so, brother,” exclaimed Elizabeth; “you wrong your own heart; you wrong the charity of the blessed gospel; you wrong Charles, who you know saved your life at the risk of his own.” “What I have said, I have said,” replied he. “Say no more, Elizabeth,” I interposed. “He will, I fear, one day need my forgiveness; if so, he will find it. Farewell, Elizabeth. Otherwise I would have parted with you. I know not whether the resolution you mentioned when I came in is to be regarded as final or not. That is a matter which rests with yourself. I am not the man to entreat anyone to break a resolution in my favor. If, however, you alter your mind, you will find me as I was. Farewell.”

CHAPTER XI: PRIESTCRAFT The incidents related in my last chapter, but ill prepared me for my second interview with Mr. Wilson. In my first interview I was calm, candid, willing, even anxious to become, if not a believer in all that passes for religion, at least in God and immortality. But now I was ruffled, I was exasperated against the clergy, those meddling priests as I regarded them; and I was resolved to combat Mr. Wilson’s arguments with all the force of reason I could master. On this second day I found Mr. Wilson where I did before, but not this time alone; some

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five or six of his brother clergymen were with him, all of whom, with faces as grave as a church-yard, showed a becoming horror at my approach. I was greeted with scarcely a single civil word. The clergymen looked up to heaven and sighed, hung down their heads and were silent. “I have called,” said I, addressing myself to Mr. Wilson, “to hear what farther you have to offer on the subject of our former conversation.” “Ah, I had forgotten,” replied he in a sanctimonious tone, “you are the young man with whom I had some conversation on the existence of God; was not what I said sufficient to remove your doubts?” “No, sir.” “Then I fear all that I can say will be useless. He who denies the existence of God is too far gone in blindness of mind and hardness of heart to be affected by anything short of the omnipotent workings of the Holy Ghost. He is past being reasoned with. In the language of the Holy Ghost, he is a fool.” “Be that as it may; if you have any reasons to offer, I can hear them; and if they have any weight I can feel them.” “I will pray for you.” “I want your reasons, not your prayers.” “The Scriptures forbid us to cast pearls before swine, or to give that which is holy unto dogs.” “An unnecessary prohibition in your case.” “Would you insult one of God’s ministers?” “I might answer you in the words of one of your saints, slightly varied, ‘I wist not that thou west a minister of God, thou whited wall;’18 but I insult no man, and shall always repel insult, let it come from whom it may.” “I perceive, young man, that you are in the gall of bitterness and the bonds of iniquity.” “I am not here, sir, to be informed of my condition, but at your special invitation, to be resolved of certain doubts, which you boasted your skill to solve. If you have lost confidence in your ability, or if you are otherwise engaged, I can retire.” “Go to God with your doubts. He only can solve them; you are quarreling with God. Go and make your peace with God.” “Your directions are admirable. Pity they had not occurred to you a little sooner. But be so good now as to hear me a moment.”

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[Ed. The phrase could be a reference to Acts 23:3.]

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“I have no wish to hear you.” “I care not for that; but hear me you shall. You have given me your message, and I will give you mine. I, sir, was early taught to love God, and I early sought to serve him. I was early religious, and for some years found in religion all the enjoyment I had. Sectarian dissensions sprung up, grieved and finally disgusted me. They compelled me to ask why I supported Christianity. I asked but could not answer; I went to my minister and he told me if I doubted I should be damned.” “And told you the truth,” said Mr. Wilson. “I went to another, another, and still another, and received the same answer. I complained not. I resorted to the Bible, read, re-read it, read everything I could lay my hands on that promised to throw light on the subject laboring in my mind; I spent years in study; I prayed, and prayed God, by night and by day, to help me. I sought for the truth with my whole heart.” “That is false,” interposed one of the clergymen present; “no man ever prayed to God for the truth and remained an atheist.” “One article after another of my faith went, till I found myself at last without hope in immortality or belief in God. I wept at this result; but I said nothing—sought to unsettle no one’s faith, but pursued my way peaceably as a man, a citizen, and a friend. At the request of one, whose request to me is a command, I attended the other day one of your inquiry meetings; you know what passed there. At your request I called here, with what result, you know as well as I. I am here again at your request, and I have thus far, for reasons best known to yourselves, received only insult and abuse. One word therefore to you, and to all who call yourselves ministers of God; I have found you always loud in your professions, but always unable or unwilling to give a reason for the faith you enjoin. I have ever found you in relation to your opponents proud, haughty, overbearing, relentless; professed preachers of peace and love, I have ever found you sowing the seeds of discord, meddling with everyone’s private affairs, poisoning the cup of domestic bliss, and withering the purest and holiest affections of the human heart. You have brought wrath and hatred into this hitherto peaceful village; you have blasted my hopes of happiness, done me all the injury man can do to man; and what you have done to me you have done to thousands, and will do, so long as the world endures your profession. You make earth a hell that your own services may be in request, make the people believe in a God of wrath that you may be employed as mediators between them and his vengeance. Did I believe in your imaginary place of punishment, I would say to you in the words of your master, ‘Ye serpents, ye

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generation of vipers, how can ye escape the damnation of hell’ [Matt 23:32]? Hitherto I have treated you with respect; there is war between us now, and earth shall be rid of you, or I will die in the attempt. Farewell. Before you dream of converting the infidel, learn humility, honesty, and good manners.” So saying, I left the house and returned to my lodgings. When I was gone the reverend gentlemen looked at one another and smiled; “that young man,” said one of them, “would make a most capital preacher were he only on the right side.” “Perhaps,” said another, “he is nearer right than we should be willing the world should believe.” “Never mind,” said still another, “the people are superstitious; they will have some kind of worship, and we must let them have their way.” These reverend gentlemen it seems understood one another.

CHAPTER XII: IMMORTALITY I pass over several months in which nothing, I can bring myself to relate, of much importance occurred. Elizabeth and I met a few times after the interview I have mentioned. She was ever the same pure-minded, affectionate girl; but the view which she had taken of her duty to God, and the struggle which thence ensued between religion and love, surrounded as she was by pious friends whose zeal for the soul hereafter far outran their knowledge of what would constitute its real well-being here, preyed upon her health, and threatened the worst results. From those results I raise not the veil. One tie alone was left me, one alone bound me to my race, and to virtue. My mother, bowed with years and afflictions, still lived, though in a distant part of the country. A letter from a distant relative with whom she resided, informed me that she was very ill, and demanded my presence, as she could not survive many days. I need not say this letter afflicted me. I had not seen my mother for several years; not because I wanted filial affection, but I had rarely been able to do as I would. Poverty is a stern master, and when combined with talent and ambition, often compels us to seem wanting in most of the better and more amiable affections of our nature. I had always loved and reverenced my mother; but her image rose before me now as it never had before. It looked mournfully upon me, and in the eloquence of mute sorrow seemed to upbraid me with neglect, and to tell me that I had failed to prove myself a good son. I lost no time in complying with my mother’s request. I found her still living, but evidently near her last. She recognized me, brightened up a moment, thanked me for coming to see her, thanked her

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God that he had permitted her to look once more upon the face of her son, her only child, and to God, the God in whom she believed, who had protected her through life, and in whom she had found solace and support under all her trials and sorrows, she commended me, with all the fervor of undoubting piety, and the warmth of maternal love, for time and eternity. The effort exhausted her; she sunk into a sort of lethargy, which in a few hours proved to be the sleep of death. I watched by the lifeless body; I followed it to its resting place in the earth; went at twilight and stood by the grave which had closed over it. Do you ask what were my thoughts and feelings? I was a disbeliever, but I was a man, and had a heart; and not the less a heart because few shared its affections. But the feelings with which professed believers and unbelievers meet death, either for themselves or for others, are very nearly similar. When death comes into the circle of our friends and sunders the cords of affection, it is backward we look, not forward, and we are with the departed as he lives in our memories, not as he may be in our hopes. The hopes nurtured by religion are very consoling when grief exists only in anticipation, or after time has hallowed it; but they have little power in the moment when it actually breaks in upon the soul, and pierces the heart. Besides, there are few people who know how to use their immortality. Death to the great mass of believers as well as of unbelievers comes as the king of terrors, in the shape of a total extinction of being. The immortality of the soul is assented to rather than believed—believed rather than lived. And withal it is something so far in the distant future that till long after the spirit has left the body, we think and speak of the loved ones as no more. Rarely does the believer find that relief in the doctrine of immortality, which he insists on with so much eloquence in his controversy with unbelievers. He might find it, he ought to find it, and one day will; but not till he learns that man is immortal, and not merely is to be immortal. I lingered several weeks around the grave of my mother and in the neighborhood where she had lived. It was the place where I had passed my own childhood and youth. It was the scene of those early associations which become the dearer to us as we leave them the farther behind. I stood where I had sported in the freedom of early childhood; but I stood alone, for no one was there with whom I could speak of its frolics. One feels singularly desolate when he sees only strange faces, and hears only strange voices in what was the home of his early life. I returned to the village where I resided when I first introduced myself to my readers. But what was that spot to me now? Nature had

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done much for it, but nature herself is very much what we make her. There must be beauty in our souls, or we shall see no loveliness in her face; and beauty had died out of my soul. She who might have recalled it to life, and thrown its hues over all the world was—but of that I will not speak. It was now that I really needed the hope of immortality. The world was to me one vast desert and life was without end or aim. The hope of immortality is not needed to enable us to bear grief, to meet great calamities. These can be, as they have been, met by the atheist with a serene brow and a tranquil pulse. We need not the hope of immortality in order to meet death with composure. The manner in which we meet death depends altogether more on the state of our nerves than the nature of our hopes. But we want it when earth has lost its gloss of novelty, when our hopes have been blasted, our affections withered, and the shortness of life and the vanity of all human pursuits have come home to us, and made us exclaim, “Vanity of vanities all is vanity” [Eccles 1:2]; we want then the hope of immortality to give to life an end, an aim. We all of us at times feel this want. The infidel feels it early in life. He learns all too soon, what to him is a withering fact that man does not complete his destiny on earth. Man never completes anything here. What then shall he do if there be no hereafter? With what courage can I betake myself to my task? I may begin but the grave lies between me and the completion. Death will come to interrupt my work, and compel me to leave it unfinished. This is more terrible to me than the thought of ceasing to be. I could almost—at least, I think I could—consent to be no more, after I had finished my world, achieved my destiny; but to die before my work is completed, while that destiny is but begun—this is the death which comes to me indeed as a “King of Terrors.”19 The hope of another life to be the complement of this steps in to save us from this death, to give us the courage and the hope to begin. The rough sketch shall hereafter become the finished picture, the artist shall give it the last touch at his ease; the science we had just begun shall be completed, and the incipient destiny shall be achieved. Fear not to begin, thou hast eternity before thee in which to end. I wanted, at the time of which I speak, this hope. I had no future. I was shut up in this narrow life as in a cage. All for whom I could have lived, labored, and died, were gone, or worse than gone. I had no end, no aim. My affections were driven back to stagnate and 19

[Ed. “King of Terrors” is a reference to death. See Job 18:14.]

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become putrid in my own breast. I had no one to care for. The world was to me as if it were not; and yet a strange restlessness came over me. I could be still nowhere. I roved listlessly from object to object, my body was carried from place to place, I knew not why, and asked not myself wherefore. And, yet change of object, change of scene wrought no change within me. I existed, but did not live. He who has no future, has no life.

CHAPTER XIII: THE REFORMER It is no part of my plan to give a minute history of my life. My wanderings extended far and lasted a weary while; but time at length began to exert its healing influence, and I to return slowly towards life. I gradually began to make observations on what was passing around me, and was at length arrested by the imperfections of the social state. Wherever I went I beheld injustice, oppression, inequality in wealth, social position, moral and intellectual culture—the many everywhere toiling for the few. Here is a man well made, with vigorous body and active limbs, an intellect capable of grappling with the weightiest problems of science, and heart of loving all things which are beautiful and good; and yet is he compelled to toil and rack his brains from morning to night, in order to gain the bare means of subsistence, which shall after all be infinitely inferior to the fare of the rich man’s dog. Wealth is everywhere, in practice at least, counted the supreme good, and everywhere its producers are the poor and wretched. They who toil not, spin not, are they who are clad in soft raiment, and fare sumptuously every day. What monstrous injustice is here! Here are priests, statesmen, lawyers, all boasting their services, and pretending to manage society as it ought to be managed. But what do they for the mass, the great, unprivileged, hard-handed many? A rich man is murdered, and the whole community rises to ferret out the murderer; a poor man is murdered, leaving a wife and children to the tender mercies of a heartless world, and no questions are asked. Mothers, pale and emaciated, watch the live long night over their starving little ones; young women are driven by poverty to prostitution; young men are becoming thieves, robbers, murderers, that they may not waste away in absolute want, unknown and unhonored. On every hand vice and crime, and wailing and wo; and the vice and crime of the poor alone exciting horror, and the wailing and wo of the rich alone calling forth commiseration. O, it is a bad world. Society is all wrong. These iniquitous distinctions of class, this injus-

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tice, this oppression of the toiling many to feed the luxury, and the vanity of the idle and worse than useless few, must be redressed. But who shall do it? Not the better sort for they are the better sort only in consequence of their existence; not the poorer sort, for they are ignorant and dependent. Yet it must be done; nay, shall be done. Justice shall be introduced and man’s earthly well-being made possible. But who shall do it? I will do it. I will tell these lords of the earth to their faces that they are tyrants and oppressors, that a day of vengeance is at hand. I will tell these wronged, down-trodden masses, that they are men, not beasts of burden; that they have as rich a nature as their masters, and as pure blood coursing in their veins. I will speak to them in the name of justice, of freedom, and my voice shall be trumpet-toned. I will wake the dead, and make them feel the might that has for ages slumbered in the peasant’s arm; I will bid them stand up men, freemen, and swear, in the depths of their being, that men they will be, living or dying, and that from this time henceforth wrong from man to man shall cease, that the earth shall no longer echo to the groans of the slave, but resound with the songs of liberty, joy, and peace. Now I had found a purpose, an end, an aim—a future, and began to live again. No more whimpering, no more sickly sentimentalism; I was a man now, and had a man’s work before me. I might stand alone against a hostile world, but what of that? I felt I had that within me, which was more than a match for all the forces it could muster against me; I carried a whole world within me, infinitely superior to the world without me, and which should ere long replace it. O ye, who whimper and whine over your petty miseries, go forth into the world, behold the wrongs and outrages to which man subjects his brother, and seek to arrest them; so shall you forget your own puny sorrows and find the happiness ye sigh for. Into the great work of reforming society, or rather of reconstructing society, or more accurately still, of pulling down the society I found existing, I now entered with zeal and energy. I had now as I have said a future; nay, I had a religion—a faith and a cultus, of which I was the apostle, and felt I could be the martyr. I went to the work in right good earnest. I wrote, lectured, published, talked, disputed, thought, dreamed, until sickness, poverty, and exhaustion of mind and energy, caused me to doubt of success, and to pause, and ask myself, if the means I used were adequate to the end I contemplated. My system was the sensualism of the school of Locke. I relied solely on what I termed enlightened self-interest. I did not doubt but

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appeals to man’s interest would be adequate to my wants. I knew what I proposed was for the interest of all men, and I fancied that all I had to do was to convince them of this fact. But some how or other this was not enough. The truth is, I professed one system, but in fact demanded the results of another. No reform can be effected without sacrifice, and sacrifice comes not from selfishness. I was astonished to find the multitude for whom I was wasting my life, choosing rather to return to the flesh-pots of their masters than submit to the few inevitable privations of the wilderness which lay between them and the promised land. I had not then learned that the reformer is powerless save as he appeals to men’s sense of duty. Show the people that they are bound by the eternal sanctions of duty to effect your reforms, make them feel that the God within commands them, and you may count on them to the last, to go with you to the battlefield, the dungeon, the scaffold, or the cross. But this I learned not till long afterwards. And then I was a man, and by no means without my share of the weakness of human nature. I commenced with due spirit and confidence, but I gradually began to grow weary of standing ever alone; I grew sick of the combat, and yearned for peace and fellowship with my kind. I was never intended for a warrior, was never fitted to be a reformer. My natural inclinations and tastes were for a quiet and retired life passed in the midst of a family and a choice circle of friends. In laboring for mankind my love for them increased; and in proportion as I became really philanthropic, the solitude to which I was doomed became insupportable. I could not bear to feel that in the vast multitude around me, not a single heart beat in unison with my own. I would love and be loved. Not the race only would I love. I wished for some one dearer than all to cheer me on to the combat, and welcome my return. It was doubtless a weakness, but it was a weakness I have never been able to get over. The affections have always had great power over me, and in fact have always done with me pretty much as they would. Could I have so generalized my affections as to have cared for mankind only in the abstract, and to have had no craving for sympathy with individuals, I should have been a stronger man, perhaps, and might not have failed in my undertaking. But this was not in my nature. I could never live on abstractions, love everybody in general and nobody in particular. I was alone. There was no God in heaven to whom I could go for succor; there was no spot on earth to which I could retire for a while, throw off my armor and feel myself secure; no sympathizing soul with whom I could talk over my plans, give free utterance to the feelings which I must ordi-

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narily suppress, and find ample amends for the ungenerous scorn of the world. I felt that I was wronged, that I was misinterpreted, and that it was all in vain to seek to make myself understood. My philanthropy turned sour, and, I grieve to say, I ended by railing against mankind; a no uncommon case, as I have since learned, with those who set out to be world-reformers. Few are the old men who have not turned their backs upon the dreams of their youth.

CHAPTER XIV: THE CHRISTIAN While in the condition I have described—poor, sick, despondent, brooding over abortive projects, affections soured, hopes disappointed, at war with myself and with mankind—I was visited by a Mr. Howard, an elderly gentleman, who resided some dozen miles distant, of whom I had often heard, but whom I had not before seen. After introducing himself, and some general observations which interested me in his favor, he invited me to accompany him to his residence, assuring me that it would afford him and his family great pleasure if I would consent to make his home mine for a longer or shorter time as might suit my convenience. This invitation, which seemed prompted by really generous sentiment, I was in no condition to think lightly of. I accepted it very gratefully; and as I had not many arrangements to make, I was soon ready, and, taking a seat with Mr. Howard in his carriage, we departed. This Mr. Howard, at the time I speak of, was no everyday character. Endowed by nature with a warm heart, a clear and discriminating mind, he had spared no pains in cultivating his natural advantages. He was well acquainted with history, familiar with all the general literature of the day, and what was better than all, he had mingled in the world, had seen men in all conditions and under nearly all aspects, and that too without losing his love for them, or his strong desire to serve them. He had been absent in Europe for some time, or it is possible that he had interested himself in my movements much earlier. On his return home, he had been informed by his family, that there was a man making some noise in the neighboring city about a radical change in society, who was laboring to introduce a state of absolute social equality; but, they added, it is said he is an atheist, and a very dangerous man in the community. Mr. Howard also heard of me from other quarters, and heard too that I seemed to be sincere, that I had made some sacrifices for what I held to be the cause of humanity, and that I was now in ill-health, and most likely destitute of the common comforts of life, if not even its necessaries. This was

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enough. “That man of whom you speak,” said he, “if what you tell me be correct, is no atheist. God is love, and no man who sincerely loves his brother can be a disbeliever in God. I will see him, and thank him in the name of religion for his efforts at social reform; for if I do not mistake his character, he has much more of Christianity than have the great mass of the professed followers of Jesus.” He was as good as his word, and had now called on me as I have related, and invited me to his home. “Mr. Elwood,” said he, as the carriage drove off, “I have been much interested in what I have heard respecting your efforts in the cause of social melioration. I have just returned from the Old World. I have seen its most favored countries, have spent considerable time in examining the rich monuments of its genius, arts and industry; but everywhere, amidst the much which I have heartily approved, and wished to see my countrymen studying to imitate, I have been pained to witness the depressed condition of the great mass of the people. The favored few may be enlightened, cultivated, refined; but the many are almost uniformly ignorant, half-brutish, and shut out of from nearly all the advantages society was instituted by the Creator to secure to its members. The splendid palaces rise side by side with the wretched hovels of the poor. They may be filled with every luxury for every sense, wrung from the toil and sweat of the mass; but their occupants, notwithstanding their intelligence, refinement and hospitality, seem never to have dreamed that the many were not made for the express purpose of ministering to their pleasure; and on their benighted minds dawns never the great doctrine of the common brotherhood of the race. I sometimes lost my patience. I told a judge one day that I would rather take my chance at the last day with those he would hang than with himself. They were victims of an order of things they had not created, and could not control; of which he was one of the feed upholders. Instead of using the talents and means of influence God had entrusted to him, for the melioration of that order, he exerted them merely to crush whomsoever should dare disclose its defects or seek to remedy them. “I have now returned home, and here, I am sorry to say, I find the germs of the same order, the same principles and tendencies at work, and if resulting as yet in evils of less magnitude, it is owing to certain accidental causes, every day becoming less and less active. The lines of distinction between the great mass of the people and the favored few are every day becoming broader and more indelible. Labor is held in less esteem than it was, and is not so well rewarded. Wages, perhaps, are nominally higher, the laboring man may con-

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sume more and richer articles of food and clothing; but if I am not greatly mistaken, he finds it more than proportionally more difficult to maintain his former relative standing. Poverty keeps pace with wealth, and not infrequently outruns it. Poor men may indeed become rich, and rich men poor; but the rich and the poor still remain; the perpetual shifting of individuals leaves the classes as they were, neither lessening their numbers nor diminishing their evil consequences. The evil does not consist in the fact that these individuals rather than those, constitute the rich or the poor, but in the fact that there are both rich and poor. “I should pay little regard to this inequality in wealth, were its results confined to the mere physical well-being or suffering of the members of society. I am mainly affected by its moral results and those are disastrous. On the one hand, the rich become vain, arrogant, forgetful of their responsibilities, and duties, and of course immoral. For he, in the strongest sense of the word, is immoral, who neglects his duties to society, or fails to vindicate to the full extent of his ability, the rights and the well-being of the many, however amiable he may be in his private relations, polished in his manners, or respectable in the eyes of the world. On the other hand, the poor become discontented, uneasy, and discouraged; lose all self-respect, all self-confidence, molder earthward, and live and die but a single step above the brutes. O! sir, the magnitude of the evil is immense, and from the bottom of my heart, I thank you for calling public attention to it, and for laboring to remove it.” “You are the first man, Mr. Howard,” I replied, “who has ever addressed me in this style—the first who has not either condemned me outright, or exhorted me to be prudent, and not say aught to alarm the weak and timid. With a few such friends to the people as you appear to be, I had not failed in my undertaking, and in the bitterness of disappointment exclaimed with the Spanish Proverb, ‘Mankind is an ass—kicks him who attempts to take off his panniers.’ But, sir, while your language touches me sensibly, it also surprises me not a little. I have always understood that you were rich and a Christian.” “And what is there in that to surprise you?” “Every rich man I have hitherto met has cried out against me, called me an agrarian, a Jacobin, a leveler, and sounded the alarm, ‘property is in danger.’ And Christians have been my most bitter and uncompromising enemies. They have always met me with the assurance that these social inequalities and distinctions I deplore and would remove, are of divine appointment, the express will of God, and that it is therefore impious as well as foolish to war against them.”

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“There may be some truth in what you say, but I trust and believe you exaggerate. The rich men of whom you complain, are not so properly termed rich men as business men, men who are not rich but are seeking to be—men who occupy a position they would not, and who know not how to attain to the rank, influence and consideration they crave, but by using their fellow beings. They would be richer than they are, but they can be only by availing themselves adroitly, not to say dishonestly, of the labors of others. Labor is profitable to the buyer in proportion to its cheapness, and, like everything else, its cheapness depends on the supply in the market. It is therefore, as they view the matter, for their interest to keep the supply as large as possible. This supply can be large only on the condition that there be a large number of individuals who are solely dependent on the sale of their labor for their means of subsistence. Your efforts, had they succeeded, would have increased the number of independent proprietors, and diminished the number of mere laborers; consequently the supply of labor which should be for sale, and consequently, again, would have enhanced its price, and therefore lessened the profits of its purchasers. Hence the opposition you have encountered from the business part of the community. But there are rich men who are truly enlightened, who feel that they hold their riches as a trust from Heaven to be employed not for their own private advantage, but in the sacred cause of humanity, in diffusing universally truth, justice and love. These men are not your enemies, but your real friends, who take the deepest interest in your movements, and who are the first to espouse your cause and will be the last to desert it. The number of these individuals is every day increasing, and I could point you to not a few who would willingly impoverish themselves, if they could see that by so doing they would contribute to the moral and social elevation of the people.” “But how do you reconcile your democratic doctrines with your Christianity? It is difficult for me to conceive how it is possible that a true Christian, so far forth as he is Christian, should labor for the social regeneration of mankind.” “I owe my Christian friends no apology for my democratic sentiments. It is as a Christian that I take a deep and abiding interest in the well-being of my race, that I labor to elevate, morally, intellectually and physically, the poorest and most numerous class; and I were no Christian, if I did not. Christianity is the poor man’s religion.” “So I have heard the clergy say; but why they say so, I know not, unless it be because Christianity keeps the multitude star-gazing, so that the rich and the great may enjoy the fruits of the earth unob-

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served. It may be that it is the poor man’s religion, because it enjoins upon him submission to a state of things, of which he is the victim, and cries out ‘Order, Order,’ whenever the people take it into their heads to better their condition; and because it leagues with the despot and furnishes the warrant of the Almighty to sanction his despotism.” “I have,” replied Mr. Howard, “a profound respect for the clergy, and am grateful to them for the much they have done, directly or indirectly, to advance the civilization of mankind; but I have yet to learn that they are infallible. They are in fact the creatures as well as the creators of their times. I do not, because I cannot honestly, join in the usual declamation against them. The charges generally preferred against them belong to the circumstances in which they are placed, rather than to themselves. It is given only to here and there a man among the clergy as well as the rest of mankind to stand out from his own age, the prophet and the representative of the future. The clergy may have had learning, but in general they have not been deeply versed in human nature. They are unfavorably situated, especially in our times. When they visit, they find the house swept and garnished; the child has on its best bib and tucker, and everyone is clad in his Sunday suit. The best side is out. The real state of things is not seen. The clergy too have depended on books rather than on observation; and very different are the men and women of books from the men and women who actually live and breathe and move in the world round and about us. They have also inquired much oftener and altogether more earnestly, what is orthodox, than what is true; what will the church approve, than what she ought to approve, and consequently have had little time to bestow upon things as they really are. “As a body the clergy have never comprehended, have never been capable of comprehending the real character of Christianity. Nothing is more unlike the real conception of Jesus than what you and the majority of the Christian world call the Christian religion. What you call the religion of Jesus may contain some of the elements of Christianity, for it were not possible for the human race to overlook them all; but Christianity itself, as it existed in the mind of its author, is yet to be revealed. “I am a Christian, but I am a Christian in my own way, and on my own hook. I learn of Jesus. I have as good a right to interpret him as anyone else has; and if I interpret him aright, most others do not. The age in which he lived did not comprehend him, for some would have made him a king, and others crucified him between two thieves. His immediate disciples did not comprehend him, as may be col-

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lected from his reproofs, their confessions, disputes and changes of opinion. Their disciples, further removed still, it is reasonable to suppose comprehended him still less. “What now passes for Christianity is Catholicism. Protestantism, so far forth as it is Protestantism, is not a religion, and the religion we find connected with it in the minds and hearts of Protestants, is merely what has been retained of Catholicism. Religion affirms; it never does, never can protest. Catholicism succeeded to Judaism on the one hand, and paganism, as modified by the Alexandrians,20 on the other. It was a compound of both, immeasurably their superior, but immeasurably below the conception of Jesus. It borrowed indeed many terms from the Nazarene Reformer; but in most cases it interpreted them by the ideas and associations of the old religions. I have a profound respect for the Catholic Church, and very little sympathy with what Protestants say against it. If Protestantism did not mark a transition to something better, I should arrange myself with the Catholics rather than with Protestants. The Catholic Church had an important mission, that of civilizing the barbarian hordes which supplanted the Roman empire, of introducing a new order of civilization, and preparing the way for the second coming of our Lord; that is, for the introduction and establishment of a religious institution, Christian in reality as well as in name. Viewed in relation to this end, regarded merely as a provisional institution, which should in turn give way to a more perfect, as the Jewish had given way to it, I have no fault to find with Catholicism, but am willing to recognize it as a true church. But at the epoch of the Reformation it had finished its work, fulfilled its mission, and since then it has been a mere cumberer of the ground. The three hundred years which have passed away since Luther, have been merely ages of doubt, criticism, inquiry, destruction, efforts to get rid of a superannuated institution and to elaborate a new one. Of this no wise man complains, for it has been inevitable. But the new institution is not yet found, nor has any one of the numerous sects now extant, its nucleus even. But I am wandering from my point. Catholicism, excepting an impulse towards spirituality, which it received from Jesus, was in fact 20 [Ed. Cousin and Brownson interpreted the Alexandrian School of philosophy—i.e., Neoplatonic philosophers like Plotinus, Proclus, Porphyry, Jamblichus, Eunapius, Julian the Emperor who taught in and around Alexandria from about the middle of the fourth century to the capture of the city by the Arabs in 642—as the synthesis of Platonic and Christian thought. In Cousin’s estimate, the Alexandrians were Eclectics because they tried to unite Greek philosophy with religion. It was a spiritual or mystical philosophy.]

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little else than a modification of the religions which preceded it. This is well known to some of your infidel writers, and is frequently urged as an objection to the truth of Christianity. It may be an objection to what has passed for Christianity, but it is no objection to that divine system of moral and religious truth which lay in the mind of Jesus. “I mean not to say that what has passed for Christianity has had no truth, nor indeed that it has contained no Christian truth. What I mean is, that the church has not been constructed after the Christian model. The truths borrowed from Jesus have not served as its foundation, but as the decorations of its altar, or have merely entered as polished stones and been lost in its walls. The idea realized has not been the Christian idea; but in the main the Jewish idea. This has been the fundamental error of the church. The Christian world has not found its life and unity in the central idea of Christianity, although it may have recognized that idea, and insisted on it with much sincerity and force. “Jesus said, ‘ My kingdom is not of this world’ [John 18:36], and it has been thence inferred that he regarded this life only in its connection with another, and had no desire to promote its well-being save as a means of securing the happiness of the life to come. He therefore had no desire to favor social progress as such, and never sought man’s earthly well-being as an end. In consequence of this misinterpretation of the words of Jesus, the social element of human nature, has never received the attention from the church it deserved. Understanding Jesus as concerning himself exclusively with the salvation of the soul in the world after death, and promulgating his religion on earth solely to secure that end, the church has condemned this world, pronounced it a vale of tears, a wretched land, and commanded us to look for happiness neither from it nor in it. The great office of religion has not been to teach us to live, but to die—not to create a heaven on earth, but to enable us to endure suffering. There is nothing true but heaven. All here is mere illusion, unworthy a wish or a thought. All human pursuits are vain; earth is cursed for man’s sake; and thistles and brambles only shall it bring forth to his labor. Seek merely to gain admittance into heaven. Heaven is the home of the soul. There all our toils will be over. There no more pain, no more fatigue, no more sickness, no more sorrow; but all one clear, unclouded noon of unutterable bliss. No matter what are the sufferings of this short and transitory life, they are not worthy to be compared with the exceeding weight of glory which awaits us in the life to come. “In all this there is a truth, a great truth, but not the whole truth. This life is not and cannot be exempt from suffering, and far be it

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from me to think lightly of the religion which seeks to make us patient under suffering, and which consoles us for present sorrows with the hope of joys to come. We all need consolations, a friendly hand to wipe the tears from our eyes, and to pour oil and wine into our wounded hearts. But then this world is God’s world and is not to be condemned, and this life is God’s gift and should therefore count for something—cannot be mere illusion all. It is easy to account for the view which the church has taken of this world. The church grew up amid a dissolving world, when nothing seemed settled, when the earth seemed abandoned by its Maker to the Devil and his angels. But the effects of this view have been none the less disastrous, because we are able to account for it. These effects, have been to sink below its natural level the social element of Christianity, to make the devout think meanly of whatever pertains to this mode of being, and to produce the conviction that the melioration of society as such is unnecessary if not even sinful. In this view of the office of religion, you see why it is that the church through all the stages of its existence has never labored directly for the progress of man’s earthly well-being. It has indeed given alms and founded hospitals and asylums, for it has been charitable; it has sent out its missionaries to evangelize the world, for it has been zealous, and filled with the spirit of propagandism; but it has sent out these missionaries expressly for the purpose of saving the soul hereafter, never for the purpose of diffusing the arts and blessings of civilization, albeit these have often followed. “In all this I own the church has had a truth, a great truth— perhaps the only truth past ages were able to appreciate—but, as the church has interpreted it, by no means a peculiarly Christian truth, nor the truth demanded by the present. Christianity recognizes the universal belief of mankind in a future life; it assumes always an hereafter; but it never makes it the principal object of man’s life here to secure to his soul admission into heaven after death. It teaches us to prize the soul above the body; to seek the salvation of the soul; but not in the sense in which the church has alleged. Jesus would save the soul, not from future burnings, but from ignorance, low wants, groveling propensities—in a word, from sinning. When he said his kingdom was not of this world, he spoke in reference to the world in which he appeared, and asserted that his kingdom, the order of things he came to introduce and everywhere build up, was to be based on other principles than were the kingdoms then existing. These kingdoms were established on the principle that might gives right; or at best on the idea of justice, as distinct from that of love. Their maxim

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was, ‘an eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth, love to one’s neighbor, but hatred to enemies,’21 a maxim which at best could only create an eternal circle of injuries. But the kingdom of Jesus was to be based on the broad principle of absolute right, of universal philanthropy, a love for mankind, even for enemies, strong enough, if need be, to die for them on the scaffold or the cross. Those kingdoms were supported by the sword; his kingdom required the sword to remain in its scabbard, and commanded its subjects not to slay their enemies but to die for them. Jesus came to introduce a kingdom, a spiritual kingdom—not an ecclesiastical kingdom—a kingdom of righteousness, peace and love; to establish the reign of a new and a higher morality; but it was on the earth he sought to establish it. It was this world, the affairs, the minds and the hearts of men in this mode of being, he sought to subject to the law of God which is the law of right, which is again, the law of love. Hence the angels sang not only ‘Glory to God in the highest,’ but ‘on earth peace and good will to men’ [Luke 2:14]. “This great fact has been overlooked or misinterpreted; and yet it was of this fact that the wise and good of old prophesied. They saw the vice, the crime, the poverty, the suffering, the bigotry, the idolatry, the superstition, with which their own age was cursed, and they looked forth into the dim and distant future for a new order, a new age, a new world to spring into birth. They saw in the visions of their souls, in the inspirations of their hopes, an individual, a chosen messenger, a prophet, priest, king, or hero, the anointed of God, the Messiah, by whom, in due time, this new order should be introduced, and the latter-day glory, for which they yearned and hoped, and must die without witnessing, should be realized. The utterance of their hopes and their wishes and their presentiments, in the sublime strains of inspired poetry, is what the church reverences, and rightly reverences as prophecy, and the authority of which, with equal justice, it has always asserted. These prophecies of a long line of patriarchs and sages, all point to the new world Jesus came to create, to the establishment of the reign of justice and love throughout all the earth. And I, for one, believe that they were from God and shall be realized. These patriarchs and sages read in the stars, which ever and anon broke through the clouds which obscured their heavens, that the night should not last forever, that a glorious morning should dawn, a golden sun uprise, before whose beams the darkness should roll back, and the clouds disperse. To me Jesus is that sun. His light 21

[Ed. A conflation of Matt 5:38, 43.]

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has been rising for ages on our world, struggling with the darkness, and I doubt not that he will, ere long, shine forth in all his glory, the whole earth be illumined, and man everywhere be able to stand up in his true dignity, the brother of man, and the child of God. This is the purport of all prophecy; and this realized, is the establishment of universal right, and the establishment of this, is the realization of the highest social perfection, as well as individual holiness. “Man has suffered long; for ages been alienated from his brother man, the prey of false notions and anti-social habits. Long has he gone about bent to the earth, pale and haggard, bemoaning his existence, and at times, in the bitterness of his soul, cursing his Maker. Christianity comes to his relief. It brings a remedy; not merely by enjoining submission, patience, resignation; but by recognizing his right to a better condition, and breathing into his soul, the courage which dare attempt its realization. Christianity, sir, deals with man’s rights as well as with his duties. Nay, rightly interpreted, it concerns itself even more with our rights than with our duties, for even the duties it enjoins are but another name for the rights it recognizes. It begins by recognizing all men as brethren—‘one is your Father in heaven and all ye are brethren’22—it proceeds by enjoining universal philanthropy, legitimated by the fact of the common brotherhood of the race; and ends by commanding us to labor especially for the poor, the friendless, the down-trodden. Jesus claimed to be the anointed of God, because he was anointed to preach glad tidings to the poor. His ministry began with the poor, the lower classes; they heard him gladly, while the rich scorned, and the great took counsel against him; from them were taken his chosen ministers, not learned scribes and rabbis, but poor unlettered fishermen, and humble tent-makers—men who had nothing but their simple humanity, and therefore could be satisfied with nothing short of those broad and eternal principles of right, which extend alike to all the members of the race. The principles of the gospel were broad enough to reach even them. Therefore ‘blessed are the poor, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven’23—is, not merely shall be in another world, but is now, for it is for their especial benefit the Son of God has come to introduce the reign of righteousness and love. “You see now, Mr. Elwood, I hope, why it is I call Christianity the poor man’s religion. It is not because it comes with the voice of God to make him submissive to his masters; not because it seeks to 22 23

[Ed. A paraphrase of Matt 23:8.] [Ed. Paraphrase of Matt 5:3.]

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reconcile him to an order of things, the whole weight of which he must bear; but because it comes to reveal to him his rights, his own lofty and deathless nature; his equality with those who have for ages trampled him in the dust, fattened on his sweat and blood; and to assure him that he also is a man, and has a man’s wants, a man’s rights, and energies; because it says to his oppressor in the tone and authority of God, hold, thou wrongest a brother, and blasphemest thy Maker by oppressing his child; because it says to the rich, the proud, the would-be nobility of earth, in the meanest, the lowest, the most filthy of the human race, behold an equal, a brother, a child of God, humanity in all its integrity, with all its imprescriptible rights, and its capacity of endless progress in truth, love, goodness. Here, sir, is what I see in Christianity, and seeing this, I could not be a Christian did I not recognize the rights of the poor, and feel my obligations to them; I could not for one moment find peace in my own bosom, did I not make the moral and social melioration of all the members of the community, the express object of all my thoughts, wishes, and labors. I hope, sir, you will no longer feel surprised to find a professed Christian sympathizing with efforts designed to promote man’s earthly weal.” “You have presented me the gospel,” I replied, “in a new light; and had I seen it in the same light some years ago, it would have, perhaps, saved me some trouble, and reconciled me to the Christian faith. But what signifies it? You call yourself a Christian, but the whole Christian world will call you an infidel, and were you not rich would condemn you as loudly as it does me.” “Well, what of that? The first Christians were called atheists, and Jesus himself was crucified as a blasphemer, and I trust that I shall not be frightened by a nickname. The truth never yet was extinguished by a nickname, and if I have the truth, the world may call me what it will. But there is no fear that my views will be termed infidelity. I have not stated my views only. Millions of hearts are there already to respond to them, and millions of voices ere long shall echo them. The Christian world is prepared for these views, and daily in the temple is it praying for them. Everywhere is there a Simeon24 to whose heart it has been revealed that he shall see the Lord’s anointed, ready on beholding the gospel in the light I have presented it, to exclaim, ‘Lord, now lettest thou thy servant depart in peace, for mine eyes have seen thy salvation’” [Luke 2:29-30]. 24 [Ed. Simeon was the aged and devout Jew who took the infant Jesus in his arms in the temple at Jerusalem and proclaimed his “Nunc Dimittis.” See Luke 2:25-35.]

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We had now reached Mr. Howard’s residence and the conversation dropped.

CHAPTER XV: CONVALESCENCE Of Mr. Howard’s family I shall not say much. It consisted of a wife and two daughters; the eldest daughter was eighteen, the other some two years younger, both intelligent, beautiful and religious, according to their father’s reading of the gospel. It was a quiet family, and in more respects than one, just the family in which the bruised spirit might be made whole, the chilled affections recover their warmth, and the troubled heart find its peace. This family was cheerful, nay, lively; and the girls were now and then, as girls will be, a little frolicsome in a quiet way; but never, as I could discover, disposed to waste their time on trifles. Each had a regular employment, and each seemed to feel that life had serious aims which must not be lost sight of, and solemn duties which must not be neglected. Whether it was a fashionable or unfashionable family I cannot say, not being a judge of such matters. It was a wealthy family; but I never saw any display of wealth. The house, furniture, and dress of the ladies, all seemed to me chaste, simple, and in good taste. Nothing was said about high and low; for the family did not belong to the class of noveaux riches; and the poor were never alluded to unless it were to have their rights explained and enforced, or their wants relieved. Mr. Howard, however, was no great advocate of almsgiving. In former times, he would say, when mere temporary relief was all that the most sanguine friends of mankind could hope to effect, almsgiving was a duty and a virtue; but now we should aim at something higher, something which not merely palliates, but cures. Almsgiving is now often but a respectable way the rich have of displaying their wealth, or of excusing themselves from all serious efforts in behalf of the poor and needy. He wished not merely to relieve for a moment the wants of a few individuals, but to cure poverty itself, to abolish the distinction of rich and poor, believing with Agur,25 that neither riches nor poverty is best for man. But he did not seek to effect this object by giving to the poor, nor by seeking to do everything for them. The poor, he contended, were not poor because the rich wanted generosity, but justice. Nothing was needed for the poor 25 [Ed. Agur was a religious official among the Romans whose duty it was to predict the future based upon omens derived from the flight, singing, and feeding of birds, among other portents.]

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but a simple reverence for the rights and dignity of man, as man. The great inequality in wealth which obtains results from the want of strict honesty in its acquisition, from the undue advantages which individuals by their adroitness, or suppleness, and want of conscientiousness, have been able to secure to themselves, and from the want of high, moral feelings and a manly independence of spirit on the part of the poor. If every man would take with him, on commencing the pursuit of wealth, not conventional but true Christian morality, there would never be any inequality in wealth to be complained of; and consequently no poor to be commiserated, and no occasion for the display of generosity on the part of the rich. He did not ask the rich to give to the poor, but to respect the rights of the poor. For himself, he was rich; he had inherited the greater part of his wealth, and although he might question the strict morality of some of the means by which his estate had been originally acquired, he did not think it incumbent on him to throw it away; but to preserve it, and use it according to the best of his judgment for the moral, intellectual and physical improvement of the community in which his lot had been cast. I soon found myself quite domesticated in this agreeable family. I was not overloaded with kindness. I was in very feeble health, but no one tried to make me believe my health was feebler than it was. I had been unfortunate, but I heard no allusion to the fact, and no one attempted to console me. I was an infidel, but my unbelief elicited no remark—was I not also a man? Books, music, conversation, walks in the garden, short excursions to view some fine natural scenery in the neighborhood, afforded me ample means to recover my health and recruit my spirits. Several weeks glided away uncounted, and I was evidently growing better. The world began to wear now and then a little sunshine, and to look less and less coldly upon me. Bright and laughing eyes were shining around me, but all the light did not come from them; I had somewhat to remember. I was an inmate for the first time in my life in a family where I could see religion without bigotry, zeal without fanaticism, warmth of piety without superstition. I was surrounded by holy influences. The temper of my mind was rapidly changing, and old half-forgotten feelings would come up, and at times I felt as I did in that distant past when all things were bright and lovely to my view. Somehow or other the world did not seem to me so desolate as it did, and I could hardly persuade myself that some good being had not made it. Whence this disposition to return to my early faith? This new disposition to believe and worship? I had been honest,

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philanthropic; I had aimed well, I had inquired diligently, but might I not, after all, have mistaken my way? A new doubt this, not a doubt that leads to incredulity, but which may perhaps lead to something else. There is nothing, I suppose, singular or novel in this. There may be intellectual beings, who are moved by thought alone—beings who never feel, but live always in mere abstractions. Such persons are dependent never on the state of the affections, and are influenced not at all by the circumstances around them. Of these beings I know not much. I am not one of them. I have believed myself to have a heart as well as a head, and that in me, what the authors of a new science I have just heard of,26 call the affective nature, is stronger, by several degrees, than the intellectual. The fact is my feelings have generally controlled my belief, not my belief my feelings. This is no uncommon case. As a general rule would you gain the reason you must first win the heart. This is the secret of most conversions. There is no logic like love. And by-the-by, I believe that the heart is not only often stronger than the head, but in general a safer guide to truth. At any rate, I have never found it difficult to assign plenty of good reasons for doing what my heart has prompted me to do. Mr. Howard understood all this perfectly, and uniformly practiced on the principle here implied, not as a calculation, but because he was led to it by the benevolence of his own heart. He found me out of humor with myself and the world, suffering acute mental torture, and he saw at once that I must be reconciled to myself and the world, before I could look upon Christianity in the proper frame of mind to judge of its truth and beauty. Then again he was not extremely anxious to convert me. He did not regard me in my present condition as an alien from God, or as deserving to be an outcast from man. To him I was a man, a brother, a child of God. If I had been unable to come to the same belief he had, it might be my loss, but could not be my fault. He would gladly see me a believer, but he thought probably the influence of Christian example, and above all, communion with truly Christian dispositions, would go farther than any arguments addressed merely to my understanding towards making me one.

26 [Ed. Brownson may be referring to phrenology, the study of size and shape of the skull as indicative of human intellectual and moral characteristics. Phrenology was propagated in the United States by the German physician Johann Kaspar Spurzheim (1776-1832) and the Scottish educational and social reformer George Combe (1788-1858). See Brownson’s “Pretensions of Phrenology,” Boston Quarterly Review 2 (April 1839): 205-29, and in EW, 4, chapter 14.]

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CHAPTER XVI: A PARADOX As I began to recover the tone of my mind, and to look with a less jaundiced eye upon the world, my infidelity became a frequent subject of conversation. One evening, while we were conversing, I remarked to Mr. Howard, that since I had been in his family, I had been almost persuaded to become a Christian. “Perhaps,” he replied, “you are, and always have been, much nearer being a Christian than you imagine.” “But I can hardly be a Christian without knowing it.” “I am not so sure of that. Christianity is not a creed, but a life.27 He who has the spirit of Jesus is a Christian, be his speculative belief what it may.” “I have not as yet advanced far enough to admit even the existence of a God. I see not then how I can have much of Christ in me.” “Christ is not a dogma to be believed, but a spirit to be cultivated and obeyed. Whoever loves truth and goodness, and is willing to die for their honor and the redemption of man, as Jesus did, I hold to be a Christian in the only worthy sense of the term. He may not indeed have the ‘letter’ which ‘killeth,’ but that is no great loss, so long as he has the ‘spirit’ which ‘giveth life,’”28 “You seem determined to make me out a Christian, and that too without changing my faith.” “The belief in Christ lies in the bottom of every honest man’s heart. Christianity is nothing foreign to our soul. It is the ideal, the realization of which would constitute the perfection of our nature. Just so far as you advance in the work of perfecting your own nature, do you grow in Christ; and could you attain to the highest perfection admitted by your nature as a man, you would attain to the stature of a perfect man in Christ Jesus. In yielding obedience to the moral laws of your own being, you are yielding obedience to the gospel. One of these laws, the one which I term the social element of human nature, you obeyed in your efforts to reform society and augment the sum of the common weal of your kind. Consequently in obeying this element, you were conforming to the Christian law. You fancied you were obeying a law of infidelity, but that was an error of judgment, 27 [Ed. Here Brownson is following Samuel Taylor Coleridge, as he had done in some of his previous articles. In Aids to Reflection, vol. 9 of The Collected Works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, ed. John Beer (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1993), 202, Coleridge argued: “Christianity is not a Theory, or a Speculation; but a Life. Not a Philosophy of Life, but a Life and a living Process.”] 28 [Ed. A reference to 2 Cor 3:6.]

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easily accounted for. You saw that element generally overlooked or discarded by the Christian world; you therefore inferred that it could not be an element of Christianity; and you rejected Christianity because you supposed it rejected this element. But had you seen that Christianity recognized this element as its great, its central law, you would not have thought of rejecting it.” “But I was an unbeliever long before I ever dreamed of turning social reformer.” “Very possibly; but still for a Christian reason. All the infidelity I have ever met with springs from one of two causes acting separately, or from both combined. The first cause of infidelity I have already spoken of. Some men feel a strong desire to redress social or political grievances, and are repulsed by the church. They therefore imagine the church opposed to political freedom, and social progress; and identifying Christianity with the church, they disown it, and very properly. The second cause of infidelity is found in the development of the philosophical element of our nature. This element is strong in some men. They must be free to inquire what and wherefore they believe. This inquiry the church has prohibited; they have therefore concluded it prohibited by Christianity itself; and therefore have rejected Christianity and I add again, very properly. In both of these cases the supposed rejection of Christianity has been induced by Christian motives; and the infidel could not have been, with his lights, a Christian, had he done differently.” “You seem, sir, disposed to attribute infidelity to good causes and not to bad.” “Certainly. I have long since learned to hold myself ignorant of the real causes of a man’s opinions, till I have been able to trace them to a good, even a sacred source. Infidelity indicates an inquiring mind, an honest mind, not a depraved heart. It originates in what is good in the individual, and is disgraceful only to the church which has given occasion for it. Instead then of censuring infidels, denouncing them in the name of God, and trying to set the community against them, I look into the church to ascertain, if I can, its errors or defects which justify infidelity. Christians, not infidels, are to be denounced if any are.” “But, sir, will the church suffer you to make such assertions? Will it not denounce you as well as me?” “I am not much in the habit of asking permission of the church to say this or that, and if it choose to denounce me, all I have to say is, I will denounce it; and I am sure it will regard my denunciation of it, as much as I shall its denunciation of me.”

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“Every man who believes Christianity and knows why he believes it, has at some period of his life doubted it. Authority and tradition may answer the wants of the multitude, but there are those who must not only know what they believe, but wherefore they believe. In these men the philosophical element is active. They ask, why do we believe Christianity? What are the grounds for believing it? When they ask this question, they have no thought of doubting, far less of disbelieving. They are honest, but they have a craving to comprehend that faith they have hitherto taken on trust. But when they begin this questioning they are necessarily ignorant, and doubt is the inevitable result. “Doubt, although in itself free from sin, is a critical matter. I am far from pretending that we may doubt without danger. There is always danger in cutting loose from our old fastenings, and going forth upon an unknown sea, while as yet unskilled in navigation. There is always danger that when we doubt the truth of the creed in which we have been reared, we shall make our doubt an excuse for disregarding all moral restraints, and for the indulgence of all our baser propensities; there is also danger that we shall be too hasty; and rush too precipitately from mere doubt to dogmatic infidelity; nevertheless, the hazard here implied we must run, unless we would be forever in leading strings. “Doubt itself has no necessary connection with infidelity, or the rejection of Christianity. We can never attain to a rational faith in Christianity without passing through the wilderness of doubt; but the natural result of doubt would be conviction, not disbelief; that is, where it runs a free course. But unhappily it is not suffered to run this free course. It is almost always obstructed. Nearly the whole Christian world condemns it, pronounces it a sin, the effect of a depraved heart or a lawless will, unchurches, anathematizes the trembling doubter, and assures him, that if he continues to doubt he shall be damned not only here but hereafter. “From this fact results one of two consequences. If the want to account to oneself for his faith, and to see clearly the grounds of its truth, be but moderate, the doubter stifles his doubts, sinks back under the dominion of authority and tradition, assents to whatever the church enjoins, and remains henceforth destitute of all real spiritual life, a dead weight on the cause of Christ, and a disgrace to humanity. Such, I fear, are at the present moment, a majority of the members of our churches. These are they who are loudest against the infidel, and the most ready to anathematize all freedom of mind. Poor creatures! Having no reason themselves to give for the faith they

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avow, they fancy none can be given. On the other hand, if the want of which I speak be very urgent, that is, if the philosophical element of our nature be very strong and active, the obstacles which our doubts encounter, enrage us, make us mad at the church for its unreasonableness, and drive us into infidelity. I think your own experience will bear me out in what I say. “When you first asked yourself why you believed Christianity nothing was further from your thoughts than its rejection. You were young, you had not, and you could not have had, at that age, the necessary acquaintance either with human nature or the gospel, to be able to assign rational grounds for believing Christianity. You doubted because you wanted evidence to convince, and that evidence you were not then in a state to receive. If your Christian friends had encouraged you to doubt, told you that it was your duty to doubt till you should attain to rational conviction; if they had exhorted you to push your investigations into all subjects, sacred or profane, and bid you abide by the result of your investigations, be that result what it might, you would never have ranked yourself among unbelievers, but would have long ere this attained to a well-grounded faith in God, Christ, and immortality. “But your friends I will venture to say were not wise enough for this. They told you these doubts were sinful, were from the Devil, and you must stifle them. They undertook to frighten you. They talked to you of death and the judgment, told you long raw-headand-bloody-bones stories about the death-bed, of noted unbelievers, and with cant and rigmarole, if not direct abuse and denunciation, sought to win you back to the church. Poor fools! They took the very course to make you disgusted with religion and ambitious to become an infidel. Firmly as I believe in God, Christ, and immortality, I confess, I rarely meet with a work written in defense of Christianity that does not stir the devil in me, and make me ready to renew the old war of the Titans upon the Gods.29 If the Gods cannot employ more respectable advocates than they have hitherto done, I think it were no mean honor to be sent to hell for giving judgment against them. Happily, however, we are not dependent on their feed advocates, nor the witnesses they summon. Let God alone, and he will plead his own cause, and for witnesses, we have a witness within worth all others.

29 [Ed. The Titans in Greek mythology were the male children of Uranus and Gaia who battled with their father and other divinities in a heavenly power struggle.]

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“But this by the way. The philosophical element in you was strong and active. You must have a reason for the faith you avowed. That element the church disowned and would not suffer you to obey. But the infidel owned it and bid you obey it. You sided then with the infidel against the church, that you might be free to philosophize; in other words, that you might be at liberty to exercise your mind freely upon all subjects you should judge worthy of your examination. You became an infidel for the same reason that Luther became a Protestant. Luther became a Protestant not because he objected to the creed of the Catholic Church, but because he would not submit to the authority of the pope. So you rejected Christianity not because you had found its doctrines untrue, but because the church in its name asserted an authority over your faith which you deemed unwarrantable and mischievous.” “But I think my inquiries proved that the supernatural pretensions of Christianity were unfounded.” “I care nothing for your inquiries—asking your pardon, sir; for they came afterwards. The reasons you may have alleged for disbelieving Christianity were not the reasons which induced you to disbelieve it; but, reasons which you raked together afterwards to justify your disbelief.” “But this philosophical element of which you speak, do you mean to assert that it is a Christian element?” “Of course I do.”

CHAPTER XVII: RATIONALISM “Philosophy has a place in the history of mankind, and must therefore result from a want inherent in our nature. Men do not philosophize through mere caprice, but in obedience to an indestructible law of human nature. All men feel more or less strongly the want of comprehending, accounting for, and verifying their beliefs. This want is what I term the philosophical element of human nature. “Christianity is the name I give to the law of man’s perfection. The design of Jesus was to make us perfect men. He did not propose to perfect us by changing our natures, converting us into a different sort of being; but by developing our nature, by calling forth in their legitimate order and stimulating to their highest activity all the faculties with which we were originally endowed by our Creator. If the religious and ethical system he has proposed to this end be narrower than human nature, if it leave out of its account any one element of that nature, it cannot secure the perfection contemplated. Could it then be proved that Christianity neglects or prohibits the exercise of

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the philosophical element, I would discard it as quick as if it neglected the religious element, properly so called. “Christianity addresses itself to me as a being endowed with reason. It presupposes me capable of knowing and comprehending. It makes its appeal not to my senses, but to my reason. If then it should begin by denying my right to exercise my reason, which is virtually denying the reason itself, it would leave no reason to respond to its appeal. It is the reason that must pronounce upon its truth or falsity; but if we deny both the right and the competency of the reason to do this, we can never have any grounds for believing Christianity true or false, consequently no reason whatever for feeling ourselves obliged to obey it. Religion can dispense with reason, no better than philosophy can, for reason is its only interpreter and voucher.” “The Bible, I have supposed, commands us not to reason, but to believe, and assures us that we shall be damned if we do not.” “The Bible never threatens damnation as the punishment of disbelief, as such. But in relation to the language of the Bible on this and many other topics, there is, I apprehend, some slight mistake. Before you can rightly interpret the Bible you must take its authors’ point of sight. You, as well as many Christians, give to nature a causative power, an independent activity. If you believed in God, you would never think of ascribing to his agency what you could trace to the operation of what you term natural laws. In fact the Christian world is at present prone to restrict the sphere of the divine activity, and to introduce the ‘Deus ex Machinâ’ only when the powers of nature prove to be inadequate. “But this is all wrong. Nature has no independent activity, no causality of its own. God is the only independent existence, and he is the cause of all causes. The laws of nature are his will. Truth is not one thing and God another; right is not one thing and God another. You admit that you ought to believe the truth, and to do what is right. Then you admit, if you understand yourself, that you are bound to believe what God commands, and to do what he ordains. To say a thing is commanded by God, is precisely the same thing it is to say that it is true, it is right. God commands it; the right enjoins it; it is right; are merely three different modes of expressing one and the same thing. “Now the authors of the Bible always take this view, and regard God as the absolute sovereign of the universe whose will is law— consequently they promulgate all particular truths in the form of commands. God commands us to do this, not to do that; ordains that do this and ye shall live, do that and ye shall die. Now this form

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of speaking is strictly just, and implies no more restriction on mental freedom than does the more common form of saying, this is true, and therefore ought to be believed; this is right, and therefore ought to be done. God is everlasting and immutable right, eternal and unalterable truth. His words then are in the highest and strictest sense commands. He who utters a truth promulgates a command of God; he who points out a right or a duty declares a law of God, and has a right to say, thus God wills, thus saith the Lord. Be sure that what you utter is true, is right, and you are authorized to proclaim it as the command of God, and to demand in the name of God obedience. The Bible-writers then make no war upon the rights of the mind, when they utter the truths they behold in the form of commands. All truth is authoritative, a divine command, and whoso rebels against it, rebels against his legitimate sovereign.” “But does the Bible do what you seem to imply? Does it never proclaim anything but the truth?” “That is, are its words, the words of God; are its commands always the commands of truth? That is a subject for the human mind to determine. So far as it speaks truth, I contend it has the right to say, ‘thus saith the Lord,’ ‘so God commands.’ Our business is to ascertain what it really promulgates as the commands of God, and then if what it promulgates be really the commands of God, that is, true.” “But are you at liberty to make both of these inquiries? Will Christianity suffer you to do it?” “If it would not, I would not suffer myself to be one of its advocates. I have no confidence in any system of faith or of morals that shrinks from investigation. Not truth but falsehood shuns the light.” “But we are told that the Bible is the word of God, and therefore we must receive it blindly, implicitly.” “I rarely ask what I am told; I ask what is true. Be it that I am told that the Bible is the word of God, just so far as I find it true, I will admit it to be the word of God, but no further.” “Do you discriminate? The Bible is a whole, and as a whole is to be taken or rejected. They say we must believe what is in the Bible, because it is in the Bible, not because independently of the Bible, we have ascertained it to be true.” “They say! No more of that. I believe a proposition because I discover, or fancy I discover it to be true, not because I find it in one book or another; and I obey a command because I believe it just, not because it emanates from one source or another.”

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“But how do you determine whether a given proposition be true or false, a given command be just or unjust?” “By the reason with which I am endowed, freely developed and conscientiously directed.” “We are back where we were. Does Christianity allow you to do this?” “No, it does not allow me to do it; but commands me, makes it my duty to do it. ‘Why,’ says Jesus to the Jews and through them to all men, ‘why even of yourselves judge ye not what is right?’ ‘If I do not the works of my Father believe me not’ [John 10:37]. Here is a distinct recognition of a power in man to judge what is and what is not right, and what are and what are not the works of God, together with a call upon us to exercise this power. If we have the power to determine what are the works of God, we of course have the power to determine what is true or false. And this power it is our duty to exercise.” “The church will dissent from your interpretation.” “And I, sir, will in that case dissent from the church. I am no believer in the infallibility of the church. The church has always misinterpreted the authority of truth. She has ever had a profound sentiment of the authoritativeness of truth, that every man is bound to believe and obey the truth; that no man can knowingly disregard the truth and be guiltless. So far she has been right. But on this she has built up a system of ecclesiastical tyranny which it behooves every wise man to protest against. She has first assumed that she has the truth, identified her teachings with the teachings of God, and then claimed for herself the authority which belongs only to truth, to God. Now between the church and absolute truth there may be a distance, and her practice of claiming for herself what belongs of right to truth is founded on a species of logic I am by no means disposed to admit. “I admit the absolute authority of God, and of course of truth, since I hold truth to be one with God. Show me the truth, and I own my obligation to submit to it. But I deny that the church has any more authority to interpret truth, and declare the will of God than I have. I make no war upon the church because it has asserted the principle of authority, for I contend as strongly as she does for that principle. Her error consists in placing that principle where it does not belong, in claiming it for an individual or a corporation that has no right to it. I deny the legitimacy of all merely human government. God alone is sovereign. No power is legitimate that is not ordained of God. But when the church commands me to believe this or that she speaks in her own name, and substitutes a human authority for

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that of God. Here is her grand error. It was this assumption on the part of the Catholic Church that provoked the protest of the reformers in the sixteenth century; it is this assumption on the part of all Protestant churches now that leads to the protest of modern infidelity against all religion. And so long as the church continues to make this assumption, I will hold her accountable for all the infidelity which obtains. “Of all tyrannies ecclesiastical tyranny is the worst because it penetrates to the soul, and binds the conscience as well as the body. It makes man a slave within as well as without, and therefore utterly a slave. You may bind my body, you may task the motions of my limbs, but I am still a man if my soul be free, if my thoughts be not curbed, and my conscience itself fettered. In all ages the priesthood have established this tyranny, and they everywhere struggle with all their might to retain it. Even those of our clergy who fancy themselves the advocates of religious freedom still cling in principle and in fact to this same tyranny. They indeed protest against the authority of Rome, but they set up a written word for which they claim equal authority. They war against the hierarchy, but they claim infallibility for the congregation. The greatest extent to which their love of liberty will carry them is freedom from all civil restraints in matters of religious worship. But this is no more than Rome always contended for. This was the principle involved in the long struggle between the popes and the emperors. The church claimed for religion freedom, entire freedom from the restraints of the civil power. But she by no means allowed the individual freedom from the restrictions of the ecclesiastical power. Nor do the modern clerical advocates of religious liberty in our own country. With us each church has its creed, expressed or implied, conformity to which constitutes the Christian character. The Calvinistic clergyman is no more free in the full and enlarged sense of the term than is the Romish priest. In our own country I presume few can be found who would impose civil restrictions on religious belief; yet there are still fewer, claiming to be religious, who would leave the individual free to form his own creed, and to abide by his own honest convictions of the truth.” “Do you then claim for the individual reason the right to interpret the word of God?” “I do, and more than is commonly implied in the remark. I not only claim for the individual reason the right to interpret the Bible, which is commonly meant, but the whole word of God, whether written or unwritten; that is, the right to decide in all cases whatever, what I am to embrace as truth. But of course I hold that I am to use

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my reason reasonably. In determining what is truth, I am to survey the whole proposition, and to avail myself of all the aid I can. I am not to confine myself to my own consciousness, to my own experience; but must interrogate the consciousness, the experience of the race, so as to come as near as possible, by means of my individual reason, to the decisions of the universal reason, of which my reason is a fragment. In this inquiry, the Bible as being the most authentic record of the experience of the race, or of the teachings of the universal reason, or what is the same thing, the revelations of God, becomes to me of the greatest possible value, and my surest guide.” “I can only say that, though I object nothing to your doctrine, I apprehend the Christian world will no more own you than it would me.” “As to that I shall not trouble myself. I believe I see very clearly the signs of the times. Men are not precisely what they were. Knowledge is no longer the exclusive property of the clergy. The laity have been to school, and are going to school; and it is shrewdly suspected by some that there is no especial virtue in the imposition of hands, or in gown and band, to enable one to see and know the truth. It is beginning to be believed that humanity in all its integrity, is in every member of the race, that each member therefore has the right and the power to form his own creed. The church may war against this new state of things, but she will by so doing only hasten the day of her dissolution. The human race is already escaping from her dominion. It demands a reason, and she must give it, or be discarded. She must recognize the authority of pure reason in matters of religion as well as natural science, or she will go the way of all the earth. I say this in no Titanic spirit, but with a deep respect for the church, and an earnest wish for her future glory.”

CHAPTER XVIII: THE PREACHER The day following the conversation I have just related was Sunday and Mr. Howard for the first time invited me to accompany him to his meeting. He remarked that his minister, though pretty orthodox in the main, was a little peculiar, and perhaps I should find myself interested, if not edified. Years had elapsed since I had entered a place of religious worship, and though I felt no great desire on my part to hear a sermon, yet as I thought I might please Mr. Howard by going, I accepted his invitation. The place of meeting was a public hall capable of holding some eight or nine hundred persons, and I found it well filled with a plain,

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sensible-looking congregation, whose earnest countenances indicated that they were there not because it was a place of fashionable resort, but because they were serious worshipers and honest inquirers after truth. A single glance told you that they were bold, earnest minds, who could look truth steadily in the face, let her assume what shape she might. The preacher, a Mr. Morton, was a tall, well-proportioned man, with something a little rustic in his appearance, indicating that his life had not been spent in the circles of the gay and the fashionable. Though far from being handsome, his features were striking and impressed themselves indelibly upon the memory. His dark complexion, and small, restless black eye bespoke an active and also an irritable disposition, and assured you that he might say some bitter things. His head was large, and his brow elevated and expanded. His face bore the marks of past struggle, whether with passion, the world, or sorrow, it was not easy to say. He was apparently under forty years of age, but you felt that he was a man who could speak from experience, that he was in fact no ordinary man, but one who had a biography, if you could only get at it. There was something almost repulsive about him, and yet you were drawn insensibly towards him. On commencing his discourse he seemed not exactly at his ease, and his address was hurried, and ungraceful. His voice, too, though deep-toned, grated harshly on the ear, and produced a most unfavorable impression. But there was an air of earnestness about him, an evidence of intellectual vigor, and of moral honesty, which arrested your attention; while the novelty of his views and the boldness of his language served to enchain it till he closed. His discourse was to me a most singular production. I had never heard such a sermon before; and I confess I listened to it with the deepest interest. As a copy of it subsequently came into my hands, I will here give it word for word as he delivered it, although I am aware that it can hardly make the same impression upon my readers that it did upon me. But to the sermon: “But I certify you, brethren, that the gospel which was preached of me is not after man. For I neither received it of man, nor was I taught it but by the revelation of Jesus Christ. Gal 1:11-12.” The declaration of Paul in these words is worthy of grave consideration. There is more in it than at first sight meets the eye. Paul, you are aware, had much trouble with his brother believers. Many, a large portion of the Jewish, or as we should say today, orthodox believers in Christianity looked upon him as unsound in the faith, and as one who might do mischief. They no doubt held him to be honest, probably admired his zeal, and did homage to the

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earnestness and singleness of purpose with which he gave himself up to the great work of diffusing Christianity as he understood it; but then they feared that his boldness, his rashness, the freedom of his speculations, might compromise the gospel, and secure its enemy a triumph. Hence wherever he went, they followed him, scattering doubts as to his orthodoxy, warning the people not to listen to him, and laboring to secure the adoption of certain notions, or the observance of certain rites or ceremonies which he declared to be unessential or inconsistent with the gospel of Jesus Christ. It was to defend himself from the charges preferred by these orthodox opponents of his, to rebuke them for their folly or ignorance, and to recall his Galatian brethren to the simplicity, truth, and freedom of the gospel, that he wrote this epistle, from which I have taken my text; and he alleges as his defense the fact that the gospel he was preaching, he did not receive from men, nor was he taught it by men, but by the revelation of Jesus Christ. Paul had come to Christianity through the free action of his own mind, and had embraced it because convinced of its truth. He had opposed it, but not on account of that for which others embraced it, but on account of something which they probably did not see. The early believers in Christianity were Jews. But in believing Christianity they did not consider themselves as rejecting Judaism. They held on to the law of Moses after believing in Christ as firmly as they did before. They saw nothing in Christianity which required them to abandon their previous religious notions or observances. They saw no inconsistency in swearing by both Moses and Christ. Paul, however, was too keen-sighted, and possessed too logical a mind, to fall into this mistake. He saw from the first that if Christ should increase Moses must decrease. The prevalence of the new religion was incompatible with the existence of the old. This was doubtless the secret of his hostility to Christianity. Bred a Jew, brought up at the feet of Gamaliel,30 according to the strictest sect of the Jewish religion, he very naturally believed the Jewish religion, even to its letter, was of divine authority. How could he then regard with indifference the prevalence of a heresy which struck at the very existence of the whole Jewish economy, and which, if not checked, must change the whole religious faith and practice of his countrymen? He opposed Christianity then, because it was directly opposed to the religion he believed to be from God. 30 [Ed. Gamaliel was a Pharisaic member of the Sanhedrin in Jerusalem who was widely respected for his learning in Torah. See Acts 5:34.]

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When he became converted to Christianity he did not hesitate to avow it, and to engage with the whole ardor of his soul in the defense of his new faith. But in becoming converted to Christianity, he did not become convinced that it and Judaism were one and the same thing. He recognized the same opposition between them now that he did before. He believed now as he did before that Judaism and Christianity were in the main two distinct religions, and could never be made to harmonize together. He therefore rejected Judaism now as he had Christianity before. Consequently he saw that those Christians who still clung to the Jewish law, and the traditions of the fathers, had but a partial view of the gospel, and were in fact deceiving themselves and seeking justification by conforming to a law by the deeds of which no flesh could be justified. He wished them to be Christians, not Jews; to rely on Christ, not on Moses; on the spirit, not on the flesh; on grace, not on works; for to attempt to seek justification by the Jewish law was mere folly. Hence the cause and the nature of the controversy with them in which he was engaged. They rejoiced no doubt to find him converted from a bitter opponent to a zealous defender of the new faith; they were no doubt highly delighted that he gave his powerful aid to the Christian cause; but then why need he oppose Judaism? Why need he be so belligerent, and oppose so strenuously the traditions and usages they held sacred? The case of Paul is by no means a singular one. Let a man in these days, and in this community come to a belief in Christianity through infidelity, and after having long opposed it, and he will find that his case is very much the same. He will inevitably embrace Christianity in a shape somewhat different from that most approved by the doctors of the church. Christianity, according to their reading, had failed to satisfy him. He had seen, what perhaps none of them had seen, that Christianity, according to their interpretations, was inconsistent with itself, that it opposed or neglected some essential element of truth, and therefore deserved to be rejected. But in his lone inquiries, in his silent meditations, in his secret interviews with the Egeria31 of his soul, the spirit of truth, he has become convinced that Christianity, rightly interpreted, is true, is from God. The scales fall from his eyes, and he is exalted in his soul to the third heaven, where he converses with Jesus and holds fellowship with the Father. His views are clear and definite; his soul is fired with a holy zeal; and he goes forth with a kindling enthusiasm to proclaim the glad tidings 31

[Ed. In Roman mythology Egeria was a nymph who advised king Numa, and taught him the most efficacious prayers and incantations.]

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of his new faith. He is indefatigable in his labors, doing more in a week than the sleek doctors of the church in years. All rejoice in the new convert; all hail the energy with which he goes to his work, the fervor with which he prays, and the unction with which he preaches. But this man, though converted to Christianity has not been converted to the traditions of the fathers, nor does he defend them. He has been converted to a Christianity freed from the defects and inconsistences which he had found in the Christianity of the doctors, and which had driven him to infidelity. He is converted to Christ, not to Moses—preaches Christianity not Judaism. Forthwith a clamor is raised against him. He may be honest, it is said, may speak with power, may labor abundantly, may wish to do good, and even fancy that he is doing good; but he is too rash, too bold; he does not see to what some of his assertions lead; he does not pay respect enough to the usage of the churches; and we are afraid that he will unsettle the faith of many, breed disorder and do great harm to the holy cause of religion. Let this man go where he will, let him labor with all zeal, diligence and fidelity, let him wear out his body in the intense activity of his mind, stand alone, forego most of the kindly charities and sympathies of civilized life, suffer poverty and want, and he shall find his Christian brethren everywhere, and always the first to oppose him, diligent to throw suspicion on the worth of his labors, and to warn the people neither to believe him nor to listen to his words. And all the while they shall profess to have a generous concern for his welfare, to wish him well, and to be very sorry that he will ruin himself by his rashness, and his wild speculations. It is a great pity that he cannot be a little more prudent, and not be ever saying things which cannot but alienate from him his best friends. Here comes in Paul’s defense. Brethren, I profess and preach to you the gospel of Jesus Christ; but I certify you that I did not receive it of men, neither was I taught it but by the revelation of Jesus Christ. The gospel is no human device. Man has not made it, man does not own it; man has no right to authorize it nor to impose it; nor to say how it shall or shall not be preached. It is from God, and it is the duty of everyone to whom Jesus Christ reveals it, to preach it as he has received it, and that too without conferring with flesh and blood. If we recur more particularly to this defense, we shall find that it contains several propositions of which we shall do well not to lose sight. “I certify you, brethren, that the gospel which was preached of me, or by me, is not after man.”

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The meaning of this, I apprehend, is that he did not preach to them a gospel which men had authorized him to preach. Grant, he would say, that the gospel I preached unto you was in some, yea in all respects different from that which others preach unto you, what then? I came not to you as the envoy of men, nor of any particular class or set of men. I never entered into any engagement to preach other men’s gospels, or to preach to you what others, who regard themselves as the followers of Jesus, may preach to you, or contend ought to be preached. Men have no authority over my gospel, to dictate to me what I shall preach; and I preach not because believers have authorized or ordained and sent me forth to preach. I stand on my own feet, speak for myself, and hold myself accountable to no human tribunal for the doctrines I teach. If then I teach not what others profess to believe, or contend ought to be believed; if I entertain not the traditions of the elders and support not all the usages of the fathers, the congregations of believers have no right to call me to an account. I am not their agent; I speak not in their name, and whether I agree with them or not, is a matter of no moment. In this Paul evidently sets aside the doctrine of ordination. It has been supposed that every preacher must by a solemn act of ordination receive authority to teach. When the church has ordained him, he goes out in the name of the church, which is responsible for his doctrines, and to which he must hold himself responsible in return. Hence the jurisdiction the church has claimed over its preachers, and the right to which it has pretended, of trying them for heresy, and of suspending them from their ministry. But all this is wrong. No man, no body of men can give me or any one else, authority to teach. Every true preacher of the gospel goes forth on his own responsibility, and speaks as God gives him utterance, without being amenable therefor to any earthly tribunal, whether termed civil or ecclesiastical. Men have no business to call him to an account for what he utters, the church has no right to try him for heresy, or to suspend him from his ministry, however obnoxious to its displeasure may be the doctrines he sets forth. Grant that he departs from the traditions of the elders, from the usages of the fathers, and does not adopt the reading of learned and reverend doctors, they have nothing to do with him, but to convince him by arguments addressed to his reason and conscience, that he is wrong. Paul also asserts that he did not receive the gospel he preached, from men, nor was he taught it by men. He had not learned the gospel he was preaching from the brethren who were accusing him. They had not been his masters, and he therefore was under no obli-

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gation to them. He had not studied with the apostles, he had not taken from them even the formula of his faith; but had retired into Arabia, and not until after three years of solitary study, of communion with himself and with God, had he undertaken to preach. It was not then as a pupil of the apostles, but as a brother apostle, standing on equal ground with the immediate disciples of Jesus themselves, that he came forward as the preacher of the gospel. He stood up a free and independent man, to utter the words God gave him to utter, and without referring to the words uttered by others or asking whether his harmonized with theirs or not. He felt that he had as much right to call the immediate disciples of Jesus to an account as they him. In a word, he was preaching on his own hook, what he had learned of God to believe. He was taught by Jesus Christ, who was acknowledged by all as an authoritative teacher. Jesus Christ was ultimate, the highest possible authority, in the estimation of all believers; Paul then in claiming to have been taught by Jesus Christ, claimed to have received the gospel he preached from the highest possible authority. In claiming this he claimed to have drawn his doctrines from the primal source of truth. Grant, then, that he differed from his brethren; the error was as likely to be on their side as on his. Grant that he condemned Judaism as insufficient to wash out guilt and raise the soul to union with God; he might, nevertheless, be even a more consistent Christian than they who upheld it, and suffered no departure from the traditions of the elders. I have called your attention to this profession of Paul, of having been taught but by the revelation of Jesus Christ, for another purpose than that of showing you how he defended himself from the charges brought against him. I think I see in it something which was not merely local and temporary, but which belongs to all times and to all individuals. I think I see here the recognition of the fact that the gospel of Jesus Christ cannot be learned of men. The immediate disciples of Jesus could have taught it if anybody could; but Paul would not go and study even with them. He would not take the gospel at second hand. He would go to the primal source and receive it on as high authority as that possessed by the personal followers of Jesus, would go to the master and not to the disciple. Everyone should do the same today. Everyone should draw from the original fountain, take Jesus Christ and none other for his instructor. Thus far I suppose all will agree to what I say. But I pray you observe that when they send us to Christ, to the original fountain, it is to the Bible they send us. I speak with all becoming reverence of

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the Bible; but you must own to me that the Bible, the written Word, as we possess it now, is not an authority so high as that possessed by the oral teachings of the immediate followers of Jesus. You would esteem the instructions which Peter, James and John, were they here today, could furnish you of higher authority than the mere record of their past instructions you read in the Bible. If they were here, and you should discover a discrepancy between their teachings and the New Testament, you would rely on the former rather than on the latter. Then the instructions which Paul might have received from the immediate disciples of Jesus, were more ultimate than those which we can gather from the New Testament. But even the instructions of these immediate disciples were not ultimate enough for him. He would not learn even of them. He would go to Jesus Christ himself, and learn of the master. Now the Bible is the work, not of the master, but of the disciple; how then can sending us to the Bible be sending us to Jesus Christ, to the Master? The New Testament is a record which has come down to us of the teachings of the disciples; or if you please, a record which the disciples have left us of the teachings of their Master; but we can conceive something more ultimate still; to wit, the original instructions themselves. Those instructions could you obtain them, you would value more than any record it would be possible to make of them. There is then, or there once was, a higher source of truth than the Bible. Paul held the disciples themselves not high enough. He would go above them, and learn from their Master, and is there any more reason why I should regard the Bible as high enough, than there was that he should count their instructions high enough? Why should not I as well as Paul go above the Bible, to the very source from which the Bible-makers themselves drew? Do I learn of Christ when I merely learn of the Bible, any more than Paul would have learned of him, had he taken only the lessons of the disciples? But I may be told that Jesus Christ instructed Paul, as well as the other disciples, so that he might have another apostle to send forth into the field; and that since Paul evidently drew his instructions from the highest source, we should be content to learn of him. I am not satisfied with this. I know I am a sinner; but I do not know what I have done that I should not have as good evidence for my faith as Paul had for his: nor why I should not have as able instructors as he had. I know not wherefore Paul should have had Jesus for his instructor, and I only have certain letters Paul is said to have written for mine. Why such partiality? Am not I also a man? Am not I born as he was? Is not my nature as good as his was? Do I not stand in as much

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need of instruction as he did? Why then send him to the Master, and turn me off with the disciple? Shall I be told that there was once indeed a source of divine knowledge more original than the Bible, that then Jesus Christ was on earth, and his immediate instructions might be obtained; but that now all is changed, and we must receive our instructions from the written Word only? I do not understand this. Is there not a Jesus Christ now as much as there was in the time of Paul? Was Jesus Christ any more accessible to Paul than he is to me? Beware how you answer these questions, lest you be found denying the resurrection. To say there was a Jesus Christ, but is not now, is only another form of denying the Lord that bought us. You might in that case believe, indeed, in a Savior for Paul, but in none for me. But Paul himself teaches you better than this. He tells you not to say within yourselves, “Who shall ascend into heaven? That is, to bring Christ down from above: or who shall descend into the deep? that is, to bring up Christ again from the dead. The word is nigh thee, even in thy mouth, and in thy heart.”32 Christ is not dead, but ever living, not off in some distant world, but ever present, ever abiding with us, and ever saying unto us, “Learn of me,” for “lo I am with you unto the end of the world.”33 Most people, I apprehend, fancy that all supernatural revelations from God have ceased, and that Christ teaches now only through the medium of the written Word. But are they aware, that to believe so is as good as to deny both God and Christ? To say that God has discontinued his revelations to man, is only saying in other words, that all intercourse between him and us, is broken off; which is virtually saying that we are without God; at least that there is for us no living God, but only a God that was, but is not. A God that was but is not, is no God at all. To say that there was a Christ who taught men, but is not now, is to assert merely a dead Christ not a living, is in fact to deny the resurrection. There is an error quite prevalent even among religious people, that of believing only in a Divinity which was, but is not. All admit that God made the world, very few that he makes it. After having spent a whole eternity in the contemplation of himself, it is supposed that some six thousand years ago, he spoke the universe into existence with all its furniture of worlds and beings, impressed upon it its laws, wound it up as the clockmaker does his clock, gave the pendulum a jog, set it a-going, and then left it to go of itself. Just as though 32 33

[Ed. A paraphrase of Rom 10:6-8.] [Ed. Brownson is conflating two biblical passages, Matt 11:29; 28:20.]

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the universe could subsist a moment if the Deity, as its cause, did not remain in it, its life and substance, and motion! So though they admit that God has once and a while concerned himself with the piece of mechanism he had constructed, and condescended to give a few directions for its management, yet it was all in the past, long ages ago. No interference now, no God to reveal himself to us, who stand so much in need of his instructions. So also they admit that a Savior once appeared in Judea, was crucified under Pontius Pilate for the redemption of the world, but there is no Jesus Christ now. The Savior did not rise from the dead, and there is only a traditional Christ in which we may trust. How has the age lapsed into infidelity! Brethren, I believe in a living God, in a God who not only made the world, but who makes it; who is not only above and independent of his works, but who is ever present in them; who not only revealed himself to men in past ages, but who also reveals himself to men even now, and who is always seen by the pure in heart, and everywhere. I contend also for a living Savior, not for a Savior who lived and died in Judea, a temporary and local Savior; but for one who fills all space, and is the same “yesterday, today and forever” [Heb 13:8]. I have no sympathy with the Arian heresy of ancient times, nor with the Socinian heresy of modern times, which the church seems almost universally to embrace, save in name.34 The Christ in whom I believe is one with the Father, and he lives now, and is as much within the reach of the humble seeker after truth today as he was when Jesus walked about in Jerusalem and Galilee. Beware how you seek for your Savior in the tomb of Joseph of Arimathea. Seek not the living among the dead. Christ has risen, and ever liveth to make intercession for us. O deny not the glorious doctrine of the resurrection. Deny that doctrine and you are without hope in the world, and there is left you no redemption from sin. The Christ from whom we are to learn the gospel is not an old Christ, a Jewish Christ, a dead Christ, but the RISEN Christ, who comes to us not as the Son of Mary, clothed in flesh and subject to its infirmities, but as the Paraclete, the Comforter, the Holy Ghost, the Spirit of Truth, who was to lead us into all truth. The Holy Ghost, though distinguished in name, is one with the Son, the Christ, who is also one with the Father. Father, Son, and Holy Ghost are not three Gods, but one God. What is predicated of the one, under the rela34 [Ed. The Alexandrian priest Arius initiated the fourth-century heresy that held Christ was subordinate to God the Father. The Socinian heresy also denied the divinity of Christ. It was propagated by two Italian religious thinkers, Lelio Francesco Maria Sozzini (1525-62) and his nephew Fausto Paolo Sozzini (15391604), whose Latinized names were Socinus.]

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tion I am now considering the subject, may be predicated of the other. The teachings of the Holy Spirit, are the teachings of Christ. This Holy Spirit, the Comforter, was to be ever with us, and Jesus said, “He shall take of mine, and show them unto you” [John 16:15]. The manifestations of this Spirit are given unto all men to profit withal. The teachings of the Spirit are the gospel of Christ, and to learn the gospel from the Spirit, is to learn it from the Master. The teachings of the risen Christ, the ever-abiding Christ, the universal Christ, the true Light which enlighteneth every man that cometh into the world, the Comforter, the Spirit of Truth, I hold to be superior to all other teachings. They are more ultimate than the written Word, and to them we may appeal even from the Bible, if there be occasion. It is this, sometimes termed the inward Christ, because a spiritual Christ, and not a corporeal, that judges the Bible, interprets the Bible and vouches for its truth. This is the Master, the Bible is merely the Disciple. This Christ is near unto every one of us, knocking ever at the door of our hearts and praying for admission, and we may all let him in and receive his instructions. Whomsoever he instructs is the equal of the Bible, the peer of Peter, James or John; for Peter, James and John had no means of knowing divine truth, which you and I, my brethren, have not also within our reach. I come now to the conclusion I have all along been aiming at; to wit, the entire independence of every individual mind, as it concerns every other individual mind, in the acquisition of truth and the formation of its creed. God is impartial. He dispenses light alike to all men, of all ages and nations. All may know the truth, may know the gospel, one as well as another. Everyone has the Great Teacher within. No one therefore need go to another to be taught. The witness is within, and may bear witness that he is born of God. Now in learning the gospel you must do more than to go back and explore the archives of Judea, more than pore over the records of the past. The past is silent, and darkness broods over it. The light by which you shall behold it, the spirit by which you shall revivify it, and give it a voice and a meaning, must be borrowed from the Great Teacher within. You must seek the revelations of the Spirit, you must commune with the Divinity within you; and the word which you shall hear uttered within you, shall be superior to any written word whatever; it shall prove to be the living Word of God, which proceedeth forth from the Father, which was in the beginning with God, and which is God.35 35

[Ed. A reference to John 1:1.]

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If everyone have this Great Teacher, this Primal Source of truth in himself, there is no one dependent on another. No child of God is disinherited, and obliged to depend on an elder brother for support. No one then has the right to call another to an account for his belief. All are equals, and where all are equals no one has the supremacy. If this be true, then whoso learns of Christ, of the inward Christ, has authority to teach. He may utter his words, whatever they may be, for they are not his words but the Spirit’s. If the Spirit bid him bear his testimony against the traditions of the elders, the usages of the churches, the lessons of the doctors, so be it; let him do it and fear nothing. He must needs speak as the Spirit giveth him utterance. Let those whom he offends look to it that it turn not out that they are offended, not at him, but at the Spirit of God. He may indeed mistake the teachings of the Spirit, he may misinterpret his instructions; let him therefore be modest, humble, prayerful, that he may not hear amiss. And let all who are wedded to old usages, who are ever pointing to our pious ancestors as if truth must needs have died with them, know of a surety, that truth is an immortality, and over it time and change have no power. Its bloom is as fresh and fragrant today as it was on creation’s morn. The grave hath no power over it. Though crucified, buried in a new tomb, hewn from the rock and guarded with armed soldiery, it rises and ascends to its Father, leading captivity itself captive. Forbear, then, to war against it. What you have that is true will survive; what you have that is false, must pass away, weep and howl as ye will.

CHAPTER XIX: SOME PROGRESS Mr. Morton, after the meeting was out, at Mr. Howard’s invitation, accompanied us home and spent the remainder of the day and evening with us. I found him, as his sermon had led me to expect, free from the usual cant of his profession, but serious and even enthusiastic. He appeared to be a man conscious that heaven had raised him up for some important work, and he could not rest till he had accomplished it. He had himself been an unbeliever, but contrary to the usual practice of converted infidels, he was as liberal towards unbelievers and as unrestrained in his intercourse with them as though his own orthodoxy had never been questioned. I learned subsequently that his conduct in this respect had induced some persons more remarkable for their zeal than their insight into the motives of human conduct, to suspect that he had never been really converted, but was at heart an unbeliever still; but he was not a man to be disturbed by

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such ungenerous suspicions, by whomsoever they might be entertained. He kept on the even tenor of his way, acting always according to the promptings of his own heart, or his convictions of right, leaving the world to make its own comments. We conversed for some time on the various efforts which had been made at different periods by professed free thinkers and philosophers, to overthrow Christianity and their general ill success. This ill success I attempted to account for by the want of character in the free thinkers themselves, and by the general ignorance and stupidity of the multitude, who always had shown more alacrity in receiving the impositions of crafty priests and wily statesmen, than in listening to the instructions of philosophy and good sense. This I said somewhat against my conscience, chiefly for the purpose of drawing out Mr. Morton, and inducing him to give the opinions he himself might entertain. For, I had myself begun to suspect that religion had a deeper hold upon the human heart than unbelievers commonly imagine. “I think,” said Mr. Morton, “the real cause of failure on the part of unbelievers in uprooting religion lies much deeper than your remarks would imply. Religion is a fact in the natural history of man since we find it wherever we find man. It must then proceed from a law of his nature, or a fundamental want of his soul. If this be so, its destruction would imply not merely a change of his views, but a radical change of his nature, his conversion into a different sort of being.” “Man, then, you hold to be naturally religious?” “I hold that the ideas or conceptions, which he attempts to embody and realize, in his forms of religious faith and worship, are intuitions of reason; and without reason I suppose you would hardly contend man would be man.” “Surely not. But I am not certain that these conceptions are intuitions of reason. One of these conceptions is that of the existence of God. But I have no conception of such an existence; I cannot even conceive the possibility of such an existence.” “All in good time. We are concerning ourselves for the present with man, not with God. For the present at least, let us follow your favorite poet, ‘Know then thyself, presume not God to scan; The proper study of mankind is man.’36 Man, I take it, in his forms of religious faith and worship, seeks successfully or unsuccessfully, to realize his conceptions of the true, 36

[Ed. Alexander Pope, Essay on Man, Epistle 2, Line 2.]

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the beautiful, and the good. These conceptions are the fundamental elements of religion; and they are also under one aspect the fundamental elements of reason, without which reason would not be reason.” “Develop your meaning, if you please, at greater length.” “Without confidence, trust, hope, we could not live a moment, for we could perform no duty tending to our own preservation or that of society. But at the bottom of all confidence, trust, hope, there is always a conception of the true, and even an assumption that it is true that matters will or will not turn out thus and so. It is an unquestionable fact that we are compelled by the very constitution of our intelligence to regard things, among other relations, always under the relation of true or false. All our reasonings imply it, and all our actions proceed on the assumption of it. Now we could not conceive of things as true or false, had we not a general conception of truth, of truth in itself. Why do I call this particular proposition true, and that one false? Because this answers to my conception of truth, and that one does not. Ask the same question in relation to any number of propositions you please, and the same answer must be returned. This proves that my conception is broader than any particular truth, nay, that it embraces universal truth. Without this conception I could not perceive any difference between truth and falsehood; I should have no standard—true or false—by which to measure one or the other. This conception, conformity to which is to me the test of truth in all particular things, or propositions, is what I term the conception of the true in itself. “But we not only regard things under the relation of true or false, but we also regard them under the relation of beauty or its opposite. There must then be in the intelligence the conception of the Beautiful. If we have not this conception, I cannot understand whence come our emotions on beholding distant mountains with harmonious outlines, the tranquil lake sleeping sweetly beneath the moonbeams, the masculine form of man, the graceful form and delicate features of woman, an act of heroism, or of disinterested affection; or those emotions we are conscious of when we ramble over the wild and sequestered scenes of nature; survey piles of moss-covered ruins; linger on spots where man has contended manfully for his rights; enter the solemn temple where generations of our forefathers have worshiped, or stand among the dead and think of the nations which were but are not. Strike out from the soul the conception of the beautiful, poetry, painting, sculpture, all the fine arts with the miracles of which man has doubled his existence and embellished

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nature, would fall; most of the generous and touching sentiments of our nature would languish, and the universe would wear to our eyes one uniform, silent, drab-colored hue. “Suppose us deprived of the idea of the good, we could conceive no ground of preference. All events, all actions, all things, would be alike indifferent. We could never say this is better than that. Useful and injurious, just and unjust, right and wrong, would be unmeaning terms. Life could have no purpose, exertion no aim. Existence would be to us as non-existence. But this is not the case. We unquestionably do regard persons, events, actions and things under the relation of good or evil. We are ever asking, ‘Who will show us any good?’ But in conceiving of things as good, we necessarily conceive of something by virtue of which they are good, and the absence of which would leave them evil. We consequently have the conception of the Good in itself. “We have, then, these three ideas, the idea of the true, the idea of the beautiful, and that of the good. These ideas, since they have manifested themselves in the whole history of mankind, belong to the race; and as without them we could not be reasonable beings, we may term them constituent elements of the reason. But these ideas are not inactive. They are always struggling to realize themselves. We are ever asking ourselves, what is the true? What is the beautiful? What is the good? And exerting ourselves to possess them. We have a deep craving for them. And this craving, perhaps, in the last analysis, resolves itself into a craving for the infinite. We crave the infinite, and this craving of the infinite, is under one of its aspects, the religious sentiment.” “But do you think it true that all men have this craving for the infinite?” “Are they ever satisfied with the finite? The lamb crops its flowery food, lies down to rest, and ruminates in peace. Is it so with man? Gratify all his senses, lodge him in the marble palace, feast him on the rarest dainties of every clime, let music as voices from the invisible soothe him, flatter his ambition, let senates thrill with his eloquence, states and empires hang on his nod; power, wealth, fame, pleasure, fail to fill up the measure of his wants, and they leave him poor and needy, ever seeking what he has not, sighing for what lies still beyond him. Man is never satisfied. The chant of the poet is but one long monotonous wail of the soul weary of what it has, and looking to what it has not, and cannot reach. The artist can never transfer to his marble or his canvass the visions of beauty which haunt his soul, and make him burn with fruitless passion. The philosopher,

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poring over the volume open round and about or within him, till reason approaches the verge of insanity, is ever finding new riddles to read, new hieroglyphics to decipher; ever rages within him the ‘eternal thirst to know,’ to pierce the darkness, leap through the unknown, and grasp the infinite. This universal dissatisfaction of the soul with what it has, this perpetual craving for what lies beyond and above it, this eternal upshooting towards the boundless and the perfect, is what I call, under one of its aspects, the religious sentiment, and this sentiment is universal, eternal and indestructible.” “But admitting the existence of this sentiment, may we not regard it as the result of education? May we not ascribe its origin to the fact that in childhood and youth our heads are filled with words about the infinite, so that in all after life we are unable to satisfy ourselves with what is finite and earthly?” “I should think not. Education has no creative power; it can merely unfold and direct the powers which nature confers. It cannot make a poet of a horse, nor a mathematician of an ape. Education may undoubtedly do much towards determining the forms this sentiment shall wear, the positive institutions in which it may be embodied; but it cannot originate the tendency itself, unless we ascribe to it a power of completely altering, not merely the manifestations of a being, but also its permanent and indestructible nature. But even if education could produce the result in question, how comes it that man is the only race of beings known that so educates itself? Must it not result from something peculiar in the human race? If so, it virtually amounts to the same thing. “Besides, if you form a conception of the finite, you must also of the infinite, for the two are correlative, and contemporary in the reason. Educated or uneducated, we all have the idea of the infinite, and, what is more, we cannot get rid of it even if we would.” “Why not?” “Do you not conceive of yourself as finite?” “Certainly.” “And what is it that you say, when you say you are finite?” “That I am limited, bounded.” “Not infinite. You see, sir, that you presuppose the idea of the infinite, the moment you undertake to describe yourself as finite.” “But if all men have the conception of the infinite, and a craving for it, if all men have the conceptions of the true, the beautiful, and the good, which you say are the fundamental elements of religion, how happens it that all men have not a religion and in fact one and the same religion?”

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“Your question will be answered if you distinguish between the religious sentiment and the forms of faith and worship by which men seek to realize it. The sentiment is natural, invariable and indestructible; but the form is artificial, variable and transitory. We are religious beings by virtue of the fact that we have the conceptions of the true, the beautiful and the good; we have a religion only when we have embodied these conceptions in an institution, such as was Judaism, Greek and Roman polytheism, or, during the Middle Ages, Catholicism. When the prevailing religion, that is, the dominant religious institution of the epoch, fails to represent all that we can conceive of the true, the beautiful and the good, we break away from it, and are for the time being without religion. “Take your own case. You had all the conceptions which are the elements of religion, but as you did not find at the moment you began your inquiries, a religious institution which embodied them all to the satisfaction of your understanding, you doubted of all religion, and became an unbeliever. You are not yet able to combine these elements in a manner to satisfy yourself, and therefore, though I hold you to be religious, you have as yet no religion. “The reason why the prevailing institution does not satisfy you is either in the fact that you do not fully comprehend it, or that your ideal is above it. You may have seen the religion of your country from a low and unfavorable point of sight, and may have therefore inferred that it embodies less of truth, beauty and goodness than it actually does. In this case it is not that religion you have rejected, but something else to which you have given its name. “Admit, however, that you fully comprehend it, perceive it precisely as it is, and are really able to take in more of truth, beauty and goodness than it represents, still you have one or two inquiries to make before you can be justified in rejecting Christianity. Does what passes for Christianity fully represent the ideal of Jesus? Is it equal to what Jesus designed to institute? Is it a perfect realization of the conception of Jesus? If not, and I am sure that it is not, then you should seek to ascertain the conception of Jesus, the amount of truth, beauty and goodness he contemplated.” “And if that be below my ideal?” “Then you must turn prophet, and preach a new religion. You have no other alternative. If you will do this, and show me that you really comprehend more of truth, beauty and goodness, than Jesus did, I will become one of your disciples, and, if need be, follow you to the cross.”

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CHAPTER XX: GOD “But all this, though very well, fails to reach my case. Grant I have the conceptions of which you speak, still I have no conception of God, and without God, I can hardly be religious. I not only have no conception of God, but I cannot even form one.” “If you mean to say that you have no definite conception of God, that you cannot define the idea of God, you doubtless are correct. But if you mean that you can have no conception of God, I must beg leave to differ from you.” “But what conception can I form of God? What is God?” “He is spirit.” “But what is spirit?” “Spirit is something to be described chiefly by negatives; we can easily tell what it is not, but not so easily what it is. Nevertheless, I apprehend that you may attain to a proximate idea of what it is, if you attend to the manner in which we commonly use the word spirit. “The use of this word spirit is various. We say the spirit of the remark, and a spirited remark, spirit of nature, spirit of the universe, spirit of truth, spirit of man, a man of spirit, spirit of the affair, spirit of wine, &c. Now in all these and the like cases, I apprehend that we use the word to designate the reality and force of the thing or subject of which we speak. ‘The letter killeth, but the spirit giveth life’ [2 Cor 3:6]. The mere form or verbal enactment of the legislative authority, is not the law; the intent, the reality, the spirit of the enactment, that which is actually intended by the legislative authority, is the law, obedience to which gives life. “We say ‘the spirit of his assertion.’ In this case we make more or less clearly in our minds, a distinction between the form of the assertion, the literal words used, technically interpreted, and the general scope and meaning, the real intention. Here the force and reality of the assertion, the real thing asserted, is what we would designate by the phrase, ‘spirit of his assertion.’ “By a chemical process we extract a substance from corn, which, when diluted with water, we call ardent spirits. Here again is the same radical meaning of the word. We have extracted the force, the strength, the essence of the corn, and we term it spirit. Etymological research into the word, would confirm this result, but I waive it as unnecessary. “Now the human mind is, to say the least, so constituted, that it must believe that what is, is; that a thing cannot both exist and not exist at the same time. That which exists it must believe is something. In all objects which we see we recognize an existence. We do

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not believe that the universe is a mere apparition, a mere sense-shadow. Something is at the bottom of it. Something lies back of all appearances and shines out in all appearances. The phenomena around us may change their colors or their forms, they may now be putting forth the buds and blossoms of spring, or wearing the thick foliage of summer, or the rich and varied and golden hues of autumn, or stand in the chilling nakedness of winter; yet amid all these changes, we seem to ourselves to recognize something which changes not—a permanent, indestructible essence, the same yesterday, today and forever. This something is what we mean by reality. Amid all these appearances, these sense-shadows, these flitting apparitions, these perpetual changes, we believe there is something real, permanent, unchangeable. “Now this real, permanent, unchangeable something, we believe to be in everything which exists, and to be that which exists, and only that. It is always the thing. That which is not real, permanent, unchangeable, is to us no existence, no being, but a mere shadow, an unsubstantial form, a nothing. The reality, the permanent substance, the living force of that of which we speak, that which constitutes its essence, and makes it what it is, is then, if I mistake not, what we mean by its spirit. The spirit of a man, is the real, the permanent, the substantial man, contradistinguished from the form, the shadow, or changing apparition which environs him. Take what is real, substantial, unchangeable in man, that which constitutes him man wherever he is, and keeps him man in spite of all the modifications of disposition or character to which he may be subjected, in time or space, and you have the spirit of man; that is, you have the reality, the ground, the substance of the being called man, so far forth as he contains them in himself. “Extend your thoughts now from man to the universe. Penetrate beyond and beneath all forms and shadows, all that is changeable and transitory, that is not, but appears; seize what is real, substantial, what constitutes the ground and reality of all existences, that which remains unchanged amidst all changes, which Warms in the sun, refreshes in the breeze, Glows in the stars, and blossoms in the trees; Lives through all life, extends through all extent, Spreads undivided, operates unspent;37

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[Ed. Alexander Pope, Essay on Man, Epistle 1, Lines 271-74.]

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and you have what may be termed the spirit of the universe, the life, the essence, the ground, the living force of all that is. “It follows from this that the spiritual is always the real, the substantial, in opposition to those who regard it as chimerical, as merely imaginary. Hence also that which we regard as the real, the substantial, is always the invisible. That which is seen, which we examine with our senses, is never to us, did we but know it, the thing itself. It is mere appearance, shadow, pointing to a reality back of it, a substance which sends it forth, but which it is not. We always call that which is permanent, immutable, in the thing—not its apparition— the thing itself, and this always transcends the senses, is transcendental. Spirit is in fact the only reality of which we ever do or ever can form any conception. Men are materialists only because they misinterpret or misname their own beliefs. “Now, God is Spirit. He is then the life, the being, the force, the substance of whatever is. In light he is the light, in life he is the life; in soul he is the soul, in reason he is the reason, in truth he is the truth, in cause he is causality, in beauty he is the beautiful; in goodness he is the good—God.38 Wherever we attain to that which is real, which absolutely exists, which possesses a real, living force, we attain to God. In all these forms, in all these changing objects, whether in the natural world or the moral, which are forever passing and repassing before our eyes, is there not always one thing which we seek? Amidst all these mutations which oppress and sadden our hearts, and make us at times exclaim, This world is all a fleeting show,39 do we not seek the permanent, and that which changes not? In these forms of faith which distract us, these creeds, dogmas, theories of the moral and intellectual world, so full of vanity, ever varying and imparting life never, seek we not something which is not vain, varying, distracting, which is not dead, nor subject to death, but living and life-giving? Wearied and worn with the endless windings of our pilgrimage, finding our journey ever beginning and never ending, that toil, toil, eternal task-work is our lot, sigh we not for deliverance, to be freed from our labors, and to find repose? Weary and heavy laden we would throw off our burdens and be at rest. The soul 38 I am not sure but I am indebted to an extract which I have somewhere met with from a Hindoo writing for the thought here expressed, as well as in part for the language, but I have no leisure at present to make the necessary reference. 39 [Ed. From the Irish poet Thomas Moore’s (1779-1852) Sacred Songs (1816), “This World is All a Fleeting Show.” See The Poetical Works of Thomas Moore (New York: Sheldon and Co., 1859), 299.]

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cries out for an ineffable repose. Now, what we seek in all this, is God. He is always the one thing we are seeking after. Amidst the variable and the transitory he is the immutable and the permanent. Amidst clashing and distracting forms of faith, he is the truth; to the soul aspiring to be wise and good, he is wisdom and goodness; to the weary and heavy laden he is rest, repose. In all things we seek a reality, and all reality in the last analysis is God. “God is to us the invisible substance, the invisible reality of all that arrests our senses, excites our minds or touches our hearts; the invisible universe of which this outward, visible universe is the shadow, the apparition, or manifestation. Its life, being, cause, substance, reality are in Him, in whom we, as a part of it, ‘live and move and have our being’ [Acts 17:28]. “To the question, then, what is God? the best answer I can give, is, that he is the unseen, unchangeable, and permanent reality of this mighty apparition which men call nature, or the universe. You may say that this answer is vague and unsatisfactory, that it defines nothing. Be it so. I began by saying God cannot be defined. He is indefinable, because he is infinite, and infinite is that which cannot be defined. Nevertheless this answer I think, with the remarks I have made, will help you, not to comprehend the incomprehensible, but to apprehend it.”

CHAPTER XXI: THE DEMONSTRATION “I think I catch some glimmering of what you mean; but allowing that your answer to the question, what is God, is satisfactory, still I wish it demonstrated that there is a God.” “I can hardly be expected to give you a complete demonstration in the course of a single conversation. What I have already said, would be satisfactory to my own mind; but if it is not to yours, we will look at the problem a little closer. I suppose, if I make it as certain that there is a God, as you are that you exist, it will answer your purpose?” “Yes. I shall be satisfied with that degree of certainty.” “I have already, I believe, established the fact that we have the conceptions of the true, the beautiful, and the good, and that we should cease to be men if we had them not; or in other words, that divested of these conceptions, reason would not be reason.” “That point I consider settled.” “If we are compelled by the very constitution of our being to entertain the idea of the true, for instance, we must believe that something is true. If I believe something is true, I must believe in the true

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in itself, for it is only by means of the conception of the true in itself, that I am able to conceive of any particular truth. Besides, I have shown that the conception of the true, as a conception of the reason, is a conception of the true in itself. Now the true in itself is necessarily, universally and eternally true. For, if we could conceive any condition under which it would not be true, then its truth would depend on conditions, and the true in itself, would be proved to be not the true in itself. “Now, when we say a thing is true, we say that it is, and is just what it purports to be. That which has no existence can have no truth. The truth of a matter cannot exceed its existence. To say a thing exists is to say that it is something, a reality, a substance. When therefore we say something is true, we say something exists, that there is a substance.” “But I do not see that you are making much progress.” “Be patient. We have now found that inasmuch as we have the conception of the true, we have also the conception of substance. But we have the conception of the true in itself, that is, of the universally and eternally and unconditionally true. Then, if I am right in identifying the true with substance, in saying that the true must, so far forth as it is true, exist, be a reality, then we must admit the existence of substance in itself; that is, a substance which requires no conditions out of itself in order to be a substance, and which therefore is always and everywhere a substance, that is, absolute substance.” “Do you mean by substance matter?” “I might ask you what you mean by matter, but let that pass. I mean by substance that which really exists, which is a reality. Whether it be matter or spirit is not now the point of inquiry. Some have supposed that what we term matter and spirit are neither of them substances, but two modes by which absolute substance manifests itself. But this by the way. We have now found by analyzing the conception of the reason, the conception of absolute substance. That is, a substance which is substance in itself, containing in itself the grounds of its own existence. It is therefore uncreated and independent. If it were created it would be a substance only under certain relations, and the idea of absolute substance would have to be carried further back and predicated of the creator. The very conception of absolute substance precludes all necessity of any conditions of its existence, all idea of its depending on aught beside itself to be, or to be what it is. “This absolute substance must also be one, and can be but one. Two absolutes were as much an absurdity, as two infinities, or two almighties. It is not a mere aggregate or totality, made up of parts. If

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we suppose it made up of parts, we must suppose each of the parts an absolute substance, and then a part would be equal to the whole; or we must suppose none of the parts are absolute, and then it would be as impossible to obtain the absolute from their union, or aggregation, as it would be the infinite from the union of an indefinite number of units. The absolute then can exist only in unity, and as the substance is absolute substance, it of course must be one and one only. “This substance is also a cause. There can be no cause without a substance, unless nothing be capable of producing something. That every cause is a substance, that is to say, a real existence, nobody denies; that every substance, or real existence, of which we conceive, is also a cause, may not perhaps at first sight be quite so evident; but I think I can make it out. “We have in our minds unquestionably the idea of cause. By cause we do not understand merely invariable antecedence, as a certain philosopher pretends,40 but an active, productive force. We conceive of various causes, but of all causes as either relative or absolute, that is, as causes within certain limits and under certain conditions, or as a cause without limits, without conditions, always and everywhere a cause. The relative implies the absolute. The absolute can be found only in the absolute. The absolute cause then must be identified with absolute substance. The absolute substance is then absolute cause. “Moreover, I know substance only under the relation of cause. My real conception of all existences is of them as so many causes. I know myself only as a cause. I become acquainted with myself, I may say attain to the conception of my personal existence, only by surprising myself in the act of doing or causing something. I will to raise my arm; I attend to what is said to me, to the impressions made on my organs of sense. Now in every act of volition, of willing, of attention, there is an actor, a cause, and this cause is precisely what I mean when I say I, myself. I will, I attend. I know myself then as a power capable of producing effects, that is, as a cause. “I know the external world only as something which produces effects on me, or on itself. Its various objects produce impressions on 40 [Ed. Reference is to David Hume (1711-76), a Scottish philosopher who developed the idea that the terms “cause” and “effect” do not stand for any features, observed or inferred, in the objects to which they are applied (as some empiricists held). We only observe antecedents and consequences of things, not causality itself.]

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my organs of sense, and I see them producing certain effects on one another, and I can ascertain their existence no further than I can find them producing effects; consequently I know them only as causes. But they are not absolute causes. I see them limit one another, and they are also limited up to a certain extent by my causality. Nor am I an absolute cause. I cannot do whatever I will. My power is bounded on every side, and I am not more certain of my causality itself than I am of my weakness. “But if both nature and myself are mere limited causes, causes only within certain limits, and under certain conditions, the absolute cause, which our reason demands, must be back of both nature and us, a substance more ultimate than either. It can be found only in the absolute substance, which is not only absolute substance, but absolute cause. I thus obtain the conclusion, not only that absolute substance is absolute cause, but that it is something above and independent of nature and of myself; therefore that neither nature nor myself is the absolute cause. “I have now established the existence of one, absolute, original, independent substance, and which is also absolute cause. Now our radical idea of God is that of a cause, creator. Take away from God the idea of cause, and he would not be God. In establishing then the existence of a universal and absolute cause, one, and independent, have I not established the existence of God?” “Not to my satisfaction. Before you have finished your work, you must establish the fact that this absolute cause is not only a cause, but also intelligent, and personal. For as yet I do not see that you have advanced beyond pantheism.” “There is nothing pantheistic in the views I have thus far advanced. Pantheism is of two sorts: one, a low sort of pantheism, identifies God with nature; this is properly atheism: the other sinks nature in God, and recognizes no existence but that of God; this was the pantheism of the famous Spinoza,41 which some people have been foolish enough to call atheism. Spinoza was so absorbed in the idea of God that he could see nothing else. But let this pass. The personality of this absolute cause, by which I suppose is meant the fact that it is not a mere fatal cause, but a free intentional cause, I think, follows as a necessary induction from its independence. It is an absolute cause; nothing lies back of it compelling it to act. Its motive to activ41 [Ed. Baruch or Benedict Spinoza (1632-77) was a Jewish Dutch philosopher who interpreted and revised Descartes’ philosophy. Because he identified God and nature he has frequently been accused of pantheism or atheism.]

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ity must be drawn from itself, and I cannot conceive a cause acting freely, from its own suggestions, unless it wills to act. Its independence and unity, would therefore to my mind imply its personality in the only sense in which personality can be predicated of God. But I do not insist on this. “The intelligence of God, for I shall henceforth speak of the absolute cause, under this title, is sometimes deduced from the fact that intelligence appears in the effect; but on this argument I do not rely. I get at his intelligence by another process. “The nature, the characteristic of reason is intelligence. The reason not only has the power to know, but actually knows. It is for us the principle of intelligence. All that we know at all we know by virtue of the reason. It is by its light that I perceive my own existence, that I am conscious of what passes within me, that I take cognizance of my thoughts, my sensations, passions, emotions, affections. On its authority I affirm that I exist, that you exist, that the external world exists. All the light I have comes from it; and its authority always suffices me. “This is not all. You and I both believe the reason to be authoritative. You try to make me believe that reason determines so and so, and you feel that if you succeed in making me see the point as you do I must admit it. You would think me a madman if I denied the relations of numbers, or refused to admit plain, legitimate, logical deductions from acknowledged premises. All mankind do the same. What each believes to be reasonable, he believes all ought to accept. “Nobody ever asks for any higher authority than the reason. What we call demonstration is only stripping a subject of its envelopes, and showing it to the reason as it is. If when seen in its nakedness the reason approves it, we say it is demonstrated to be true; if the reason disapproves it, we say it is demonstrated to be false.” “It is hardly necessary to be thus particular in establishing the authority of reason with me, for I have never questioned it. Religious people are those who deny the authority of reason.” “Nevertheless, sir, I am about to make an application of the reason from which, if you are not previously prepared, you will recoil. But assuming, for the present, the authority of the reason, I shall insist on your yielding to every legitimate application of it. Now, we speak of reason as individual, as though it were yours or mine; but nevertheless, I believe it declares that it is not individual. Were it individual it were personal, and we could control its conceptions. But all its conceptions have in fact a character of necessity. We cannot control them. We cannot make it affirm what we will. It declares

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two and two are four, and we have no power of will to make it declare otherwise. “Nay, more, we always look upon the conceptions of the reason as possessing authority beyond the sphere of individual consciousness. They all bear the character of universality and absoluteness. They transcend time and space. We regard justice, for instance, as something eternal and immutable. What is just now we believe was always just and always will be just. Its character of justice is independent of time and place, and of the individuals who entertain the idea of justice. So of truth, as I have already shown. The conceptions of the reason therefore are not relative, dependent and temporary, but independent, eternal, and absolute. If the reason reveals its conceptions as absolute, it then reveals itself as absolute. On the same authority then that I affirm my existence, I affirm the absoluteness of the reason. “Now, the reason is something or it is nothing. If it were nothing, a non-entity, could it reveal itself, impose its laws upon my understanding, and speak to me a clear and independent voice in spite of my will? I have only the reason by which to determine the fact that I entertain the ideas of the true, the beautiful, and the good, and I have its authority equally express, that it is a reality, and the highest reality I am acquainted with. If then it be an absolute reality, as it declares itself to be, then, it must be identical with the absolute substance, for I have shown that there cannot be two absolutes. Then the absolute substance is not only absolute cause, but absolute reason. The essence of reason is intelligence; absolute reason must be absolute intelligence, intelligence in itself. God then is not a mere blind cause, but an intelligent cause, intelligence in itself.” “But do you mean to assert that my intelligence is absolute, that my reason is God?” “No, sir. I mean to assert no such thing. I mean merely to assert that the reason which makes its appearance in us, and whose scattered rays constitute our intelligence, is itself above us, and independent of us. When it appears in us it is of course subjected to human conditions, which are frailty and error. But at the same time, it reveals itself as stretching beyond us, and assures us that in that world into which it permits us to look as through a glass darkly, it possesses a character of absolute intelligence. Who is there to whom reason does not reveal itself as containing more light than he has beheld, more truth than he has comprehended? It is not reason subjected to the infirmities of the flesh, but reason taken absolutely, reason in its fulness, in its Godhead, of which I speak. I speak of it in its absolute-

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ness because it assures me that it is absolute, and if I may not trust it when it gives me this assurance, I know not what right I have to rely on it when it assures me of my own existence. “Reason once established in its absoluteness, the intelligence of God is demonstrated. From his intelligence and independence, I think the induction of his personality follows as a matter of course. His freedom is asserted in his independence. He is independent and absolute. No power out of himself then can force him to act. He cannot be subjected to any external necessity. All the necessity he can be under of acting must be in himself. He is then perfectly free. He need not act unless he please; and he may act as he pleases. Conceive a being thus free, and at the same time absolute intelligence, and tell me if it be possible for him to act without self-consciousness, without knowing that he acts and wherefore he acts? Must he not from the very nature of the case act from volition because he wills to act? Now, a being that is self-conscious, who knows what he does, and acts from volition, it strikes me, must possess personality in the highest degree. I am a person no further than I am a free intentional causality. But God is an infinitely free intentional causality. Therefore he must be infinitely more of a person than I am.” “But you have as yet clothed your God with no moral attributes.” “All in good time. But beware how you undertake to cut the Divinity up into attributes. He is ONE. He is, as we have thus found him, absolute substance, an infinite, free, intelligent, intentional causality. Would you determine whether he is just or not, you must descend into the reason, and inquire whether you have the absolute idea of justice. You will find this idea, as we have already found the absolute idea of goodness. The absolute can reside only in the absolute. God then is not only absolute substance, an independent, free, intelligent causality, but he is also just and good. You must go through with all the absolute ideas of the reason, and when you have exhausted these you have determined the number and character of the attributes of the Deity.” “I am not certain that I have followed you through all the steps of your analysis and induction, but if I have, and rightly comprehended you, you have indicated a process by which the existence of God may be as satisfactorily demonstrated as any article of human belief. But you must not expect me to acquiesce at once. I must have time to reflect and to go over the subject in my own mind. I can hardly persuade myself as yet that you have not committed some mistake for your conclusion seems too evident not to be doubtful.”

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“Take all the time you please. You say rightly I have indicated a process. I have only indicated it. To give a complete demonstration would require more time than I have at my command, and more patience than I fear you have to bestow upon so dry, though so important, a subject.” “But, Mr. Morton, though you have obtained a God, I do not see that he has done anything. How do you demonstrate the fact that he creates?”

CHAPTER XXII: CREATION “You will bear in mind that we have found God as a cause, not a potential cause, occasionally a cause, accidentally a cause, but absolute cause, cause in itself, always a cause, and everywhere a cause. Now a cause that causes nothing is no cause at all. If then God be a cause, he must cause something, that is, create. Creation then is necessary.” “Do you mean to say that God lies under a necessity of creating?” “God lies under nothing, for he is over all, and independent of all. The necessity of which I speak is not a foreign necessity, but a necessity of his own nature. What I mean is he cannot be what he is without creating. It would be a contradiction in terms to call him a cause, and to say that he causes nothing.” “But out of what does God create the world? Out of nothing, as our old catechisms have it?” “Not out of nothing certainly, but out of himself, out of his own fulness. You may form an idea of creation by noting what passes in the bosom of your own consciousness. I will to raise my arm. My arm may be palsied, or a stronger than mine may hold it down, so that I cannot raise it. Nevertheless I have created something; to wit, the will or intention to raise it. In like manner as I by an effort of my will or an act of my causality, create a will or intention, does God create the world. The world is God’s will or intention, existing in the bosom of his consciousness, as my will or intention exists in the bosom of mine. “Now, independent of me, my will or intention has no existence. It exists, is a reality no further than I enter into it; and it ceases to exist, vanishes into nothing the moment I relax the causative effort which gave it birth. So of the world. Independent of God it has no existence. All the life and reality it has are of God. It exists no further than he enters into it, and it ceases to exist, becomes a nonentity the moment he withdraws or relaxes the creative effort which calls it into being.

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“This, if I mistake not, strikingly illustrates the dependence of the universe, of all worlds and beings on God. They exist but by his will. He willed, and they were; commanded, and they stood fast. He has but to will and they are not; to command, and the heavens roll together as a scroll, or disappear as the morning mist before the rising sun. This is easily seen to be true because he is their life, their being; in him, says an apostle, ‘we live and move and have our being’ [Acts 17:28]. “The question is sometimes asked, where is the universe? Where is your resolution, intention? In the bosom of your consciousness. So the universe, being God’s will or intention, exists in the consciousness of the Deity. The bosom of the infinite consciousness is its place, its residence, its home. God then is all round and within it, as you are all round, and within your intention. Here is the omnipresence of the Deity. You cannot go where God is not, unless you cease to exist. Not because God fills all space, as we sometimes say, thus giving him as it were extension, but because he embosoms all space, as we embosom our thoughts in our own consciousness. “This view of creation, also, shows us the value of the universe, and teaches us to respect it. It is God’s will, God’s intention, and is divine, so far forth as it really exists, and therefore is holy, and should be reverenced. Get at a man’s intentions and you get at his real character. A man’s intentions are the revelations of himself; they show you what the man is. The universe is the revelation of the Deity. So far as we read and understand it, do we read and understand God. When I am penetrating into the heavens and tracing the revolutions of the stars, I am learning the will of God; when I penetrate the earth and explore its strata, study the minuter particles of matter and their various combinations, I am mastering the science of theology; when I listen to the music of the morning songsters, I am listening to the voice of God; and it is his beauty I see when my eye runs over the varied landscape or ‘the flower enameled mead.’42 “You see here the sacred character which attaches to all science, shadowed forth through all antiquity, by the right to cultivate it being claimed for the priests alone. But every man should be a priest; and the man of science, who does not perceive that he is also a priest, but half understands his calling. In ascertaining these laws of nature, as you call them, you are learning the ways of God. Put off your 42 [Ed. From William Godwin’s (1756-1836) Imogen: A Pastoral Romance. From the Ancient British (1784), Book 1, The Character of the Shepherdess and Her Lover.]

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shoes then when you enter the temple of science, for you enter the sanctuary of the Most High. “But man is a still fuller manifestation of the Deity. He is superior to all outward nature. Sun and stars pale before a human soul. The powers of nature, whirlwinds, tornados, cataracts, lightnings, earthquakes, are weak before the power of thought, and lose all their terrific grandeur in presence of the struggles of passion. Man with a silken thread turns aside the lightning and chains up the harmless bolt. Into man enters more of the fulness of the Divinity, for in his own likeness God made man. The study of man then is still more the study of the Divinity, and the science of man becomes a still nearer approach to the science of God. “This is not all. Viewed in this light what new worth and sacredness attaches to this creature man, on whom kings, priests and nobles have for so many ages trampled with sacrilegious feet. Whoso wrongs a man defaces the image of God, desecrates a temple of the living God, and is guilty not merely of a crime but of a sin. Indeed, all crimes become sins, all offences against man, offences against God. Hear this, ye wrong-doers, and know that it is not from your feeble brother only, that ye have to look for vengeance. Hear this, ye wronged and down-trodden; and know that God is wronged in that ye are wronged, and his omnipotent arm shall redress you, and punish your oppressors. Man is precious in the sight of God, and God will vindicate him.” “All this is very fine, but it strikes me that you identify the Deity with his works. You indeed call him a cause, but he causes or creates, if I understand you, only by putting himself forth. Independent of him, his works have no reality. He is their life, being, substance. Is not this pantheism?” “Not at all. God is indeed the life, being, substance of all his works, yet is he independent of his works. I am in my intention, and my intention is nothing any further than I enter into it; but nevertheless my intention is not me; I have the complete control over it. It does not exhaust me. It leaves me with all my creative energy, free to create anew as I please. So of God. Creation does not exhaust him. His works are not necessary to his being, they make up no part of his life. He retains all his creative energy, and may put it forth anew as seems to him good. Grant he stands in the closest relation to his works; he stands to them in the relation of a cause to an effect, not in the relation of identity, as pantheism supposes.” “But waiving the charge of pantheism, it would seem from what you have said that creation must be as old as the Creator. What then will you do with the Mosaic cosmogony, which supposes creation

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took place about six thousand years ago?” “I leave the Mosaic cosmogony where I find it. As to the inference that creation must be as old as the Creator, I would remark, that a being cannot be a creator till he creates, and as God was always a creator, always then must there have been a creation; but it does not follow from this that creation must have always assumed its present form, much less that this globe in its present state must have existed from all eternity. It may have been, for aught we know, subjected to a thousand revolutions and transformations, and the date of its habitation by man, may indeed have been no longer ago than Hebrew chronology asserts. “But much of this difficulty about the date of creation arises from supposing that creation must have taken place in time. But the creations of God are not in time but in eternity. Time begins with creation, and belongs to created nature. With God there is no time, as there is no space. He transcends time and space. He inhabiteth eternity, and is both time and space. When we speak of beginning in relation to the origin of the universe, we should refer to the source whence it comes, not to the time when it came. Its beginning is not in time but in God, and is now as much as it ever was. “You should think of the universe as something which is, not as something which was. God did not, strictly speaking, make the world, finish it, and then leave it. He makes it, he constitutes it now. Regard him therefore not, if I may borrow the language of Spinoza, as its ‘temporary and transient cause, but as its permanent and indwelling cause;’43 that is, not as a cause which effects, and then passes off from his works, to remain henceforth in idleness, or to create new worlds; but as a cause which remains in his works, ever producing them, and constituting them by being present in them, their life, being and substance. Take this view, and you will never trouble yourself with the question whether the world was created, six thousand, or six million of years ago.”

CHAPTER XXIII: RESULTS This conversation with Mr. Morton threw some light on the great problems with which I had labored, and convinced me that the philosophy I had hitherto cherished was superficial and far from giving a complete and satisfactory account of the actual facts of human nature. I had done great injustice to man in reducing him to five senses 43 [Ed. Baruch Spinoza, The Ethics [Ethica Ordine Geometrico Demonstrata] (n.p.: Joseph Simon, 1981), Part 1, Prop. 18, p. 45. “God, therefore, is the indwelling and not the transient cause of all things.”]

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and the operations of the understanding. There was more in him than I had seen. There were facts of his nature which could be traced to no empirical origin, transcendental facts, inherent in the reason itself, and which it would by no means answer to leave out of the account. Mr. Morton had assumed man to be naturally religious. Was he not right in this? How else could I account for the existence of religion as a fact of human history? Religion I find everywhere in history. No nation, tribe or horde, however enlightened, ignorant or savage, has as yet been discovered without some form of religious worship. Go where you will, you find the priest and the altar, man seeking to keep open some kind of communication with superior powers. Nor is this all. Religion is not a mere unproductive fact in our history. Of all sentiments, the religious sentiment appears to be the strongest and to exert the widest and most absolute dominion over the human race. At its bidding hostile armies lay down their arms, and meet and embrace as brothers; at its voice kings and tyrants tremble on their thrones; the mother offers up her son in sacrifice, and the virgin her chastity. Singular that a mere accidental fact, having no root in human nature, should be thus powerful, and so sway the passions, interests and affections of mankind! No man is entirely free from the workings of this sentiment. Even I myself, in my doubts and unbelief, felt the need of holding intercourse with powers above me; and there were times when I could almost kneel down and pray. A poor mother saw her child fall into the river: she rushed in after it, and did all she could to rescue it, but in vain. She saw she could do no more, and that the child must drown. In an agony of despair, she stretched out her hands and exclaimed, “O thou great Unknown, save my child!” Did she not utter the voice of nature? In fact does there not always go with us a sense of the presence of an invisible being to whom we stand in certain undefined relations? When we fancy that we are alone, when solemn silence reigns around us, and all is still, do we not fear and tremble, and start we know not at what? Does it not seem to us that we are not alone, but standing as it were before a dread presence? Then also there is the sense of insufficiency. I am oppressed with a sense of my insufficiency for myself. I start in life with high hopes and generous aims. I resolve to lead a life of strict virtue; but some how or other I am perpetually failing. I have yielded to temptation, and am expelled from the garden of innocence. For a time I weep, but soon I recover myself, resolve to try again; and again I fail. I see an excellence I cannot reach, approve a good, from which, though I struggle to gain it, I am ever departing. What shall I do? I feel the

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need of some succoring being to extend me an arm that though I stumble I may not fall utterly. All of our race, who have attained to any experience, I apprehend, have felt this painful sense of insufficiency, that “it is not in man that walketh to direct his steps” [Jer 10:23]. Hence the universal demand for spiritual aid, for a communication with the powers above, that we may obtain assistance to wash out our sins, and to enable us to maintain our integrity for the future. This feeling, I apprehend, lies at the bottom of all worship, and has given rise to all the rites and ceremonies of religion. From the consciousness of sin, the need of atoning for it, and the need of divine aid in maintaining a holy life, have arisen the various sacrifices of man, animals, fruits and flowers, which make up so great a part of all the religions of antiquity. Men did not submit to them because priests enjoined them; but because there was a deep want of the soul which demanded them. The form which they assumed was, perhaps, not always the best, but all defects of this kind belonged to the general defective culture of the epoch in question. Have not unbelievers ascribed too much to the craft of priests and statesmen? Priests have no doubt made of religion a trade, but they have been able to do this only because religion has had a strong hold on the consciences, or the affections of the people. Nor could they have originated religion. A priest is an officer of religion, and therefore must have been posterior to religion. Religion must have existed before it could have had ministers. Statesmen have no doubt found at times in religion a support for despotism, but only by availing themselves of its power over the people. Had not religion already swayed the people, it could have furnished no aid to the despot. We consider art as natural to man, or springing from a natural want, because we find that man is everywhere an artist. The rude Indian polishes his bow, and paints the prow of his birchen canoe; the Indian maiden decorates her hair with feathers and shells, and the Indian mother binds the wampum around the neck of her child, bearing witness to the same indestructible instinct which shall immortalize a Phidias or a Praxiteles a Michael Angelo or a Raphael.44 44 [Ed. Phidias (c. 500-432 B.C.) was a Greek sculptor and architect who designed the Parthenon. Praxiteles was also a Greek sculptor of the fourth century B.C. Michelangelo di Lodovico Buonarroti Simoni (1475-1564) was an Italian Renaissance sculptor, painter, architect, and poet who created so many famous pieces of art that he had an unparalleled influence on the development of Western art. Raphael Sanzio (1483-1520) was likewise a master painter and architect of the Italian High Renaissance known especially for his Madonnas and his many famous paintings in Florence and Rome.]

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From the fact that man wars with man, constructs weapons and delights in battle, we infer that the fighting propensity is natural to him. Why not, then, from the fact that he everywhere venerates and adores, erects the altar and inducts the priest, infer that the religious sentiment is natural to him, that he is naturally religious? But if religion be natural to man, it is useless to war against it. He is religious because he is man. So long then as he remains man he will have some kind of religious worship. Can the infidel change his nature? Can man be converted into a different order of being? If not, then let the infidel cease his warfare. He professes to respect nature, let him then respect it in man, and not less when it prompts him to adore, than when it prompts him to build himself a cabin, clothe his body, or seek truth and goodness. Religion must be as indestructible as man’s nature, and let us therefore cease to waste our time in trying to get rid of it. But man not only seeks to adore; he also seeks to ascertain the true object of adoration. He inquires if there be really any object worthy of adoration, and if so, what and where? This question, Mr. Morton seemed to me to have answered. The reason demands an absolute cause, and this cause we are not, and the external world is not. Then it must be above both us and nature, the cause of their causality and ours. I look into the reason. I find that it contains the ideas of the finite and the infinite. This idea of the infinite is not a secondary idea. I cannot derive it from any other idea. My ordinary experience makes me acquainted only with finite things. But from no imaginable number of finites can I deduce the infinite. I can draw from a thing only what is in it; and as the idea of the finite does not contain the infinite, I cannot deduce the infinite from it. Logically also the idea of the infinite must precede that of the finite. I cannot perceive a thing, as finite, unless I have at the same time the conception of the infinite from which to distinguish it. As my first experience is of finite things, the conception of the infinite must precede experience, and must therefore be a transcendental idea. That is, a conception of the pure reason, of the reason prior to all experience. If then I may trust the reason, there must be somewhere the infinite. But I can predicate infinity neither of myself nor of nature. Then back of and above both nature and myself, there must be an infinite reality—God. The conception of unity, of perfection, would lead me to the same result. But may I trust the reason? If not, I am in a sad condition. I have nothing but the reason with which to show even that reason ought not to be trusted. Why shall I trust it when it declares it is not worthy

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of trust, rather than when it reveals to me my own existence, nature, and God? If it be not worthy of trust, then I have no ground for believing it when it declares it to be untrustworthy; but if it be worthy of trust at all, as it is one in all its degrees, why may I not trust it in its highest revelations, as well as in its lowest? But all this is unnecessary. I am not free in this matter. Reason addresses me always in an imperative voice, and its conceptions command my assent. I cannot discredit them if I would. Moreover, what have I always contended for? I have always extolled reason and condemned religious people for depressing it. I have condemned them because I have supposed reason to be against them. I have then always admitted the authority of reason. I will do it now. If I do I see not how I can escape from Mr. Morton’s conclusions. But do I wish to escape from these conclusions? Not at all.

CHAPTER XXIV: SUPERNATURALISM “I have been thinking over,” said I to Mr. Morton, on meeting him a few days after the conversation I have recorded, “your reasoning in proof of the existence of a God; I have weighed it as carefully as I could, and I confess I am unable for the present to get away from it. But I do not see that you have made any use of inspiration. Your system seems to me only a system of rationalism, perhaps I should say, deism.” “We will not dispute about words,” he replied. Nevertheless, I hold myself to be a supernaturalist as well as a rationalist, and I seem to myself to have a place for inspiration.” “What do you understand by inspiration, and what do you consider to be its office?” “Your question is a short one, but it will require a long answer. Let me begin by saying that men are prejudiced against inspiration, chiefly because they look upon it as an isolated fact, a sort of anomaly in our experience, without any analogy with the general and ordinary operations of the human mind. But this I hold to be incorrect. Inspiration is an unquestionable fact of human experience, and, if I am not much mistaken, is as explicable as any other fact. “A favorite author with unbelievers, Thomas Paine, somewhere says in his Age of Reason, Whoever is in the habit of looking into himself, must have observed that he has two classes of thoughts.45 We 45 [Ed. The Age of Reason (1794), Part 1, in The Complete Writings of Thomas Paine, ed. Philip S. Foner (New York: The Citadel Press, 1945), 497.]

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have one class of thoughts which spring up in our minds whenever we will to think of any particular subject; another class, which are involuntary, and come of their own accord. I am accustomed, he says, to treat these uninvited visitors with great respect; for I have learned that from them we obtain the most valuable part of our knowledge. I quote from memory and doubtless do not give his exact words, but I give his thought. Now, if I mistake not, here is a recognition of certain facts which will aid us to a right conception of inspiration. “You will please to call to mind what I have heretofore said of the reason. It is our only source of light. But reason I have demonstrated to be absolute, divine. It is then superhuman, supernatural. Now, the reason has, as Paine implies in the passage quoted, not only a voluntary activity, but a spontaneous activity. It not only acts when we by our wills call it into action, as when we will to think upon any particular subject; but it enters into activity of its own accord. That we all have thoughts and ideas which spring up in our minds without any effort of volition on our part, is what I think we must all have at times more or less distinctly noted. “When you first doubted, first began to inquire, you had already, in your mind, the ideas you questioned. You had the belief in your own existence, in the existence of nature, and in that of God. You cannot even remember when you had not this belief. This belief was not of your own procuring . You had no agency in placing the ideas it implies in your mind. You may observe also that you began your intellectual life, not by denying, but by affirming. By what power did you affirm your own existence, that of nature and that of God? Surely not by reflection. For when you began to reflect, this primitive affirmation was the subject-matter of your reflection. “What I have affirmed of you I may affirm of the race. The race does not begin by reflecting, denying, and reasoning itself into conviction. It must believe something before it can deny, have ideas before it can reflect on them. Go back to the infancy of the race, and what do you discover? Doubt, reflection, philosophy? Not at all. The language of the primitive ages is affirmative: ‘In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth’ [Gen 1:1]; ‘God said let there be light, and there was light’ [Gen 1:3]. You are struck with the strength of faith you find, the undoubting confidence with which the mass affirm what you and I should hesitate long before assenting to. “From these and other facts with which I will not trouble you now, I infer that the human mind begins by affirmation, by faith, not by doubt. Now, the reflective reason or reason put into activity by our volitions, always begins by doubt, and proceeds by reflection,

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by reasoning. Its instruments are observation and logic. But in the infancy of the race, in the early chronicles of mankind, we find no employment of these instruments. Men see but they do not observe, believe but do not reason. Logic is not properly constituted till we have an Aristotle. “Now this primitive affirmation by the race, and even by the individual, as it could not have been the result of reflection, must have been by virtue of the spontaneous activity of the intelligence, the reason acting by its own energy. Now the truths we affirm on the authority of the spontaneous activity of the reason, we do not and cannot ascribe to ourselves. We are conscious that in the revelation of these truths we have taken no part. We have done nothing. We do not seem to ourselves to have any agency in the matter. We do not affirm what we affirm on our own authority. We therefore ascribe it to God, and call it inspiration, revelation. This primitive affirmation, prior to reflection, to all observation and reasoning, of the great principles of human faith, principles which lie at the bottom of all spiritual life, and form the subject-matter of all after mental action, is what the human race has always understood by inspiration. And in this you and I now see that they have been right. The reason we have identified with God. In reflection it is indeed subjected to the infirmities of the flesh; but in its spontaneous action, it acts independently of us, and is of course free from our imperfections. It acts then by virtue of its divine energy, and its revelations are real revelations from God. “Those in whom this spontaneous activity is more remarkable than in the majority, seem to the multitude to be admitted more immediately into the secrets of the Almighty. They are therefore called the inspired, by way of eminence, and are looked upon as the confidants and interpreters of God. They are the priests, the prophets of mankind. Their chants become oracles, and are treasured up as the Sacred Word of God. Their laws and institutions are received as divine, and reverenced as religion. “Observe, also, that this spontaneous activity of the reason is always accompanied with a movement of the sensibility, with a great degree of enthusiasm. The prophet, therefore, always speaks in the language of enthusiasm. His prophecy is a chant, his revelation is a hymn, his language is poetry. In confirmation of my view, you may remark, that poetry in all languages is older than prose. The sacred books of all nations, which are their earliest literature, are written in poetry. The Hebrews, who were remarkable for their religious character, have given us in their literature scarcely a single example of

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prose. The Homeric poems date beyond authentic history; we know not when their author flourished; but Grecian prose is comparatively recent. The early literature of all modern nations consists in national songs and ballads. “I understand, then, by inspiration the spontaneous revelations of the reason; and I call these revelations divine, because I hold the reason to be divine. Its voice, is the voice of God, and what it reveals without any aid from human agency, is really and truly a divine revelation. They in whom this spontaneous reason is active in a high degree, raising them above their fellows into closer communion with God, are really and truly prophets of God. They know more of God and can tell us more of God than the rest of us. Rightly then are they reverenced as inspired messengers. Rightly too are their words received by the human race as authoritative, and respected as records of divine revelations. “This word inspiration is applied to more subjects than one, though always with the same radical idea. The poet is said to be inspired, and every genuine poet is inspired. The lyric poet is inspired with a love of the lofty, the daring, the heroic, or the elegiac. A fire burns within him, kindles and exalts him, and he pours himself out in words which burn, exalt or melt the souls of his listeners. The descriptive poet is inspired with a more gentle and peaceful kind of inspiration. He is inspired by a sense of beauty in nature or in art, which he seeks to reproduce in his verse. “There is no radical difference between this inspiration proper to the poet, and that of the prophet. The poet is inspired by God under the aspect of love, beauty, joy, sorrow, liberty, heroism; the prophet is inspired by God under the aspect of Sovereign, Father, Preserver, or Redeemer, and is moved by a sense of obedience, piety, sanctity, goodness. But in both it is one and the same God that inspires. The true poet utters as infallible truth in relation to the subject-matter of his song, as the prophet. The poems of the one are as authoritative, as far as they go, as the other’s prophecies. Poetry, I am aware, enjoys no very high reputation for truth, but so far as it is genuine, it is the outspeaking of the Divinity, and embraces elements of universal truth. This explains why it is that the poet always commends himself to the universal mind, and his fame as his song is immortal. “The prophet is the poet chanting the divine. His soul is full of God, and he pours himself out in a stream of harmony on which float along the unsearchable things of God. God moves in him and speaks through him. He does not speak from himself, from reflec-

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tion, human foresight and calculation, but as he is moved by the Holy Ghost; and he utters merely the words given him to utter. “The character the inspiration assumes is determined by the genius and temper of the individual inspired. This man is inspired by the idea of the beautiful, and his whole aim is to realize it. But his individual genius and temper determine whether he shall attempt to do it by chanting a poem, composing a melody, pronouncing an oration, writing a book or constructing a temple. Another man is filled with the idea of the Holy. He sees God everywhere and in all things. His soul is absorbed in God, and he becomes a David, an Isaiah, a Paul, a Fenelon, a Penn, a Swedenborg, an Oberlin.46 “You may observe also that it is rare that one individual alone is inspired. The notion that God himself kindles up one man’s torch, and that we all must go and light our tapers at that, is not to be received without some hesitation. Here I suppose I differ somewhat from the common view of inspiration. I cannot bring myself to believe that in any age or country the human race are wholly dependent for light and warmth on any one man. God places the fate of humanity in the hands of no one of her sons. “This doctrine that only one or a few are inspired, and that the rest must go to them for light and warmth, is too near akin to the political doctrine which teaches that the mass must entrust themselves and their interests to the guidance of the enlightened few, to be wholly satisfactory to me. I always view with suspicion all doctrines which disinherit the masses and place them at the mercy of a few leaders. I believe God is impartial, that all his children share his love, and that he dispenses his favors alike to all. The opposite doctrine appears to me to be mischievous. It opens the door to the grossest abuses, and paves the way for the most intolerable tyranny. 46 [Ed. François de Salignac de la Mothe Fénelon (1651-1715) was Catholic archbishop of Cambrai (1695-1715) in France, a theologian and spiritual writer, who was famous for his Les Maximes des saints (1679) and his association with the condemned quietist Madam Guyon. He was also a favorite writer on the spiritual life among many American Protestants, especially Quakers, Unitarians and Transcendentalists. William Penn (1644-1718) was the Quaker founder of Pennsylvania. Emmanuel Swedenborg (1688-1772) was a Swedish Protestant mystical writer whose works were read by a number of Transcendentalists. After 1792, congregations of the New Jerusalem Church, established by Swedenborg’s followers, were established in the United States. Jean Frédéric Oberlin (1740-1825), born in Strasbourg, was the Lutheran pastor of Waldersbach (1767-1825), an educator and educational theorist, and a philanthropist who was active in many social reform projects. He was drawn to Swedenborg’s mysticism. Oberlin College in Ohio was named after him.]

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“Nothing is more common, you know, than to find those who have no confidence in the people. Even the great and good Washington, though he loved the people, doubted whether they could be safely entrusted with so large a share of liberty as they are entrusted with by our political institutions. Alexander Hamilton,47 a no ordinary man, distrusts the people, and thinks we shall have to resort to monarchy at last; and almost any day you please you shall meet men who have the greatest regard for the good of mankind, a profound reverence for the dignity of human nature, and who seldom let pass an opportunity of speaking of the infinite worth of the human soul, as it exists even in the humblest of our race, who nevertheless have no confidence in the people. They are afraid of crowds and look with a sort of contempt on the movements of multitudes. They have great confidence in the capacity of the people to be instructed, in their capacity of progress; but none in their spontaneous power of perceiving truth and obeying its impulses. The people must be instructed. The enlightened few must teach them; the favored few must go among them and by showing them examples of superior excellence stimulate them to virtue. Now all this, though it proceed from kind feeling, enlarged sympathies and generous hopes, is yet based on the notion that the few have means of knowledge, which the many have not, and that but for the light these favored few emit, the many would be in total darkness. The people have no light in themselves. Here and there you shall find a man who may be called a sun shining with his own light, but all the rest are mere planets and satellites, shining only as they are shined upon. “Now I protest against this doctrine. The true light enlighteneth every man who cometh into the world.48 Every man has the true light in himself, and is a sun, and not a planet. If the masses are not aware of this, the reason perhaps may be found in the fact that they are in the habit of looking outward not inward. Each man, instead of looking into himself for light looks abroad, and up to some great man, learned man, or, what is worse still, to some rich man. “The impression has been very general, perhaps at times universal, that the people need rulers, guides, nursing fathers and nursing mothers. Out of this has grown up aristocracies, monarchies, despotisms, tyrannies. From the earliest ages of history the few have struggled 47 [Ed. Alexander Hamilton (1757-1804) was a leading American Federalist and co-author of The Federalist papers. Brownson rarely had much good to say about Hamilton. He is generally represented as a political force for the privileged few.] 48 [Ed. A reference to John 1:9, one of Brownson’s favorite biblical passages.]

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to save the people from themselves. The people, it is said, are ignorant, rash, and if entrusted with their own concerns, will assuredly ruin themselves. Hence it is always for the people’s good that the few govern them; and when governing them in the worst possible manner, overwhelming them with taxes and reducing them to complete slavery, it has still been for their good. Although perverting their consciences, and corrupting their manners by the false maxims and licentious examples of courts, it has all been for the people’s good. Now, this could never have been but for the prevalence of the notion that the many have merely the capacity of receiving light, and none of originating it; that the many are therefore incapable of taking care of themselves, but must entreat the noble few to take care of them. “The same notion introduced into our religious faith has been attended by consequences still more revolting to a true lover of his race. The notion that only a few are religiously inspired, that God reveals his purposes only to a few chosen witnesses, and appoints these to reveal them to the people, has built up priesthoods, given a basis to priestcraft, and brought the human race into bondage to sacerdotal corporations. If the masses who bowed with all reverence to the priest had not believed that he possessed means of communicating with the gods which they did not, would they have submitted to his exactions? Every priesthood is built up on the idea that God reveals himself only to a few, and that these few are to be the teachers of the world. The priest having once made the notion prevail that he was more in God’s secrets than the mass, and that they had no means of knowing God but through him, was able to impose upon them almost at will. “The vast amount of wretched cant and fulsome panegyric, which disgusts the enlightened mind and correct taste, in regard to the Bible, comes from the same source. Why do men cry out so vehemently against everyone who advances a doctrine not found in the Bible, or not taken directly from it? Simply because they suppose the authors of the Bible were specially illuminated in order to be in their turn the special illuminators of the world. The Jewish nation was instructed that it might instruct other nations. Peter, James, John and Paul were taught the truth by God himself that they might teach it to others. This and all coming ages are therefore entirely dependent on a single book for all true knowledge of God. Alas for man, then, if by any wickedness the book should be corrupted, or by any accident destroyed! Alas, too, for the nations who receive not this book, have never heard of it, and had no means of hearing of it! They are all in darkness, wandering in the wilderness with not a single star even to

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break through the thick clouds and guide them by its feeble light to their home. “Now, people may say what they will, priests anathematize as they may, and statesmen utter as many old saws as they please, but I for one protest with the whole energy of my being, by all my reverence for God, and by all my love for mankind against a doctrine pregnant with such disastrous consequences. I shall not be a convert to it, till I become able to go all lengths in upholding priestcraft and kingcraft. “I value books, and of all books I value the Bible the most; I value the services of great and good men; and I yield to no man in my readiness to receive instructions from those above me; but I will not own that any man has any means of knowing God, man and man’s destiny, which I have not also. If there be that in any man by virtue of which he has the right to call himself priest or king, there is also that in every man by virtue of which he has the same right. The gospel aims to make all men kings and priests. Every man is a man if he chooses to be, and has in himself all that he needs in order to be a man in the full significance of the term; and therefore no one has any occasion to borrow a part of his manship from his brother. “But do not infer from this that I hold all to be inspired in an equal degree. Reason is in all men, and it acts spontaneously in all men. All men then are inspired to a certain extent, and hence the power of all to apprehend the inspiration of each. But the reason is not active to the same degree in all men. No doubt some feel it more vividly than others, and have a clearer view of God, and duty. They are therefore undoubtedly capacitated to take the lead, to go before the multitude. But all have a kindred inspiration and are merely younger brothers. They are members of the same family, and equal heirs, though not the elder members, nor the first to come into possession of their inheritance. “Neither will you understand me to deny that one man may aid another. In whatever requires observation, in science and philosophy, one may undoubtedly be of great service to another, and even to the world. Plato, Aristotle, Des Cartes,49 Bacon, Locke, have not lived in vain nor spent their strength for nought. The human race is greatly their debtor. But in all that concerns first principles each mind has the light in itself. The great office of the teacher, the principal mission of books, is to turn the mind in upon itself, and induce it to 49 [René Descartes (1596-1650) was a French philosopher and mathematician, considered the founder of modern philosophy.]

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look with clear vision and reverent feeling upon the light ever shining there. “Inspiration rarely manifests itself in single minds alone. It may sometimes do it; but in general it manifests itself in the masses, and is called the spirit of the age. Christianity was an inspiration in this sense. The age in which it broke out was inspired. It was in fact a spontaneous outbreak of the common mind, the outspeaking of God moving in the midst of the people. It found in Jesus its first clear and distinct utterance, in Paul its first philosophic interpreter, who gave it a fixed formula, and founded the church. Yet not in the mind of Jesus only was there this inspiration. Other minds and hearts as well as his were travailing with the divine idea of immortality; and when his ministers went forth to preach it, they did but reveal the multitude to themselves. They merely gave voice and form to what was already in the minds and hearts of their hearers. Hence their power, the success of their preaching, and the conversion of the world. “Ordinarily when the time has come for a new doctrine to be brought out and incorporated into the common belief of mankind, you find everywhere persons springing up, independent of each other, with a strong faith in it, and an invincible zeal in its defense. A new virtue is to be realized and practiced by the race; all the world seem carried away in its direction. The staid and sober few who may remain unaffected, may oppose themselves to the general current, but all in vain. Conservatives may sneer, reason, declaim, nickname, call the defenders of the new virtue, disorganizers, enemies of God and man, but all to no purpose. On they sweep by a power not their own, which they comprehend not, and which they do not even seek to comprehend. In all other respects than this one, they may be wrong, and even destructive. No matter. There is no resisting them. Old institutions, old manners, old customs, old modes of thought, men and women counted wise and prudent, all are before them as the chaff of the summer threshing floor before the wind—are swept away or trampled under foot as on the multitude presses to the realization of the idea with which it is inspired. To the mere spectator this multitude may appear as the apostles did to some on the day of Pentecost, when ‘others mocking, said, These men are filled with new wine’ [Acts 2:13]. In this way the Christian idea of immortality became predominant; in this same way the doctrine of salvation by a crucified Redeemer was established, and the church founded; in this same way was instituted the Commonwealth in England, and the Republic in France; and this same way all important revolutions or reforms in the faith or practice of mankind will be effected.”

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CHAPTER XXV: THE BIBLE “I find nothing in particular to object to your views of inspiration. I see very clearly that you have a right to call yourself a supernaturalist as well as a rationalist. But I confess that I do not see how, on the ground you have assumed, you can maintain the special inspiration of the authors of the Bible. Why were not Homer, Socrates, Plato, Milton, Rousseau, inspired as well as David, Isaiah, Ezekiel and Paul?” “If, instead of the word special, you used the word exclusive, I would admit your objection. I do not contend for the exclusive inspiration of the Bible writers, but I do contend for their special inspiration.” “But you do not admit them to be inspired in the same sense the Christian world does.” “Of that I am not so certain. There is a looseness, a vagueness in most men’s notions which render it extremely difficult to tell precisely what they are. Give precision to the prevailing ideas of inspiration entertained by the Christian world, express them in clear and definite terms, and I think they will be found to be the same with mine. It has never been a doctrine of the church that none but the writers of the Bible were illuminated by the Spirit of God. Some of the early Greek Fathers contended for the reality of the inspiration of the gentile sages. They say that it is by the inspirations of one and the same logos or reason, that an Isaiah prophesies, a Homer sings, and a Euclid solves mathematical problems. Paul assures us that ‘the manifestation of the Spirit is given unto every man to profit withal’ [1 Cor 12:6]. Job declares that ‘there is a spirit in man and the inspiration of the Almighty giveth him understanding’ [Job 32:8]. John bears witness to a ‘true light which enlighteneth every man that cometh into the world’ [John 1:9]. Jesus promises the Comforter, the Spirit of truth, who was to abide with us forever, and who should lead us into all truth.50 Moreover the church has always, in some form or other, held to the reality of the inner Light. Always has it held to the doctrine of experimental religion, and in experimental religion it contends for an illumination of the understanding, by the Spirit of God, as well as for a purification of the affections. So the exclusive inspiration of the Bible-writers has never been a doctrine of the church. I do not then, in reality, depart from what has ever been accounted orthodoxy when I assert that God reveals himself to all men. What else in 50

[Ed. A reference to John 14:1-17.]

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fact has the church meant by its doctrine of ‘common grace?’51 What else has it meant by the assertion that the Spirit of God strives with all men? “But while I contend that in a certain sense God reveals himself to all men, and that all therefore are really and truly inspired, I also admit that individuals may be specially inspired; that is, inspired in a more eminent degree, than the many. These individuals are admitted into a closer intimacy, if I may so speak, with the All-wise and Allholy, and therefore are able to tell us more of God, and to be better interpreters of his will. Now ordinarily we call none inspired, save those who are inspired in an eminent degree. These alone are called the inspired; these alone are the prophets of God. This is what produces the seeming discrepancy between my views and those of the church. But the discrepancy is only seeming, not real. I too call these individuals the inspired; I too call them prophets of God, in a sense in which I do not others. “Now, bear in mind, that we have determined the spontaneous reason—that is, reason acting independently of our wills—to be supernatural, divine. This reason is in all men. Hence, the universal beliefs of mankind, the universality of the belief in God and religion. Hence, too, the power of all men to judge of supernatural revelations. All are able to detect the supernatural, because all have the supernatural in themselves. Were it not so, we could detect God in no miracle, we could recognize him in none of his works, and could receive no revelation of him. Inasmuch as the reason taken in its independence is absolute, is supernatural, its spontaneous revelations are supernatural, superhuman. “Bear in mind also that some individuals experience more of the workings of the supernatural reason than do the many. God is revealed to them more fully than he is to the world. These, according to the common mode of speaking, are the inspired, the prophets of God. Their words are words of God, as we have seen, and are for that reason authoritative. Now the Bible I hold to be written by individuals of this description. It is a record which the inspired prophets of the Hebrew nation, have left us of the revelations of God which they had received. This, if I mistake not, is the doctrine of the church, and if I understand myself it harmonizes with the doctrine I have contended for on inspiration.

51 [Ed. The Calvinist doctrine of common grace refers to that grace that comes to all human beings through the gift of creation.]

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“I know but two methods of arriving at truth; one by reflection, the other by the inspiration of God. That is, we attain to truth by its spontaneous revelations, or by the slow and painful process of analysis and induction. In the last case we ourselves work, and often to no effect. In the first, as I have shown over and over again, it is God that works. Now, I see in the Bible-writers very few marks of analysis and induction. These writers do not attain to the truths they utter by reasoning, by philosophizing. The truths they utter, they receive as flashes of lightning, and hence it is that they utter them as it were with ‘tongues of fire’ [Acts 2:3]. Being truths of the universal reason, truths transcending time and space, they commend themselves to all, and seem to address themselves to every man, and ‘in his own tongue wherein he was born’ [Acts 2:8]. But when you read Plato and Cicero, you see the marks of reflection. These men you see are able philosophers, and have attained to much truth; but they are not prophets; they do not speak with authority. Their words are not the original words of God, but an attempted interpretation and verification of the original words of God. They make no revelation to you of new or hidden truths; but merely account to you for certain beliefs you already entertain. Here is the difference between the two classes of writers to which you have referred me. “Then again the writers of the Bible are specially inspired in another sense. Rousseau was not without inspiration, but his was not a peculiarly religious inspiration. His inspiration was of another kind. He was inspired with the idea of nature, as contradistinguished from artificiality, or conventionalism. His mission was to break down the old social fabric and to lay the foundations of a new social order, more in accordance with the nature of man and of things. But the Bible-writers are inspired by God under the aspect religion more especially contemplates him. They are inspired with God as the Holy, as the object of veneration and worship, and as this is the highest view we can take of God, they are more especially prophets of God. There is a passage in Paul’s first Epistle to the Corinthians, which throws some light on the doctrine I would set forth. ‘Now there are diversities of gifts, but the same Spirit. And there are differences of administration but the same Lord. And there are diversities of operations; but it is the same God, which worketh all and in all. But the manifestation of the Spirit is given unto every man to profit withal. For to one is given by the Spirit the word of wisdom; to another the word of knowledge; to another faith; to another the gifts of healing; to another the working of miracles; to another prophecy; to another discerning of spirits; to another divers kinds of tongues; to another

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the interpretation of tongues: But all these worketh—or are effected by—that one and the self-same Spirit, dividing unto every man severally as he will’ [1 Cor 12:4-11].52 “Nations and individuals are inspired in relation to special purposes, for the performance of some special work in the general progress of humanity. The Jews were chosen by the Spirit to bring out and perfect the religious element of man’s nature; the Greeks had the mission of developing the philosophical element, and of realizing the idea of the beautiful; Rome, that of bringing out the patriotic element, and of founding law or jurisprudence. In like manner each of these general divisions of the great work of human progress is subdivided among individuals. In relation to the religious element, to Moses is assigned one work, to David another, and to Isaiah still another. In relation to the philosophical element, one task is allotted to a Socrates, another to a Plato, and still another to an Aristotle. So I might say in regard to all the other elements of human nature. The Spirit requires not one man to do the whole, but subdivides and distributes the work among nations and individuals according to his own pleasure. Every man then who is called to a particular work is specially inspired. And as religion is the highest of all, as the religious element in fact embraces all the other elements of our nature, they who are specially inspired to bring out the religious element, are inspired with a mission so much higher than all others that they alone seem worthy to be called the inspired. The writers of the Bible having this kind of inspiration, being inspired for the accomplishment of this mission, are therefore specially inspired; and stand not only in the first rank of the inspired, but in a rank by themselves above all others.” “But do you believe everything written in the Bible is true?” “Your question is a broad one, and is not easily answered; because no one man can tell precisely all that is actually written in the Bible. The mere words of the Bible are nothing. We must look at what is actually meant. Now, I know no man who is able in all cases to say what is actually meant by the Bible-writers, whose experience is wide and various enough to interpret all they have said. Therefore I hold it the part of the wise man to be silent in some cases, and neither profess to believe nor to disbelieve. It will be time enough for him to accept or reject, when he is sure that he understands.”

52 [Ed. In the original text Brownson had wrongly referred to 1 Cor 7:4-11, instead of 1 Cor 12:4-11.]

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“From all of which I am to understand that there are some things in the Bible which you do not believe.” “Rather that there are some matters in it which I do not profess to be able to understand. I certainly would not, in all cases even where I do understand, abide by the mere letter. I certainly would not take it upon myself to defend all the laws ascribed to Moses, as so many divine institutions in the absolute sense of the term; but I would contend strenuously for the divine inspiration of Moses, and for the truth of the great principles he sought to embody in his legislation.” “What say you of the marvelous stories called miracles with which the Bible is filled?” “The first question with regard to these miracles is, did they actually take place? I can assign no reasons a priori why they should not have taken place. Nature is but God’s will, and he is not bound by what we term its laws; for its laws are himself. Therefore there was nothing to hinder him from performing them, if he chose. Also the general canons of historical criticism, which I adopt in all other cases, seem to require me to admit them. I cannot persuade myself that the universal belief in miracles is wholly an error. I could not so believe without depriving myself of all ground of certainty. Then the miracles of the New Testament are so interwoven with the texture of the narrative, and make up so essential a part of it, that I cannot deny them without casting suspicion on the whole narrative itself. And I cannot reject the narrative itself without departing from the principles of historical evidence which I find myself compelled to admit everywhere else. “The second question in regard to the miracles is, are they genuine miracles? That is, were they actually performed by the power of God, or were they mere tricks of jugglery? This question is not to be answered in the gross, but in detail. Each individual miracle is to be taken on its own bottom, and to be judged by itself. This we are able to do because, as I have shown, we have in us an element of the supernatural. Therefore, there is in us a power of detecting God intuitively. If we detect the presence of God in the miracle, we are to term it an actual miracle. This I think I can do, at least, in some of the alleged miracles. I therefore contend for the genuineness of at least a portion of the miracles recorded in the Bible.” “Do you use the miracles as proofs of the revelation?” “No. Because the evidence I have of the truth of the revelation is stronger than that which I have of the fact that the miracles actually took place. The miracles rest on historical testimony, the weakest

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kind of testimony;53 the truth of the revelation rests on the testimony of a witness I have within. I do not use them as proofs because I have as much ability to detect the presence of God in a moral doctrine as I have in the display of physical power. If I know nothing of God, I cannot detect him in the extraordinary display of physical power; if I know enough of him to detect him in the miracle, I must needs know enough of him to detect him in the doctrine, and therefore I do not need the miracle.” “What then is the use of miracles?” “I do not know what was the actual purpose for which they were wrought; nor do I know what purpose they actually served. I can conceive, however, of a purpose they might have answered, and there is a use I can make of them now. As to the purpose they might have served: Mankind, especially when but partially enlightened, are much more attracted by extraordinary displays of physical power, than by the exhibition of moral grandeur. Had Jesus, for instance, appeared in the simple dress of a Jewish peasant from the obscure village of Nazareth, out of which it was proverbially said no good thing could come,54 whatever had been the purity of his life, the truth and excellence of his doctrines, he would hardly have secured a single listener. The miracles he performed, therefore, were necessary to draw attention to him, and induce people to listen to him. To the simple peasant-teacher nobody would have paid any attention. But from the man who could cast out devils, open the eyes of the blind, unstop the ears of the deaf, enable the lame to walk and cause the dumb to sing, who could still the raging tempest, and compel the grave to yield up the dead to life, they could not so easily turn away. Here was something extraordinary; here was a wonderful man, what had he got to say? “Again, you cannot have failed to observe how prone men are to regard nature as possessed of causative power. Nature moves on so harmoniously, with so much regularity and uniformity, that we are exceedingly liable to regard all her phenomena as the effects of her own independent causality; thus stopping at second causes and virtually banishing God from the universe. Now it seems necessary that this order, this uniformity should at times be broken through, so that we may see that an omnipotent will rules in the affairs of the world; that there is a God who holds nature in his hand and does with it as 53 [Ed. Such a view is articulated in Locke’s An Essay Concerning Human Understanding, Book 4, chap. 15. ] 54 [Ed. A reference to John 1:46.]

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he pleases. Miracles, which are interruptions of the natural course of events, occurring at distant intervals, seem to me admirably calculated to produce this effect, to raise men’s minds from second causes to the first cause, and to show them that nature is but what he wills. “There is another use of miracles, or rather of the events termed miracles, which I can make. I may regard them as so many symbols, each covering a great truth, or an important moral lesson. This use of them, is, perhaps, the principal one to be made of them now, and it is affected by no theory we may adopt as to their having actually occurred. Take as an illustration of what I mean, the miracle of the resurrection. I of course admit the miracle in its literal sense. But suppose I could not make it out that the body of Jesus actually rose, yet the great lesson taught us by the story of the resurrection remains unimpaired. Jesus was engaged in a great work, that of the complete and final redemption of man from every species of thraldom. In this work he encountered opposition, he was taken and crucified, buried in a new tomb, closed up and guarded with armed soldiery; but on the third day he rose from the dead, and after a few days ascended in triumph to God. So runs the narrative. “Now for the moral. The defenders of the truth may be poor and few in number, they may be despised, persecuted and put to death. Their cause may seem crushed to the earth, and destroyed forever. But it is not dead. It shall rise again. It shall burst the cerements of the grave, strike to the earth the armed bands of its enemies, and rise on high and shine forth in divine glory and majesty. And is it not so. The earth has been strewn with the dead bodies of the defenders of liberty, and yet not one drop of blood has been spilt in vain. The cause has always risen from the grave, and been always marching onwards to victory. An obscure individual utters a great idea; the kings of the earth conspire against him, his feeble band of followers are dispersed, but the idea is immortal, is unconquerable, and rises from the dust of the battle-field, where it was supposed to be left with the slain, prepared for new battles and ultimate victory. Here is a truth precious to all the friends of humanity. It breathes the breath of life into the reformer, enables him to stand up undaunted against a world. What though I am alone, and of the people there is none with me? What though ye scoff and sneer at me? What though ye rage and vent your spite at me? Rage on, do your worst. Ye may silence my tongue, palsy my arm, crush my body, and seal me up in a new tomb hewn from the rock. What then? Ye cannot touch the holy cause in which I am engaged. I speak for God, for man, and my words shall echo through eternity; before the truths I utter ye

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shall yet grow pale and tremble; nay, bow down and worship. Here is the moral of the resurrection. Cherish it all ye who love your race, and know that in the sacredness of your cause ye are immortal and invincible.”

CHAPTER XXVI: THE CHURCH “Passing over the Bible, what is your view of the church?” “The object of Jesus was to found a spiritual kingdom on earth; that is, to bring all mankind under the dominion of the great ethical and religious principles he set forth, all of which an apostle sums up in the terms, ‘righteousness and peace, and joy in the Holy Ghost’ [Rom 14:17]. A kingdom of this kind must needs have its throne in the conscience and the affections, and is therefore by its very nature internal and invisible. The true church of Christ, the true catholic church, I hold therefore to be not an outward, visible church, but an inward and invisible church.55 “Nevertheless the internal must needs have an outward, visible symbol. It must manifest itself in the outward organization of mankind. In the past it has been able to do this only by means of an organization separate from the civil or political organization; that is, by a separation of church and state. But I do not find that Jesus contemplated this double organization of mankind. In strictness he allows but a single organization. The state should be a church. That is, the state should be organized in perfect accordance with the great principles of truth and righteousness which constitute the internal church, and then no other organization of mankind would be needed, or in fact admissible. The time before this can be done will be long. Mankind are yet suffering from the evils, which have resulted from the union of church and state; that is, by the alliance of the two organizations, and they must very generally regard what I am contending for as a renewal of the same. They cannot as yet understand the difference between a union of church and state, and the unity, or identity, of church and state. So we must wait patiently. All will come right in due time.” “But I am more particularly interested in the doctrines of the church. In order to be a Christian must I embrace all these mysterious, absurd or conflicting dogmas, the church has contended for?” 55 [Ed. Brownson revised this view of the church after he read Pierre Leroux. On this, see his “The Church and Its Mission,” Christian World 1 (February 4, 11, 25, 1843) and “Discipline of the Church,” idem., (April 15, 1843).]

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“My friend, Mr. Howard, who never troubles himself with the dogmas of the church, will tell you that in order to be a Christian, all you need is to live the life of Jesus.” “Certainly,” remarked Mr. Howard, who that instant came in. “I see little good which comes from mere doctrinal discussions. I find men very much the same under all creeds and under none. Tell me a man’s creed and I must still inquire what are his morals. I care little about modes of faith. Give me a good life, patterned after the life of Jesus, and I am satisfied.” “So am I,” replied Mr. Morton. “Nevertheless, ideas are not to be thought lightly of. There are great problems relating to God, to man, and his relations to God, to man’s duty and destiny, which it is very important should be solved; and I must believe one’s character is essentially affected by the solutions he adopts. I am far from condemning zeal for the faith, and I confess that I prefer bigotry, and even the most violent persecution for opinion’s sake, to mere indifference to all opinions. True liberality is at an infinite remove from indifference. Liberality does not prohibit one from valuing his own faith, from regarding it as superior to all others, and of infinite importance to the welfare of the soul; but it consists in allowing to all men the same right to form their own opinions, and to propagate and defend them, which we claim for ourselves. “For my own part, my philosophy teaches me to be very slow in dissenting from opinions which have been embraced by any considerable portions of my fellow men. The fact that a given doctrine has been widely believed, and earnestly contended for, is to me a presumption that it covers some truth, or an aspect of some truth, essential to the complete intellectual life of man. I then do not attempt to reject and disprove, but to comprehend and verify; and I count not myself to have rightly comprehended a doctrine till I have seen it in a light in which my reason approves it. “It is undoubtedly no easy matter to get at the precise truth or aspect of truth covered by a particular doctrine. My method is to interrogate my own consciousness. All doctrines cover a fact of consciousness, or are designed to meet some want of the soul or understanding. I attempt then by a scrupulous analysis of human nature, to find what is the fact which the doctrine in question is designed to cover, or the want it is intended to meet. When I have discovered this fact, or this want, I take it for granted that I have discovered all that is essential in the doctrine. Undoubtedly in this analysis I may err; I may overlook some fact; I may not reduce a given fact to its lowest denomination; and I may misinterpret the facts I do discover. But I

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must be as honest and faithful as I can, and do all in my power to guard against error. To this end I must proceed slowly, and not be hasty in rushing to conclusions. I must go over the ground often, and review, and re-review my work till I have attained to all the exactness in my power. “In a work of this kind I have been engaged for some years. When I have completed it to my own satisfaction, I hope to be able to give the world the results. But as yet I am a learner. Every day enlarges my experience and develops new wants within me, which essentially modify my former conclusions. Where I shall end, I know not now. But the more I inquire, the more deep and varied becomes my experience, the more confidence do I acquire in the experiences recorded in the Bible, and the more willing do I become to trust them where my own is imperfect or doubtful. “On the great leading points of Christian faith I have attained to what I deem well-grounded convictions, and these convictions, so far as I can myself judge, are substantially the same with those which the church has always contended for. How far the church will receive my expositions, I know not, and care not. I agree with it in the main as to what it actually believes, but I differ from it often as to the account it gives of its faith. I accept its faith, but not always its philosophy, what it really means, though I sometimes reject its interpretations. “The great error of different sects is not in the fact that they embrace false doctrines, but defective doctrines. What they have is true, as far as it goes, but is not the whole truth. Each sect has a truth and is so intent on maintaining that truth that it overlooks others equally essential. The Calvinist has a great truth, the sovereignty of God. He would introduce this truth everywhere. God is to him an absolute sovereign, who disposes of all things as he pleases, makes one vessel unto honor and another unto dishonor; has mercy on whom he will, and whom he will he hardeneth. This is all true. But there is another truth which the Calvinist overlooks, the free agency of man. He is so intent on exalting God, and extending the sphere of the divine action that he leaves man out of the account. “The Arminian, on the other hand, struck with the fact that man after all must count for something, plants himself on man’s free agency. In his efforts to exalt man, and give him his proper sphere of activity, he overlooks the divine agency, and virtually annihilates God. Now both build on real facts; for God is absolute sovereign and man is free. Both facts must be accepted. Man’s freedom must be so interpreted as to leave God’s sovereignty complete, and God’s sovereignty must be so interpreted as to leave man’s ability unimpaired.

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“The believer in endless punishment is struck with the fact of God’s justice. He recognizes the fact which our reason discloses, that no man should be suffered to sin with impunity. God is just. He is of purer eyes than to look on sin with the least allowance or approbation. He will therefore by no means clear the guilty. So intent is the believer in endless punishment on this fact that he does not sufficiently consider that God is also a God of love and mercy. The Universalist seizes upon this latter fact which he exaggerates and so interprets as virtually to exclude the idea of justice. Both are right and both are wrong. But the two ideas are easily enough reconciled. The Universalist does not object to man’s receiving the consequences which, in the order of Providence, necessarily follow transgression; nor will the believer in endless misery deem it unjust that a man, when he has ceased to sin and become holy, should receive the rewards of holiness. Then assume that God will never place a man in any condition in which he cannot repent, and become holy if he will, and all controversy must cease. If the man sins eternally, let him be damned eternally; if he repent and becomes holy, whenever the event may occur, let him, as he must from the very state of his soul, enjoy God and heaven. “The Trinitarian contends for the Deity of the Son and Spirit, and in doing this he overlooks to some extent the fact of God’s unity, that Father, Son and Holy Ghost are but one God. The Unitarian takes up the idea of unity which the Trinitarian neglects, and looks so steadily on this, that he fails to see that this one God exists as a Trinity. We ought to be careful that our explanations of the Trinity do not impair the idea of unity, and we should so understand the unity of God as to leave room for the admission of his threefold existence.” “And how is this to be done?” “I can give you now only one way of doing it. I might remark that if you supposed God to be a mere unity, an absolute unity, you could never get at multiplicity; consequently you could never arrive at creation. God is not a mere barren unity, dwelling in eternal solitude, but he manifests himself in variety. Now in order to do this he must be both one and many, finite and infinite. He must then be one and many, and their relation. Here is a Trinity which you will find in the reason, implied in every assertion, and in every thought. But on this I cannot now dwell. I look at God as the ground of all existence, the source whence all life and being proceed, and I call him the Father. I look again at this same God, as manifested, or uttered, that is, put forth, and I call it the Word, or Son. I look once more at this same God as a vivifying and sanctifying Spirit, preserving nature and

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giving it its life, enlightening the soul and sanctifying it, and I call it the Holy Ghost. Here are to my mind three obvious distinctions, each of which is God, and all three of which are one and the same God. “The doctrine of the Atonement has excited not a little controversy. Still I think the doctrine is founded in truth. Christianity addresses man as a sinner and it seeks his recovery, his reconciliation and union with God. “Now I apprehend that man everywhere has the consciousness of sin. The tradition of a primitive Fall is nearly if not quite universal. No man feels that he stands in his proper relation to God. Everyone feels that he has sinned against God, and has fallen from his primitive innocence, and lost the divine favor. Now this is not a state in which a man is willing to live; for say what we will, man has a conscience, and one that makes itself heard too, at least sometimes. Nothing is so painful to man, so insupportable, as the consciousness that he is a sinner. Let me but feel that I have held fast to my integrity, that I have walked ever by the law of God, and have nothing wherewith to reproach myself, and I can smile even at the stake. But when once I am obliged to confess to myself that I am a sinner, and can no longer look upon myself but with a sort of loathing, I am miserable indeed. I already feel the tortures of the damned; the flames of hell are already burning within me, and I have not one drop of water with which to cool my parched tongue. I cannot live in this state. “But this is only half of the evil. Sin makes me a coward. Adam, after his transgression, comes not forth to meet his God, but seeks to conceal himself among the trees. When I have the consciousness of sin, I am afraid to meet God. I think he must be angry with me. I have a fearful looking for of wrath and indignation. God is my enemy and he can crush me. My own heart condemns me, and God is greater than my heart. “As a sinner I need two things; first, that which shall wash out my sins, save me from the tortures of a guilty conscience, and make me holy; and second, that which shall restore me to the favor of God which I feel I must have lost, save me from his wrath, and make him again my friend. Now here are two deep wants of the human soul to be met. They are universal wants as I learn from the fact that men in all ages and countries of the world, in all times and places, have sought to provide for them. Sometimes by sacrifices and offerings, and sometimes by self-inflicted penance, lacerations of the body, the sacrifice of the objects dearest to the affections, or by voluntary submission to poverty and want. The rites and ceremonies and disciplines of all religions have this end in view. The Jewish economy was, to a great extent,

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proposed as a means of saving the soul from sin and reconciling it to God. To this end were its fasts, its ablutions, oblations and sacrifices. “But the blood of bulls, of rams and he-goats, cannot wash away guilt and atone for sin. The injunctions of the Jewish law were inadequate. By the deeds which that law enjoined no flesh could be justified. Those deeds could not purge the conscience and make the comers thereunto perfect. “Christianity proposes itself as the sovereign remedy. It offers us the Atonement. But what according to Christianity is the Atonement? Through all religions you find runs the idea of sacrifice. Man has never felt it possible to atone for sin and gain the favor of God without a sacrifice. But the sacrifice enjoined by all religions previous to Christianity were insufficient, and could not secure the justification, much less the sanctification of the sinner. The sacrifice Christianity enjoins, is therefore different in kind from that enjoined by any other religion. What it is may be inferred from a passage in the prophet Micah: ‘Wherewith shall I come before the Lord and bow myself before the high God? Shall I come with burnt offerings, with calves a year old? Will the Lord be pleased with thousands of rams, or ten thousands of rivers of oil? Shall I give my first-born for my transgression, the fruit of my body for the sin of my soul? He hath showed thee, O man, what is good. And what doth the Lord require of thee, but to do justly, to love mercy, and to walk humbly with thy God’ [Mic 6:6-8]? A just God can accept only the just, and to be reconciled to God we must come into harmony with him, possess in ourselves a godly spirit or disposition. The real sacrifice then enjoined by Christianity is a self-sacrifice. We are to present ourselves to God a living sacrifice. The literal death of Jesus, viewed as detached from its connections and moral influence, does not either save us from our own guilt, or bring us into union with God. This the church has always asserted, in asserting that in order to effect our salvation there must be a practical application of the Atonement. The individual must become really and personally holy, and then and not till then, will God accept him, and blot out the remembrance of his transgression. This is the real Christian doctrine of Atonement stated in its philosophical nakedness. “But if you go back to the age in which the gospel was first promulgated, you will readily perceive that the doctrine in this naked form could not have met its wants, nor in fact can it meet the want of the great majority of our own generation. The mass could not so refine upon the matter, nor appreciate a doctrine apparently so dry and abstract. Here they were, tortured with guilt and trembling be-

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fore a stern and inexorable judge. What should they do? Assure us, say they, that God will pardon us. Mercy, mercy, we want mercy. Do you doubt? Behold then the cross. See there, nailed to the accursed tree, the Son of God. If God has not refused to give you up his only begotten and well-beloved Son to die for you, shall he refuse to pardon you? Behold his infinite compassion for sinners, and dare trust his mercy. “Go again with the doctrine of the Atonement in its philosophic formula to the northern barbarians who overran the Roman empire, and talk to them of the necessity of personal holiness, and of being godlike in their dispositions; of the importance of self-sacrifice, and walking according to the rules of right reason, and what impression will you make? The spiritual nature in them is unawakened; they live in the senses and not in the spirit. Would you humanize them and purify and exalt their sentiments, you must have something to strike their imaginations, and touch their sensibility. Point your ruthless barbarian on whose heart mercy has never gleamed, to the cross: let him see there a bleeding and agonizing God, a God dying that man might live, and his rough soul is touched, and tears stream down his weather-beaten cheeks. What a sinner am I, that I have caused God to come down and die on the cross that I might live? “That the Christian doctrine of Atonement might meet the wants of the human race, and be efficient in reconciling them to God, it was necessary that it should be presented in its symbolic form. It has been so presented, and well is it that it has been. Nevertheless, the church must suffer those of us who wish, to interpret the symbol. The death of Jesus is symbolic of the great fact that sin is washed out and the Atonement realized only by giving up ourselves to God, and by being ready, able and willing to live and die for man as Jesus did. This great fact is what the church has always been striving after, and it has done it in the only way in which it has been able to do it. You must speak to men in their own language. You do not tell men the truth, when you undertake to tell it to them in a language of which they are ignorant. “About the doctrine of regeneration, also, the Christian world has disputed. I conceive, however, that the matter may be easily settled. Pelagius recognized in man a certain degree of ability to effect his own salvation. Saint Augustine denied human ability and represented salvation as wholly of God.56 56 [Ed. Pelagius (c. 360-after 421) was a priest who lived in Rome and about 402 he questioned the doctrine of grace that he found in Augustine’s Confessions. Augustine (354-430) was the bishop of Hippo in North Africa. He is known in ecclesiastical tradition as the doctor of grace, but he did not deny human ability, as Brownson asserts.]

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“Now, on the one hand, man is unquestionably fallen, and has not the ability to recover himself. I am conscious that I am not sufficient to effect my own redemption. I feel the need of assistance. On the other hand, I am equally conscious that I possess some ability. I have two sources of recuperative energy, my reason and my will. My affections and tastes are corrupted, but I am still able to see the right and to will it. But this is not enough. Though I see the good, and resolve to pursue it, I am drawn by my lusts into sin. These are the facts of consciousness. “Now what I want is, that my body should be brought into subjection to the law of my mind, that my affections and tastes should be so changed as to give me a relish for the food which endureth unto everlasting life. I may, as an unregenerate man, see the right, will it, and even do it, so far as its outward performance is concerned. But this is not enough. I must do it because I love it. God says, ‘My son, give me thy heart’ [Prov 23:26]. I must delight in the law of the Lord, and find my meat and drink in doing his will. Now the change by which this effect is produced in me, is what I understand by regeneration. But this change I do not effect. It is effected by the Spirit of God. Yet not without my concurrence and cooperation. I am a complex being. On one side of my nature I am passive, and on the other I am active. In the fact of regeneration I both act and am acted upon. There is a concurrence of both powers, the divine and the human.57 You may not be able to tell precisely where grace ends and human ability begins, but you must beware that you do not so interpret the one as to exclude the other. “Other doctrines I would remark upon, but I have talked till I am tired. You will gather, from what I have said, my general views of Christian doctrines, and my method of investigating them. Beware of exclusiveness. Beware of denying. Seek always to comprehend. Know that the human mind never embraces unmixed falsehood, and cannot believe a pure absurdity. Range freely over all doctrines, analyze them all, and what you find in them which accords with human nature, as you find it in your own experience, or in the records of the race, hold fast and cherish, for it is the truth of God and profitable to man.”

57

[Ed. Brownson articulates here what has become known as synergism (from the Greek synergos, meaning “working together”), the belief that the human will contributes part and divine grace contributes part of salvation.]

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CHAPTER XXVII: CONCLUSION I have now gone through with what I had to say respecting my intellectual struggles, in passing from infidelity to an unwavering belief in God and the supernatural origin of Christianity. I have detailed with some minuteness and with as much accuracy as I could, the various arguments and views by which my recovery was effected. I have always felt myself greatly indebted to my friends, Mr. Howard and Mr. Morton, for the aid they afforded me. The one gave me an exemplification of Christianity in practical life, and won my love for it; the other showed me its foundation in my nature, and demonstrated its truth to my understanding. The more I pursued the course of reasoning Mr. Morton pointed out, the more clear and certain did the truth of Christianity appear to my mind; and I am now fully satisfied that every man who becomes acquainted with the laws of his own reason, and the wants of his own soul, must be convinced that the religion of Jesus is true and from God. The effect of this change in my belief on the temper of my mind and my general disposition, I am satisfied has been salutary. I have had much to contend with since as well as before; the current of my life has never run smooth; I have ever been in a false position, and I have had trials the world has little suspected; but I have generally maintained a calm and equable frame of mind, and been able to bear my burdens without being overwhelmed. I have seen a Providence in all things, and have felt that all the events of this world, whether great or small, were under the control of a wise governor, who would cause all things to work together for good. I have often had to stand alone, and to contend single-handed against my Christian brethren; but I have been sustained because I felt I was right, and that God would never abandon those who were faithful to conscience and duty. The heavens have often been obscured by thick clouds, and the light of day has been shut out; but I have never doubted that there were a bright sun and clear blue sky beyond. As to the particular views which I have adopted, their general character may be gathered from the conversations of my friend and teacher Mr. Morton. I have not, however, adhered blindly to his opinions. In some respects I have modified them, and often I have chosen, where I adopted them, to express them in different terms. His great object was to present Christianity in a light which should enable the unbeliever to see its truth. He found me an unbeliever, and he could not therefore talk to me as if I was already a believer. There can be no doubt that had he been conversing with individuals whose

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faith was fixed, he would have used much more scriptural language, and been less careful to point out the rational element of religion. But he had to adapt his language to my wants, to use a language I could understand; and which should enable me to see the coincidence between my own experience and that which I found recorded in the Bible. In this he did right, and so far as I was concerned he was signally successful; and must have been equally successful with any others who should have been in a like condition with myself. In looking back upon the long struggle I have had, I must thank God for it. I have been reproached by my Christian brethren; they have tried to make me believe that I was very wicked in being an unbeliever; but I have never reproached myself for having been one, nor have I ever regretted it. I would consent to go through the whole again, rather than not have the spiritual experience I have thus acquired. I have sinned, but never in having doubted; I have much to answer for, but not for having been an unbeliever. I have no apologies to make to the Christian world. I have no forgiveness to ask of it. I have done it no disservice, and it will one day see that I have not been an unprofitable servant. It has never fairly owned me, but I care not for that. Even to this day it calls me an infidel, but that is nothing. It will one day be astonished at its own blindness; and when freed from the flesh, in that world where I shall not be disturbed by the darkness of this, I shall see it doing even more than justice to my memory. I have not lived in vain, nor in vain have I doubted, inquired, and finally been convinced. When the scales fell from my eyes, and I beheld the true light I followed it; and I have done what was in my power to direct others to it. My task is now well nigh done, and I am ready to give in my last account. I say not this in a spirit of vainboasting, but in humble confidence. I say it to express my strong faith in God, and in his care for all who attempt to do his will. I doubt not that many good Christians may be shocked at first sight at what I have here recorded. They will see no coincidence between the views here set forth and their own cherished convictions; but I will assure them, that as they read on, and fairly comprehend them, they will find the coincidence all but perfect. The Christianity here set forth is the Christianity of the universal church, though presented perhaps in an uncommon light. I cannot persuade myself that a new Christianity is here presented, but the old Christianity which all the world has believed, under a new aspect, perhaps, and an aspect more peculiarly adapted to the wants of the present age. It cannot have escaped general observation that religion, for some time, has failed to exert that influence over the mind and heart that it

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should. There is not much open skepticism, not much avowed infidelity, but there is a vast amount of concealed doubt, and untold difficulty. Few, very few among us but ask for more certain evidence of the Christian faith than they possess. Many, many are the confessions to this effect, which I have received from men and women whose religious character stands fair in the eyes of the church. I have been told by men of unquestionable piety, that the only means they have to maintain their belief even in God, is never to suffer themselves to inquire into the grounds of that belief. The moment they ask for proofs, they say, they begin to doubt. Our churches are but partially filled, and the majority of those who attend them complain that they are not fed. Our clergy are industrious, and in most cases do all that men can do, and yet not many mighty works do they, because of the people’s unbelief. Everywhere we hear complaint. Even amongst the clergy themselves doubt finds its way. Learned professors proclaim publicly and emphatically, even while denouncing infidelity, that we can have no certainty, that our evidence of Christianity is at best but a high degree of probability. Surely, then, it is time to turn Christianity over and see if it have not a side which we have not hitherto observed. Perhaps when we come to see it on another side, in a new light it will appear unto us more beautiful and have greater power to attract our love and reverence. The views here presented have won the love and reverence of one man who was once as obstinate an unbeliever as can be found. I know not why they should not have the same effect on others. More I would say, but I have lingered too long already. If any have been interested in the several personages I have introduced, as having been in some way or other connected with my spiritual conflicts, and who would wish to know their ultimate fate, I must reply by asking where, in the case of any one of us, are those who started with us in life, and whose young hearts responded warmly to our own? Where are the friends and acquaintances we formed, and whose course for a while run parallel with our own? There were many of them, but where are they now? One by one they have dropped away, and we have plodded on, in our turn to drop aside, and be passed by the new throngs pressing onward to an unknown goal. “And Elizabeth, will you tell us nothing of her?” Pardon me. I have planted wild flowers on her grave, and watered them with my tears.

2. INTRODUCTORY STATEMENT Boston Quarterly Review 3 (January, 1840): 1-20

I must beseech the good-natured public not to accuse me of trifling with them. When I declared three months ago that the publication of this journal was ended,1 I little thought that it would ever be resumed, much less under my editorial care. I wished for rest, and felt that I needed it; and I trust I shall be believed when I say that it is with unfeigned reluctance that I reenter a career which I then flattered myself I had abandoned forever. Why I have been induced to resume without delay the editorial labors, which I declared to be ended, does not concern the public. I have been assured that the work was doing good, and that it ought not to be discontinued. Some partisan prints have spoken harshly of it, since I announced its discontinuance, and this I have regarded as an indication that it was not altogether useless. The publisher has also thought it worth continuing under a business point of view, and as several distinguished literary friends, whose contributions cannot fail to be a public benefit, have generously proffered me their assistance, I have concluded to go on with it, and do as well by it as my health and ability will permit. I resume this publication under circumstances somewhat different from those under which I commenced it. Before undertaking this Review, I had rendered myself, so far as known, not a little unpopular, by my association with the Workingmen’s party, and my bold and uncompromising defense of the laboring classes. I was obliged to stand alone. Individuals, who enjoyed some reputation in the community, although entertaining views nearly coincident with my own, were chary of acknowledging the fact, and would have shrunk from recognizing any periodical, which I should conduct, as their

1 [Ed. See Boston Quarterly Review 2 (October, 1839): 517-18, where Brownson indicated that he was ceasing publication because the task of authoring, not just editing, most of the articles for the Review had “impaired his health.”] 181

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organ.2 There was no sect or party that would not have spurned my proffered assistance. I felt therefore that, in justice to others, I must make my Review the organ merely of my individual sentiments, so that, if my heresies should incur reproach, no one but myself would be obliged to share it, and if the publication failed, no one but myself would be affected by the disgrace which always accompanies an unsuccessful undertaking. But I view the matter somewhat differently now. I do not now feel that I am alone, that the work to which I am devoted is in any sense peculiar to myself. They who share my views, I doubt not, are as willing to cooperate with me as with any one else. I will not now do them the injustice to think that they will regard a periodical, devoted to the cause they approve, as unworthy of support because I am its conductor. The Review therefore ceases to be merely the organ of an individual, and aspires to the broad and generous character, more befitting a literary periodical. Two years’ experience has convinced me that there is even reputation to be acquired by a bold and manly defense of the general principles this Review has put forth; and therefore I have no hesitation in stating clearly and distinctly its leading design, and in calling upon all those who approve it to give it a liberal support. As heretofore this journal will be devoted to religion, philosophy, politics, and general literature. In relation to all these subjects, it has fixed doctrines, which it will labor diligently to bring out and defend. What these doctrines are, may be collected from the two volumes already issued. But a few words by way of explanation, perhaps, will not be deemed impertinent by any class of readers. The great idea, which constitutes the life and unity of the Review, is that of freedom. The Review is instituted for the purpose of carrying freedom into all subjects, and into all the relations of life. It approaches all subjects of thought with freedom; it holds nothing too sacred to be examined, and claims the right to reject whatever 2 [Ed. In about April of 1839, when a number of Transcendentalists were discussing the possibility of creating a new journal, Brownson suggested that the new journal be combined with his Review. Margaret Fuller and Emerson rejected the offer for reasons that are probably not too difficult to guess. Brownson had alienated some of the Transcendentalists and his views were not theirs. Some like Alcott consider the Review the best contemporary journal in the United States, but he and others also felt that it fell “far below the idea of the best minds among us,” he confided to his journal on March 27, 1839. Fuller, Emerson, and Alcott thought they could do better. On this, see Clarence L. F. Gohdes, The Periodicals of American Transcendentalism (Durham: Duke University Press, 1931), 63-64.]

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cannot abide the test of pure reason. But by freedom is not meant lawlessness. Man is under law, and under law it is his glory to remain, if the laws to which he is subjected be coincident with the decrees of eternal justice. Into religion, as well as other matters, it carries the spirit of free inquiry. Religion is a great subject. Nothing does or can affect us more intimately. It ought then to be examined with freedom, though of course with an earnest and reverent spirit. It is only by submitting religion to the test of reason, in like manner as we do politics and natural science, that we can check infidelity, and recall the community to a firm and living faith in Christianity. In taking up this subject, my aim has long been, and I trust ever will be, not to lessen the authority of religion, nor to render it less awe-inspiring, but to infuse into its study the spirit of liberal science. I know from my own experience that few things are more influential in stirring up hostility in the minds of youth against religion than the misguided zeal of its friends, which would withdraw it from the free action of reason. There is a period in our lives, to say the least, when we would know why we believe, and when we protest with all the energy of our nature against all attempts to check free thought, and to chain us down to a cold, formal assent to doctrines, for the reasonableness of which there is nothing in our own experience to vouch, and which must be accepted on an authority, the legitimacy of which we do not perceive. It is in vain, when we are in this state of protest, indignant at all intellectual restraint, to bid us not examine, but believe. Whoso would render religion a service, must begin by respecting the rights of the mind. But as to the actual doctrines inculcated, saving the forms in which they may be clothed, I do not apprehend that they will differ essentially from what has been and is the universal faith of the Christian church. As we grow older, as we inquire more earnestly, and with a broader experience, into religious matters, we have a natural tendency to return to the simple faith of our childhood, and we become less and less inclined to depart from commonly received opinions. We start in youth, strong in ourselves, exulting in our exuberant life, confident in our own resources, but destitute of experience. We have powerful intuitions, but no clear insight, no real understanding of the mysteries of our spiritual nature. We know not the world we carry about with us, and have no presentiment of the wants which will one day spring up in the unknown depths of the soul. The great doctrines of religion, which have been embraced in all ages, and in which religious people take so deep an interest, find then no echo in

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our experience. We have lived nothing which can interpret them and give them a significance. They are to us unmeaning. The interest taken in them appears to us affected, often a base hypocrisy, and the eulogistic terms in which they are spoken of, disgusting cant. But as we take our share in the rough and tumble of life, as we become torn by internal conflicts, worn out by the wars ever renewed between the flesh and the spirit, and convinced by repeated failures of our own insufficiency for ourselves, we begin to discover a significance in these hitherto rejected doctrines, and no longer laugh at the scholastic distinctions of “common grace,” and “efficient grace.” As our own experience becomes broad enough and deep enough to disclose the psychological facts on which the great doctrines of the church rest for their support, we see that these priests and these fanatical multitudes, that we had looked down upon in the pride of our ignorance, have not been altogether in the wrong, as we had supposed them. We feel that they have had, though often without knowing it, reason on their side, and that it was our own inexperience that had made us think otherwise. I remember well the time when the Bible was to me a revolting book, when I could find no meaning in it, and when I could not believe that religious people could honestly regard it as they professed to regard it. Its very style and language were offensive, and if I was called upon to write upon religious topics, I took good care to avoid, as much as possible, the use of its phraseology. But it is not so with me now. Life has developed within me wants which no other book can satisfy. Say nothing now of the divine origin of the Bible; take it merely as an ancient writing which has come down to us, and it is to me a truly wonderful production. I take up the writings of the most admired geniuses of ancient or modern times; I read them, and relish them; and yet there is a depth in my experience they do not fathom. This is much, I say; but I have lived more than is here; I have wants this does not meet; it records only a moiety of my experience. But with the Bible it is not so. Whatever my state, its authors seem to have anticipated it. Whatever anomaly in my experience I note, they seem to have recorded it. What experience these men had, if indeed they spoke from experience! It is well called the Book, for it is the book in which seems to be registered all that the individual or the race ever has lived, or ever can live. It is all here. If I would bow down with sorrow for sin, and pour out my soul in deep contrition for my wanderings, here are the very words I want, and words terribly expressive. If I would break forth in thanksgiving for release from the bonds of iniquity, and shout in exulting strains my forgiveness, here

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is the hymn already composed, which exactly meets the temper of my mind. Then, again, even the language of our common English version, ridiculed as it often has been, is after all the only language, in which I can utter the spiritual facts which are developed within me. I seek to vary the expression, to select what I may regard as an equivalent but more elegant term, and some how or other the soul of the passage escapes, and I find remaining nothing but a lifeless form of words. It does not therefore seem strange to me now, though it once did, the attachment the Christian world has to this venerable Book, nor the tenacity with which they, who speak the English tongue, hold on to our common version, in spite of the defects which criticism justly points out. But notwithstanding all this, I should rebel, should the attempt be made to force me to receive the Bible as the word of God. I receive it as the word of God, because I have reproduced much of it in my own soul; because I am conscious of that within me which vouches for its divinity. And no man can really receive it as the word of God, till his own experience has developed within him the need of it, and furnished him the key to its meaning. Our own life must lead us to it. We must be initiated into the mysteries of religion in the temple of our own souls, and then, and not till then, shall we comprehend the significance of the Bible, and the doctrines of grace. The natural man receiveth not the things of the spirit; they are foolishness to him, for they are spiritually discerned.3 Here is the doctrine of experimental religion, and its justification too. And here is the heresy which I profess, and shall defend. I claim the right to examine all doctrines, and to interpret them by my own experience; but I hold myself bound to rectify my own experience by the recorded experience of the race; and hence it is that I always regard the fact that a doctrine has been widely disseminated, long believed, and able to take a firm hold on the heart of the race, as a strong presumption of its truth. The human race is no doubt liable to err, but he who should contend that it can embrace unmixed error, and be altogether in the wrong, would deprive himself in advance of all evidence, wherewith to prove himself in the right. I have no faculty for perceiving and recognizing truth, which was not possessed equally by all who went before me. If that faculty could be wholly at fault in them, how know I that it is not equally at fault in me? The wise man does not reject the doctrines which past ages have bequeathed him; he merely seeks to comprehend them. 3

[Ed. A reference here to 1 Cor 2:14]

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At present the doctrines of the church seem to me to be buried beneath a heap of words, which to the generality of men have very little of meaning. People do not look beneath those words; they seem to me to stop at the idol and not to penetrate to the idea; to prostrate themselves before the carved image, without recognizing the numen, which it should shadow forth. The many who worship, though moved by a religious impulse, are to a great extent idolaters. The church symbols need not be destroyed, nor warred against; but if we would have men bow down and worship with true adoration, with gratitude and joy, with profit to their souls, we must interpret these symbols anew, and express the truths they conceal, in words adapted to the present state of the human understanding. Much space, as heretofore, will be devoted to the discussion of metaphysical subjects. This perhaps will not be regarded as a recommendation of the Review. Metaphysics do not enjoy the best reputation in the world. Many sensible people regard all time and thought bestowed upon metaphysical studies as so much time and thought thrown away; for they entertain the notion that these studies serve no useful purpose; that they merely tend to draw off attention from the practical affairs of life, to multiply jarring and contradictory systems, to fill the brain with perplexing subtleties, and to overload every subject of human inquiry with needless and unmeaning distinctions. But are these people correct? This is not an idle question; but who can answer it without resorting to those very metaphysical studies they condemn? We all of us, consciously or unconsciously, are continually resorting to these studies; and whoever asks, Why? or, Wherefore? in relation to any subject whatever, affirms them to be indispensable. Then these, too, are stirring times; times in which all is agitated and nothing settled. Men are everywhere loosened from their old moorings, and afloat upon a tumultuous ocean, at the mercy of the winds and waves. A spirit of free inquiry has gone abroad, and keen and searching glances are sent into all subjects. All that men have heretofore regarded as sacred and well established is arraigned and put upon its defense. Old opinions are recklessly abandoned, new views are rashly put forth, new creeds are proposed, new institutions projected, and an entire reorganization of the human race contended for. Surely this is not a condition of things, a wise lover of peace and security, of God and man, would desire to see rendered permanent. But how shall we change it? Not by declaiming against it. It is useless to dwell on the danger it threatens. A terrible spirit has been raised, and there is no charm in eloquence, none in authority, to exorcize it.

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The evil we see and apprehend can be averted only by searching to the bottom our general faculty of knowing, by determining with what it is we know, what it is that we can know, what are the grounds and conditions of all science. Now to attempt to do this is precisely what it is to engage in the study of metaphysics. Metaphysics are the science of science, that which determines the ground and conditions of science in general. Without them, it is impossible to make any scientific progress, beyond that of amassing materials for science. There is no distrust among us of the physical sciences. But the physical sciences repose upon a metaphysical basis. It is the metaphysician who furnishes the naturalist his method, and legitimates his inductions. The instrument, used in the construction of the natural sciences, is the human intelligence, and to determine the value and right manner of using the intelligence belongs to the metaphysician. Before he had determined this, the naturalist made but slow progress. Men looked on nature with open eyes and keen senses before the time of Bacon,4 but it was not till he had taught them how to observe her features, and how to question her, that she began in very deed to surrender to them her secrets. This age devotes much attention to the study of history, which is well; for the hoary past contains much that we need to know. We are but the continuation and development of what has gone before us. What has placed us where we are, and made us what we are? Strike out the metaphysical sciences, and how will you answer these questions? Reject these sciences, and take your stand where you will, you are in the labyrinth, and no Ariadne at hand to furnish you the thread.5 Reject these sciences, and tell me, I pray you, the meaning of that fierce and long continued struggle between Greece and the great King, of the deadly feuds ever nurtured between Athens and Sparta, of the quarrel between Marius and Scylla, of the victory of Julius over Pompey, of the Guelph and Ghibbeline parties, of the Reformation by Luther, of the French Revolution, of the parties even of our own country;6 and why it is that silence is rapidly gathering over the 4 [Ed. Francis Bacon (1561-1626) was the outstanding representative of Renaissance empiricism, emphasizing the scientific method of observation and experimentation and verification.] 5 [Ed. In Greek mythology Ariadne is the daughter of Minos and Pasiphaë. According to one tradition she fell in love with Theseus and gave him a thread of wool to escape from the Labyrinth after killing the Minotaur.] 6 [Ed. Brownson points to major classic conflicts in the West to underline his point that history itself is an extension of the internal conflicts in human nature. The ideological conflicts of the past reflect the tensions inherent in the human condition.]

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memory of our own once idolized Hamilton, while young America pronounces with ever increasing enthusiasm the name of Jefferson? You can tell me nothing of all this. All to you is dark and meaningless; for the torch which shall illumine the historic page, and enable you to read it, must be kindled at the despised taper, whose feeble light glimmers from the window of the solitary metaphysician. The key to the past can be found only by a careful analysis of the elements of human nature, as they present themselves today to the eye of individual consciousness, and which the past was engaged in developing. The activity of the human race is controlled by a system of ideas. Each nation, too, has its idea, which constitutes its life and unity, and which holds a determinate place in the general system of ideas which presides over the development of humanity. We can then act with intelligence in neither the cause of our country, nor in that of mankind, without the sciences, which disclose to us the laws by which the race advances, and which involve the destiny of our own nation. There is a logical sequence in the life of a nation. Grant it a given idea to start with, and you may deduce beforehand its history, with perfect accuracy, providing it meets with no counteracting force, to prevent it from following out its idea to its last results. If its idea be a narrow one, one which takes in but a small portion of human nature, it will be short-lived and inglorious. From this fate it can be saved only by speculative thought, a thought which is dependent on no outward circumstances, hemmed in by no bounds of time and space. Philosophy, by disclosing the defectiveness of the reigning idea, and what is needed to supply its deficiency, combining itself with education, passing into text books and professors’ lessons, penetrating the hall of legislation, the pulpit, the Lyceum, infusing itself into the whole national literature, may gradually enlarge the national idea, bring up from their obscurity other elements of human nature, and finally modify the general character of the nation, give it a higher, a more universal life, and thus prolong its existence, and exalt its glory. But I am far from proposing in this place to enter into a defense of metaphysical studies. To these studies the public attention has already been drawn, and everywhere in our midst, men, learned and unlearned, are philosophizing with all their might. There is therefore little for us to do now but to see to it that their philosophizing tend to some account, to advance the cause of truth, and to promote the honor and dignity of their country. The philosophy, by whose results we have long been governed, is now passing away. The dominion of Locke is broken up, and he now has only a few adherents, and they are men of yesterday, who can

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exert no influence on tomorrow. The tendency is just now to an opposite extreme, to what among us is called Transcendentalism, a system of philosophy—if that may be called a system, which disclaims all system—which builds upon an order of facts, proceeding from an origin which transcends the senses and the operations of the understanding. The source of this order of facts is called by some instinct, by others spontaneity, and by others still, inspiration. They are intuitive and immediate. All among us, who are denominated sometimes the New School, contend for the reality of this order of facts, and so far all who have broken with the past are agreed. But there are some individuals, holding a high rank in the movement party, who regard this order of facts as the only order it is necessary to recognize, and with these they think themselves able to construct a philosophy, which shall explain the existence of God, man, and nature. They therefore pay little attention to the senses, hold reasoning or logic in slight esteem, and treat the demand for proofs of their statements with contempt. With these individuals I do not entirely agree. If I started with them, I could not stop short of exclusive mysticism, and should end in denying the existence of man and the universe. I find also facts in the history of philosophy which I cannot account for on their hypothesis. There can be nothing in the history of philosophy which has not its root in human nature. Now I find, in tracing the history of philosophy, the great systems of sensualism, idealism, and skepticism. If instinct be the only element of human nature, if it be in all men, and always active, as it must be, if it be instinct, and always a teacher of truth, and its own sufficient voucher, I cannot understand how these other systems could ever have originated, or for one moment been entertained. I recognize spontaneity as a source, and a fruitful source of ideas, and I also admit that the ideas, which come to us from this source, do not require to be proved. But I recognize also other orders of facts, not less real, nor less essential in their place than these. In running away from the sensualism of Locke, I would take care not to lose sight of that portion of reality which his system embraced; and in rejecting logic as an originator of ideas, I would still hold fast to it, as an essential instrument for clearing up our ideas, arranging them in their systematic order, and enabling us to master them. The individuals, to whom I have alluded, have unquestionably a portion of truth, and a portion which for a long time has been denied or neglected, and which is essential to every system of philosophy that can pretend to do anything like justice to human nature. But, struck with the brilliancy of these facts, their energy, and the enthusiasm they call forth, is it not possible that they have

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given them an undue prominence, and failed to assign to other facts of human nature, less brilliant, more prosaic, but equally real, the importance they deserve? In politics, this journal will sustain democratic principles and measures. As a necessary consequence of this, it will cooperate with that party which adopts these principles, and supports these measures, the Democratic party. This will be regretted by some who take a deep interest in the religious, philosophical, and literary character of the Review. They will regret this, on the one hand, because they do not adopt what I term democratic measures, and on the other hand, because they have imbibed the notion that the man of letters should stand aloof from the political strife of his countrymen. With regard to the first consideration, it is enough to say that every man is bound by his duty to his God, his race, and his country, to support those principles and measures, which he believes to be just and true, without asking whom he may please or whom he may offend. As it concerns the second consideration, I will only add, it can have no weight with me. Politics is a great subject, one in which every man in this country, if he desire good government, either for himself or for others, should take a deep interest. I have always felt that I belonged to the world, that I was an inhabitant of it; and if I have cultivated letters, if I have devoted some time and thought to abstract speculations, it has been solely for the purpose of gaining the light and the strength, which should fit me for discharging my duty to it. I am told that I ought to confine myself to first principles, to abstract truth, and not descend to controversies about measures, much less about men. All this is very well, and I would readily do so, could I be persuaded that I, and my fellow men, are nothing but abstractions. But I have painful evidence that I have a body which connects me with the material interests of the world, and I have no doubt that even those of my friends, who delight so much in the ideal and the abstract, have also a certain portion of flesh and blood which need caring for. The true man, the whole man, neglects no interest, overlooks neither body nor soul, but seeks to bring about a reconciliation between spirit and flesh, mind and matter, God and man. He is not the true scholar who removes himself from the practical concerns of life, and holds communion only with an unreal world; and, I own, I have no respect for the philosophy which dwells forever in the abstract, and never steps forth into the world to reduce its theories to practice. I admit the importance of first principles; few men have shown more attachment to them than I have. I have great faith in them. I

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wish them always to be resorted to, and always obeyed. But I look into the world as it is; I see contradictory principles set forth, and hostile measures supported. While I am standing aloof from party strife, while I am studiously avoiding all allusion to what I regard as democratic measures, and am engaged only in dealing forth abstractions, although they shall one day be clothed with life, an anti-democratic party is at work, and securing, it may be, the success of antidemocratic measures—measures which may trammel the whole industry of the country for years to come, and from the deleterious effects of which we shall be able to escape only through rebellion and revolution. Suppose all democrats should do as I am exhorted to do, concern themselves only with first principles, and never seek to carry out those principles by means of appropriate measures, what would be the result? The enemies of the democracy would have the field to themselves, and falsehood would be enthroned, before truth could marshal her forces. Nor can I consent to the notion, which these friends seem to entertain, that politics is a low and debasing subject, or that a scholar necessarily derogates from his dignity, by engaging in the political movements of his countrymen, and doing what he can to sustain what he believes to be true principles, and to secure to his country the practical blessings of them, by supporting measures which will embody them in laws and institutions. Even the great Goethe,7 the ideal of many of our literary folks who are shocked at the idea of a scholar’s turning politician, did not disdain to be even a placeman. If he could be a politician, an officeholder, to serve a petty Duke, without derogating from the dignity of letters, surely the scholar may do as much here for the purpose of serving the people. Politics is one of the great concernments of the human race. In this country of universal suffrage, every man ought to be a politician. I say not that he should be a politician and nothing else, but that he should be a politician. If he be a politician, he must concern himself with three things, principles, measures, men. Measures are necessary to carry out the principles, and men are necessary to carry out the measures. The aim should always be to seek for true principles, and for the measures which those principles demand, and to support men who will support the measures. In regard to the principles, we may keep aloof, to a great extent, from party strife; but the moment we undertake to 7 [Ed. Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (1749-1832), German poet and novelist, was not one of Brownson’s favorite writers. He considered him a good poet, but a bad philosopher because he was excessively subjective.]

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carry out those principles by means of measures, we enter upon party ground, and must act, if we act at all, with a party, and for and against men. Away then with the cant against politics and party.8 You must take the world as you find it, reform it with such materials as you have, and in obedience to laws which a higher power than that of man enacts. Nevertheless, into party strife this journal will enter no farther than to discuss in a calm and philosophic spirit the great principles of political science, and, as occasion demands, to point out in the same spirit the measures which are necessary to reduce those principles to practice. I regard the Democratic party of this country not indeed as a perfect party, but as a true movement party, constituting the American division of the great movement party of the world. In cooperating with this party, I am sure that I am a fellow-laborer with the friends of humanity who, in France, Germany, Italy, England, are seeking to work out a greater good for the human race. We are all soldiers in the same grand army of progress, and may feel that we are a mighty host, and shall, whatever enemies we may have to encounter, ultimately gain a complete and decisive victory. But, if I enrol myself in the ranks of this party, it is not as a slave, but as a freeman. In proclaiming great principles, in discussing measures, in determining what ought to be done, I speak from my own heart and mind, as God gives me utterance. I say I do not regard the Democratic party as perfect. I see much to be done which it has not yet attempted. I own, I am not satisfied with the inequality in wealth, intelligence, and social position, which I see even in this land of equal rights. We are far from having realized what I regard as true democratic equality. I struggle for a greater degree of equality, and I believe that it will one day be obtained. I look forward to a time when every man “shall sit under his own vine and fig tree, with none to molest or make afraid” [2 Kings 18:31]; when the relations of master and slave, and of proprietor and workman, or employer and employed, shall be unknown; when, instead of one man’s working for another and receiving wages therefor, all men will be independent proprietors, working on their own capitals, on their own farms, or in their own shops. I am aware that this will seem to my wise countrymen a Utopian dream, and that not a few will look upon me for indulging such a dream as insane, and fit only 8 [Ed. In his earlier years Brownson had decried party politics and he would do so again in the future, but not so during the heyday of his involvement in the Democratic party, 1838 to 1840.]

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for a madhouse, or as a rabid agrarian, against whom every man of substance should set his face. But all this moves me not. I think I see the tendency of modern civilization, and I think I am as able as my neighbors, who have hardly given a moment’s serious thought to the subject, to judge of the practicability of my dream. As for rabid agrarianism, I pray my wise friends not to be too fast. Perhaps I may love my race as well as they, and feel as strong a desire as they for peace and good order. How do they know that I delight in strife? and how do they know that I do not see as clearly as they that an arbitrary division of property is a scheme not to be countenanced? Nay, how know they that I have not examined all the schemes, which reformers have prepared for reorganizing society, as thoroughly as they have, and that I also reject them? Wait a moment, good people; you shall not be hurt. Be so indulgent as to bear in mind that I have only said that I desire a certain order of things, and that I believe that it will one day be brought about; but when, or by what means, I have not said. For aught you know, I hold myself to be entirely ignorant of the means by which that order of things is to be introduced.9 I have brought forward no scheme for introducing it, and how know you that I have any scheme? But you tell me such an order of things cannot be introduced. How know you that? Are you prophets? Then give me the proofs of your title to the prophetic character. Perhaps, if it come to prophesying, my commission to prophesy may be as good as yours. At any rate, admit it to be possible that I may have a little common sense, as well as you a great deal. But if it can be brought about, you say, by what means? This is a question, and one which I cannot answer. I have no scheme of my own, and I pretend not to devise one. I have no plan of a world-reform for you to adopt, for I have not yet found one that I could adopt for myself. I have paid some attention to the schemes of world-reformers from Plato down to Robert Owen and M. Fourier,10 but none of them seem to me of any great value. There is not one of them that I cannot easily convict of inadequacy to the end for which it is proposed. 9 [Ed. Brownson was soon to talk about means in his “The Laboring Classes,” Boston Quarterly Review 3 (July 1840): 358-95. See also this volume, chapter 7.] 10 [Ed. Robert Owen (1771-1858) was a Welsh social reformer whose socialist A New View of Society (1813) Brownson had read and had been influenced by as a young man. François-Marie-Charles Fourier (1772-1837) was a French social theorist, often called a utopian socialist like Owen. He authored utopian socialist tracts like The Theory of Universal Unity (1822) and The New Industrial and Societal World (1829), arguing that personal integrity is possible only in unity with others.]

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If then I have no scheme for introducing this new and desirable order of things, you may ask me, why I broach the subject? Simply because it is very well when one starts on a voyage that he should know the port he would make. If he knows not this, how shall he know what course to steer, or be able to determine whether he is sailing in a right direction or a wrong one? If we know not the end we would gain, how can we determine what should be the policy of government, whether this or that measure be good or bad? Say, for instance, we have a large amount of unoccupied lands. The question comes up, how shall we dispose of them? If the end to be sought is to make every man a proprietor, and a laborer on his own capital, then the answer is plain that they should be disposed of in small parcels, and only to actual settlers, who will themselves perform the labor of cultivating them. And as it is desirable to have as many of these independent proprietors as possible, it follows that the lands should be disposed of at a low price; so that as many men as possible, of small means, may be induced to emigrate and purchase them farms. Say the question concerning our factory system, as a permanent system, comes up. Ought government to encourage this system, and seek to fasten it on the country forever? What is the tendency of this system? To diminish the number of proprietors, and to increase the number of operatives at wages. Then it is hostile to the order of things we should seek to introduce. Then it ought not to be encouraged. This says nothing against manufactures; it merely condemns the present system, and teaches us that we should labor to make the operatives the owners of the factory. We may see from these two instances the necessity of clearly understanding the end we would gain; and therefore the propriety of discussing the question, what is the order of society we should labor to build up? As to the method of bringing about the order of society I contemplate, I suppose I am not much wiser than other folks. Society is nothing but the reflex of human nature. You can have nothing in human society which is not in humanity. Humanity in all its integrity is in every individual. In every society then, however imperfect may be its actual state, you have all the elements of the most perfect state to which the human race can aspire. But these elements are imperfectly developed, or improperly compounded. This is the cause of the evils which exist. Your resort for a remedy is, therefore, to mind. You must examine society as it is, and see wherein it is defective; analyze human nature, ascertain its elements, and from these infer the perfection to which you may aspire. Some elements now are developed, and others are not; some elements are dominant which

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should be subservient, and vice versa. You must study to mold your institutions so as gradually to develop what is undeveloped, and to bring up the elements of human nature, which are now in obscurity, and reduce to servitude others which have now improperly the mastery. This is to be done by means of education, the pulpit, the press, the lyceum, and the legislature. You cannot create the order of things proposed, nor introduce it at once; you must develop it, and grow into it as best you can. Here is my agrarianism, my recklessness. If any are alarmed at it, why, God help them; I cannot. Of literature proper, I have not much to say. I place no value on literature for its own sake, and never make it an end to be sought. It deserves our attention only as a means of individual or social growth. The literary aim of this journal will be to breathe into our literature a free and elevated spirit, and to give it a democratic cast, a truly American direction. I would enlist literature on the side of the people, and secure all its influence to the cause of democracy. In conducting this Review, I wish it to be understood that its contributors are under no obligation to conform to my sentiments and opinions. I have my own doctrines; those I shall always bring out and insist upon; for those, I shall hold myself responsible. But the Review is intended for all who sympathize with the movement party, for all who wish to see progress effected in politics, philosophy, literature, or religion. I am myself an eclectic, and I seek to carry the spirit of eclecticism into all the departments of life and thought; but the Transcendentalists, the mystics, the theosophists, the idealists, may make this journal at all times, if they choose, their medium of communication with the public, as freely as if the editor was one of their own number. As I open the Review to persons entertaining views which differ from my own, and, as I am not willing to be thought to advocate contradictory doctrines, my own articles will always bear my signature. For these articles the public may hold me responsible, but for none others. Contributors may annex their own names or not to their contributions, at their own option. I shall always exercise the editorial right to say what articles may or may not be inserted; but pledge myself always to insert, as I have space, all articles sent me, whatever the peculiar doctrines they advocate, when they possess the requisite literary merit, and discuss topics, which, in my judgment, are worth examining. The fact that any given paper from a contributor is inserted, must never be regarded as a proof that the editor approves its doctrines. It is merely a proof that he thinks it presents an aspect of a great subject which it is well to contemplate. The doc-

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trines of the Review will, of course, be those of its editor. These, he trusts, will secure to it the requisite degree of unity and consistency. My wish is, so far as my limits admit, to afford an opportunity to everyone who has a word to utter, of uttering it freely. With these remarks, I send the Review forth again, to find such reception as the public shall see proper to give it.

3. AN ORATION ON AMERICAN LITERATURE1 Boston Quarterly Review 3 (January, 1840): 57-79

The anniversary of a literary society composed of young men who are prosecuting, or who have just closed their academical studies, can never be without its interest. It is a season of pleasant recollection, and joyful hope. Literature in the progress of events has become a power, and one of the mightiest powers of our times; and whatever, therefore, pertains to it, or to those who cultivate it, must have a deep interest for all who have not yet to learn that their own lot is bound up with that of their kind. The influence of literature on the destiny of nations, its power to develop the energies of the soul, to purify the taste, exalt the sentiments, enlarge the views, and advance the civilization of mankind, were, perhaps, an appropriate subject to be discussed on an occasion like the one which now calls us together; but I have thought that I should best consult my own powers and your wishes, by choosing a more limited, but I hope not a less interesting subject. I have, therefore, selected the hackneyed, but important subject of American Literature. This is a subject which must be uppermost in your thoughts, as scholars and as patriots. Every young man who engages in literary pursuits doubtless hopes to be able one day to do somewhat to advance the literature of his country, and to exalt her intellectual character in the eyes of the world. In considering American literature, it will not be my object to point out its various characteristics, and to dwell on what it has already achieved. When the question is between us and foreigners, who reproach us for not having accomplished more for the literature of the world, it may become us to assume as proud an air, and to speak in as lofty tones as we can; but when the question is merely a domestic one, and we are discussing it in our own family circle, it behooves us rather to inquire why our literature has not attained to a larger 1

[Ed. This essay was first published as An Oration, delivered before the United Brothers Society of Brown University, at Providence, R.I., September 3, 1839 (Cambridge: Metcalf, Torry and Ballou, 1839).] 197

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and healthier growth, and by what means it may become worthy of ourselves and of our country. This inquiry is the subject to which I respectfully invite your attention. Of American Literature as it has been, and even as it now is, not much is to be said flattering to our national vanity. We have produced some works respectable for their practical aims and utility; we have brought forth much which passes for poetry, but there is no great poem of American origin, unless we call Barlow’s Columbiad2 such—our only national epic—and we could make up but a meager collection of national songs. Latterly, we have given birth to some tolerable novels, and made a good beginning in history. But, aside from the newspaper press, which we are somewhat prone to underrate, we have produced nothing in the literary way whereof to boast. We have no literature that can begin to compare with the literature of England, the literature of Germany, or that of France. To what are we to ascribe this? Many are somewhat prone to ascribe it to the fact that we are a young people, and have not lived long enough to create a literature. They may not be wholly wrong in this. In a political sense and in relation to the long future before us, we are undoubtedly a young people. But there is a sense in which we are an old people. We did not begin in this country as savages or as barbarians. Our fathers were of a civilized race. They brought with them to these western wilds, the polity, arts, and refinements of civilized life. They could boast one of the richest literatures of the world. Chaucer, Shakespeare, Spenser, Bacon, Milton, were among our ancestors; and the literatures of the old world have ever been open to us. The Bible and the classics have been in our possession, and these lie at the bottom of all modern literature. I have, therefore, not much confidence in this plea of minority, on which our countrymen are so much disposed to rely. We must seek the cause of the meagerness of our literature elsewhere. This cause is sometimes looked for in the democratic institutions which we have adopted. We have, it is said, no court the center of fashion and elegance, to exalt the imagination, and give laws to taste; no long line of titled nobility, raised far above the people, and presenting us models of excellence. We see, it is said, nothing great among us, no elevated rank to which we may aspire, and therefore can have no lofty ambition; and having no ambition to be great, we 2 [Ed. Reference to Joel Barlow’s (1754-1812) The Vision of Columbus (1787), an epic poem in nine books, celebrating the future progress of the Americas in the arts, sciences, and international commerce.]

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can produce nothing great. Our minds and deeds of a necessity sink down to the level of our conditions. This is the Tory version of the matter, repeated with sickening frequency in the London Quarterly,3 and kindred prints in the old world and the new. But there is nothing in democratic institutions to hinder the expansion of mind, to check the play of fancy and imagination, or to impede free thought and free utterance. It is true that we democrats have little room for the display of that ambition, which craves to be raised to the Baronetage, or to be called my Lord; but we have in revenge ample room for the workings of the somewhat loftier ambition to be a man amongst men, and to devote ourselves to the service of our God, our country, or our race. That democratic institutions are not unfavorable to the creation of a free, rich, and living literature, the sacred remains of Athenian literature are amply sufficient to prove. One of the real causes of the meagerness of our literature is to be looked for, I apprehend, in the fact that we were for a long time dependent as colonies on England. The condition of colonists, which so long continued, generated a feeling of dependence, a habit of looking to England for direction in nearly all cases, which we have not yet wholly surmounted. Colonists almost invariably regard the mother country as their moral and intellectual superior. It is their native land; their home, to which they look back as exiles, with deep yearning and tender recollection. In it are the objects with which they are most familiar, which are dear to the heart, and around which cluster all the hallowed associations of childhood and youth. They borrow its language, its laws, its customs, fashions, sentiments, and opinions. Through these the mother country exerts an almost absolute spiritual dominion over the colonies, which may be continued long after events shall have severed the political ties which bind them together. This is especially true, if the mother country be herself really a noble nation, ranking among the foremost nations of the civilized world, advanced in its literary and scientific culture, and filled with the monuments of a renowned ancestry. England, we all know, has her faults; her political constitution is a medley of jarring and discordant principles, and her administration is selfish, and rarely moral; but nevertheless, her people are among the most remarkable recorded in history. They want the sprightliness, the versatility, the clear perception and the keen relish of the beautiful, so characteristic of the ancient Athenians; the warm household feelings, the strong religious 3 [Ed. The London Quarterly Review (1809-1967) was the Tory alternative to the Edinburgh Review, a Whig journal.]

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faith, original and profound metaphysical thought of the modern Germans; the wit, the delicate taste, the expansiveness and sociability of their neighbors, the French; but they are brave, enterprising, energetic, practical, the Romans of modern history, and a no inconsiderable advance on the Romans of antiquity. At the epoch of the colonization of this country in their political institutions, and social arrangements, in literature and science, they were foremost among the leading nations of Europe. They were to the colonists, and not without some show of truth, to say the least, the first nation of the world. Possessing this character, and held in this estimation by the colonists, England’s dominion over their minds and hearts is nothing wonderful. The loyalty natural to the human heart, and especially to the English heart, which leads us to reverence and obey what we regard as above us, very naturally induced homage to England, and made us receive her word as law. There was little for us to reverence and obey in our wilderness homes. The colonists were few in number, strangers to one another, at best companions in exile. They were equals in rank, and very nearly equals in wealth, and intellectual attainments. All that they had been accustomed to regard as superior to themselves, was in the mother country. Where else, then, were they to look for their spiritual sovereign? The colonists, we know, did in fact regard the mother country with the greatest deference and with childlike affection. This is seen in the institutions they adopted, the laws they enacted, the usages they perpetuated, and the names they gave to their towns and villages. All these speak of home, of fatherland. Everywhere did they seek to reproduce England, or to erect monuments to her memory. They gloried in calling themselves Englishmen; and whatever was English, was right in their eyes, unless it conflicted with some immediate interest or with their interpretation of the Jewish and Christian codes. On these latter points, our fathers showed no want of independence. From England they imported all their articles of luxury, and most of those of use; from England, also, they received their fashions, usages, and most of their sentiments and opinions. The Revolution which converted the colonies into independent states, and sundered the political ties which bound us to Great Britain, changed but little of all this. After the temporary animosity generated by the struggle for independence had subsided, the affection of the people for England revived in nearly all its former force. England was still the mother country. She was still in our estimation, if not in fact, our moral and intellectual superior. She continued to

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manufacture our cottons and woolens, our knives and forks, our fashions, our literature, our sentiments and opinions. We regarded her, after the Revolution, in all but political matters as the superior and ruling nation. We wished for her approbation; we sought her sanction for what we had done and were doing; and were anxious that she should own that we had not been naughty children in running away from our mother and setting up for ourselves. Here, if I mistake not, is a chief cause why we have made no greater advances in literature. With this feeling towards England, we must needs regard her literature as the model of excellence, and anxious to commend ourselves to her grace, we must needs conclude that, in order to do it, we must write as much like Englishmen as possible. Feeling ourselves inferior, we could have no confidence in our own taste or judgment, and therefore could not think and speak freely. We could not be ourselves. We could not trust the workings of our own minds. We were safe only when we thought as the English thought, wrote as the English wrote, or sang as the English sang. But how the English thought, wrote, or sang, we could, at the distance we were placed, and the little intercourse we had with good English society, know but imperfectly. When, therefore, we attempted to write, we were like those who write in a foreign language, which they have studied only late in life, and which they have but imperfectly acquired. The energy of mind, due to the subject we proposed to treat, was wasted in avoiding Americanisms, and in trying to conceal the place of our birth and education. We sank of necessity into servile imitators, into mere copyists; and in seeking to write as Englishmen, abdicated our power to write as Americans, and as men. Whoever would attain to excellence in anything must repose a generous confidence in himself. He must feel that he is equal to what he undertakes. He must proceed calmly and with a conscious strength to his task. If he doubts himself, if he feels that he must make an effort that he must strain, he will do nothing but betray his weakness. We Americans in literary matters have had no self-confidence. There is no repose in our literature. There is ever a straining after effect, a labor to be eloquent, striking, or profound. This proceeds in a great measure from the fact that we have found our model of excellence, not in our own minds and hearts, nor in human nature generally, but in the literature of that land from which our forefathers came. Instead of studying man, we have studied English literature; instead of drawing our inspirations from the universal reason, which glows within and agitates the American heart, not less than the English heart, we have sought them in the productions of the English

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muse. We have written and sung, or at least aimed to write and sing, for Englishmen, and to gain the applause, or escape the censure of the English critic. Hence our minds have been crippled, and our literature has been tame and servile. But so long as we retain the memory of our colonial dependence on England, we shall not attain to literary excellence. We shall attain to freedom and originality, and produce works worthy of admiration for their freshness and power, not till we dare set up for ourselves; till we come to feel that American human nature is as rich as English human nature; that the emotions and the forms of speech, natural to an American, are as proper in themselves, as conformable to the laws of universal human nature, as those natural to an Englishman; and that Boston, New York, or Providence, has as much right to decide authoritatively on matters of taste and composition, as London. Another cause of the meagerness of our literature, nearly akin to the one just mentioned, if not growing out of it, is to be found in the fact that our literary men have been but slow to accept our democratic institutions, and conform to the order of things which our fathers established. Educated in schools modeled after the English, early accustomed by the literature they study, and the lessons of their professors to distrust the people, to look upon democratic institutions as unfavorable to the development of genius, and to regard the institutions of their own country as a doubtful experiment, they have failed to imbibe the national spirit and have therefore been able to fetch but a feeble echo from the national heart. Till quite recently, the literary men of our country have not sympathized with the people, and have had in their hearts no deep and abiding love, as they have had in their minds no clear conceptions of the great doctrine of equal rights and social equality, to which this nation stands pledged. They may have had a tender concern for the people; they may have been willing to labor to enlighten them; they may even have preferred a republican form of government, but they have not been true democrats in their hearts. There has been a great gulf between them and the American people. Now nothing is more certain than that the men who create a national literature must be filled with the spirit of their nation, be the impersonations of its wishes, hopes, fears, sentiments. The American people are democratic—I use the word in its etymological and philosophical sense—and consequently the creators of American literature must be democrats. It is not I that says this; it is truth, it is philosophy, and therefore if you dislike it, blame not me. No man, who studies attentively the American people, can doubt that their

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souls, however defective their utterance, or their notions, are wedded to democracy. No party, not believed to be democratic, can rise in the nation to even a respectable minority; and no measure, believed to be anti-democratic, can stand any chance of success. We may deny this, we may quarrel with it, and declare it altogether wrong; but so it is; and it is only they who conform to it, not from policy, but from the heart, from the real love of democracy, and a full understanding of what it is that can do much to advance American literature. The fact that the majority of our literary men have been distrustful of the democracy, or opposed to it, is one reason why our literature has not attained to a larger growth, and become more honorable to the country. Another cause, why our literature has continued so meager, is to be found in the circumstances of our country, which have made no great literary demands, and which have turned our mental energies almost altogether in another direction. Literature is not a nation’s first want, any more than reading and writing is the first want of the individual. We are not, properly speaking, as I have said, a young people, but ours is a young country. We received it at a comparatively recent period, fresh from the hands of nature. We have had the primitive forests to clear away, the virgin soil to cultivate, commerce and manufactures to call into existence and encourage, cities and villages to erect; roads, canals, and railways to construct; in a word, our whole material interests to provide for, and the field of our future glory to prepare. Here was our first work, and in this work we have shown our creative powers, displayed our skill and energy, and done that whereof it is permitted us to boast. While engaged in this work, we could not turn our attention to the cultivation of a national literature. Moreover, while engaged in this work, while clearing away the forest, planting the rose in the wilderness, and erecting cities and villages where lately prowled the beast of prey, or curled the smoke of the wigwam, literature adequate to our wants was furnished by the mother country, of a better quality, and at a cheaper rate than we could furnish it for ourselves. Here is, after all, the chief cause of the deficiency of our literature, and the main reason why we have so long remained the literary vassals of England. The truth is, there has been, as yet, no great demand for literature among us. We have been engaged in no great work for the successful prosecution of which literature was necessary, and the activity of our minds, and the sentiments of our hearts, have found thus far their utterance in deeds rather than in words. This remark to those who have not reflected may seem of little importance. It may be thought that literature, like virtue, is independent on time and place,

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and may spring up wherever it is the will of scholars that it should. But literature is no arbitrary creation. It is dependent on higher laws than those of human enactment. It comes only when it is needed, and comes always in a shape and of a quality, in commercial phrase, to suit the market. No matter what your schools are, or what is the number and excellence of your scholars, you cannot force its growth, or introduce it before its time. Literature springs up only in those epochs when there is some great work to be performed for the human race, when there are great moral, philosophical, or social problems up for solution, and when all minds and hearts are busy with them. It never amounts to anything in a nation or in an epoch, where all is settled. China is full of schools and literary men; and what is more, holds literature in the highest honor, and finds her aristocracy in her scholars; yet has China no literature worth naming. In that land of immobility, of routine, where all is prescribed, where all change is prohibited, and everything must be today what it was yesterday, what can literature be but an empty form, or an endless repetition? No new thought is there permitted, no new problem ever comes up for solution, and what can literature find there to do? If you consult literary history, you will find that there is no literature, ancient or modern, which is not indebted for its existence to some social fermentation, to some social change or revolution, which has brought along a new class of sentiments to be uttered, or raised up new problems to be solved. The men, who contribute to its existence or growth, are always men affected by the movement spirit. They are dissatisfied with what is. Weary of the present, they look back and yearn for what appears to them the serene past; or they look forward to the future, see in their mind’s eye an unrealized good, which they must struggle to obtain. In this they do but represent their age. The spirit, the hope, or the regret which agitates them, agitates the mass. It is on this condition that they become popular, and it is on the condition of being popular that their works form a part of the literature of their epoch. This fact will appear evident, if we glance at a few of the more renowned literatures of the world. The most remarkable literature of the ancient world, though of limited extent, is the Jewish. This literature lies at the bottom of all modern literature. The Bible, more than Greek and Roman literature, has influenced the scholars of modern Europe. But this remarkable literature is not the gradual and regular accumulation of centuries. It is the production of a few but distinct epochs, and all these epochs are epochs of change, or of fermenta-

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tion. The first division marks the passage of the Hebrew people from the nomadic state to that of fixed dwellings, and the wars consequent upon that passage; the second division is produced by the change of the government from a theocracy to a monarchy; the third is indebted for its existence to the struggle between the national worship and the idolatry of the surrounding nations; the Babylonian conquest, the return from captivity, the rebuilding of the temple, and the reestablishment of the national worship, are the great events which produce the rest. The history of Grecian literature bears witness to the same fact. We know not the exact date of the Homeric poems, but they were evidently composed when the Grecian mind was experiencing more than its wonted activity. The Iliad marks an epoch when Greece was parceled out among petty princes, who oppressed their subjects, wasted their lands, and devoured one another by perpetual wars. The poet remembers or feigns a happier past, sighs over the present, and pours out his soul to call the Grecian princes to union and peace. The Odyssey, though of a later date, marks also an epoch of commotion, but less turbulent than that of the Iliad. We see in the Odyssey the dawn of an era of peace, some indications even of a nascent republicanism. Commerce begins to flourish, agriculture to attract attention, and the various other peaceful arts begin to be cultivated. Hesiod marks an epoch of transition. The heroic ages have passed away; “the age of chivalry,” as Burke would say, “is gone.”4 It is no longer an age of wild adventure, rapine, and war. The cities are adopting a republican rule, and striving to introduce something like civil order. Still the evils of the precedent lawless life are fresh in men’s memories, and sadden their hearts. It is a period of painful recollection, as well as of sweet hope. Much remains to be done, and the poet steps forward with a grave air and an earnest spirit to call men to the worship of the Gods, and the cultivation of the earth; to a peaceful, religious, and industrious life. The Persian wars, that mighty struggle between Europe and Asia, between the past and the future, in which the future so gloriously triumphed at Marathon, Platea, and Salamis,5 that fearful contest between the aristocratic element and the democratic, of which Sparta represented the aristocratic, and Athens the democratic, and that other 4 [Ed. See Edmund Burke (1729-97), Reflections on the Revolution in France (1790), in The Writings and Speeches of Edmund Burke, 12 vols. (Boston: Little, Brown, and Co., 1901), 3:331.] 5 [Ed. At Marathon (490 B.C.), the battle of Plataea (479 B.C.), and the battle of Salamis (480 B.C.), the Greeks defeated the Persians.]

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contest, moral and intellectual, excited between the advocates of the national mythology, and the new philosophy introduced by Socrates, and carried so near perfection by the beautiful and sublime genius of Plato—these great struggles, and the mighty questions they raised, occur in what we regard as the most brilliant epoch of Grecian literature. When these contests were over, the questions they raised disposed of, Grecian genius fell asleep, and has not yet awaked. Rome bears witness to the same. Rome existed for many centuries without creating a literature. Her state was originally a monarchy; subsequently it passed under the rule of the nobles, where it continued until near the epoch of the empire. But the democracy early made its appearance, and began its struggle for its rights. It gained some slight concessions in the Licinian law,6 and the establishment of the Tribunes; it demanded a few of its rights virtuously and eloquently under the Gracchi, factiously under Marius, criminally under Catiline, triumphantly under Julius Caesar; it was duped by Anthony and Octavius, merged in the emperor under the Caesars, and expired in the last of the pretorian guards, to be resuscitated in the camp of the Nazarenes by the cross of Christ.7 The period in which this struggle was fiercest is, as every tyro knows, that which is denominated the golden age of Roman literature. The contest did not indeed rage under the reign of Augustus,8 the period when so many writers flourished, but all these writers were born and reared amid the strife, and had taken part in it.

6 [Ed. The Licinian Law, named after the Roman lawyer Lucius Licinius Crasus (d. 91 B.C.) , proposed to banish from Rome Latins who had gained Roman citizenship by illegal means.] 7 [Ed. The Gracchi, Tiberius and Gaius (fl. 120 B.C.), were orators and statesmen who tried to improve by legislation the social and legal condition of Roman plebeians. Gaius Marius (c. 157-86 B.C.) was a Roman politician who helped to remove property qualifications for service in the legions. Lucius Sergius Catilina (c. 108-62 B.C.), Roman politician, organized a widespread conspiracy against the Roman republic with the supposed object of bringing about the cancellation of debts, and distribution of all offices of honor and emolument among the conspirators. Cicero defeated the attempt. Marc Antony (Marcus Antonius, c. 83-30 B.C.), a Roman Triumvir, and Gaius Octavian (63 B.C.-14 A.D.)—a member of the Triumvirate with Antony and Marcus Lepidus, first emperor of Rome, and founder of a Roman state that endured for centuries—were two of the most important figures during the dying days of the Roman republic.] 8 [Ed. Gaius Julius Caesar Octavian, from 31 B.C. until his death 14 A.D. presided over the Roman state after the destruction of the triumvirate. In 27 B.C. he was awarded the title Augustus, signifying his semi-divine or more than human nature, and concentrated upon reviving the Roman religion in Rome.]

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The history of the church shows that its literature springs up in its seasons of controversy with paganism, heresy, philosophy, or infidelity. When orthodoxy reigns unquestioned, and all is reduced to uniformity of opinion, literature cannot flourish. The wild crusades which rolled the hosts of Europe upon Asia, filled with a spirit of religion, adventure, and rapine, were followed by the Troubadours and Minnesingers.9 The brilliant literature of modern Italy, immortalized by the illustrious names of Dante and Tasso,10 owes its birth to the struggle to reproduce or preserve the municipal regime of republican Rome, and to the fermentation of men’s minds, which preceded and prepared the Protestant Reformation. The effort to maintain Protestantism in England, and to give it supremacy over Catholicism, is marked by the masculine literature of the age of Elizabeth. The richest portion of English literature belongs to the seventeenth century; and what is that century in England but an epoch of political and religious revolutions, defeated, effected, or adjourned? The French boast the literature of the age of Louis XIV,11 and not without reason. A literature which embraces the names of Bossuet, Fenelon, Corneille, Racine, and Moliere, not to mention others, may well justify a nation’s boast.12 But what is that age but one of decided change in the constitution of the state? With Louis XIV, ended the 9 [Ed. From the eleventh to the thirteenth century, generations of lyric poets (troubadours, from trobar, meaning to invent or find) from southern France, northern Spain and northern Italy flourished composing verses on courtly love in the Provençal dialect. Minnesingers were German poet musicians of courtly love who flourished during the twelfth and thirteenth centuries.] 10 [Ed. Dante Alighieri (1265-1321) was the father of Italian poetry and left a massive amount of literature, including the Divine Comedy, which has endured in the West. Torquato Tasso (1544-95) was also an Italian poet, author of Jerusalem Delivered, considered the greatest poem of the Counter-Reformation.] 11 [Ed. Louis XIV (1638-1715), king of France from 1643, was known as the “Sun King.” He proclaimed “L’état c’est moi,” demonstrating his view of absolute monarchy.] 12 [Ed. Jacques Bénigne Bossuet (1627-1704) was the Catholic bishop of Meaux (1681-1704), theologian, spiritual writer, and a famous orator of a series of funeral sermons delivered at the French court between 1666 and 1687. Pierre Corneille (1606-84) was a French dramatist and poet, considered the creator of French classical tragedy. His most important works were Le Cid (1637), Horace (1640), Cinna (1641), and Polyeucte (1643). Jean-Baptiste Racine (1639-99) was also a French dramatic poet, known especially for his mastery of French classical tragedy, including Andromaque (1667), Britannicus (1669), Bérénice (1679), and Bajazet (1672). Molière is the pseudonym Jean-Baptiste Poquelin (1622-73), French dramatist and perhaps the greatest of all writers of French comedies such as Tartuffe (1664), L’École des femmes (1662), and Le Misanthrope (1669).]

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feudal monarchy in France, and was constituted the imperial monarchy of Rome, a monarchy representing, not the personal rights of the barbarian chieftain, but the majesty of the state. The later literature of France belongs to the epochs in which were elaborated in the public mind the revolution of 1789 and that of 1830. French literature has declined since the present order of things has been established, and that it has not declined still more, is owing to the fact that there is still a powerful party in France struggling for another revolution. And amidst what circumstances has arisen the world-renowned literature of Germany? Surely, amidst the fierce hostility of the social and moral elements. The war of elements has manifested itself somewhat less in outward deeds in Germany than it has in France; but it has been not the less fierce on that account. Germany has felt the shock of the contending elements, which for the last three fourths of a century has shaken the world. Everybody knows this has been a period of wide and deep commotion. All that was old and hitherto deemed venerable has been arraigned; the throne, the altar, and even the state have been summoned to the bar; the people, for almost the first time since history began, have stepped upon the stage, and in rough tones demanded the right to play their part in the piece. Thrones have been subverted, dynasties have been changed, old customs abolished, new systems, new usages, and almost a new language introduced. It has been a tearful age. The timid have quaked, and the bravest have at times turned pale. The whole world has seemed loosened from its fastenings. Work of all kinds, for all heads, and all hearts, has there been. We have had kings to defend, nobilities to defend, priesthoods to defend, religion itself to defend; we have had new theories to put forth, illustrate, and reduce to practice; the whole movement party to support and urge onward, and a clear and piercing voice to utter for the poor, the friendless, and the down-trodden. All this has passed over the German mind and heart, and found its utterance in her own Teutonic tones, in a literature that the world will not willingly let die. But why proceed further in the attempt to establish, what perhaps nobody will deny, that literature comes but when it is bidden, but at those epochs when there is work to be done for the human race? In all the instances I have referred to, as well as in the many I have passed over, there were great questions at issue, grave problems up for solution, with which the minds and hearts of the multitude were busy; and the men who contributed to the literature were also busy with these questions, these problems; felt a deep and thrilling

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interest in them; were men who saw work to be done, and came forth with what skill and energy were in them to do it. This rapid survey, which I have taken of a few points in literary history, may teach us that we must not rely on our schools nor on our scholars. If we have not already created a literature, of which we need not be ashamed, it is because we have not had a work for humanity to perform which demanded a literature; and if we are to have a literature, we must have some great work to do which will need it. The great questions, which have agitated Europe since the middle of the last century, have never but partially agitated us; and so far as they have agitated us at all, they were settled by our political revolution. We secured then all that the old world has as yet contended for. We established then a republican government, which was already established in our convictions and in our habits, and we fancied that we had solved the social problem forever. The wild commotion of the old world has scarcely affected us. We have listened to the distant roar of her contending hosts with unmoved hearts and serene brows. We have stood upon the mountain, with our heads bathed in clear sunshine, and beheld the cloud below, seen the lightning flash and heard the thunder roll at our feet, with a tranquil pulse. Had we felt the same agitation that Germany felt, doubtless we should have contributed our share to the literature of the epoch. But in that fearful war we were not enlisted. We had served our campaign and were honorably discharged. But have we solved the problem forever—finished the work humanity gave us to do? And is there henceforth nothing for us but to rest from our labors and repose beneath the laurels won by our fathers? As we answer this question so must we answer the question whether there is to be an American literature. You may demand an American literature, you may give yourselves up to its creation with the generous enthusiasm of youth, and labor for it through life with unflagging zeal; but it shall be in vain, unless your country be called to perform a great and glorious work for the human race, and a work too for the successful accomplishment of which a free, rich, and living literature shall be indispensable. This is the law of Providence, and you cannot withdraw yourselves from its action. Have we then done our work? Is there nothing more for us to do? Done our work! What mean we? Has the world fulfilled its mission, and is the human race about to be annihilated? One generation cometh and another goeth, but the earth abideth forever; individuals die, but the race is immortal. When an individual has fulfilled its work it dies; all beings die, when they have nothing more to do, and

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the human race itself is immortal only on the condition that there is for it an eternal task-work. But we are yet in the infancy of the race; we have but just begun our work; why then talk of its being ended? As well might the infant that has achieved its first step and ascertained that it can walk without assistance, lie down and say there is nothing more for it to do. Eternity is before us, and the progress of the race is illimitable. Let thought stretch its pinions, soar to the highest point it can reach, and man in his upward career shall rise above it. But I need not resort to general principles to make out my case. Whoever has eyes to see or ears to hear, cannot fail to perceive that grave questions, problems of immense magnitude, are coming up among us and demanding a solution in tones which it is not in man to resist. The old world is still engaged in the old war between the plebeians and the patricians. The great struggle going on there need not indeed alarm us, for it cannot come here. That struggle has for its object on the part of the people not republicanism in the state, nor equal wealth among the members of society, but the abolition of rank, founded on birth. It has never existed with us, and, as I have said, never can; for here birth confers no distinction. The struggle which is coming up here is not between the high born and the low born, between the gentlemen and the simplemen; for, thank God, we have learned that all who are born at all are well born. It is to be a struggle between the accumulator of wealth and the simple laborer who actually produces it; briefly, a struggle between MAN and MONEY. This struggle has not yet fairly commenced in the old world, but it must come there and ultimately make the tour of the globe. In the old world, the interests of labor are, to a great extent, lost in the interests of the rich commoner, and will be, so long as the rich commoner finds an hereditary nobility above him. But here we have no hereditary nobility, no titled rank, no privileges of birth. We have established political equality, declared the lists open to all, and the prize to the swiftest runner. But we have not obtained in practice the equality we have established in theory. There are distinctions amongst us, inequalities, not without a long train of grievous evils, which an increasing party will hold to be compatible neither with the principles of our political institutions, nor with the true interests of humanity. The question has already been asked, what are the boasted advantages of a democratic government, if the people under it are to be in point of fact cursed with all the evils of social inequality? What avails it that I am declared equal to my neighbor, when in fact I am regarded by him, and by myself, and by all others, as his social infe-

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rior, when he may task my labor almost at will, and fix himself the wages he shall pay me? when, in fact, he may live in ease and luxury without labor, and I, an able-bodied man, and well skilled in all kinds of labor, can, by my simple labor, but barely keep myself and family from starving? The question has been asked, too, can a rich man, a man who has accumulated and possesses great wealth, be a good Christian? There are those among us who begin to suspect that Jesus meant something when he said, “it is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle, than for a rich man to enter the kingdom of heaven” [Matt 19:24]. There are those who ask themselves, when they see the extremes of wealth and poverty which meet us in our cities, bloated luxury and pining want side by side, if this be a Christian order of things, if indeed this order of things is to last forever? As a Christian, am I not bound to love my fellow men, even the lowest and most polluted, well enough, if need be, to die for them, as Jesus died on the cross for me? Am I then permitted to avail myself of the labors of others, so as to accumulate an immense estate; am I then permitted to live in luxury, to feast on the rarities of every clime which commerce procures me, while my brother languishes in poverty, while the poor mother at my next door is watching, pale and emaciated, over her starving boy, and the poor sempstress is prostituting herself so as not to die of famine? You will see at once that these are fearful and searching questions, such as cannot be put in a tone of solemn earnest, without shaking society to its center. Questions like these are coming up amongst us. We may deny it, may seek to suppress them, or to hush the matter up; but come they will, and come they must. It is not in my power nor in yours to suppress these questions. We may regret as much as we will that they must come, but nothing remains for us but to meet them. The whole matter of wealth and labor, of the means by which wealth is accumulated, of the relation between capitalists and laborers, of wages, which a French nobleman has pronounced “a prolonged slavery,”13 must come up, be discussed and disposed of. To my view, questions relating to this matter, are the most fearful questions which can be asked, and they seem to me to involve a revolution to which all preceding revolutions were but mere child’s play. Questions of equal magnitude have never come up for the discussion of humanity, none which go so deep or extend so far. It is not for me to say what is to be the issue of this struggle between wealth and labor, and this is neither the 13 [Ed. It is not clear to whom Brownson is referring, but it may be Félicité Robert de Lamennais, De L’esclavage moderne, 4th ed. (Paris: Pagneree, 1840), 50-52.]

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place nor the occasion on which to decide the part the philosopher, the Christian, the philanthropist, ought to take. I have not put the questions I have for the purpose of answering them. I merely point you to a war of two great social elements, describe to you its dominant traits, and say, in that war, on one side or the other, we are all to enlist, and do battle as best we may. In the struggle of these two elements, true American literature will be born. This struggle, which has already commenced, presents the conditions of its birth and its growth. We have now to solve, not the question of political equality, but the problem of social equality. This problem, if I have not wholly misconceived its magnitude and bearing, will present work for whomsoever has a hand, a head, or a heart; and in the effort to finish this work, a literature will be born before which all the literatures now extant may, perhaps, shrink into insignificance. I confess, brothers, that notwithstanding the fearful nature of the social contest I see coming on, I am not alarmed. I even behold it with the joy with which the war-horse snuffs the battle from afar. I behold it, and feel that I have not been born too early, nor too late; that there is work for me also, if I have but the skill and the courage to undertake it. And as to the result, I apprehend nothing. I have faith in principle; I have faith in humanity; above all, I have faith in God. The right side in the long run always comes up, and the cause is ultimately victorious which ought to be victorious. Truth is never vanquished; right cannot be defeated; nor humanity successfully betrayed. Onward through the ages the human race pursues its course. Kings, priests, nobles, may attempt to block up its path, but it pushes aside their feeble barriers, sweeps away their Bastilles, and passes on unobstructed through the marshaled ranks of their armed soldiery. Whoso would contribute to American literature, ought indeed to reflect deeply on the nature and wants of his own soul; ought to store his mind with the riches of ancient and modern literature and science; but he must engage in this great work, live and labor with no thought of creating a literature, but give himself up wholly to the work of solving some great problem, or of making some great moral, religious, philosophical, or social principle prevail. If in his efforts to make what he believes the right cause triumphant, he utter a true word, humanity shall catch it up and echo it through eternity. He must be an active, living man, living for his race, and striving to do its work. The discipline he needs is that which fits him to sympathize with humanity, and strengthens him to do battle in her cause. The American poet must sing for the human race; draw his inspiration

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not from Castaly, or Helicon,14 but from the human heart; and the orator must not study to turn and polish his periods, but to kindle up his countrymen, to compel them to arm and march against the enemies of freedom, truth, justice, and love. Rest easy, brothers, as to literature. Regard literature always as a means, never as an end. Early seek out a noble end to be gained; early wed yourselves to great principles; early convince yourselves that you live for man, for truth, for God, and you shall speak, write, or sing words that shall not die, but which shall be life, and life-giving. What will be the destiny of American literature, I know not, and pretend not to foretell. But this much you will permit me to say in conclusion, that God in his providence has given the American people a great problem to work out. He has given it us in charge to prove what man may be, when and where he has free and full scope to act out the almightiness that slumbers within him. Here, for the first time since history began, man has obtained an open field and fair play. Everywhere else, up to the present moment, he has been borne down by kings, priests, and nobles; the loftier aspirations of his nature have been suppressed, and the fire of his genius smothered, by unhallowed tyranny. Long, long ages has he struggled under every disadvantage; and under every disadvantage, though oft defeated, he has never despaired, or bated a jot of heart or hope,15 but always rallied himself anew with fresh courage and strength to the combat. Here, at length, he has gained the vantage ground. No longer must he struggle for very existence; no longer must he make a wall of his dead body to protect his wife and little ones. His domestic hearth is sacred, his fields are safe from the invader, and his flocks and herds may graze unmolested. He can now choose his ground. He may now abandon the attitude of defense, and assume that of attack. He has no longer to defend his right to free thought and free speech, to the possession and use of himself. Here, thank God, we have no apologies to offer for speaking out for man, for truth, for justice, for freedom, for equality. We carry the war into the enemy’s country. We summon the oppressor to judgment; the adherents to arbitrary governments, to superannuated creeds, and hoary abuses, to stand forth 14

[Ed. Castaly or Castalia was a fountain in Greece where the muses drank for inspiration. Helicon was a mountain range in Boeotia stretching from the Corinthian Gulf north to Lake Copais where the muses gained inspiration and celebrated festivals of love.] 15 [Ed. For the phrase, see John Milton, “To Mr. Cyriack Skinner upon his blindness,” lines 6-7. See The Poems of John Milton, ed. John Carey and Alastair Fowler (London: Longmans, Green, and Company, 1968), 414.

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and show cause, if they can, why sentence shall not be pronounced against them. We call upon those recreants to their race, who believe all made for one, or the many for the few, to stand forth and give us a reason for the faith they avow. Here democracy is the order of the day, the PEOPLE are the orthodox party, and to them the aristocrat must answer for his heresy. Such is the position we now occupy, such the progress we have made in working out the problem committed to us. Shall we stop here? I do not believe we shall. I do not believe that we shall prove false to our trust, or slight our work. I seem to myself to see many proofs around me that we are beginning to comprehend more fully our mission, and to prepare ourselves to engage in earnest for its execution. I see this in the wide and deep agitation of the public mind; I see it in the new parties and associations which everyday is forming; I see it in the weighty problems, moral, religious, social, political, economical, which both the learned and the unlearned are discussing; I feel it in the new spirit which has been of late breathed into American publications, and I recognize it in the increasing depth and earnestness of American writers. No; I cannot be mistaken. America will not be false to her mission. She will be true to that cause which landed our fathers on Plymouth Rock, which sustained the free mind and warm heart of Roger Williams, in which Warren fell,16 for which Washington fought, to which Franklin and Jefferson gave their lives. Sacerdocy has had its day; monarchy has had its day; nobility has had its day; and MAN, if there be justice in heaven, shall have his day. In prosecuting the work committed to us, there will arise poets, philosophers, theologians, politicians, whose wide and deep experience will find utterance in a living literature. When they will arise, how soon, or how late, I know not, ask not. And, brothers, do not ye ask. But seek ye out the work God has given your country to perform for the human race; woo it as a bride; wed yourselves to it for better or for worse; be true to it in good report and in evil, in life and in death; and though you may not write books, compose poems, or construct theories, your lives shall be books, poems, theories, which will not die, but live—live forever in the memory of your race, and, what is better, in the ever improving condition of all coming generations. 16 [Ed. Reference is probably to Joseph Warren (1741-1775), a patriotic leader of the resistance in Massachusetts during the American Revolution, who was killed at Bunker Hill.]

4. THE PEOPLE’S OWN BOOK1 Boston Quarterly Review 3 (January, 1840): 117-27

The author of this book is one of the most remarkable men of the day, and one of the ablest and most vigorous writers in the French language. He was originally a Catholic priest, and early distinguished himself as one of the most ingenious and successful defenders of the Catholic Church. His Essai sur l’indifference en Matiere de Religion, the first volume of which, if we recollect aright, was published in 1810, arrested the attention of the best thinkers and most distinguished literary men in France, and contributed not a little towards awakening an interest in the French for religious studies.2 Prior to the Revolution of July, 1830, he was generally regarded as a firm adherent to the policy of Rome, and as strongly opposed to the liberal or movement party. Since then, however, he has arranged himself on the side of the people, and exerted himself nobly in the cause of freedom both religious and political, for which he has had the high honor of being deposed by the Pope, his spiritual sovereign. The most remarkable feature in the Abbé de la Mennais’ doctrine of liberty is its connection with religion. It is well known that for some time the friends of freedom in Europe have been opposed to the church, and in general to all religion. The privileged orders have also taken great pains to make it widely believed that religion requires the support of existing abuses, and that no one can contend for social meliorations without falling into infidelity. This has created a false issue, one which M. de la Mennais rejects. He has en1

[Ed. Review of Félicité-Robert de Lamennais’ The People’s Own Book, Trans. Nathaniel Greene (Boston: Charles C. Little and James Brown, 1839).] 2 [Ed. Lamennais’ Essai in four volumes (1817-23) argued, against the promoters of the Enlightenment in France, that reason was insufficient to come to an understanding of God. Human beings learned of God first of all through tradition and human language. The early Lamennais was a French Catholic theological and philosophical traditionalist, meaning that he held to the idea that tradition and the common sense of humanity provided more certitude for an understanding of God and religion than did weak reason.] 215

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deavored, and with signal success, to show that there is no discrepancy between religion and liberty: nay, more, that Christianity offers a solid foundation for the broadest freedom, and that in order to be true to its spirit, its friends must labor with all their might to restore to the people their rights, and to correct all social abuses. He proves that all men are equal before God, and therefore equal one to another. All men have one Father, and are therefore brethren, and ought to treat one another as brothers. This is the Christian law. This law is violated, whenever distinction of races is recognized; whenever one man is clothed with authority over his equals; whenever one man, or a number of men are invested with certain privileges, which are not shared equally by the whole. As this is the case everywhere, everywhere therefore is the Christian law violated. Everywhere therefore is there suffering, lamentation. The people everywhere groan and travail in pain, sighing to be delivered from their bondage into the glorious liberty of the sons of God. To this deliverance the people have a right. For it every Christian should contend; and they wrong their brethren, deny Christianity, and blaspheme God, who oppose it. This is a new doctrine in France. It is something new since the days of the philosophers, to undertake to show that Christianity is the religion which favors not kings and privileged orders, but the people, the poor and needy, the wronged and down-trodden. Hitherto the few have made the many submit to the grievous burdens under which they groaned, by representing it as irreligious to attempt to remove them. They have enlisted the clergy on their side, and made religion, the very essence of which is justice and love, contribute to the support of oppression. They have deterred the pious from seeking to better their condition, by denouncing all who seek the melioration of society as infidels. But the Abbé has put a stop to this unhallowed proceeding. He has nobly vindicated religion and the people. He has turned the tables upon the people’s masters, and denounced their masters, not the people, as infidels. He has enlisted religion on the side of freedom; recalled that long forgotten gospel, which was glad tidings to the poor, and dared follow the example of Jesus whom the common people heard gladly, and whom the people’s masters crucified between two thieves. He speaks out for freedom, the broadest freedom, not in the tones of the infidel scoffer, but in the name of God, Christ, and man, and with the authority of a prophet. His “Words of a Believer” has had no parallel since the days of Jeremiah.3 It is at once a prophecy, a curse, a hymn, fraught with deep, terrible, 3

[Ed. The Words of a Believer (New York: DeBehr, 1834).]

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and joyful meaning. It is the doom of the tyrant, and the jubileeshout of the oppressed. We know of no work in which the true spirit of Christianity is more faithfully represented. It proclaims, “Blessed are the poor, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven” [Matt 5:3]; and woe unto the rich oppressor, the royal spoiler, the Scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites, who bind heavy burdens and lay them on men’s shoulders, while they themselves will not move them with one of their fingers. We need not say that we heartily sympathize with this doctrine, nor that we rejoice to find such a man as the Abbé de la Mennais sustaining with his fervid imagination, poetic fire, and unmatched logic, a doctrine to the promulgation and defense of which our own life has for many years been devoted. The view he takes we had also taken, and attempted to set forth; and that too when we seemed to ourselves to stand alone. We had seen the evils of society, the wrongs and outrages to which man is subject even in this land of equal rights, and we had ventured to demand reform, to labor to redress the grievances we saw; but our first and most uncompromising enemies we found in the church, among the clergy. Young and inexperienced then, we took it for granted that religion and social abuses were inseparable. We therefore rejected religion. Experience soon taught us that infidelity had no power to reform the world. We reexamined religion, read again the New Testament, sought to comprehend the Christian movement, and came at length to the conclusion that all the doctrines of Christianity harmonize with, or rather rest for their support on, the “perfect law of liberty” [James 1:25]; that Jesus came not merely to save the soul in another world, but to establish the reign of God on earth, in society not less than in the heart of the individual. Since then we have spoken in favor of reform as the believer, not in our own name, but in the name of God, of Christ, of religion; nor have we spoken in vain. Here and there a petty priest, bred up among the aristocracy, ignorant of everything pertaining to his profession, a priest after the order of Aaron, and not of the Most High God after the order of Melchizedek,4 may now and then cry out, in a waspish tone, infidel, and seek to prove that religion sanctions the degradation of the masses; but the American people are rapidly coming to the belief that religion and liberty go hand in hand; that Jesus was the prophet of the people; that he blesses the suffering, and curses those who lord it over their brethren, either in church or state.

4

[Ed. Reference is to Heb 7:11.]

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The Abbé has been denounced, has been termed an enemy to social order, a disorganizer, a furious Jacobin, and the like; but what of that? Did ever yet a man stand up and speak the truth in clear and manly tones, plead in earnest for the down-trodden masses, and demand social reforms, without being denounced? He who will be true to the spirit of Jesus, who will follow the dictates of justice and love, shall always call forth the wrath of all who profit by existing abuses, who gain their wealth, their rank, and consideration from the toil and sweat and degradation of their brethren. He shall be called a seditious fellow, an agrarian, a disorganizer, a destructive; he shall be denounced as the enemy of God and man; the people shall be cautioned against listening to his words, and God shall be importuned to blast him with a celestial curse. But what of that? Regard it not. Woe only to him whom they who fatten on their brethren praise; woe only to the favorite of the aristocracy. He of whom they speak well should ask himself, “Lord, what sin hath thy servant committed, that the wicked praise me?” The fact that the privileged orders and their whippers-in have denounced the Abbé de la Mennais is altogether in his favor, and should induce us to take up his works with the expectation of finding them remarkable for the timely utterance of great and living truths, truths which are needed to regenerate society, and raise man to the possession of his heavenly inheritance. The work before us is intended for the people, and is a brief and lucid statement of the rights and duties of man. Thomas Paine, the Deist, wrote the Rights of Man, an able production;5 but he adds nothing concerning man’s duties. The clergy generally dwell on man’s duties, but recognize not his rights. The Abbé, more Christian than either, treats both the rights and the duties of man. It is useless to talk of men’s duties before you recognize their rights. The Abbé therefore begins with a statement of man’s rights, and this he does clearly and powerfully. Rights without duty are as if they were not. I can possess and enjoy my rights only by a faithful discharge of my duties. The exposition of rights is therefore justly followed by an exposition of duties. The Abbé is a social reformer; he wishes to introduce the reign of justice and love into all the affairs of mankind. He does not believe that the numerous and weighty evils, which everywhere afflict the human race, are inevitable or irremediable. He does not believe that God has smitten the human race with a curse, and doomed it to universal and interminable wo. “The foolishness of man perverteth 5 [Ed. The deist Thomas Paine (1737-1809) wrote the Rights of Man (1791, 1792) in response to Edmund Burke’s Reflections on the French Revolution.]

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his way, and his heart fretteth against the Lord” [Prov 19:3]. God is love; a kind and munificent father, who makes ample provision for all his children. There is room on the earth for all, and there is enough produced for the comfort of all. But man perverts the order of God, and distributes His gifts without regard to justice or love. Shall it be always so? “Is this vast multitude destined to run through the circle of the same sorrows forever? Has it nothing to hope from the future? Upon all points of the route traced for it through the tide of time, shall there never escape from its bosom but the same heart-rending cry of distress? Is there any intrinsic or extrinsic fatal necessity which forbids all improvement of its condition, even to the end? Has our Heavenly Father willed that its sufferings should be eternal? “Believe it not; the thought is blasphemy. “The ways of God are ways of love. Men receive from him not the evils that afflict his poor creatures, but the blessings which he showers upon them in profusion. “The softened air which animates them in spring is his breath, and the refreshing dews of summer descend from him. “The few say; You are destined to misery from your birth; here below, your life is only suffering, and cannot be otherwise. But your sufferings, it is they who make them; and, because they have founded their own good upon the evil of the many, they would persuade these that their misery is irremediable, and that a simple effort to escape from it is an attempt equally criminal and insensate. “Listen not to these deceitful words. The perfect felicity, to which every human being aspires, is not, it is true, of this world. You pass through it for the attainment of an end, for the fulfillment of duties, for the accomplishment of a work; repose is beyond, and now is the time for labor. This labor, however, according to the design of Him who imposes it, is not a continual chastisement to be undergone; but, so far as the effort which it necessitates will permit, a real though mingled good, a commencement of that joy the plenitude of which is its term. “We are like the ploughman who sows in the spring, and gathers only in autumn. But has he no pleasure in his toil, and does not contentment germinate with hope in his furrows? “The misery, which you are told is irremediable, it is on the contrary your duty to remedy. And since the obstacle is not in the laws of nature but in those of men, you can do it when you will; for they who erroneously suppose it to be their interest to hinder you, what are they in your hands? What is their power? You are a hundred against one of them.

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“How can you wonder that you have hitherto reaped so little of the fruit of your efforts? You have in your hands that which overturns, you have not in your hearts that which builds up and establishes. Justice has sometimes failed you, charity always. “You had to defend your rights; you, or the few in your name, have often attacked the rights of others. You had to establish fraternity on the earth, the reign of God, the reign of love; instead of that, each one has thought only of himself, and each one has had only his own proper interest in view. Hatred and envy have animated you. Search your hearts, and most of you will find there this secret thought: ‘I labor and suffer; such an one is indolent and satiated with enjoyments. Why he, rather than I?’ And your greatest desire is to be in his place, to live like him, and act like him. “Now, that would not be to destroy the evil, but to perpetuate it. The evil is in the injustice, and not in that it is this one rather than that one who profits by the injustice. “Would you succeed? Accomplish good ends by good means. Confound not the power that is guided by justice and charity with brutal and ferocious violence. “Would you succeed? Think of your brethren as much as of yourselves. Let their cause be your cause, their good your good, their evil your evil. See and feel not only for yourselves but for them. Let your indifference be transformed into profound sympathy, and your selfishness into generous devotion. You will then no longer remain isolated individuals, with whom a few who are better united will do what they please. You will become one and when you are one you will be all; and who will then dare to interpose between you and the end you would attain? Isolated at present, because each one is occupied only with himself, with his own personal objects, you are made to oppose each other, and are mastered one by the other; when you shall have but one interest, one will, one common action, where is the power that can vanquish you? “But comprehend well your task, or you will always fail. “It is not in your power, individually, to better your destiny; for the mass will still continue in a state of equal suffering, and the world remain unchanged. Good and evil will still subsist in the same proportions; they will only be differently distributed, with regard to persons. “One will mount, another descend, and that will be all. “The object is not to substitute one domination for another. Of what consequence is it who bears sway? All domination implies separate classes, consequently privileges, consequently conflicting inter-

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ests, and, by virtue of the laws made by the privileged classes to secure the advantages of their superior position, the sacrifice of the many to the few. The people are as the manure of the earth where they take root. “Behold your task, it is great. It is to form the universal family, to build the city of God, and, progressively, by unceasing effort, to realize his work in humanity. “When, loving each other like brothers, you mutually treat each other like brothers; when each one, seeking his own in the common good, is always ready to devote himself for all the members of the common family, who are in turn equally ready to devote themselves for him; then, most of the evils under the weight of which the human race now groans, will disappear, as the mists of morning are dissipated at the rising of the sun. And thus will God’s will be accomplished, for it is his will that love, gradually, and ever more and more intimately uniting the scattered elements of humanity, and organizing them in one sole body, should cause them to become one as He himself is one.”6 Here is the end at which the people should aim. But without a knowledge of the means necessary to gain it, their labors will be fruitless. Poor, weary travelers, desiring to reach a habitation for the night, must learn the way. “Many speak to you only of your duties; others speak to you only of your rights. This is dangerously to separate what is in fact inseparable. You should know both your duties and your rights, that you may perform the one and defend the other. Otherwise you will never escape from your misery. “Right and duty are like two palm-trees, which bear fruit only when growing side by side. “Your right is you, your liberty, your life. “Can it be that each one has not the right of living, the right of preserving that which he holds from God? “Can it be that each one has not the right uninterruptedly to develop and employ his corporeal and spiritual faculties, to provide for his wants, to meliorate his condition, to rise more and more from the condition of the brute, and be ever approaching nearer to God? “Can anyone justly retain a poor human being in ignorance and in misery, in deprivation and abasement, when his efforts for escape are hurtful to none, or hurtful to those only, who found their wellbeing on iniquity by founding it on the misfortunes of others? 6

[Ed. The People’s Own Book, 29-37.]

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“The anger of these bad men, when the weak shake off the chains that bind them, is it not the anger of the ferocious beast with its struggling victim? And their complaints, are they not the complaints of the vulture at the escape of its prey? “Now, what is true of one is true of all. All ought to live, all ought to enjoy a lawful liberty of action, all ought to accomplish their end by an incessant development and perfecting of themselves. People ought then mutually to respect the rights of each other, and it is there where duty, justice, commences. “But justice suffices not for the wants of humanity. Each one under his own government does indeed fully enjoy his rights; but he remains isolated in the world, deprived of the succor and aid necessary to all. Does a man want bread, they would say; let him seek it; do I prevent him? I have taken nothing that belonged to him; each one to himself and each one for himself. They would repeat the words of Cain: ‘Am I my brother’s keeper?’ The widow, the orphan, the sick, the feeble, would be abandoned; no reciprocal support, no disinterested kindness; everywhere selfishness and indifference; no more of genuine relations, no more sharing of joys or sorrows, no more of common feeling. Life, retired to the center of each heart, would be consumed in solitude, like a lamp in a tomb, which shines only upon the ruins of man; for a man without heart, compassion, sympathy, love, what is he but a moving corpse? “And since we have need of each other for mutual support, like frail plants which are agitated and bent by the slightest winds, since mankind would perish without a mutual communication of the goods individually possessed by virtue of the law of justice, another law is necessary for the preservation of the human race; and that law is CHARITY. Charity, which forms a single living body of the scattered members of humanity, is the consummation of duty, of which the foundation is justice. “What would a man be, deprived of all liberty on earth, who could neither go, nor come, nor act, but as another commanded or permitted? What would an entire people be, reduced to this condition? The savage beasts live happier and less degraded in the bosom of their forests. “Moreover, what would a man be, selfishly concentrated within himself, neither directly injuring nor serving any one, dreaming only of himself, living only for himself? What can a people be, composed of unconnected individuals, where no one sympathizes with the misfortunes of others, nor feels himself obliged to aid or assist his fellow creatures; where all interchange of services is but a calculation of

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interest; where the groan of suffering, the lamentation of grief, the sob of distress, the cry of hunger, evaporate in the air as unmeaning sounds; where no blessings are diffused by a secret impulsion of that love which alone knows what it is to possess, because it enjoys only that which it gives? “This people, like the scattered grains abandoned upon the ground after the harvest has been gathered, would soon rot in the dirt, if it were not swept away by one of those tempests, which God has ordered occasionally to pass over the world for its purification. “It is right that frees, but it is duty that unites; the union of the two is life, and their perfect union is perfect life.”7 These extracts show the spirit of the work and suggest its principal doctrines. We should be glad, had we room, to make one other extract, exhibiting the manner in which the Abbé views religion, but must be content to refer to the book itself. After what we have said, and the extracts we have made, we need not commend the book to our readers. It should be the pocket companion of every citizen of the Republic. It should lie on the table with the Bible, Pilgrim’s Progress, and the Psalm Book;8 and if the Board of Education wish to escape utter damnation, they will obtain leave to make it a volume in their Common School Library. It only remains for us to return our thanks to the translator9 for giving this work to our community in an English dress. He could not have employed more profitably the few hours for study he is able to snatch from his official duties. The work is a public benefit. And let us add, the translation is among our finest specimens of translation from the French. The translator has entered into the heart of his author, and sympathized entirely with his spirit; and his version is beautiful and accurate, not unworthy of the original. We subjoin the note with which he introduces it. “The problem of man’s existence, its conditions, the rights resulting from those conditions, and the duties involved, is now com7

[Ed. Ibid., 41-46.] [Ed. References are to John Bunyan’s (1628-99) The Pilgrim’s Progress (1678, 1674), a kind of diary of a soul struggling against evil in the journey of salvation. The Massachusetts’ Bay Psalm Book (1640), a metrical version of the Psalms, was the first book printed in the American colonies. It was the work of Congregationalist Puritans.] 9 [Ed. Nathaniel Greene (1797-1877) was the translator. Greene was also an editor, a Jacksonian Democratic politician, and the Boston postmaster from 1829 to 1841 and from 1844 to 1849. Born in New Hampshire, Greene had an affinity with Brownson during the days of high Jacksonian Democracy in Massachusetts.] 8

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manding the attention due to its importance. We see humanity, not as it originally came from the hands of its Creator, but such as the events of thousands of years have made it. We mistake habit for nature, and lose the power of distinguishing between the natural and the artificial. It is desirable to recover and to exercise this power; to analyze man, society; to ascertain the original condition of the one, and trace the history of the other; to ascertain the rights and duties of the one, and the origin, objects, and legitimate powers of the other. While seeking for light upon these and kindred questions, accident threw in my way “Le Livre du Peuple,” by the celebrated Abbé de la Mennais, and it occurred to me that a translation might be beneficial to those whose minds are exercised on these subjects. Although more particularly addressed to the people of Europe, who are now suffering many evils and oppressions from which we have happily escaped, it nevertheless contains much that is applicable to every people in every age; and with the hope that it may be useful, if not in teaching rights, at least in exciting to the performance of duties, this volume is respectfully commended to his fellow citizens by—THE TRANSLATOR.”10

10

[Ed. The People’s Own Book, 3-5.]

5. AN ORATION BEFORE THE DEMOCRACY OF WORCESTER1 Friends and Fellow Citizens: We cannot assemble on this day without lively emotion. Too many associations cluster around it and it marks an epoch too important in the annals of our race for us to meet its yearly return with indifference. We hail it as the birthday of our Republic; we also hail it as the birthday of freedom to the long oppressed and down-trodden masses. The story of the American Revolution has often been told; and the praises of those to whose wisdom, foresight, bravery, and selfsacrifice we owe it that we are a free people, have not remained unsung. The story is full of interest, but as a mere story it may be matched elsewhere; and the prominent actors in the struggle which resulted in our political independence, though seldom surpassed in the nobler deeds and nobler qualities of men, have been equalled, and may be again. They, and the special events in which they took their part, viewed simply as individuals, and as particular events, shrink into insignificance before the sublime cause which was then at stake; before the American Revolution regarded in its place in universal history, and in its bearing on the future progress of mankind. In truth, only those events are worthy of commemoration, which concern universal humanity, and which therefore have a place in universal history. Whatever is purely individual passes away and leaves no trace; what concerns merely an individual people, is temporary and local in its nature, and is therefore without power to touch the universal heart. Individuals die; nations die; but the race is immortal; and individuals and nations become worthy of consideration only as they contribute to the life and growth of the race. Our Revolution, did it mark merely the political independence of the colonies on the mother country, and the establishment of a national government for themselves, might indeed have its interest for us, American citizens; 1 [Ed. An Oration before the Democracy of Worcester and Vicinity, Delivered at Worcester, Mass., July 4, 1840 (Boston: E. Littlefield, 1840; Worcester: M. D. Phillips, 1840).] 225

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but it would be without a place in the history of mankind, and could call forth little enthusiasm from the philosopher or the philanthropist. Its importance arises from the fact that far other interests than those of a few colonists and their descendants, were in question, from the fact that, in the Providential chain of events, the American Revolution was a revolution for the race. The question of American Independence on England was of course debated and decided in our Revolution; but there was also debated, and, to the eye of the philosopher decided, a question of far graver import, and of far more thrilling interest. In the debate between the colonists and the mother country, entire humanity mingled. Man’s whole future was there under discussion, and on the issue of that debate, it depended whether the human race should be held back in endless thrall, hopeless bondage; or be suffered to continue its line of march through the ages to the completion of its destiny. The whole question of modern civilization was there and every success gained by the American forces over the British was a success gained to civilization itself. Here is wherefore we have a right to commemorate this day; and wherefore we exult in its clustering associations, its thrilling incidents, its proud recollections, without subjecting ourselves to the charge of national prejudice, or of national vanity. We meet as American citizens, it is true; but we meet, also, as men, and it is even more as men than as citizens that we exult. We commemorate the triumph of the colonists over transatlantic tyranny; we commemorate also one of the proudest of time’s victories for humanity. But what was the cause, what was the question debated in our revolution? What was the victory then gained to civilization? We comprehend not the American Revolution, we grasp not its real meaning till we are able to answer these and all similar questions; not indeed till we can separate it from the special controversy between the colonists and the king and parliament of Great Britain, and view it in its bearings on the general progress of the race. Humanity may be viewed as a vast collective being with a life and a growth of its own, in some sense, independent of the individuals who compose it. Without individuals there would, of course, be no race; but he who can see in the human race only individuals, has no reason to applaud himself for the keenness or extent of his vision. There is man as well as men, and the life and progress of men, become to us matters of interest only as they are subsidiary to the life and progress of man.

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Humanity viewed as a vast collective being, has a life and a growth of its own, and strictly analogous to the life and growth of individuals. It has its infancy, youth, adolescence, manhood and mature age. These are the successive stages in its career of civilization; and mark its progress towards the fulfillment of its destiny in time and space. The infancy of the race is the savage state. In this state man contains the elements of all he can ever become; but contains them undeveloped and for the most part inoperative. The savage state is that of mere individuality. It embosoms indeed, the elements of society, but not society itself. Each individual is his own center; a whole in himself, and not a member of the community. He fishes, hunts, makes war on his own account; not in subordination to a life, to interests and wants paramount to his own. His state, therefore, cannot be the definitive state of man for the simple reason that it gives little or no scope to two essential and indestructible elements of human nature, the moral and the social. Man is created with a conscience. He is by his very constitution placed under law, made accountable to a power above himself. He may do, not what he will, but what he has the RIGHT to do. He makes progress only in proportion as this moral law, the law of eternal justice, becomes more and more clear and precise to his understanding, and able to exert more and more influence over his heart. The priest seizes upon this element of man’s nature, possesses himself of it as his patrimony; and by its aid founds theocracy, which is the first step humanity takes in its career of civilization. The priesthood, by the force of the moral element, or of conscience, curbs the wild freedom of the savage, and breaks down his proud individuality. It brings him under a moral rule, a dominion foreign to himself; in theory that of the Divinity; in practice that of the priesthood, which in the end proves to be the worst of all possible tyrannies, for it enslaves the soul as well as the body. But man is not a moral being only. He has a conscience; he has also a heart, affections which bind him to his kind, as well as a moral sense which gives him a relation to his Maker. He is not made to be alone. Alone, he can never attain to manhood, comprehend aught of the deep mysteries of his being, or fulfil his destiny. He is made capable of loving; and he is never man in the full significance of the term, till he has loved, and with a love that can triumph over time and all its mutations; over pain, sickness, sorrow, and the grave; and bloom in immortal beauty where all else has become withered and dry. Love unites Adam to Eve, and Eve to Adam; and from all-creating love proceeds the family, then society, and then the state. Society

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is the creation of love. Love is its source, its basis, and its cement. On this element of our nature, under certain of its aspects, seizes the politician, and founds the city or state, civil society, or the body politic. The state once constituted, breaks down theocracy, upheld by the priests, as theocracy had broken down the individuality of the savage. The Israelites, weary of the priestly domination, demand a king, and Samuel is forced to anoint to the regal office, Saul, the son of Kish—not a priest, but a mule-driver.2 The savage state gives predominance to the element of individual freedom and this constitutes its glory; but it gives little scope for the display of the moral and social elements of human nature and this is its condemnation. Giving no scope to these, it admits of no common bond, no union, no co-operation and, consequently no progress. The savage state is not a progressive state. Savages accomplish nothing. Ages pass away and leave them as they were. Three thousand years have effected no improvement in the condition of the savage tribes, for instance, bordering on the Persian Gulf, and the description of them by the companions of Alexander, answers for them today, as well as on the day it was written. Theocracy, which succeeds universally to the savage state, and constitutes the first epoch in the civilization of the race, accepts the moral element of human nature, and seeks to govern by virtue of ideas of right and wrong, of holy and unholy; but it breaks down the element of individuality, deprives the individual of all freedom, and establishes the heaviest of all despotisms. It also neglects the social nature. It smites the affections, or declares their indulgence sinful, unless first sanctioned by the priest. The state is but feeble, scarcely constituted, and wholly under the control of the priesthood. The individual counts for nothing in his own eyes, and therefore can count for nothing in the eyes of his brother. The race is completely subjugated, and enslaved, body and soul, individually and socially. The political order, as we see it in Greece and Rome, accepts the social element, but makes too little account of the moral and individual. It emancipates the state, but not the individual; recognizes the rights of the city, but not the rights of man. For the rights of man, it gives us franchises and privileges. The state is held to be supreme. It assumes to regulate morals and opinions, and tolerates the priesthood only as one of its functionaries. In theory it has a right to do whatever it will, and the individual has no rights of his own which he may allege to stay its action. He is, therefore, enslaved to 2

[Ed. Reference is to 1 Sam 8:1-10:8.]

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the state in like manner as under the theocratic rule, he had been to the priesthood. Liberty, in the broad sense of modern civilization, is unknown. A Roman orator apostrophizes liberty, it is true; but it is the liberty of the Roman citizen, not of man, a liberty held as a grant from the city and revocable at will; not a liberty held by virtue of his nature and endowments as a human being. Hence slavery is regarded as no anomaly; and in the freest and palmiest days of Greece and Rome, the slaves by far outnumber the freemen. Here are the elements which must enter into every civilization worthy of the name; and must so enter as to preserve each its individuality, and yet be so blended as to form but a single whole. The true civilization of man, the beau ideal of that civilization after which humanity struggles, and to which it will one day attain, is that in which the individual element exists in all the force of the savage state, the moral in all the force of the theocratic, and the social in all the force of the political. Man is every where individually as free as the savage, as submissive to moral laws as theocracy enjoins, and as closely wedded to social order, to the community, as the state commands. This is the ideal of that civilization to which we should aspire. As yet a civilization embracing these three elements, in both their severalty and their union, has, so far as history teaches, nowhere been realized. Over the greater part of the Asiatic world, the theocratic power was early established, and continues even to this day; and of the degraded condition of the great mass of the people, it is not necessary to speak. The political order first obtained in ancient Greece, and rose to its highest glory under the sway of imperial Rome. But Greece and Rome have passed away. The northern barbarians overran their territory, broke down their political rule, and prepared the European soil for a new order of civilization. With the destruction of the Roman empire, commences a new order of civilization, the Christian civilization. This order accepts the three elements enumerated, and seeks to give to each its appropriate sphere and combine them all into a uniform and harmonious whole. As yet, it is in its infancy, at least far from having attained its full growth; but it embosoms the germs of a perfect civilization, and possesses the necessary vitality and warmth to continue their development till they have attained their full growth. The three elements, we have found, are all embraced by the order of civilization to which we belong. The element of individuality was introduced by the northern barbarians, and is found represented in modern history by the feudal baron. The moral element was introduced by Christianity, and has been represented by the church. The

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political element has been perpetuated from imperial Rome, first under the form of imperial monarchy, representing the majesty of the state; and second, under that of the communes, towns, whence the commons, continuing the municipal regime of Republican Rome, and representing the majesty of society, or as we say in this country, the majesty of the people. But though these elements all exist in modern civilization and constitute it, they have as yet existed only as separate, and, generally, as hostile powers. Each has struggled for exclusive dominion; and their struggle constitutes the life of modern society, and the subject matter of its history. The moral power, represented by the church, struggled to re-establish theocracy, and seemed for a time likely to succeed. But it reached its culminating point under Gregory VII3 and has since declined. Individuality triumphed for a time in the feudal regime, but at length succumbed to the combined forces of the monarch and the commons. Imperial monarchy tried to become supreme, but abdicated with Charles V of Germany, and was beheaded in the persons of Charles Stuart of England, and Louis Capet of France.4 The commons, representing the majesty of society, tried their hand at empire, but were defeated in the dissolution of the Long Parliament, by Cromwell, and forced to a compromise, in what Englishmen call the Revolution of 1688.5 No one has succeeded, no one has been destroyed; but their union remains to be effected. The exclusive triumph of any one of these elements would have failed to secure to man his rights, or that social order his nature demands. Individuality as represented by the Feudal Baron, had it triumphed, would have led us back to the savage, and proved the destruction of all social order and of all moral order. If the church had gained absolute ascendancy, it would not have been the ascendancy of moral ideas, but of the priesthood. The commons, whether as we 3

[Ed. Gregory VII (c. 1015-85) was pope from 1073 to 1085.] [Ed. Charles V (1500-58) was elected emperor in 1519 and thereafter became the most powerful man in Europe, but abdicated in 1556 because of conflicts surrounding the Protestant Reformation. Charles Stuart (1600-49), king of England (1625-49) was executed for “high treason” during the Civil War in England. Louis XVI (1754-93), king of France (1774-93), was executed during the French Revolution.] 5 [Ed. The Long Parliament (1640-60) ruled in England during and after the Civil War, but the army leader and Lord Protector Oliver Cromwell (1599-1658) in 1653 expelled the Rump Parliament (i.e., the radical members of the Long Parliament who had executed Charles I) because they had not reformed church and state. The Glorious Revolution of 1688 resulted in the abdication of James II (16341701), king of England (1685-88), and the succession of William III and Mary II.] 4

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see them in the free towns of Germany, and the Low Countries, in the South of France, and the Republics of Italy, or again as effecting the English Revolution in the seventeenth century, or the French in the eighteenth, had they triumphed, would by no means have realized true freedom for man. The parliament of Great Britain succeeded to all the powers and prerogatives of Charles Stuart, whom it had beheaded. The powers it wrested from the monarchy, it claimed for itself as a political body, not for the people as individuals; consequently, the people, as individuals, were no more free under the Commonwealth than they were under the monarchy. France, in her revolution attempted more, and went farther; but in the only political constitution she framed worthy of much consideration, the supremacy of the state was virtually preserved, and the rights of man as man, in contradistinction from the rights of the citizen, were by no means secured. The French Revolution is supposed to have failed, because it went too far in the path of freedom; future historians will, perhaps, contend that it failed because it went not far enough, stopped short of the goal, and shrunk from enfranchising the proletary as well as the burgher. If we study the feudal society, we shall find that in the epoch of its greatest prosperity, it constituted but a small portion of the whole population of the country. Grant, then, that the feudal baron was a man, in the proper condition of a man, all below him must be below that condition. In sustaining, then, the feudal society, only a few individuals were sustained in their rights as men; and nothing was done for the great mass of the population. The great mass were necessarily left out of their proper condition as men, and far below their true rank as human beings. The commons, by which we understand the people, were at first regarded as an inferior race, as ignoble. Whatever their talents, industry, wealth, they could not claim equality with the feudal society, and were perpetually subject to be harassed and trampled upon by the military barons and their retainers. Their success could therefore be secured only by organization; and their admission into the government must necessarily be as an organized body, as an order, or an estate. As an estate, the Third Estate, we find them at an early period admitted into the States General of France, and Parliament of England. The French Revolution was a revolution in favor of the Third Estate. The present king of France is the King of the Third Estate, a burgher-king, citizen-king, as he is called.6 The revolution in En6 [Ed. Reference is to Louis Philippe (1773-1850), king of France from 1830 until the Revolution of 1848 when he abdicated.]

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gland, in the 17th century, was also a revolution in favor of the commons, or the burgher class, and the political equality of this class with the feudal society was confirmed by the compromise of 1688. But in gaining political equality in either France or England, for the burgher class, as a class, it by no means followed that the political equality of the individuals who composed it was secured. This class is composed of traders, manufacturers, and artisans; but though it has, as an estate, as an order, as a body corporate, risen to its true elevation in the body politic, the great mass of the individuals of whom it is composed, remain to this day in both England and France, without political significance, and far below the true rank of men. Again, the feudal society, under another aspect represents the power or sovereignty which is supposed to be attached to the soil, to territory. Now, if we give absolute dominion to this society, constituted as it is throughout all Europe, we shall be very far from freeing the whole agricultural population. We shall free only the proprietors; but not the actual cultivators. Consequently we shall be far from restoring to every man the individual freedom which belongs to him. The feudal society, or nobility, represents landed capital. This at the commencement of modern society is the only capital which possesses political importance. The possessors of this capital are the only portion of the population which has a right to political power. The King is suzerain or lord paramount because he is the greatest landholder. Now, so long as this was the case, capital invested in trade, in manufactures, was without political importance; and, unrepresented in the state, it was without power to protect itself. It was, therefore, insecure, and constantly exposed to encroachments from the possessors of landed capital. It is the vague tradition of this insecurity to capital employed in trade that makes our business men even yet so timid in regard to the tenure of property, and so ready to see in the slightest movements of the laboring classes an attack on the rights of property or the possessions of the rich. Property employed in trade was once insecure, and the chiefs of industry were liable to be robbed; but not, as they would now fain make us believe, or as they may, through their ignorance of history, themselves believe, by the working men, the laboring poor; for these in no age, in no country of the world, have ever been known to strike at the rights of property, or to manifest a disposition to encroach on the possessions of the rich. No: the insecurity to property was on the other side; and its owners were despoiled, not by the poor laborer, but by military knights and barons, the feudal nobility.

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The first great struggle of modern society was therefore to protect what I may term commercial, or business capital, against landed capital; merchants, traders, manufacturers, artisans, against the owners of the soil, the great landed nobility. This struggle lasts from the twelfth century to nearly the close of the seventeenth, to the great Whig revolution in England, in 1688. The triumph of the English Whigs was the triumph of capital employed in business over that invested in land. The Whigs were the merchants, the traders, the manufacturers, the bankers, the fund-holders, and stock-jobbers. They chartered, against the earnest opposition of the Tories, the Bank of England; they sustained the East India Company in its monopoly, and in a word supported for England in the early part of the eighteenth century, precisely that policy which American Whigs advocate for this country, in the middle of the nineteenth; that is to say, more than one hundred years after the progress of events has superannuated it. The English Whigs, however, succeeded in raising commercial capital to an equality with landed capital, and, therefore, the burgher class, politically, to an equality with the feudal nobility. They gained then all the protection needed for this portion of the general capital of the community, long before the epoch of our Revolution. Taking our stand now at the general peace of Europe in 1767, we may say that the progress of modern society had by turns developed each element of modern civilization, and established a compromise between them; that it had brought up the commons or burgher class to a political equality, as an estate, with the nobility, and placed commercial, manufacturing, or business capital, on an equal footing, to say the least, with landed capital. So much had been effected to realize the ideal of modern civilization. Two things remained to [be] done. First, to base the political organization on the great principles of immutable justice, piety and love, represented by the church, and to make them the basis of all governmental measures and enactments; and secondly, to realize in the case of each individual man, in perfect harmony with the moral and social elements of his nature, that individual freedom and independence, of which theocracy and the state had formerly deprived him. In other words, to bring up to a level with the great landed proprietor, each agricultural laborer; and with the merchant, manufacturer, and mechanical employer, each operative employed in trade, manufactures, or the mechanic arts. That is to say, the whole population, which at the time, in wealth, position, and attainments, ranked below the chiefs of the burgher class, and the owners of the soil. Or still again, to establish a perfect equality, not of class with class, but

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of man with man. To bring up not merely the laboring class, as a class, but each individual laborer, so that all should stand up with their feet on the same level; on the common level of humanity, so that every man should be a man, nothing more and nothing less. This was the great work to be done for civilization at the opening of our Revolution. The mission of this country is to emancipate labor, and to raise up the individual laborer to the level of a man. Our Revolution I regard, therefore, as the taking possession of this field for the performance of this work. The most that England could do was to raise up the commons, as an estate, and secure equality to the chiefs of the industrial society with the landed nobility. Had we remained politically connected with her, we could have advanced no further. We could only have followed out the policy of the English Whigs, and given commercial capital a supremacy over landed capital, and made our farmers and our whole agricultural population subordinate to our business population; we could, in short, only have done what our American Whigs are at present trying to do. We could not then have contributed aught to the great work of civilization. We should have had no mission of our own, no work to perform for humanity, and, consequently no place in her history. This work could not have been performed in the old world; for there society was monopolized by the few. Old institutions, prejudices and traditions must effectually oppose it. Nobility, whether landed or commercial, must war against it. It could be effected only on a virgin soul,7 where the soil should be divided among the great mass of the population, and not held by a few overgrown proprietors; where the plough should be in the hand of its owner, as one of your own sons has said with equal truth and eloquence; where the field of industry should be open to all, and the means of rising to independence placed in the hands of all. In Europe there was old hereditary monarchy to batter down, hereditary nobility to root out, church establishments to break up, and the ignorance of the great mass of the population to dispel, all matters surpassing the strength of the laborer and in opposition to the interests, or supposed interests, of all others. Nothing could be done there. Labor must be elevated elsewhere, and attain its rank on another soil. This other soil was the new world, which Providence had long held in reserve, and which was opened to the race just at the moment when in the progress of events it had become necessary. Our Revolution which severed the bonds which bound us to England, gave us the free control of this 7

[Ed. A misprint. Brownson means “soil.”]

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new world, placed us in possession of the field in which to perform the new work demanded by modern civilization. Hence it is that I said our Revolution was a revolution for the race, a revolution not merely for the benefit of the colonists, but for civilization itself. We may now seize the meaning of the American Revolution. What was the grand idea it involved? It was a Revolution not in favor of the priesthood, nor of the state; not in favor of this class or of that; not in favor of feudal nobility, nor of the new commercial nobility; but in favor of man universally—of man, who was to be advanced by raising up each individual laborer to the rank of a man, so that he should stand up an equal among men, with a manly spirit and a manly bearing. In effecting the American Revolution, our fathers pledged themselves to this work; in honoring their memories, and in accepting the Revolution, we in our turn pledge ourselves to this work, solemnly assure the old world and the new that we are consecrated, soul and body, to the noble mission of making every laborer a free man; an equal to every other member of the community, so that justice shall be established on the earth, and equality henceforth universally reign between man and man.8 If I have succeeded thus far in conveying to your minds, fellow citizens, the idea I have in my own mind, I have given you the sense of the American Revolution, and a clear statement of the great mission our country is charged to execute for mankind. Now as American statesmen or as American citizens, we should keep this work ever in view. It is the standard by which we should try the merit of all parties and measures. Knowing now what there is to be done, what we are to aim at, we know how to decide what party is the true American party, and what measures are warranted by American principles. I have, as you will now perceive, had constantly in my mind, even in giving you this historical and philosophical account of civilization in general, the practical questions of the day. My aim has been 8

This word equality has a frightful meaning for many good folks. Although I mean much by it, I am far from meaning that all men must become of exactly the same size in mind, in body, or in possessions. What I oppose is not the natural diversity there may be between man and man, but the artificial inequality which has been introduced. I complain not that another man is taller than I am; but I am by no means willing that a man, short by nature, should contrive to stand with his feet on my shoulders, and then look round on the multitude and exclaim, “See how tall I am!” What I demand is that all men stand with their feet on the same level, and each one pass for what he is. If, when standing up by my side, with your feet on the same level with mine, you are taller than I, by the head and shoulders, why thank God for your height, I shall not murmur.

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to get at the principles which should govern the American statesman. America, in the disposition of events, by Providence, has received a great work to perform, a work for universal civilization, a work in which the whole human race is interested. This work her statesmen are bound to consult, and their worth arises solely from their ability to perform it, and of their fidelity to it. You and I, fellow citizens, hold today the place of judges. We constitute the tribunal before which the candidates for office must plead; and important is it that we understand what we should demand of those who seek to be entrusted with power: that we know what is the end the statesman should aim at, so that we may know whether the candidates are or are not worthy of our suffrages. It matters little who are the men, viewed simply as individuals, who may be placed at the head of affairs; but if this country have a mission and a destiny, there must be for it a true policy and a false. But which is the true policy, and which the false, we can determine only by determining what is the work given us to accomplish. What might be true public policy at one epoch in the progress of society, and in one country, may be false and mischievous in another; because the end to be gained is different. At one time, in European countries, it is undoubtedly the true policy to raise up the business community, to protect business capital against the overwhelming influence of landed capital. But when the burgher class has become the equal of the feudal, the business community the peer of the nobility, then the strengthening of business capital, the multiplication of its facilities and safeguards, ceases to be the legitimate policy. The good contemplated by that policy is already gained, and its continuance can therefore be productive only of evil. The policy of the English Whigs under Queen Ann,9 and at the accession of the House of Brunswick to the British throne, was, undoubtedly, to a great extent, the policy demanded for the advancement of modern civilization. It was the only policy which could effectually break down the old landed aristocracy, and refute the old notion that none but a freeholder ought to be entrusted with the right of suffrage; in other words, the notion that sovereignty is an incident of territory or land, and not of humanity. The importance given to commerce and manufactures, to capitalists engaged in these pursuits, was the only remedy then practicable, for the evils transmitted from the feudal ages. The support, the special support, of 9 [Ed. Anne Stuart (1665-1715), queen of England (1702-15), was the second daughter of James II.]

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merchants, manufacturers, bankers, fund-holders, stock-jobbers even, was then demanded by humanity, and was the only means at hand of advancing society. But when the feudal society is humbled, and territorial rights abolished, when real estate no longer possesses any undue advantages over personal or moveable, when the work to be done is not to protect the business community against the proprietors of the soil; but that of elevating the proletary, rather than the burgher, the employed, rather than the employer; in a word, each individual of the whole class of workingmen, then this policy loses its legitimacy, and ceases to be in harmony with the new wants of the times, with the new interests of humanity which the progress of events has developed. Here then we may see which of the two parties now dividing our country is deserving of our support; which of these parties supports a policy in harmony with the great work we have already determined to be the work assigned by Providence to the American people. The American Whig policy is unquestionably the same in substance with the policy of the old English Whigs. Our American Whigs proceed on the ground that America is England, and on the ground, too, that the world has stood still for the last one hundred and fifty years. The great events which have transpired since 1688, have, in their estimation, changed nothing, for the simple reason, it may be presumed, that they themselves during this long period have learned nothing. They belong to that unfortunate class of mortals whose faces are on the back sides of their heads, and who, therefore, have no power of seeing what is before them. Go back to the foundation of your government, and you see at once that their policy is that of the English Whigs. Alexander Hamilton was a great man, and no doubt a sincere patriot; but his policy was to found government mainly for the protection of capital, and especially of business capital. When he came into the government as Secretary of the Treasury, his avowed policy was to favor the business portion of the community. He labored to foster the banks, and to create, for the protection of the government, an army of fundholders and stock-jobbers, who should be specially interested in sustaining it. He seems always to proceed on the ground that the great study of the statesman should be to protect the government against the people. This, according to him, can be done only by giving to the business community a special interest in the government. This is the key to the whole system of Hamiltonian politics. How had England sustained herself against the crown and aristocracy? Assuredly by raising up a commercial nobility and by lend-

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ing the patronage of the government to the chiefs of industry. The same, said Hamilton, must be done here; without reflecting that here there were no crown and landed nobility to guard against, and without its entering his head, that it might be precisely against this business community that the people might need to be protected. This was nothing. The people might trammel the government. Hence, he advocates a national bank, funds the national debt, and makes the banks the organs of the business community, the depositories of the revenues of the government. Now this policy is precisely that of the Whig party of today. This explains much of the language they use. The country they tell us is ruined! Why? Because we have ceased to cultivate the earth, or because the earth refuses to yield her increase? No. The earth has lost none of her productive energy, and rewards, as well as ever, the labors of the husbandman. Because the people have nothing to eat, drink, or wear; because they are so poor they cannot command the necessaries and comforts of life? No. There was never a time since the settlement of this country when the great mass of the people fed better, were better clad, or better lodged than now. Where then is the evidence of this grand ruin which has befallen the country? In what does this ruin consist? Simply in the fact that mere business men have not at this moment the same relative advantage over the rest of the community that they had or fancy they had a few years ago. It is not a time when men can make and lose fortunes three or four times a day by speculations in eastern and western lands, by the mere transfer, or hypothetical transfer, of stocks. Evidently it is not quite so favorable to business men, as it might be; and as the business men deem themselves the whole community, as they take their own prosperity to be the measure of the general prosperity of the country, and as they are not so prosperous as they were, or as they think they were, they conclude, very logically that the country is ruined. There is no insincerity in this. Their principle, so far as principle they have, is to advance the general prosperity of the community, by affording, through the aid of government, special encouragement to business, to the chiefs of industry. In accordance with this principle, one of your own townsmen, an honorable Senator, when Governor of this Commonwealth,10 lamented much the sufferings of the poor laborer, for he is a kind hearted man, and is always touched by the 10 [Ed. Reference is to Levi Lincoln (1782-1868), a Massachusetts state senator (1812-13), and governor (1825-34). Early in his career he was a Jeffersonian Republican, but later moved into the National Republican party, and was helpful in organizing the Whig party in Massachusetts.]

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sufferings of the poor. But what remedy did he then propose? Simply the laying of a high tariff, which should raise the price of manufactures, and thus enable manufacturers to pay their workmen higher wages. This was his policy then, as it is, no doubt, the honest policy of his party now. Now, what is this policy, but simply affording special encouragement to the business men, that the business men, without diminishing their own gain, may give higher wages to their workmen? In plain English, it is for government to take care of the rich that the rich may take care of the poor; which in effect is not unlike protecting the wolves that the wolves may protect the sheep. Look over the community; who constitute the American Whig party? The chiefs of this party we all know are the chiefs of the business community, as distinguished from the agricultural and laboring community. They are our merchants, manufacturers, bankers, fundholders, owners of stock and directors of railroads and other corporations; speculators, men who wish to make their fortunes without adding anything to the wealth or prosperity of the community, bankrupt speculators, who were once rich on paper but who now find themselves in the condition of what an English writer, not inaptly, calls gigmanity disgiged;11 men whose respectability depends on the fact that they sport a gig, and who now find themselves without the wherewithal to sport a gig; who, by the bye, never sported a gig save only on credit, and who now find credit difficult to obtain. These constitute the Whig party—at least its leaders—and the great mass of those we meet on railroads, in steam boats, marching in processions, with banners flying, or congregating in log cabins, singing the praises of hard cider, and drinking—champaign.12 Think not that it is by accident that these men are the chiefs, ay, and rank and file too, of the Whig party. Nothing takes place in this world by accident. There is a reason for all things which take place, 11 [Ed. The phrase “gigmanity disgiged” is from Thomas Carlyle’s The Diamond Necklace (1837), Chapter 5. See Thomas Carlyle: Critical and Miscellaneous Essays, Volume 3, in The Works of Thomas Carlyle, 30 vols. (New York: AMS Press, 1969), 28:353. Carlyle coined the phrase, meaning by it a person who was shallow and pretentious.] 12 [Ed. The reference here is to the 1840 political campaign which was particularly noisy and ostentatious with constant displays of coonskin caps, cider barrels, and miniature log cabins to demonstrate popular appeal. A Baltimore paper wryly observed after Harrison was nominated for the presidency that he “would be entirely happy on his backwoods farm if he had a pension, a log cabin and a barrel of hard cider.” The Whigs turned the slur into a popular campaign slogan. On this, see Schlesinger, Age of Jackson, 290-91.]

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and a sort of necessity for them to fall out very much as they do. These men are men who think only of business, and who have no conception of any good to a country, which is not a special good to the trader and speculator. Now, the fact that these men are Whigs, and that the great mass of the men of this character in our whole country are partisans of Whiggism, is good proof that the Whig policy is precisely what I have described it to be, that of the old English Whigs, the policy of protecting the business community in preference to all other classes; the policy which assigns to government as its primary, almost its sole duty, that of affording facilities to business capital, or capital invested simply in trade in some one or all of its ramifications. I stand not here to speak against trade, nor to underrate the importance of the business community; but I do stand here to say, and to make it believed if I can, that the special protection and encouragement by government of the business community is by no means furthering the great work given us to do. You will bear in mind that the American work is not to raise up the burgher class to equality with a feudal nobility, for that work was done before our Revolution; nor to give to commercial capital a supremacy over landed capital, the business community a supremacy over the agricultural community; because, here the soil is so divided among small proprietors that it cannot possibly exert more than its due share of influence: nor is it, in fact, to advance merely the chiefs of industry, landed proprietors, or mercantile and manufacturing employers as such; but the great mass falling below these, who are neither owners of land nor employers, the working men, proletaries. Our mission is so to elevate these that each one shall be a proprietor as well as a laborer, a laborer not merely at wages, but on his own farm or in his own shop, possessing enough of the funds of production to be an independent workman on his own capital, as are already the great mass of our farmers. This is our work. Now the Whig policy, under this point of view, is simply to afford special protection to the employer, and thus enable him to give higher wages to the workman. It contemplates no elevation of the workman, of the class which it is our special duty to elevate, beyond that of enhancing his wages. And it proposes to enhance his wages not by diminishing the profits of the employer but in fact by increasing them. In the first place, then, suppose their policy to succeed; suppose the government by a high tariff or otherwise, so to increase the facilities for the profitable investment of capital that the employer can

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enhance the wages of his workmen without diminishing his own profits, what will be the result? The relative distance between the business community and the laboring community must remain, to say the least, as great as before. Nothing then would be gained on the score of equality. If the workman should actually receive more, compared with what he now receives, he would receive no more compared with the amount of profits obtained by his employer, and therefore would by no means receive, which after all is the main point, a greater share of the proceeds of his own labor. But this is not all. The profits of the business community can be increased only by the enhanced prices of the commodities in which they deal. If these prices are actually enhanced, it can be only at the expense of labor. If the relation between the price of the article and the cost of the labor to produce it, remains the same, there can be no increase of profit to the dealer. Consequently, the supposed policy if carried into effect, would not enable the employer to enhance the wages of the laborer without diminishing his own profits, and therefore he would not enhance them. But waive this. Suppose the prices of all articles are so raised that the manufacturer can pay his workmen higher wages without diminishing his profits. These wages can be only nominally higher, because the workman is in general a consumer to the full extent of his income, and consequently the increase of his wages is canceled by the increased prices he must pay for the articles he consumes. Suppose then that the Whig policy, in regard to labor and the laboring class, should be adopted, it would accomplish nothing for the laborer. It would effect nothing towards making him a proprietor, as he ought to be. It would at best merely keep him as he is without making his condition essentially worse. But the Whig policy goes further. The Whig party we all know is the Bank party, and at present, the whole politics of the country is involved in the Bank question. This is the question of the times. Now, what part of the community require banks? Moneyed men? Men of real capital who have money to lend? Rarely. For they could, so far as mere loaning of money is concerned, loan to as much advantage to themselves without banks, certainly without banks of issue, as with them. Are they demanded by the farmers, the men who own the plough and hold it? Not at all. These men care little for banks, except banks of earth, or banks of manure. They do not ask credit, they give credit. They trust the soil, that if with their hardy hands, they cultivate it with proper care, they shall be amply repaid. Do your mechanics, your simple artisans, who drive the plane, turn the

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auger, or handle the hammer and sledge, and last and awl, do these ask loans from banks? No. They rarely go to your banks, and rarely obtain bank accommodations. Who then want banks? Simply your business men, your employers, traders and speculators. That is to say, your money borrowers. Banks are not wanted by money lenders, but by money borrowers. The men who besiege your legislatures for bank charters are not the men who have money to lend, but the men who have money to borrow. That is, they are men who wish to get into their possession the products of industry, without being under the necessity of giving an equivalent for them, till they have sold them, and realized an equivalent. The banks are a simple contrivance, by which the business community may command the products of industry, take the products of labor, and not pay the laborer for them, till they are sold, and sold for enough to pay the laborer, and the commission of the seller. The advantages of a contrivance like this to the business men need not be specified. These men are enabled in the first place to monopolize the whole business of buying and selling. They are able in all cases to come between the consumer and producer, and to raise a premium from both. They can so arrange it that the producer cannot carry his own produce to market, and therefore so that they and not he can fix the prices of produce. This places both the producer and consumer at the mercy of the speculator. By means of bank facilities speculators can obtain credit; but as they are the bank owners, the credit they obtain costs them nothing. Able to make their own bank credit pass for actual payment on their purchases, at least for a time, they are able to give credit to those to whom they sell. This stimulates the community to buy, for there are few men who, if they can obtain credit, will not purchase more than they would if they must pay cash down. By being able through their own facilities for obtaining credit, to give it, the business community come to be the creditor class, to bring the great mass of the people into debt to them. There have been times when nearly our whole agricultural and mechanical population were indebted to the trading community. Your farmer and artisan were indebted to the country trader, your country trader was indebted to your city trader, who in his turn was indebted to the importer or the manufacturer. Now, I need not stop to speak of the influence of the creditor over the debtor, and the almost absolute control which the creditor class may exert over the debtor class. If the banking system can be sustained, then the class which that system benefits, can always stand

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in relation to the rest of the community as creditor to debtor. In this case, it may control its operations, and tax its labor almost at will. The support of the banking system, then, has a direct tendency to elevate the business community at the expense of the agricultural and laboring community. It is therefore necessarily a part of the old English Whig policy, and our Whigs in adopting it prove that their policy is the same with the British Whigs, and that they are at war with what we have proved to be the true American policy. Let this policy once become that of the government, let its advocates once become possessed of the government, and with their immense creditor influence, fostered and sustained by nine hundred state banks, all held together and their power concentrated and directed to a common object, by means of a grand national bank, and we may easily see that everything in this country must henceforth become subordinate to the trader and speculator. The farmer and common laborer will be merely operatives in the employ of the business man, political equality will be broken down, and the hope, of the laborer of one day becoming a man, deferred perhaps forever. Here is the Whig policy, a policy well enough when the work of civilization was to break down an overgrown landed aristocracy, but the worst conceivable when the work is that of elevating the laborer. Elevating the laborer! What Whig dreams of elevating the laborer? There are those who laugh at the log cabin and hard cider. For my part I do not laugh at them. They speak to me an instructive lesson. They are to me the appropriate symbol of the party which adopts them. They say plainly as language can say, “Elevate us to power, adopt our policy, and there shall be palaces and champaign for us; but for you, O ye people, look for nothing better than log cabins and hard cider.” I thank the Whigs for their honesty, I thank them for their frankness, in hanging out a banner that at once discloses their policy and what must be its results. For myself I honor the log cabin; for in it I drew my earliest breath, and spent my earliest and happiest days; but then the palace was not near to over-top it, and it did not remind me that I was born to be a slave. I have no dread of the log cabin as such. I can breath as freely and sleep as sweetly beneath its bark covered roof, as in the lordly palace; but then, I must be a freeman, enjoying the fruits of my own labor, not the slave of a wealthy nabob, who from my toil and sweat has erected the palace that looks down in contempt on my lowly dwelling place. But sustain the Whig policy, and you shall have log cabins for the working man, and palaces for the master; hard cider for the operative, champaign for his employer.

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The whole manner of carrying on the present electioneering campaign, on the part of the Whigs, proves that their policy is to benefit the capitalist and not the workingman. They in all their proceedings, show the most sovereign contempt for the workingman’s understanding. They claim to be his especial friends, and warn him against his real friends; but they seek to gain his vote by means which would sink him to a brute. They make no appeal to his good sense, they make no avowal of principles, which if carried out, would meliorate his condition. They address him as though he were one of a mere rabble to be caught by the largesses of some petty lordling, by pretty sights and pretty sounds. These Whig songs, Whig processions, and Whig revelings, are not without meaning, a meaning which will one day be thundered back upon their affrightened ears. If they wished to elevate the laboring classes, would they address them in a style that must degrade them, seek to brutalize them with hard cider, and induce them to part with their birthright of free men for a Harrison song?13 But I joyfully turn from the Whig policy to the Democratic. Is the course of the Democratic party more in harmony with true American principles than that of the Whig party? Does the Democratic party pursue the policy demanded by the great work Providence has given us to accomplish? I have defined the American Revolution to be, taking possession of the field in which we are to play our part. Of course, then, the first work is to keep possession of this field and to keep it open. We must not only maintain our political independence on foreigners, but also maintain an open field for freedom, that is, we must maintain a free government. Now, if you for one moment glance at the extent of the American territory, you must see that this territory cannot be maintained sacred to freedom, if brought under our grand central government, however democratic might be the forms of that government. The interests of the different sections are so various, not to say hostile, the distance of each individual from the government is so great, and the power which would fall to the lot of the ordinary citizen is so little that the government must soon break in pieces and dissolve in anarchy, or require so much power centralized in the government that none would be left to the individual citizen. The field is to be kept open to liberty only by dividing the powers of government, between one federal government and many state governments. If we give to the federal government sufficient power to control the states in their 13

[Ed. For a few of these “Harrison” songs, see ibid., 290-94.]

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internal affairs, we deprive them of their character of governments, and render them merely ingenious contrivances for the administration of government. We have in fact a consolidated government. It is essential, therefore, while we maintain the supremacy of the federal government in all that concerns our relations as a people with foreigners, and of the several states with each other, we should still preserve the states in all else as distinct sovereignties, as independent states. The Whig party has always sought to encroach on the power of the states, and to strengthen that of the Union. But the Democratic party, first took its rise in opposition to this tendency. It first arose as a state rights party, and made its first stand on the fact that the states have not lost by the union, their political existence, nor in any sense parted with their sovereignty; that they have merely by mutual agreement, or compact, called the constitution, ordained that a certain portion of their sovereignty should be exercised by all the states in common, by means of a federal government. Its great object has been to maintain this doctrine. The real question now before the American people so far as concerns the federal government is whether we shall maintain that government as a federal government, or whether we shall suffer it to become a grand consolidated government. As a federal government, it may be extended by the formation of new states over any conceivable extent of territory, over the whole continent, for instance, and thus secure the whole continent to freedom. But should it become a consolidated government, it would soon break in pieces, and several new governments would be formed, with separate and hostile interests, leading to war, and war would lead to a strong government, to monarchy, and then to despotism. In contending then for state rights, and warring against the tendency to centralization, the Democratic party has been true to the idea of American institutions, and has been fulfilling the destiny assigned to the American people. After gaining the field and maintaining it open to the cause of freedom, the next step was to realize, politically, that equality between man and man, which it is our mission to realize socially. Our government is not, like that of England, composed of three estates as the King, Lords, and Commons, the King, the Nobility, and People, each with a negative on the other. Our work was not to raise up the Commons to a political equality with the King and Nobility. This was done in England. Moreover, the King and Nobility did not emigrate to this country. None but the Commons came. Consequently, there were none here but the people. All classes and all individuals of

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our society always have belonged, and do now belong to the people. The political equality here to be realized then was not the equality of class with class, but of man with man. Now political equality between man is represented by universal suffrage. Universal suffrage, necessarily recognizes each man as a member of the body politic by virtue, not of his possessions, his endowments, his accidents, but by virtue of his manhood. Universal suffrage can be sustained only on the ground that a man by virtue of his manhood is a member of the body politic. If every man is a member of the body politic by the simple fact that he is a man, then is every man, in so far as he is a man, politically equal to every other man. Furthermore universal suffrage gives to every man an equal voice in the political affairs of his country; every man an opportunity to bring forward to the public notice his own wants, interests and convictions, and thus compel the government to consult the good of all. It recognizes every man to be a man, and lays the foundation, as it constitutes a means of social equality. Now the Whig party we know has always opposed universal suffrage. So opposed are they to it, and so little does it enter into their minds to sustain it, that the Whig members of the legislature in their reply to the chief magistrate of this Commonwealth14 at the close of the last session, seem to think they have sufficiently refuted him, and destroyed his political reputation when they have shown that he has avowed the doctrine of universal suffrage. These Whig members say more severe things against our truly democratic Governor, but evidently in their own minds, they think the severest thing they say is that he favors universal suffrage. Everywhere you find the Whigs opposing universal suffrage and surrounding the exercise of the right of suffrage by the laborer, with as many difficulties as possible. In Baltimore, Philadelphia, New York, they have shown by their Registry laws what they would do if they could. But the Democratic party is and always has been the universal suffrage party. It has ever held that suffrage is an incident of humanity and not an incident of property. It has been constantly laboring from the formation of our government to extend the exercise of this right, and to render its exercise as easy as is compatible with its honest exercise. Here then again the party proves its sympathy with the great work given us, and that it is the true American party, and therefore the party of humanity. 14 [Ed. Reference is to Marcus Morton (1784-1864), Democratic governor of Massachusetts (1839-41).]

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Again, the Democratic party is the party of freedom of thought and utterance. Mind is superior to matter. All reforms, all progress pre-exist in thought before they are realized in fact. Thought precedes action, and the human race is carried forward only by the action of mind upon mind. The mind must be free to look through society, to see it as it is, to inquire the remedy demanded, the reforms which are practicable, and to proclaim the results of its inquiries, or society cannot advance. Look over your old Asiatic world. Why are the nations there struck with the curse of immobility? Why do ages on ages roll away and bring no change? Why is all there as still and as putrid as the stagnant pool on whose surface no breeze ever stirs a ripple? All there is silent, somber, monotonous; for there is no freedom to the mind. Tyranny has entered into the soul and struck man in the interior sanctuary of his being. He has no power to think; he does not reason; cannot reflect. He is the slave of custom, of habit, of routine, and follows on in the track of his forefathers in one endless round. O, there is a worse slavery than that of the body. The cords with which you bind my limbs shall be as flax at the touch of fire, if you will but leave free my power of thought. Carry free thought to your degraded serf, to your down-trodden millions of the old world; let them dare investigate their condition, look their masters in the face, and ask whence comes it that we are what we are; and forthwith their fetters snap, an unwonted power nerves their arms, thrones totter, nobilities fall, and they stand up men, free men, in the image of their Maker, and look around with love and joy on the face of brothers. Now the Democratic party has always been the party of freedom for the mind. It has uniformly opposed all test laws, all shackles on a free press, and said that “error is harmless if reason be left free to combat her.”15 We have much to do. We see the end we would gain but see not clearly the means of attaining it. We must inquire. Many minds must be active; and all schemes must be brought forward and canvassed; all opinions weighed, all systems examined before we can be in a condition to finish our work. But we cannot do this unless we are left free to think, and free to utter our thoughts, either by speech or the 15

[Ed. Brownson is probably referring to Thomas Jefferson’s famous line in his first Inaugural Address of 4 March 1801: “We are all Republicans, we are all Federalists. If there be any among us who would wish to dissolve this Union or to change its republican form, let them stand undisturbed as monuments of the safety with which error of opinion may be tolerated where reason is left free to combat it.” See Inaugural Addresses of the Presidents of the United States (Washington, D.C.: United States Government Printing Office, 1974), 14.]

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press. In espousing this freedom of mind, “soul-liberty,” and in defending the freedom of speech and the press, the Democratic party has been true to the American mission. America is freedom’s chosen land. It is to freedom what Palestine was to piety; and if the Jews were God’s chosen people, to develop and realize the religious element of human nature, Americans are not less the chosen people of God to develop and realize the social element, and with it the true idea of a man. Their soil is sacred to liberty. No species of tyranny must dwell in it; no tyrant’s foot must desecrate it. Of all tyrants, he who would penetrate into the soul and rivet his fetters on thought itself, is the worst. And the curses of humanity should fall as hail-stones upon the head of whomsoever would compel the prophet of God, him to whom God has given a word, to lock up that word in his own bosom and die with it unuttered. Democracy is true to freedom; she compels not the prophets of God to wander the earth in sheep-skin and goat-skin garments, to dwell apart in lonely caves, or in the mountains; but says to them, come forth; ye who have aught to speak, speak freely, speak boldly, out of your own full hearts and from your own strong convictions. We will not make the word of God a burden to you, nor compel you to withhold the words for the want of which nations may fare the worse. It is this, more than anything else, which proves the sympathy of the Democratic party with American principles. While the Whig party advocate alien and sedition laws, gag laws under the elder Adams, and introduces into the Senate even today under pretense of guarding the purity of elections, a law intended to gag every man of the Democratic party whose influence they dread,16 the Democratic party says, give the widest range to thought, and the utmost freedom to utterance. The Democratic party looks beyond even political equality and aims at social equality. It wars against privilege and monopoly. It seeks to open the field to every man, to secure to every man equal chances. While the Whig party labors to lock up the whole capital of the country in close corporations, to give to these corporations the monopoly of every branch of industry, thus compelling the laborer to sustain towards these corporations the same relation which the villeins formerly sustained towards the landlord, the Democratic party has opposed, with what success it could, all corporations which conceal the monopoly principle or which confer any special privilege on the corporators. 16 [Ed. The references are to acts passed during President John Adams administration on July 14, 1798. On this, see Henry Steele Commager, ed., Documents of American History, ninth edition, 2 vols. (New York: Appleton-Century-Crofts, 1973), 1:177-78.]

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Here again the party is true to the American mission. It labors not merely for the chiefs of the industrious class, but for the individual laborer, and watches over his freedom and independence as its most precious treasure. In the recent controversy with the Bank party, the democracy has been faithful to the same cause. The establishment of a United States Bank, as the completion of the Bank hierarchy, and the making of it the depository of the revenues of the government, would have for its direct and inevitable result, the bringing of the government under the control of the business community. It would be making the business men, in contradistinction from the agricultural and laboring community, the actual rulers of the government. It would then be a direct departure from the end we have to seek. It would be abandoning all that was gained by our Revolution, it would be deserting our post, and giving up the sacred soil of freedom to the enemy. It was necessary then to oppose the Bank, to prevent its reestablishment. It was also necessary for the government to dissolve entirely its connection with banks and the business of banking, and to collect and keep and disburse its own revenues. Hence, the opposition to the Bank, and to our present system of banking on the one hand, and the establishment on the other hand of the independent treasury. Both these measures were necessary to keep the government free from the special control of a particular class of the community, and open to the whole people. And open to the whole people, recognizing no classes, seeking only the elevation of each individual man, it must be kept, if we would be true to the cause for which our fathers fought. Tried, then, by the rule I have laid down, it must be evident to all that the Whig policy should be reprobated by every American, and the democratic policy be sustained by every man who would see America proving faithful to the cause of her glorious Revolution. Fellow citizens, I have detained you long, and you, as well as I, are, no doubt, fatigued. But I have felt it due to the cause which assembles us together this day with calmness and yet with earnestness to state as clearly as I could the real nature of the contest in which we are now engaged. I have felt that this contest is the same with that in which our fathers took their part, sixty-four years ago, that it is no ephemeral contest, no contest about men, nor about offices; but about great and everlasting principles. I have wished to show you that the election which approaches, marks a crisis not less important than that which our fathers met, and met so nobly. I have wished to show you that more than yourselves are interested in the

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contest now going on between Whigs and Democrats, more than your posterity, more than your whole country. In the fierce controversy now raging from one end of the Union to the other, entire humanity again mingles, and takes part. The cause of modern civilization is to be decided next November, at the American ballot box. There is to be fought the great battle for the race. Every American citizen is a soldier in the grand army of humanity, or in the ranks of her enemies. Not often does it fall to the lot of us, human beings, to be actors in so great a struggle, not often are so high and so awful responsibilities imposed upon us. I have wished to make this felt; and I have wished also to ascertain over which of the two camps into which the whole American people are now drawn out, floats in the breeze the broad banner of humanity, the banner of civilization, of freedom, of God. I see that banner. I see it floating over the camp of the democracy. They today are the army of mankind, they fight for the race, for truth, for freedom, and my heart leaps to join them. There in their camp, under their tents, in their ranks, should every true American say, is my place, and there will I do my duty come what may. And float in triumph, too, shall that broad banner. Slow and toilsome has been the progress of the race; oft it has been defeated; oft has it been driven back; oft have its serried ranks been broken, its forces scattered, and its cause trampled in the dust. But ever has it rallied anew to the contest. Never has its courage failed, and never shall fail. It rallied anew sixty-four years ago, and bid the world hear and respect. It rallies again today, and utters its manifesto, and on the altar of millions of beating hearts, swears it will march to victory. Humanity stands now on a vantage ground. Fear not then for the result. Soldiers, in the army of humanity, soldiers for freedom, for progress, for right, for man, to your posts. Above the din of battle hear a voice cheering on to the combat, coming from the degraded millions of the old world, from the nations trodden down by kings, hierarchies and nobilities. They call to you; they bid you be true, true, for their emancipation as well as your freedom depends on the issue of the battle you are about to give. Hear them, and let your hearts be firm, and your arms strong. The spirits of your fathers are with you; nay, the spirits of all who have bled for freedom from Marathon, Platea and Salamis to Bunker’s Hill, and Saratoga, and Yorktown, are with you, animate you to combat, fight with you, and will secure your triumph.17 17

[Ed. References to three battles of the Revolutionary War: Bunker Hill (1775) close to Boston; Saratoga (1777) close to Lake Champlain, and the decisive battle of the war at Yorktown, Virginia (1781).]

6. TWO ARTICLES FROM THE PRINCETON REVIEW1 Boston Quarterly Review 3 (July, 1840): 265-323

Under ordinary circumstances, this pamphlet, a mere reprint of a couple of articles, which appeared some months since in the Princeton Review, would scarcely claim our notice; but as it is put forth under the sanction of a theologian and scholar of considerable eminence in his way, and in connection with an important controversy, which has been going on for some time in our neighborhood, we have thought that we could not, in justice to ourselves or our friends, suffer it to pass silently into oblivion. No tolerable observer of the signs of the times can have failed to perceive that we are, in this vicinity at least, in the midst of a very important revolution; a revolution, which extends to every department of thought and threatens to change ultimately the whole moral aspect of our society. Everything is loosened from its old fastenings, and is floating no one can tell exactly whither. The revolution or movement, if the term be preferred, has already extended too far to be arrested, and is so radical in its nature that none who take the least interest in the general condition of their race can regard it with indifference. It was not to be expected that all would look upon this movement from the same point of view, or with the same feelings. In reference to this, as to all other important movements, the community is naturally divided into the party of the hopeful, and that of the fearful. They who have felt the insufficiency of the old systems, creeds, and institutions to satisfy their moral, religious, intellectual, and so1 [Ed. Andrews Norton, ed., Two Articles from the “Princeton Review,” Concerning the Transcendental Philosophy of the Germans, and of Cousin, and Its Influence on Opinion in this Country (Cambridge: John Owen, 1840). Norton republished the following: [J. W. Alexander, A. B. Dod, Charles Hodge], “Transcendentalism,” Biblical Repertory and Princeton Review 11 (January 1839): 37-101; and [Charles Hodge] “The Latest Form of Infidelity,” Biblical Repertory and Princeton Review 12 (January 1840): 31-71.]

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cial wants, who feel the impulse of this new movement, and labor for its furtherance, must hail it with joy, and contemplate its progress with thanksgiving; but they who are satisfied with the old order of things, who regard all change as necessarily a departure from truth and holiness, must needs behold it with alarm, and unaffected grief. All change carries along with it something saddening and fearful. In a world where so much is mutable and fleeting, nothing is more earnestly craved than that which shall not change nor pass away. We would have something which shall be to us tomorrow what it is today. Ever is today severing some link which connected us with yesterday, and ever are we compelled to feel that we are carried further and further from all that we have been. Earnestly, then, and often with hearts torn and bleeding, do we look around for something which will not desert us, which will not fade away with every autumn leaf, but abide with us, bind into one unbroken whole, youth, manhood, and old age, and maintain its identity amid all the mutations to which life is subject. Unable to find this something, this the unchanging and the permanent, in our feelings, in our outward circumstances, or in the ordinary affairs of the world, we generally seek it in our opinions, and more especially in our religious opinions. When we change our faith, we feel that the tie which connects what we are with what we have been is broken, and that instead of recalling with pleasure the past, with its multitude of associations, mellowed and endeared by time and distance, as something pertaining to ourselves, we must recall it as something which belongs to another. Instead of solacing ourselves with it, we must disown it, and strive to forget it. But so long as we can say that we believe today as we did yesterday, that we have retained in old age the faith of our childhood, we feel that we have not lost our identity; that we are they to whom belongs what we remember; and we can but secretly applaud ourselves that while all around us has been moving and passing away, we have remained firm, and that while all things have ceased to be what they were, we have ever continued the same. Then, again, the opinions we have embraced, the faith we have cherished, the convictions we have arrived at, it may be through toil and suffering, are to us the truth, and we cannot regard departure from them in any other light than departure from truth itself. These new opinions which are broached, these new speculations, which the rash and inexperienced are indulging, what are they? Whither do they tend? We see them but dimly, and only through the medium of our own preestablished systems. We see them not as a whole, as they

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exist in the minds of those who put them forth. We catch only some partial glimpses of them. We collect only a few shreds of the new systems, which we compare with our own, and finding they do not match, we must needs pronounce them useless, or worse. The new cloth sewed on to our old garments adds nothing to their beauty, but takes from it. Why, then, not be contented with the old garments, we so long have worn? We are accustomed to them; they are fitted to our shape, or our shape is fitted to them, and they put us to no inconvenience. In them we feel at home, and can move about at our ease. It is not difficult, then, to understand why any important movement in any department of thought must be opposed by a considerable number of even able and good men, who, instead of welcoming it as a minister of grace, must denounce it with bitter imprecations as an angel of darkness. Thus much we have thought it not improper to say in defense of those who oppose themselves to the new movement, who look upon it with distrust, and labor with all zeal and diligence to stay its progress. There is nothing unnatural in their conduct, or that should lead the friends of progress to suspect them of any want of a tender regard for mankind, or of a sincere love of truth. They feel that if the movement be not arrested, it will break them loose from their old moorings, and sweep away all that they have hitherto cherished as true and sacred; that all their past labors may be rendered of no avail; and that now, when the fire of youth has ceased to burn, when the vigor of manhood is abated, and they would repose their wearied and exhausted spirits for the rest of their lives, they must renew the struggle, the painful toil of clearing up doubt, and fixing the basis of faith. Really, he must be wanting in the common sympathies of our nature, who is not touched with their condition, and who does not readily pardon their querulousness, and even their bitter denunciations. Among those who have taken the most decided stand against this new movement, no man is in this neighborhood more conspicuous than Mr. Andrews Norton, under whose auspices the pamphlet before us has been put forth. We have no personal acquaintance with Mr. Norton, but we have heard him spoken of as a scholar of enviable attainments, and as a theologian with few equals in this or any other country. He was formerly a professor in the Cambridge Theological School, and was, we believe, distinguished for his ultra rationalism. He gained some notoriety several years ago by some papers in the Christian Examiner, the organ of the Unitarian public, in review of Professor Stuart’s Commentary on the Epistle to the He-

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brews, in which he displayed considerable philological ability.2 In 1833, he put forth a Statement of Reasons for not believing the Doctrines commonly reputed Orthodox, in which he pared the Christian faith down to the smallest conceivable point, and in the opinion of most Christians, divested the gospel of all its richness.3 In 1837, he published a volume on the Genuineness of the Gospels, which was reviewed in this journal for January, 1839.4 Since then, he has published several newspaper Essays, denunciatory of what he terms a new school in literature and religion, a Discourse on the Latest Form of Infidelity, and a pamphlet in its vindication.5 These productions we have read, and with the attention which was due to the high source from which they emanated. They all bear the marks of a cultivated mind, and of a man who thinks he sees mischievous errors creeping into the church, and who feels it his duty to warn the public against them; but they do not indicate so thorough a comprehension of the movement he opposes, as would seem to be necessary if he would oppose it effectually. It is said he usually sits in a room with the shutters closed, which has the double effect of keeping the light out and the darkness in. This may be slander, but his productions, it must be confessed, afford no satisfactory refutation of it. But be this as it may, we cannot but respect Mr. Norton for his readiness to oppose publicly what he holds to be mischievous speculation. Many others, who think with him, have in private circles de2 [Ed. Moses Stuart (1780-1852) was a biblical scholar at Andover Theological Seminary who introduced German biblical criticism to American theological education. His A Commentary on the Epistle to the Hebrews, 2 vols. (Andover, Massuchusetts: M. Newman, 1827, 1828) was reviewed by Andrews Norton in “On the Author of the Epistle to the Hebrews,” Christian Examiner 4 (NovemberDecember, 1827): 495-519; 5 (January-February, 1828): 37-69; 6 (May, 1829): 198-225.] 3 [Ed. A Statement of Reasons for Not Believing the Doctrines of Trinitarians Respecting the Nature of God, and the Person of Christ (1819; Cambridge: Brown, Shattach, and Co., 1833; Boston: Hilliard, Gray, and Co., 1833). First published in 1819, A Statement was much enlarged in 1833 and republished several times thereafter.] 4 [Ed. The Evidences of the Genuineness of the Gospels (Boston: J. B. Russell, 1837) was reviewed in Boston Quarterly Review 2 (January, 1839): 86-113, republished in EW, 4, chapter 9.] 5 [Ed. “The New School in Literature and Religion,” Boston Daily Advertiser (August 27, 1838): 2; A Discourse on the Latest Form of Infidelity; Delivered at the Request of the “Association of the Alumni of the Cambridge Theological School,” on the 19th of July, 1839 (Cambridge, Mass.: John Owens, 1839); and Remarks on a Pamphlet Entitled “‘The Latest Form of Infidelity’ Examined” (Cambridge, Mass.: John Owens, 1839).]

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nounced in no measured terms the men and the doctrines of what is termed the new school, but he is almost the only one who has had the manliness to bring his charges before the public, and in a tangible shape. He is almost the only one in this neighborhood, who has been willing to come out publicly in defense of the old school, and to give the advocates of the new an opportunity to speak out in their own behalf. For the disposition he has shown in this respect we thank him, and honor him as one who is furthering the cause of truth. Whether he has manifested the best spirit possible, or given to the controversy the best possible direction, is another inquiry, and with which we do not at present concern ourselves. Certain it is that he regards the questions at issue of a momentous character, and their right solution as of immense importance to religion and morals. So far he is right, and should be commended for the stand he has taken. It is not easy to characterize in a word the new movement, the progress of which Mr. Norton and his friends would arrest. The men who are affected by it are called by their opponents, Transcendentalists, and their doctrines are termed Transcendentalism. The movement is properly threefold; philosophical, theological, and political or social; and they who are affected by it are in pursuit of a sound philosophy of the human mind, a just interpretation of man’s relations to his Maker, and with his brother. Their doctrines relate to religion, philosophy, and liberty; and on these three subjects, the new school and the old are at issue. How the name, Transcendentalist, came to be applied to the members of this movement party, we are not informed. They did not themselves assume it, nor does it with any justice describe them. They differ widely in their opinions, and agree in little except in their common opposition to the old school. They do not swear by Locke, and they recognize no authority in matters of opinion but the human mind, whether termed the reason with some of them, or the soul with others. They have all felt that our old catechisms need revision, and that our old systems of philosophy do not do justice to all the elements of human nature, and that these systems can by no means furnish a solid basis for belief in God, much less in Christianity. Here is the amount of their agreement. Some of them embrace the Transcendental philosophy, some of them reject it, some of them ignore all philosophy, plant themselves on their instincts, and wait for the huge world to come round to them. Some of them read Cousin, some Goethe and Carlyle, others none at all. Some of them reason, others merely dream. No single term can describe them. Nothing can be more unjust to them, or more likely to mislead the public

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than to lump them all together and predicate the same things of them all. It is against this movement party that Mr. Norton and his friends direct their efforts, and that the pamphlet under consideration is intended to bear. Mr. Norton characterizes it as the latest form of infidelity; the Princeton Reviewers labor to fix upon it the charges of impiety, atheism, pantheism, and that of being of a foreign origin. With regard to the last charge, we would suggest to our patriotic brethren that truth transcends both time and space, and if so be we have it, it matters little whether its first discoverer be a Frenchman, a Dutchman, or a Yankee. But in point of fact the charge is unfounded. Mr. Norton, in describing its character under a religious point of view, detailed what he supposed to be the opinions of Spinoza, Schleiermacher, De Wette, and Strauss;6 the Princeton Reviewers, contemplating it more particularly under a philosophical point of view, think they describe it by giving an account of the speculations of Kant, Fichte, Schelling, Hegel, and Cousin. But both are wrong. The movement is really of American origin, and the prominent actors in it were carried away by it before ever they formed any acquaintance with French or German metaphysics; and their attachment to the literatures of France and Germany is the effect of their connection with the movement, not the cause. Moreover, there are no members of the movement party, who would adopt entirely the views of any one of the distinguished foreigners named. We are inquiring for ourselves, and following out the direction of our own minds, but willing to receive aid, let it come from what quarter it may. These distinguished foreigners are not our masters, but our fellow disciples, and we feel under no special obligation to defend their opinions. We have nothing to do with Hegel, or Schelling, or Kant, or Cousin, any further than our own inquiries lead us to approve their speculations. We are aiming at truth, and believe that here, where thought is free, and the philosopher may tell his whole thought without any circumlocution or reticence, we may attain to a purer philosophy than can be found in either France or 6 [Ed. Baruch Spinoza (1632-77) was a Dutch philosopher, sometimes accused of pantheism. Friedrich Schlieremacher (1768-1834) was a Romantic German theologian considered to be the father of modern Protestant theology. Wilhelm Martin Leberecht De Wette (1780-1845) has been called the father of modern biblical criticism. He tried to reconcile modern German philosophy and theology. David Friedrich Strauss (1808-74) was author of Das Leben Jesu (1835), a critical assessment of the historical evidence of the Gospels that created an immediate and long lasting controversy in the theological community.]

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Germany. Instead, then, of attempting to check the movement by accounts of speculations elsewhere, Mr. Norton and the Reviewers would do well to confine themselves more closely to the actual state of thought, and the actual tendency of inquiry in our own community. The real aim of the Transcendentalist is to ascertain a solid ground for faith in the reality of the spiritual world. Their speculations have reference in the main to the grounds of human knowledge. Can we know anything? If so, how and what? Here is the real question with which they are laboring. Some of them ask this question without any ulterior views, merely for the sake of satisfying their own minds; others ask it for the purpose of legitimating their religious beliefs; others still, that they may obtain a firm foundation for political freedom. This question is, as every philosopher knows, fundamental, and must be answered before we can proceed scientifically in the construction of any system of religion, morals, or politics. Mr. Norton seems to us to assume the negative of this question. He virtually, if not expressly, denies the reality of human knowledge. This is clearly implied in his Discourse on “the Latest Form of Infidelity.” “To the demand for certainty,” he says, “let it come from what quarter it may, I answer, that I know of no absolute certainty beyond the limit of momentary consciousness, a certainty that vanishes the instant it exists, and is lost in the region of metaphysical doubt. Beyond this limit, absolute certainty, so far as human reason may judge, cannot be the privilege of any finite being. When we talk of certainty, a wise man will remember what he is, and the narrow bounds of his wisdom, and of his powers.”7 The light of consciousness is the general light of the reason. The power by which we know in the fact of consciousness is the same with the power by which we know in general. The power by which I am conscious of pain, joy, or grief, is precisely the power by which I know that I exist, that the external world exists, that I am surrounded by beings that live and move, that there is a sun which shines over my head, and flowers that bloom at my feet. Now if this power be incapable of attaining to certainty in regard to facts which lie outside of me, it must, as it is the same in both cases, be incapable of attaining to certainty in regard to what is within me. Consciousness is nothing but our general power of intelligence, returning upon itself; and if we may not rely on this intelligence in relation to all the objects 7 [Ed. A Discourse on the Latest Form of Infidelity; Delivered at the Request of the “Association of the Alumni of the Cambridge Theological School,” on the 19th of July, 1839 (1839; New York: Kennikat Press, 1971), 30.]

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which come within its reach, then we have no right to rely on it in what we term consciousness. When, therefore, Mr. Norton denies certainty to everything except momentary consciousness, he does it on a ground fatal to all certainty. If we can be certain of nothing but momentary consciousness, we cannot be certain of even that. Mr. Norton, then, in denying all other certainty, denies, if he did but know it, all certainty. Then he denies the reality of human knowledge, and plunges into universal skepticism. Far be it from us, however, to intimate that Mr. Norton consciously and intentionally adopts the skeptical doctrine, much less that he would go the whole length with Pyrrho, or Sextus Empiricus;8 all we mean is that his language, if taken in its simple and literal sense, must carry him thus far. If he were a metaphysician, we should unquestionably hold him to his words; but as he does not seem, in any of his writings which have fallen under our notice, to be capable of any sharp analysis of thought, much less of tracing out all the logical consequences of a general proposition, we are disposed to believe that he in his own mind intends nothing against the reality of human knowledge. But whatever be the actual extent to which he would carry his own skepticism, the philosophical system to which he is attached, affords, it is evident, no solid ground to religious faith. This system of philosophy, of which Locke is the greatest modern master, recognizes in man no power of knowing anything which transcends the senses, except the operations of our own minds. Adopting this system, Berkeley demonstrated but too easily the non-existence of the external world; and Hume, by showing that we can by no power we possess attain legitimately to the idea of cause, opened the door to universal skepticism. Condillac and the French philosophes, by taking it up in relation to its account of the origin of human knowledge, struck out of existence all spiritual beings, and of course all religion, and with it all foundation for morals.9 It is this fact which has led our Transcendentalists to reject it. They felt if that philosophy was to be adopted as the last word of the 8 [Ed. Pyrrho (c. 360-370 B.C.) was the first great Greek skeptic and a court philosopher who traveled with Alexander the Great. Sextus Empiricus (fl. first quarter of third century B.C.) was the codifier of Greek Skepticism. Skeptics claim to have no certain knowledge of hidden or non-evident things.] 9 [Ed. George Berkeley (1685-1753) was a bishop of the Anglican Church of Ireland and an Irish Idealist metaphysician who developed his philosophical system as a safeguard against skepticism. Étienne Bonnot de Condillac (1714-80) was a French empirical philosopher who adopted much of John Locke’s empiricism, placing great emphasis upon sensation. Brownson, like Cousin, disliked Condillac and saw him as a materialist.]

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reason, that faith and reason must be forever irreconcilable, and that no man could be religious but at the expense of his logic. The senses are merely the medium through which we become acquainted with the facts of the external world. They demand in the soul, distinct from themselves, a power to recognize, to perceive the objects they present. Now, if this power be denied, all knowledge must be denied. This power the old philosophy has denied by representing the mind prior to the affection of the senses as a mere blank sheet. Furthermore, if all our ideas come through the senses, we can have no idea of anything which transcends them. God, all the objects of the spiritual world, in as much as they confessedly are not objects of the senses, must then be absolutely inconceivable. Add, if you will, to the senses reflection, and you do not help the matter. Reflection can add nothing but itself to the materials furnished by the senses, and reasoning can deduce from those materials only what is contained in them. The spiritual is not contained in them, and therefore cannot be deduced from them. This the Transcendentalists have seen and felt. They have therefore looked into the consciousness, examined human nature anew, to see if they could not find in man the power of recognizing and of knowing objects which transcend the reach of the senses. This power they profess to have discovered. They claim for man the power, not of discovering, but of knowing by intuition the spiritual world. According to them objects of religious faith are not merely objects believed on testimony, but objects of science, of which we may have a true inward experience of which we may have a direct and immediate knowledge, as much so as of the ideas or sensations of our own minds. We may know that God exists as positively, as certainly, as we may know that we feel hunger or thirst, joy or grief. Are the Transcendentalists right in this? If not, they allege, then is there for man nothing which deserves the name of knowledge, because the denial of the power to perceive directly spiritual truth, involves the denial of the power to perceive any truth whatever. Here is the real matter in dispute between the old school and the new. Here is the real question at issue. As yet this question has been considered principally in relation to the evidences of Christianity. Mr. Norton’s doctrine, as he applies it to these evidences, we confess, appears to us not only to deny all grounds of faith in Christianity, but to involve the universal skepticism we have charged him with in his general system of philosophy. But without insisting too strenuously on this, we must maintain that, by denying the power for which the Transcendentalists contend, he puts us out of the condition of

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having any grounds for faith in Christianity. We say this with deliberation, and with a full knowledge of the serious charge it involves against Mr. Norton, and we say it from a full and settled conviction of its truth, not for the idle purpose of retorting a charge which he has rashly brought against us and our friends. According to Mr. Norton the truths of religion are never, properly speaking, revealed to the human mind. What is revealed, is when revealed known. If the truths of religion were revealed to us we should then know them, and know them to be truths as much as we do any other truths. But he denies us the power to know them. “There can be,” he says in his Discourse, “no intuition, no direct perception of the truth of Christianity.”10 He then asserts positively that the truth of Christianity is and can be no object of human knowledge. It is not demonstrable but merely probable. All that we can know about it is that some being alleged to be miraculously endowed, and who may therefore be supposed to know, asserts it. On the most favorable supposition, according to the doctrine of Mr. Norton’s Discourse, all that we can know is that this miraculously endowed being has asserted the truth of Christianity, that he has asserted the reality of the objects of the Christian’s faith; but we cannot know the altogether more important fact that these objects do actually exist. If this being be worthy of credit, these objects exist, but if he be not worthy of credit, we have and can have no evidence whether they really exist or not. We cannot then at best know God, but merely that an extraordinary being has declared that a God clothed with certain attributes, off somewhere in the depths of the unknown, does actually exist; and that this extraordinary being has given us probable reasons for believing that he himself is worthy to be believed. To this we object that it is contrary to the express declaration of the very witness, Mr. Norton introduces as worthy of all reliance. Jesus says, “the pure in heart shall see God” [Matt 5:8]; this is eternal life to know thee the only true God” [John 17:3]; “if any man will do his will he shall know of the doctrine, whether it be of God, or whether I speak of myself ” [John 7:17]; “we know what we worship” [John 4:22]. These declarations plainly teach that the truth of Christianity, though it might need to be supernaturally revealed, is nevertheless, when revealed, an object of knowledge. If Jesus, on whose sole authority Mr. Norton relies, be worthy of credence, as he contends, then by the mouth of his own witness is he proved to be wrong in placing the truth of Christianity beyond the limits of human knowledge. 10

[Ed. The Latest Form of Infidelity, 32.]

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If Mr. Norton be right in representing the truths of religion as matters transcending human knowledge, it follows that we can assert them and believe in them only on the authority of the miraculous being supposed. This being must be miraculously endowed, or else he himself could know no more of the matter than ordinary mortals, and therefore could speak with no more authority. Hence, we are driven to the necessity of declaring miracles the sole evidence possible of Christianity. In accordance with this fact is Mr. Norton’s definition of faith in Christianity. By faith in Christianity he does not understand faith in the truths of religion, but in the fact of their miraculous assertion. “By a belief in Christianity,” he says in his Discourse, “we mean a belief that Christianity is a revelation by God of the truths of religion; and that the divine authority of him whom God raised up to speak to us in his name was attested by miraculous displays of his power.”11 This definition is worthy of note, for it is the key to Mr. Norton’s whole system. It does not represent belief in Christianity to be belief in the truths of religion themselves, but in the fact that these truths were revealed, or more properly, asserted, by the authority of God, and that he who asserted them established his right to speak in the name of God by the performance of miracles. It is simply a belief that certain doctrines have been asserted by a teacher divinely commissioned, and that the divine commission of this teacher was attested by miraculous displays of God’s power. The whole definition is therefore based on the hypothesis that it is not the truths of religion themselves that we believe, but the mere fact that they have been miraculously asserted. The Transcendentalists would define belief in Christianity somewhat differently. They would say, by a belief in Christianity, we mean a belief in the truths, in the reality of the spiritual objects, which Jesus Christ revealed; and now that these truths are revealed, brought to light, we may have a direct perception of them, may know them, and therefore receive them without reference to the authority or endowments of him who first revealed them. While therefore they would not hesitate to acknowledge Jesus as the one who was divinely commissioned to reveal these truths, they would claim for themselves now, in the actual state of humanity, the ability to perceive them and 11 [Ed. Ibid., 5. Brownson has slightly misquoted here. Norton actually wrote: “By a belief in Christianity, we mean the belief that Christianity is a revelation by God of the truths of religion; and that the divine authority of him whom God commissioned to speak to us in his name was attested, in the only mode in which it could be, by miraculous displays of his power.”]

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to know immediately, by intuition, by a mere looking upon them that they are truths. Here is the fundamental difference between Mr. Norton and the Transcendentalists, on this question of the evidences of Christianity. And here may be seen the nature and importance of the controversy which has for some time been going on between him, and the Rev. George Ripley of this city.12 Mr. Ripley no more than Mr. Norton denies the supernatural origin of Christianity. He admits that Jesus was supernaturally endowed, and therefore that his existence was a miracle. He also admits that the miracles recorded in the New Testament were actually wrought. The question at issue between the two is not as to the fact of the miracles. Mr. Norton, as we have seen, denies that the truths of religion can themselves be known, and asserts that they must therefore be taken on the authority of the teacher, which authority could be attested by miracles only; Mr. Ripley does not question the authority of the teacher, nor the fact that miracles attest that authority, but simply contends that we may have, now that they are revealed, a direct perception of the truths of religion and therefore a means of knowing that they are truths independent of the authority of the teacher. Mr. Norton asserts that we can at best know only the fact that the teacher is divinely commissioned, from which it is fair to infer the truth of what he taught; Mr. Ripley maintains that we may know by direct perception, by actual experience, the truths themselves, that what the teacher taught is true, without being under the necessity of inferring it from the fact that the teacher was divinely commissioned. The difference between the two is very great, and the advantages are altogether on Mr. Ripley’s side. On Mr. Norton’s ground Christianity can be sustained only by means of those historical proofs that sustain the miracles by which the authority of the teacher is attested. These historical proofs, Mr. Norton himself admits, do not amount to certainty. But this objection he seeks to obviate by contending that certainty is not for such beings as we are. In order to show that these proofs are sufficient, he denies us the capacity to know, and apparently without reflecting that just in proportion as he diminishes our capacity of knowing he necessarily diminishes the value of his proofs. If we can be certain of nothing, we of course cannot be certain that his historical proofs amount to anything. Nevertheless he contends that the historical proofs amount to a high degree of probability, and that this is all we can aspire to in any case, 12

[Ed. On this controversy, see the Introduction, pp. 11-12; EW3:13; EW 4:12-14.]

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except that of momentary consciousness. But, if he can be certain of nothing but momentary consciousness, as he says, how can he be certain that these proofs amount even to a probability? But we will pass over this. On his own hypothesis, the truth of Christianity is not a certainty but a probability. But it is a probability that rests on historical testimony. It can then be a probability only to those who can avail themselves of that testimony. This everybody knows is but a small portion of mankind. His doctrine, then, not only deprives us of all certain evidence of the certain truth of Christianity, but declares that the great mass of mankind are absolutely disinherited by their Maker, placed out of the condition of ever ascertaining for themselves even the probable truth of that which they must believe, or have no assurance of salvation. They are placed entirely at the mercy of the learned few, and the gospel which was glad tidings to the poor can be glad tidings only to the erudite. Mr. Ripley’s doctrine, on the contrary, rescues the mass from the power of the learned few and places the truth of Christianity within the reach of every man. Few only of our race are able to judge of the pretensions of an authorized teacher, to sift the testimony of history, balance probabilities and decide for themselves, whether the miracles recorded in the New Testament were actually wrought or not, or if wrought that they establish the divine authority of the teacher; but all are capable of judging of the doctrine itself, whether it be of God or not. The unlettered ploughman by this is placed, so far as the evidences of his religious faith are concerned, on a level with the most erudite scholar or the profoundest philosopher. Christianity by this is adapted to the masses, and fitted to become an universal religion. Its evidence is simplified, and the necessity of relying on an authorized teacher superseded. It recognizes a witness within the soul that testifies for God, and gives us the grounds of a living faith in his being and his Providence, in his love and his mercy. It destroys the very foundation of a sacerdotal caste, and saves humanity from ecclesiastical domination. It paves the way for universal freedom, for every man to become a priest and a king, and gives assurance that the prophets did not merely dream in foretelling the approach of a time, when we shall not “teach every man his neighbor and every man his brother, saying, Know the Lord; for all shall know him from the least to the greatest” [Heb 8:11]. But this is not all. Mr. Norton’s doctrine is not only exposed to the objections we have stated, but in reducing the evidences of Christianity to miracles alone, he destroys the value of the evidence of the miracles themselves. He resorts to miracles because we have no power

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to know God immediately by direct perception. But if we cannot know God of ourselves, we cannot know of ourselves what is or is not divine. How then can we know that this teacher, on whom we rely, is divinely commissioned? By the miraculous displays of God’s power which accompanied his ministry? But before these displays of power can attest his divine commission, they must be known to be from God. We know that they are displays of God’s power only because we detect the finger of God in them. But if we know nothing of God, how can we know that what we term his finger really is his? Miracles are known to be from God only because they bear on their face the marks of the Divinity; but in order to know that these marks are marks of the Divinity, we must have some previous knowledge of God, or some intuitive power of recognizing him. Whence obtain we this knowledge? If, as Mr. Norton says, there can be no intuition, no direct perception, no knowledge of God but by a supernatural revelation, made by an authorized teacher, whose authority is attested by miracles, we of course can know nothing of God until we receive the revelation, and that revelation we must not use until we have authenticated it. But we cannot authenticate it till we have established the fact that the miracles which accompany it are displays of his power. But this cannot be done without some knowledge of God, and knowledge of God we have not till we have done it. Mr. Norton, unconsciously no doubt, assumes in his argument the very intuitive power that he denies. He doubtless takes it for granted that any man on seeing a miracle may determine whether it be of God or not. The miracle then finds man in possession of a certain amount of knowledge of God. Whence did he obtain this knowledge of God? Not by a supernatural revelation, for that revelation itself would be a miracle, and there would be the same difficulty in determining the fact that it is a display of God’s power, that there would be in the case of any other miracle. Then this knowledge must be intuitive. There must be in man the capacity to recognize God whenever he presents himself, to know that it is he as soon as he appears. In order then to sustain his own doctrine, Mr. Norton must resort to the transcendental element of human nature, and accept the power which he denies. But he denies this power in so many words. Then he denies the basis of his own scheme of evidence, and puts himself out of the condition to establish the fact that the miracles are displays of God’s power, and then out of the condition to establish the divine authority of the teacher; and therefore out of the condition of being able on his own ground of adducing any evidence at all of the truth of Christianity.

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This result is inevitable, and is strictly logical. Mr. Norton begins by denying all certainty, by denying at least our capacity to know God intuitively, that is, by seeing him. And because we want this capacity, he alleges that miracles are the only possible proofs of Christianity. But wanting this capacity, we cannot detect that element of the Divinity in the miracles without which they would be no attestation of the authority of him who speaks to us in the name of God. The miracles then are no evidences. Then we have no evidences of Christianity. Then are we, following Mr. Norton, plunged into the depths of religious skepticism. Mr. Norton is said by his friends to be an able logician; we will thank him to point out a flaw in this reasoning. Nay, more than this; we call upon him to do it, or else to admit that he has rashly assumed the responsibility of a teacher. But with what face can Mr. Norton, defending as he does doctrines which leave us no foundation for faith, bring the charge of infidelity against his neighbors? How dares he, denying as he does all certainty but that of momentary consciousness, to denominate their doctrines “The latest Form of Infidelity.” How can he be certain, if he can be certain of nothing but momentary consciousness, that their doctrines are not a true expression of Christianity? If he must needs be a skeptic, let him forbear to assume the airs of a dogmatist. He should remember “the narrow bounds of his wisdom and of his powers,”13 and be modest. Now it is against this skepticism, so fatal to all scientific progress, and to the growth of all that is generous and noble in human nature that Transcendentalism protests. It claims for man the power of knowing, and especially of knowing the truth of that religion which God revealed to us by his Son, and on which depend the hopes of the race for progress here and of the soul for a heaven hereafter. Is it to be stigmatized as the Latest Form of Infidelity for this? Does Mr. Norton think that he shall succeed in making it believed that the way to establish one’s claims to be a believer, is to deny that the human mind can know aught of that which it professes to believe? And that the way to incur the reproach of infidelity is to assert the capacity of the human soul to know the truths of religion? He denies us this capacity; but we trust he does not propose to set himself up as a type of the race. Admit, if he insist upon it, that he wants this capacity, he cannot be certain that others have it not; and if they assert that they have it, he is bound upon his own principles to believe them; for he 13 [Ed. Ibid., 30. Brownson is quoting Norton’s definition of a wise man who will be prudent in making any assertions of certitude.]

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labors hard in the Notes to his Discourse to show that belief on testimony, or on the authority of others, is the most rational belief in the world. Having made these remarks on the characteristic differences between the Transcendentalists and their opponents, the principal question at issue between them, and the particular controversy in connection with which the pamphlet before us has been put forth, we turn now to an examination of the pamphlet itself. The pamphlet before us is, as we have said, a mere reprint of a couple of articles, which appeared some months since in the Princeton Review, an old-school Presbyterian journal, published, we believe, in Philadelphia. The first essay is headed Transcendentalism; the second, The latest Form of Infidelity, and is in part taken up with a notice of the controversy between Mr. Norton and Mr. Ripley, of which we have already spoken, and the remainder with an account of the philosophical school of Hegel. The part relating to the controversy, Mr. Norton has prudently suppressed. It contained some severe censures on himself, which he could hardly be expected to republish.14 The part which speaks of the Hegelian school is made up chiefly of extracts from the writings of Leo and Hengstenberg,15 violent opponents of that school, and at best, of no great authority. This second essay therefore will claim but a small share of our attention. The first essay is the abler of the two and altogether the more important. It is evidently written by a man of considerable power and some reading; though by one who does not appear to be gifted with any remarkable philosophical insight.16 He frankly avows in the outset that he does not comprehend the systems he declaims against. This avowal is honorable to his candor, but it was altogether needless. He is unaccustomed to that sharp analysis of thought without which no philosophical system, whatever its merits, can be intelligible. He moreover takes up the systems he warns us against, from the theological point of view, instead of the philosophical, and writes, 14

[Ed. The writers of the Princeton Review article on “Transcendentalism” shared the philosophical empiricism of Norton, but they were highly critical of the “Socinian” developments of the New England theology in Massachusetts.] 15 [Ed. Brownson is referring to two anti-Hegelians, the Prussian conservative historian, Heinrich Leo (1799-1878), and the conservative German Lutheran theologian Ernst Wilhelm Hengstenberg (1802-69) whom Charles Hodge referred to repeatedly in the article on “The Latest Form of Infidelity.”] 16 [Ed. The article on “Transcendentalism” from the Princeton Review was not written by a single author; it has been attributed to three Presbyterian ministers: James Waddel Alexander (1804-59), a theologian, Albert Baldwin Dod (1805-45), a mathematician, and Charles Hodge (1797-1878), a systematic theologian.]

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we are sorry to say, as the priest, and not as the philosopher. The writer in question has a great dislike to our New England. He thinks New England is a cold, hyperborean region, on which the sun rarely shines, and into the hearts of whose people no warmth ever penetrates. He holds our philosophy and our theology in light esteem, and charges upon them most of the dangers he apprehends from the prevalence of Transcendentalism. This is severe. New England is somewhat rough we admit, and her climate is not the mildest in the world; but she rests upon a granite foundation and is tolerably well satisfied with herself, and not much accustomed to envy her neighbors their superior advantages. Her letters, religion, and philosophy speak for themselves, and ask no defense at the hands of her sons. She institutes no comparisons, and shrinks from none. She has labored to do what she could for moral and intellectual progress; but if she find that some other section of our common country has done more for mankind than she has, she will not feel humbled, but “thank God and take courage.” The reviewer jumbles together in the same category, men and systems, of nearly opposite tendencies. Through the whole of his essay there is a singular confusion of ideas. In condemning what he calls the New England philosophy, he assumes as his own the very doctrine it is the great design of his essay to decry. Though professedly a follower of “the immortal Locke,” he adopts a philosophy which Locke’s doctrine repudiates. Speaking of utilitarianism, he says, “The system runs counter to nature. Reason about it as you will, the soul cannot let so monstrous an error lie next to itself; the heart will throb forth its innate tendency, and conscience assert its prerogative. Nor will men believe concerning virtue any more than concerning truth, that it has no foundation but its tendency to happiness; even though such tendency be as justly predicable of the one as of the other. The very consideration of what is involved in the monosyllable ought, is sufficient to bring before any man’s consciousness the sense of a distinction between virtue and utility, between that which it is prudent to do, and that which it is right to do.”17 This is sound doctrine; but we would thank the writer to inform us how it can be legitimated on Locke’s philosophy, or without adopting the order of thought condemned as Transcendental. But this is not all; we not only find him adopting the deductions of one system as belonging to another which repudiates them, and 17

41.]

[Ed. Andrews Norton, ed., Two Articles, 9; see also “Transcendentalism,”

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rejecting the very philosophy without which he cannot substantiate his own doctrines, but we find him lumping together men who have scarcely anything in common, and bringing the same sweeping charges against them all. According to him Kant, Fichte, Schelling, Hegel, Cousin, Coleridge, Carlyle, and Emerson belong to the same school, and advocate virtually the same philosophy. This is about as scientific as it would be for a naturalist to class man and all species of animals under the general term animal, and to predicate the same things of them all, without recognizing any specific differences among them. It is even worse than this; for up to a certain point the naturalist would be justified in his proceeding; but the individuals named are so far from being all of the same school that some of them are not even philosophers; Carlyle and Emerson, for instance, regular declaimers against all philosophizing as was their common master Goethe. A writer who shows in the outset such entire want of discrimination, forfeits in advance the confidence of his readers, and destroys all the weight they might otherwise attach to his judgment. The reviewer has not only erred in confounding men of such opposite tendencies as Kant and Hegel, in the same school, but also in representing the American Transcendentalists as the mere off-shoots of the German. He would check the Transcendental movement at home by detailing what he supposes to be the errors of Kant, Fichte, Schelling, and Hegel. Now he ought to know that very few among us have studied these distinguished German writers and that none among us are their followers. Admit Kant’s philosophy ended in ideal skepticism, Fichte’s in a pure egoism, Schelling’s in pantheism, and Hegel’s in absolute nihilism, what is that to us? We are not answerable for their errors, nor in any way responsible for their speculations. We stand on our own feet; we philosophize for ourselves, and claim the right to be judged according to our own works. The account which the reviewer gives of the German philosophy is meager and so far as our information extends far from being correct. It is altogether one-sided, and given in the narrow spirit of the sectarian priest, and not in the liberal spirit of the catholic philosopher. Words, used by the author in a philosophic and systematic sense, are taken by the reviewer in a loose, indeterminate, theological sense, and irreligion is made to appear, where but for his ignorance he might have discovered the most reverential piety. But we do not feel ourselves called upon to defend the Germans here accused. We do not arrange ourselves among their followers. Their philosophy does not satisfy us, and while we respect it, we do not adopt it. Moreover, to do anything like justice to the school of Kant and Fichte, and that of

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Schelling and Hegel, would require much more space than we have now at our command. So far, then, as they are concerned, we shall leave for the present the charges preferred against them without any formal answer. But in what is alleged against Cousin, and some individuals in our own community, we feel a much deeper interest. We have taken some pains to set before our countrymen the distinctive features of Cousin’s philosophy, and to that philosophy, to a certain extent, we have on more occasions than one given in our own adhesion.18 We are therefore called upon to admit the charges preferred, or else in justice to him and to ourselves to attempt their refutation. The reviewer condemns Transcendentalism, as he supposes it to be represented by Cousin, not in itself, not because it is false, but because in its applications it runs, or is supposed to run, athwart his own theological prejudices. But this, though it may do very well for a man who probably pledged himself to abide by a certain creed, before he had even begun his inquiries after truth, will by no means answer for the philosopher. Philosophy in the person of Descartes asserted her independence on theology, to which she had been enslaved through all the Middle Ages, and she will not consent to be in bondage again. She is free, and pursues her own method, and proclaims her own conclusions, without leave asked or accepted of theology. The theologian is bound by the letter, and must conform to a prescribed formula; but the philosopher penetrates beneath the letter and sits in judgment on the formula itself. The theologian begins by laying down certain doctrines, which are taken without examination, and which must bound and rule his philosophy; the philosopher begins not by laying down what must be believed, but by inquiring what is true. He takes the torch of truth and goes forth into the dark night to see what he can see, and what he sees he reports as he sees it. The postulates of the theologian are not ultimate enough for him, and he claims the right, instead of making them the limits of his inquiries, to make his inquiries the test of their truth. This he claims for philosophy, and this the reviewer must bear in mind, if he wishes his warnings to be heeded by philosophers. It is too late to attempt with any prospect of success to bring the human mind again into bondage to the priesthood. We accept and reverence religion 18 [Ed. See, for example, “Cousin’s Philosophy,” Christian Examiner 21 (September, 1836): 33-64; “The Eclectic Philosophy,” and “Eclecticism—Ontology,” Boston Quarterly Review 2 (January, 1839): 86-113; (April, 1839): 169-87. See also EW, 3, chapter 6 and EW, 4, chapter 8.]

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not because our fathers did, nor because the clergy enjoin it, but because by the right exercise of our intelligence we demonstrate it to be true. To this the world must come; and on this condition only can there be any well grounded hope of a religious future. If your theologies cannot abide the test of philosophy, so much the worse for them and for you. We shall not refrain from philosophizing on that account. If you seek to deter us by calling us infidels, you will injure yourselves rather than us. Inquiry is going abroad, and you cannot check it, if you would. As an “overflowing scourge” it will sweep away every “refuge of lies,”19 and woe to you who seek to withstand it; ye are but so many dead men, and ye will be ground to powder. The principal charges brought by the reviewer against the philosophy which he represents the Transcendentalists as advocating, or which he fears will become prevalent in this country, are those of atheism, pantheism, egoism, and fatalism. Before proceeding to consider the validity of these charges, we must define what we understand by them. Atheism, if we rightly apprehend it, is a denial of the infinite, and the sinking of the idea of unity in that of mere totality. The atheist sees things only in their diversity and their multiplicity. He recognizes no common bond which connects them, no unity which underlies them. To him the universe is merely a vast assemblage of particulars, suggesting, it may be, an idea of totality, but never of unity. He can therefore perceive no cause which produces it, no substance which is its uniform, permanent, and unchanging ground, and of which its various phenomena may be regarded as the accidents; and consequently he can perceive no God. Literally, then, the atheist is one who sinks God in the universe. Pantheism is the reverse of atheism. It originates in the exclusive contemplation of the infinite. The pantheist takes little note of things in their diversity and multiplicity, but views them almost exclusively in their unity and identity. He fixes his mind upon what is unchanging and permanent, and not on what is mutable and fleeting, in the phenomena of the universe, on the original ground, the indestructible essence, and not on the phenomena themselves; and thus gradually comes to view all things as one indissoluble whole, proceeding from the same source, and preserving ever their unity and identity, however far they may seem to diverge from it. Pantheism is therefore the assertion of the absolute unity and identity of whatever is. As atheism sinks God in nature, so pantheism sinks nature in God. Athe19

[Ed. References to Isa 28:15.]

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ism sees no God; pantheism sees nothing but God. Atheism is the exaggeration of a worldly philosophy; pantheism of a religious philosophy. Pantheism is the error of a soul devout to excess. Pantheists are individuals who are so filled with the idea of God, so struck with his unity, eternity, all-sufficiency, and omnipresence that they have eyes for nothing else; they are so impressed with the reality and absoluteness of his existence that all else appears to them as unreal, as mere shadow or apparition. Consequently pantheism prevails most in religious epochs and countries. The Eastern world is remarkable for its warm devotional spirit; and as we should expect, pantheism, it is said, is there almost universally prevalent. Of European countries in modern times, Germany is the most devout, and there, more than in any other European country, does pantheism obtain. Egoism results from an exclusive attention to the phenomena of the will. The facts of human nature may be arranged under three fundamental faculties, sensibility, reason, and activity or will. Exclusive contemplation of the phenomena of sensibility leads to atheism; exclusive contemplation of the phenomena of reason leads to pantheism; exclusive contemplation of the phenomena of activity or the will leads to egoism. The will, which is our proper personality, has to a certain extent a real creative force; a certain portion of the phenomena of consciousness are facts of our own creating. We can also exert great control over the world round and about us. The landscape wears ever the hue of our own souls, and from us is projected the beauty we see in the flowering earth, and the starry heavens. Then, who knows the might of the human will, which has quailed not before the proudest tyrant, and bent not before persecution and death? Who can tell what shall be able to withstand the omnipotence of “I will”? Nor is this all: without the assent of the will there can be no fact of knowledge. In every act of intelligence the will intervenes. From this the inference is not unnatural that the intelligence is a property of the will or personality. We then proceed to predicate knowledge of ourselves. It is we that know, our proper personality that knows. The proper personality, or the ME, is identical with the will. To know, then, is an act of the will. We know, then, but what we will to know, and know precisely as we will to know. If the power to know be a mere property of the will or personality, then it is subjective. The attribute cannot go beyond its subject. Then our intelligence cannot extend beyond our own personality. Then we can know nothing except what pertains to our personality. Then all the objects of our knowledge are merely our own personality, or the ME and its accidents, taking itself at once as both subject and object. The external

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world which we seem to see, all that which we regard as the NOTME is merely the ME projected. Then so far as we can know there is nothing in existence, but the I, or ME, and its accidents. This is egoism, and perhaps is that to which Mr. Norton’s doctrine, that we can be certain of nothing but momentary consciousness, might be reduced. As atheism sinks God in nature, as pantheism sinks nature in God, so egoism sinks both God and nature in man. Now, is the Transcendental Philosophy, if that be the name preferred, as represented by Cousin, justly chargeable with the error of either of these systems? If it denies the infinite, then it is justly chargeable with atheism; if it denies the finite, then it is justly chargeable with pantheism; if it sees the finite and the infinite only in the human personality, then it is justly chargeable with egoism. How stands the case? That Cousin does not deny the infinite is certain! He contends for the idea of the infinite as one of the original elements of reason; he therefore cannot be an atheist. He also admits the idea of the finite, which he represents as also an original and fundamental element of reason. He cannot then be a pantheist. These ideas in his philosophy are represented as connected by a third, that of their relation. This idea of relation is the idea of cause, the element of personality, activity or will. But this element of human nature he carefully distinguishes from reason and sensibility; and as he recognizes an impersonal element in these last, he cannot be an egoist. This, to those who fully understand the matter, is amply sufficient to exonerate Cousin’s philosophy from the charges the reviewer brings against what he terms Transcendentalism; but as the matter is important, and by no means the plainest in the world, we may do well not to dismiss it without some further remarks. Whoever undertakes to construct a system of the universe with a single principle, will be sure to construct a system at war with common sense. If he undertake it with the idea of the finite alone, he will leave out God; with the infinite alone, he will leave out nature; with that of our own personal activity, he will leave out both God and nature. But common sense always holds on to the threefold existence, the existence of God, of nature, and of man. The human race believes and always has believed in all three. It never confounds God with nature, nor nature with God, nor God and nature with men. In its eyes all three are real existences, not mere illusions; and distinct, not identical, although inseparable. Now this faith of the human race most philosophers destroy by attempting to reduce all the phenomena of consciousness to a single

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principle; but Cousin saves it by recognizing three original fundamental faculties of human nature, not resolvable one into another, and beyond which analysis in this direction cannot go. These three faculties correspond to the threefold faith we have pointed out. They are reason, sensibility, and activity. Through the medium of reason we attain to the conception of God, through sensibility to that of external nature, and through activity to that of our own personal existence. According to this psychology, to deny the existence of either God, nature, or man, is to do violence to human consciousness. We pass from psychology to ontology, from the idea to being, by the aid of the reason, which reveals itself to us as impersonal and objective. Reason is the only authority we have for the certainty we feel in momentary consciousness. We must then deny its authority here, or else admit its authority when it declares itself to be impersonal and objective. Being impersonal and objective, it is as valid authority for what lies out of us, as for what transpires within us. But when we say the reason reveals to us this or that, it is but saying in other words that we know this or that. The reason reveals to me my own existence; that is, I know that I exist; reason reveals to me a world of reality lying beyond me; that is, I know that such world exists. I have therefore as positive knowledge in relation to ontology, as I have in relation to psychology. This, if we understand it, is Cousin’s doctrine. Now under what characters does reason reveal to us the reality which we profess to know by virtue of its light? This is only asking in other words, under what relations does reason conceive of all existences of which it professes to take cognizance? And this again is only asking, what are the fundamental ideas or conceptions of the reason? According to Cousin, the human reason conceives all things by virtue of two ideas. These two ideas embrace two correlative series of terms which may be variously expressed as one and many, unity and plurality, space and immensity, time and eternity, perfect and imperfect, absolute and relative, infinite and finite. But they may all be reduced to two terms, namely, the infinite and the finite. The human reason must conceive of all things which can be to it objects of conception, either as finite, or as infinite. Once more: the conceptions of the reason, according to Cousin, are not mere conceptions of a subjective reason, and therefore of doubtful authority when transported into a region lying beyond the sphere of consciousness; nor are they entities, as some of the old Schoolmen are said to have contended; nor identical with being, as Hegel teaches; but they are conceptions furnished us by an impersonal, an absolute reason, and must therefore correspond to reality.

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These conceptions are conceptions of what actually exists. They reveal to us real existences; no mediator is necessary between them and the object conceived of; they are the mediator between the object and us. Consequently, when we have once established the fact that the idea of the infinite is a conception of the reason, we have established the still more important fact that the infinite really exists. So of the idea of the finite. When therefore reason is proved to possess two categories, the idea of the infinite, and that of the finite, according to Cousin, it is proved that both finite and infinite are realities. The idea of the infinite of course involves the idea of God; the idea of the finite involves that of nature. God and nature then both exist. It must be borne in mind that we are not demonstrating the truth of this theory, nor detailing the reasons by which Cousin sustains it. We are merely stating it for the purpose of showing that whatever be its foundation in truth, it can be obnoxious to the charge neither of atheism nor of pantheism. To do this we have labored to show that the recognition of the infinite, the denial of which is atheism, and the recognition of the finite, the denial of which is pantheism, are fundamental in Cousin’s philosophy. By doing this, he escapes at least from the charges preferred by the reviewer. Reason may be reduced to two categories, the idea of the infinite and that of the finite. These ideas are fundamental. They are original. They cannot be derived one from the other, nor is one reducible to the other. But reason does not merely conceive of the infinite and of the finite. Its conceptions bear a certain relation to each other. It gives us the infinite and finite, not merely as existing, but as bearing to each other the relation of cause and effect. In the actual development of reason the two ideas are correlative, and always go together; but the reason always conceives of unity as preceding variety, the infinite as proceeding the finite, and as in fact producing it. This is the feature of Cousin’s philosophy we wish our readers to be careful not to overlook. “You cannot,” he says, “separate variety from unity, nor unity from variety, substance from phenomenon, nor phenomenon from substance. One is anterior to the other, but one is not without the other. They coexist necessarily. But how do they coexist? What is the mystery of this coexistence? Unity is anterior to multiplicity. How then has it been able to admit multiplicity? Thought cannot admit one without the other; but in the real order, we have seen that one is anterior to the other. How then is effected this passage from unity to variety? Here is the fundamental vice of ancient and modern theories. Here also is the vice of Kant’s theory. It places unity on one side

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and multiplicity on the other, infinite and finite in such an opposition that it is impossible to pass from the one to the other. A superior analysis resolves this contradiction. “We have identified all the second terms with each other; we have also identified all the first terms. And what are these first terms? They are immensity, eternity, infinity, unity. We shall see one day how the Eleatic school,20 placing itself exclusively in this point of view, on the summit of immensity, eternity, being in itself, infinite substance, has defied every other school, in departing from thence, to be ever able to arrive at relative being, the finite, multiplicity; and it has sported not a little with those who admit the existence of the world, which is after all only a huge multiplicity. The fundamental error of the Eleatic school comes from the fact that in all the first terms we have enumerated it forgot one which equals all the others in certainty, and may claim the same authority, to wit, the idea of cause. Immensity or unity of space, eternity or unity of time, unity of numbers, unity of perfection, the ideal of all beauty, infinity, substance, being in itself, or the absolute, each is also a cause, not a relative, contingent, finite cause, but absolute cause. Now unity, substance, being absolute cause, it cannot but pass into act; it cannot but develop itself. With merely being in itself, absolute substance without causality, the world is impossible. But if being in itself be absolute cause, creation is not merely possible but necessary, and the world cannot but be. Take away the category of causality, which is of no importance to the superficial observer, from the collection of the others, and what do you do? You destroy the possibility of the creation of the world; for you would require unity alone to pass into variety, substance into phenomenon, the relative to be drawn from the absolute. But the absolute is not the absolutum quid of the Scholastics, but absolute cause, which absolutely creates, absolutely manifests itself, and in developing itself falls into the condition of all development, enters into variety, the imperfect, the finite, and produces all that we see around us.”21 We have made this extract to show that Cousin does not attempt to construct a system of the universe by means of a single principle, 20 [Ed. The Eleatic school was one of the pre-Socratic Greek schools of philosophy. The head of the school was Parmenides of Elea (c. 515-after 450 B.C.) who emphasized the unity of reality and asserted that the changing world of appearances is an illusion of the senses.] 21 Introduction a l’Histoire de la Philosophie. Leçon IV. [Ed. Introduction to the History of Philosophy, trans. Henning Gotfried Linberg (Boston: Hilliard, Gray, Little, and Wilkins, 1832), 116-18.]

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which were to fall into absolute nihilism, or into atheism, or pantheism. By recognizing the idea of the finite, the idea of the infinite, and their relation in the character of cause and effect, as first principles, he establishes a psychology broad enough to serve as a basis of an ontology which embraces the threefold existence of God, nature, and man, and therefore places himself in harmony with common sense and the universal faith of mankind. This he does, and, so far as we can see, in the only possible way there is of doing it. Shall he then be called an atheist or a pantheist? God, according to Cousin, is not a mere unity, a dead unity, an abstraction, which is indivisible, and which cannot go out of itself; but a living unity, which develops itself in variety, in multiplicity. Cousin here escapes the pantheism of the ancient Eleatic school, represented by Xenophanes, Parmenides, and Zeno, and also the fundamental error of the Alexandrian School, of which last some have regarded him as merely the continuator.22 “According to the Alexandrians,” he says, “the universal principle of things, God, is absolute unity, unity without any mixture, without any division with itself. Now absolute unity, so far forth as it is unity, is a unity which can have no attributes, qualities, or modifications; for this would divide it. Its existence is then reduced to pure essence. But what! are we returned to the God of Parmenides, to the Eleatic unity, to that abstract unity, without attributes and without qualities, which indifferently becomes the spiritual substance of the human soul, and the subject of all possible modifications of matter, of a clod of earth, as of the soul of Cato? No, thanks to God, there is nothing of all this. [ . . . ] According to the school of Alexandria, God is not pure essence; he is also intelligence, absolute intelligence, that is, absolute as intelligence can be. For intelligence, reduced to its simplest expression, implies the intelligence of something, for example, of intelligence [. . . ]. Now here is already a distinction of subject in knowledge and of object. Such is the most simple expression of intelligence; and such is in fact the divine intelligence according to the Alexandrians. The God of the Alexandrians possesses in 22 [Ed. Xenophanes was a sixth century B.C. Greek philosopher and poet whom Plato wrongly considered the founder of the Eleatic school. Zeno of Elea (c. 490after 430 B.C.) was a follower of Parmenides, emphasizing the unity and permanence of reality. The Alexandrian school taught various forms of Platonic or neoPlatonic thought at Alexandria from about the middle of the fourth century to 642, A.D. when the Arabs took over the city. Some of the Alexandrians were called eclectics. They tried to bring Christian and Greek philosophical traditions into harmony.]

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his second degree, in his second point of view, the attribute of intelligence. He possesses also another attribute. He must be conceived of as having in himself power, that power, that activity which is activity, which is a creative power. Here is the Alexandrian Trinity; that is God in himself, God as intelligence, and God as power. We do not easily see what is wanting in this theodicy. Nevertheless it contains a fundamental error. “God as intelligence admits in himself a division, for he can know only by taking himself as the object of his knowledge. The attribute of intelligence therefore necessarily introduces duality into the essence of the divine unity—the inseparable condition of all thought, the character of all consciousness. Either then is it necessary to resign ourselves to a God without consciousness, or to consent to duality in the primitive unity. Moreover, God is power, productive power, only on the condition that he can produce without exhausting himself, produce indefinitely. Power then introduces into the agent, who possesses and exercises it, indefinite multiplicity. But the God of the Alexandrians had been laid down at first as an absolute unity. When therefore the Alexandrian philosophy very wisely adds to him intelligence and power, it adds duality and multiplicity to unity. I repeat it, intelligence and power necessarily engender duality and multiplicity. Now here is the principle of the whole error of the Alexandrian School. According to it, multiplicity, diversity, and duality, the beginning of diversity, are inferior to absolute unity. Whence it follows that God, as pure essence, as substance, is superior to God as cause, as intelligence, and as power. From this it follows, in general, that power and action, intelligence and thought, are inferior to existence in itself, to absolute unity. Here is the principle of the whole error, the principle which has betrayed the Alexandrians into all their aberrations. “But it is not true that unity is superior to duality and multiplicity, even though duality and multiplicity should be derived from the unity to which they are attached. For what are duality and multiplicity produced by unity, if not the manifestation of unity? A unity, which should not develop itself in duality and multiplicity, would be only an abstract unity. Now unity is either abstract, and then it is as if it were not, or it is real, and if real it cannot but develop itself in duality and multiplicity. [ . . . ] If God is only being in itself, he is as if he were not; but if he really be, if he exist at once both as substance and as cause, at once as essence and as intelligence and power, he

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cannot but develop himself. Now all development proceeds forth from unity, but does not dissolve it; it manifests it.”23 The besetting sin of ancient philosophers, as well as of some modern philosophers, consists in representing God, primarily, as mere essence, without quality or attribute; the dark inscrutable ground of being rather than actual being itself. From this pure essence, one and indivisible, it is impossible to get at the idea of God as it exists in the common sense of mankind, and especially at the idea of creation. Whatever attributes we may subsequently clothe the Deity with, we must conceive of them as arbitrarily superinduced upon his being, not as constituting the essential elements of his being itself. The Eleatics represented God as mere unity, as mere essence, one and indivisible, without quality or attribute. They therefore admitted no creation, no world, nothing but God, who was as if he were not. The Alexandrians also represented God, as we have seen, in the first instance, as pure essence. But they went further, and clothed him with the attributes of intelligence and power. But these attributes were not essential, in their philosophy, to the idea of God. They could and did conceive of God without them. They were then not essential elements of the being of God. How then did it follow that he possessed them? Schelling seems to us to have fallen into the same error. God in the first instance is conceived of as pure essence, as absolute identity, as the dark ground of existence on which life may be traced, but which possesses, in itself, no attribute or quality. All you can say of him is that he is. Another view of God, indeed, presents him as living and as manifesting himself, in the real world and in the ideal, in two parallel lines. But how does Schelling pass from God as pure essence, to God as cause, as intelligence, manifesting himself in man and in nature? How does he demonstrate the existence of the attributes he predicates of God? All that is essential to God must be included in the primary conception of God. But intelligence and power, if we understand Schelling, are not included in this primary conception. Then they are not essential to the being of God. How then demonstrate that he possesses them? If God be pure essence, he cannot be legitimately regarded as intelligent. If he create, it must be unconsciously, without knowing either himself, or what he does. He becomes then a dark, blind ne23 Cours de 1’Histoire de la Philosophie. Tome I, 320-23. [Ed. Course of the History of Modern Philosophy, trans. O. W. Wight, 2 vols. (New York: D. Appleton and Co., 1852), 1: 446-47. The last two sentences of this quotation are not in the English translation.]

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cessity, from which the universe is fatally evolved. He then cannot be a person, and then nothing which corresponds to our idea of God. Furthermore, if he be mere essence, mere being, without attribute or quality, he cannot create. There can be no creation, nor even an evolution of himself, for he contains nothing to be evolved. Unity multiplied by unity yields only unity. Then there can be no world; there can be nothing but God, who is himself practically reduced to nothing; and we are virtually condemned to a system of absolute nihilism. For a being that possesses no quality, no attribute, and therefore can do nothing, differs in no respect from the negation of all being. Absolute Being then becomes identical with absolute Nothing. To this result it is possible the speculations of Schelling and Hegel, under a certain aspect, may tend; but this result, whatever the pamphlet before us may allege, can by no means be predicated of Cousin’s system. He avoids it, by denying that God is given in our primary idea of him as pure essence, as a mere abstract unity, to be subsequently conceived of as clothed with certain attributes. In his theodicy God is given in our primary idea of him, not only as absolute being, but also as absolute cause and absolute intelligence. Creative power is not an attribute of God, but God is himself, in his very essence, absolute cause; intelligence is not merely an attribute of God, but God is absolute intelligence. Absolute cause, and absolute intelligence are the very essence of God. They are not then mere attributes of a being lying back of and above them, and which exists in all its entireness without them, on which they are superinduced, or out of which they are evolved; but they are the essential elements of God himself. They are God, not in the second degree, as the Alexandrians taught, but God in the first degree. This distinction is altogether more important than the reviewer seems to have apprehended. By means of this distinction, the personality of God, and the creation of the world, the two truths which pantheism denies, are saved, and legitimately. What is in fact our idea of personality? Assuredly that of a free activity, conscious of itself and of what it does. A power person must contain in itself the power of acting, and must know that it is itself and not another that acts. In other words, to our conception of personality, causality and intelligence are essential. We regard ourselves as persons because we can act, create, or produce, and do it consciously. Take away the conception of cause, the idea implied when we say, I will do it, or I will not do it, and we cease to be persons. Take away the conception of intelligence, the consciousness, or capacity of knowing, that it is I myself who wills, and the full idea of personality, as common sense

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conceives it, is also taken away. Grant these two, and we are persons. Now God, according to Cousin, is absolute cause. Then he is an absolutely free activity. Then he possesses the first condition of personality. He is also absolute intelligence; not merely absolutely intelligent, knowing all things, but he is absolute intelligence, intelligence in itself. Then he must be conscious or self-knowing. He must know what he does, and that it is he himself who does it. He possesses then the other condition of personality. As cause he creates, as intelligence he knows that he creates, and that it is he that does it. He must then create consciously, and therefore with intention, both knowing and willing what he does. Then he is, in the strictest sense of the word, a person, absolute personality. Be this true or false, it is the legitimate deduction from the principles of Cousin’s philosophy. He is not then to be charged with pantheism. His philosophy has no pantheistic tendency. We are aware that it is thought by some that, though Cousin represents God as a cause, it is as a necessary cause, and not as a free, independent cause. We do not so understand him. A necessary cause, that is, a necessary cause understood as the antithesis of a free cause, is a solecism. A cause is a cause only so far as it is free and independent. I am a cause only to the extent to which I am free. What I do through a necessity imposed upon me, which I am not free to do or not to do, I do not; but the power or force necessitating me does it. Now, that which necessitates and that which is necessitated cannot be one and the same. The being necessitated to act must be diverse from the being or force necessitating. Now, to conceive of God as acting or creating under necessity, as a necessary cause in opposition to a free cause, is to conceive of him as only a secondary cause, and to suppose another cause lying back of him which necessitates him. But God, in our primary idea of him, is given as ultimate cause, as absolute cause; then there can be no cause back of him to necessitate him. To say that he is a necessary cause, is to deny what we affirm him to be, that God is God, and to imply a cause more ultimate than the ultimate itself. Now, God, in that he is absolute cause, is ultimate cause. He is, in that he is absolute, independent, and in that he is independent, he is free. There is no power or force distinct from him to control him. Then he cannot be necessitated. Then if he be a cause at all, he must be a free cause. There is and can be no such thing as necessary causes, except in a relative sense. All cause in the last analysis must be free, and precisely of the nature of that cause which in ourselves we term power of

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willing. We speak of blind and necessary causes in relation to external nature; but only because we do not conceive of them as causes at all in the strict sense of the word. Their causality is not in themselves, but out of them, in God. The causes we recognize in external nature we regard merely as secondary causes. Religion, as well as philosophy, teaches us that the real causality at work in external nature is nothing else but the power or agency of the Creator himself. The very fact that nature itself is blind and necessary, subject to a power which it is not, forbids us to regard it as really a cause except in a subordinate sense, and compels us to trace it up to nature’s God, to a free and intelligent causality which produces and controls it. We do never conceive of necessary cause as being really a cause. When therefore we admit cause in the absolute sense of the term, we always conceive of it as a free and independent cause. God is absolute cause, and being absolute cause he must be absolutely free. As he is absolute, ultimate, we can conceive no cause controlling him; therefore we cannot even conceive of him as being necessitated, or as a mere necessary cause in opposition to a free cause. But it is said that Cousin alleges that creation is necessary, that God cannot but create, and in so alleging he takes away God’s freedom and reduces him to a mere necessity. This objection is invalid, because it takes the word necessary in one sense, while Cousin uses it in another. Cousin, by no means, as may be inferred from what we have said, intends to teach that God is forced or compelled by a foreign power to create. Being a cause he must cause something, otherwise he would be merely a possible cause and not an actual cause (causa in potentia, non in actu) which would be to us as no cause at all. But God, in the theodicy which flows from Cousin’s philosophy, is not given as a mere possible cause, but a real cause, an actual cause; that is, not a cause which may be a cause but is not yet, but a cause which is actually a cause; that is, which actually creates. This is our primary conception of God. Now a God who actually creates must needs be conceived of in connection with actual creation. The creation of the world follows as a necessary consequence from our conception of God. We cannot conceive of an actual creator without conceiving of an actual creation. In this sense creation is necessary. God cannot but create, as Cousin says; which in fact is nothing more nor less than saying that God cannot be an actual creator without creating; that is again, he cannot create without creating. This is a proposition which, it strikes us, need excite no alarm, and which no man of plain sense can think of controverting. The term creator necessarily implies the correlative

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term creation. Creation, everybody admits, implies a creator, and creator not less implies creation. To conceive of a creator without a creation is to conceive of a creator which is not a creator. If the reviewer will point out to us how God can be a creator without creating, we will admit his objection, but must persist in considering his objection invalid until he does it. The reason why this objection is urged is that they, who urge it, do not themselves conceive of God as a creator. To them he is not in his essence a cause. He merely possesses the power, when he pleases to put it forth, to become a cause. In their conception he is merely a causa in potentia, non in actu. He can be, and with all his essential attributes, without causing or producing anything. This is the character under which they conceive of God. They do then, albeit unconsciously, fall into the old Eleatic pantheism, or at best into the fundamental vice of the school of Alexandria; and are themselves guilty of the very errors they charge upon Cousin. From this conception of God, we have shown over and over again it is impossible to pass to that of creation, impossible to conceive how he, who is unchangeable, can change from a mere possible cause to an actual cause. We see no way of avoiding the difficulty but by conceiving of God, by representing God in our primary conception of him, as an actual cause, a being that does really create. And Cousin, we think, shows very clearly and satisfactorily that this is our primary conception of the Deity. As this point is important, the turning point of the whole controversy, we must, at the risk of exhausting the patience of our readers, dwell yet longer upon it. What is the God of common sense? How does the human race conceive of God? Is he not to the race the creator? Do they not always regard him as the maker, as the actual cause of the universe? Common sense finds within man the conception of cause; it looks abroad on the universe and says it has been caused, it has had a maker. Under this radical idea of cause, or of maker, it represents God. It sees the necessity of a maker, simply because it sees a world which it believes was made. This is the extent to which common sense goes. Take away the actual universe, and it would conceive of no God, for it would see no necessity of a God. Its conception then is not the conception of a possible God, but of an actual God; that is to say not of a creator which is not a creator, but merely has the power to become a creator, but of a creator who actually creates. This is the common sense conception of God. The God of common sense is always the God who actually creates the world, who is the actual cause of the universe.

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Now it is in common sense, not in philosophical systems, that we are to look for the primitive conceptions of the race; and in the primitive conceptions of the race that we are to look for the primary conceptions of reason. The test of a philosophical system, the proof of its truth, is in the fact that it agrees with and explains the conceptions of the reason as manifested in humanity. Cousin recognizes the idea of God precisely as we find it in common sense; and by his analysis of the reason he has shown that common sense is worthy of reliance. He demonstrates the truth of the idea of God as the human race conceives it. He demonstrates, then, that God, in our primary conception of him, is not merely a God who may become a cause, albeit he has as yet caused nothing, but of a being who is actually a cause, an actual creator. He has demonstrated then the necessity of creation; that is to say, a creator being given, he has demonstrated that creation is implied, that it must follow as a necessary consequence. This is all he means by saying that creation is necessary. We are obliged, for the want of room, to pass over much of the reviewer’s carping at what Cousin says of the spontaneous reason. Cousin’s doctrine is that reason is impersonal and objective. It appears in us, and is our light, and by virtue of it we are intelligent; but it is distinct from us. Reason has two modes of activity, one reflective and the other spontaneous. The reflective reason is reason subjected to the control of the human personality; the spontaneous reason is reason acting by virtue of its own agency, or more strictly, reason acting independently of our personality. But in all action there is a cause which acts. In the spontaneous activity of reason, there must be a causality, but that causality is not ours; that causality is revealed to us in the reason as God, and hence the voice of the spontaneous reason is declared to be the voice of God. That is to say, the intelligence, we receive by virtue of the impersonal operations of the reason or principle of intelligence, is given us directly by God, who is intelligence itself. It is, therefore, a real inspiration. But this spontaneous reason operates in all men, and, therefore, all men are inspired. This conclusion the reviewer regards as startling. Why so? Has he not read in the Bible of a “true light, which enlighteneth every man who cometh into the world” [John 1:9]? Has he not also read, in the same book, that “the manifestation of the Spirit is given unto all men to profit withal” [1 Cor 12:7]? Nay, does not his own church teach, notwithstanding the small number it admits will be effectually called, that God’s spirit strives with all men, and that besides “efficient grace,” which is extended to the few, there is a “common grace,” which is extended to the many, teaching them so fully what they should be-

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lieve and do, that they are rendered inexcusable, and justly deserving of endless damnation if they do not believe and obey the truth? In admitting all this, does he not admit that, in a certain sense and to a certain degree, all men are divinely inspired? Why then is Cousin’s doctrine more startling than his own? Cousin does not contend that all men are inspired in the same degree, nor that all are inspired for the same special purpose. He contends for no more than Edwards did, in his sermon on the Reality of the Inner Light,24 only he has cleared up and legitimated what Edwards left obscure and doubtful. We see nothing startling in the idea that God holds intercourse with the human soul, and speaks to his children in every age and country, and to “everyone in his own tongue, wherein he was born” [Acts 2:8]. Every man need not by this be considered as inspired to the degree that was Moses, or David, or Isaiah, or Peter, or Paul nor inspired with reference to the same special end. Nor is the preeminence or value of the inspiration of the sacred prophets affected or lessened by the fact that all men have that degree of inspiration which enables them to receive, understand, and appreciate their prophecies. The spontaneous reason, according to Cousin, gives us the ideas of the infinite and finite, and their relation as cause and effect. The passage from these ideas to God is not difficult, he says, “for these ideas are God.”25 This the reviewer thinks is most villainous. Be it so. We shall not attempt to defend it, in the sense in which the reviewer understands it. Hegel teaches the absolute identity of thought and being, of idea and object. Hence the ideal and the real are not merely parallel, but identical. Hence the laws of logic are the laws of being, and a true system of logic would be a true system of ontology. Now, the reviewer, we presume, fancies that in this statement of Cousin he finds a recognition of this doctrine of Hegel. But Cousin nowhere teaches the identity of thought and being, of idea and object. With Schelling, he maintains that there is a correspondence between the ideal world and the real, thought and nature; and with Hegel, that the laws which humanity develops in her history, and nature through all its phenomena, correspond to the laws of the reason, and are, therefore, susceptible of a logical formula, identical with the logical formula of the reason. A perfect system of logic would undoubtedly be a 24 [Ed. Brownson had read and quoted from the Worcester edition of Jonathan Edwards’ “The Divine and Supernatural Light.” See The Works of President Edwards, 8 vols. (Worcester, Mass.: Isaiah Thomas, 1809), 8:290-310.] 25 [Ed. Cousin expressed this idea in a number of places. See, e.g., Elements of Psychology: Included in a Critical Examination of Locke’s Essay on the Human Understanding, trans. Caleb Sprague Henry (Hartford: Cooke and Co., 1834), 400.]

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complete history of humanity and of nature, but not because the real and ideal are identical, but because they correspond one to the other. We say Cousin nowhere teaches the identity of thought and being, of idea and object. Thought, in its usual signification, is an act of the intelligence, idea a fact of consciousness. Now as Cousin is always careful to distinguish man from nature, and man and nature from God, we can hardly believe him capable of being so illogical as to confound the ideal with the real, a mere fact of consciousness with the reality which exists independently of us. He always recognizes a distinction between subject and object, and in his philosophy, if we understand it, conception is the mediator between the subject and object, the medium, by which we pass to the reality lying outside of us. He rejects the doctrine of the Nominalists, that ideas are mere signs, mere words, existing in the dictionary only, and also the doctrine ascribed to the Realists, that ideas are real existences, little beings, as Malebranche calls them,26 which are by no means despicable; and says that he will grant that ideas are conceptions of reason, of intelligence, of thought, providing we will agree with him as to what thought, intelligence, reason really is. Reason, properly speaking, according to Cousin, is not man, nor is it God, but it is the mediator between the two. We see God, we approach God only by means of a mediator. This is as true in a philosophical sense, as it is in a religious sense. But this mediator is not of man’s procuring; God and man can come together only by God’s letting himself down to man. Man cannot raise himself to God. He knows not God because he is God’s equal, apprehends not the infinite, as some of our Transcendentalists would seem to teach, because he himself is infinite. But the union is effected by God’s condescension. God furnishes the mediator by means of which we come into relation with him. Reason, then, as the mediator, intellectual, between God and man, is divine, and not human. The essence of reason is intelligence. Intelligence, regarded in its principle and in its absoluteness, is the very essence of God. Reason, then, in its principle, is God. Reason consists in ideas, or rather the idea of the infinite, the idea of the finite, and that of their relation exhaust the reason; they are it. Viewing these ideas, then, in their principle, as ob26 [Ed. Nicholas Malebranche (1638-1715) was a French Catholic ontologist philosopher, theologian, and priest of the Oratory. Malebranche was influenced by Descartes but modified in significant ways Cartesian ontology, epistemology, and physics. His great work, The Search after Truth (1674), presented his most famous doctrines of vision in God and occasionalism. For Malebranche ideas that function in human cognition are in God, and are thus eternal and independent of finite minds.]

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jects of our intelligence, and not in their character of facts of consciousness, we may say with propriety they are God. Cousin says, “God is thought, absolute thought, the eternal reason, cause, and substance of the truths which man perceives.”27 He here uses the term thought (pensee) as the synonym of intelligence, and speaks of intelligence in its principle, not of intelligence as a fact of human nature. Thought, properly speaking, is an act of human intelligence, an act of the mind. In this sense, of course, Cousin cannot mean that thought is God. But the principle of thought is intelligence; the principle of our intelligence is reason; the principle of reason is absolute intelligence, intelligence in itself, whose essence is intelligence; and intelligence in this sense is identical as has been before demonstrated with God. Thought, then, taken abstractly from the thinker, and regarded in its principle, and in its absoluteness, is identical with God. It is in this sense Cousin calls God thought. Bearing this sense in mind, we can interpret, in a not very exceptionable manner, the expression, “every man thinks God.”28 God is not the thought, not a product of our thinking, but, as intelligence, he is the principle of all thought, and, therefore, is involved in every thought, as the principle of a thing is always involved in the thing itself. Hence, the impossibility of real atheism. No man is in point of fact an atheist; and no one would believe himself an atheist, did he but comprehend what is implied in the simple fact that he thinks; for God, in a philosophical sense—not in a moral and religious sense— is in all his thoughts. This view of the matter will also exonerate Cousin from the charge of presumption, which the reviewer brings against him, in representing God as comprehensible. God is revealed to us under the ideas of the infinite, the finite, and their relation. These ideas are the reason, and reason taken objectively, in its principle and in its absoluteness, is identical with God. Now the nature of ideas is to be intelligible, as the essence of reason is intelligence. These ideas are the essence of intelligence, and intelligence in itself is God. These ideas then, taken objectively, for the reality for which they stand, not for the affections of the human mind, are as we have seen, God. Now as they are in their very nature intelligible, and as they are, if we may so speak, the essence of God, it follows that the essence of God is altogether intelligible and comprehensible. This is all Cousin means by representing God as comprehensible. He does not mean that we fi27

[Ed. See Cousin’s Introduction to the History of Philosophy, 165-66.] [Ed. See Cousin’s Elements of Psychology, trans. C. S. Henry, 4th ed. (New York: Ivison and Phinney, 1856), 435-36. Cousin is borrowing from Leibniz here.] 28

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nite beings can fathom the infinite, much less that we can penetrate the divine intelligence itself, and ascertain and comprehend the counsels of God. We can comprehend the fact that he is, and comprehend the nature of his being; but beyond all this lies an infinite universe of the unknown into which we cannot penetrate. With these remarks on the alleged atheistical and pantheistical tendencies of Transcendentalism, as represented by Cousin, we proceed to the charge of fatalism. Fatalism may be understood as predicated of God or as predicated of humanity. When predicated of God it means that the universe is not a free creation, by an intelligent and independent cause, but a necessary evolution from the dark, unconscious bosom of the Absolute. In this sense we have refuted the charge by what we have said of pantheism. We think we have demonstrated that necessary cause, understood in opposition to free cause, is a solecism; and we trust we have made it sufficiently evident that Cousin ascribes the creation of the universe to a free, independent, intentional causality. According to him, the universe is what it is not because God was compelled to make it what it is, but because he willed to make it what it is, and not something else. Fatalism when predicated of humanity is the denial to humanity of all free development, and the assertion of the fact that all its acts are rendered necessary and inevitable by the cause from which it receives its birth and its law. In this sense the charge is unfounded, so far as Cousin’s philosophy is concerned; for he maintains that the ME, that which we mean when we say, I, myself, is in its very nature a cause. It is undoubtedly a limited cause, but the limit of its causality is the limit of its being. If a cause, according to the principles we have established, it must be free. To subject it to necessity were to destroy it, that is, to annihilate us, and to compel us to reenter into the bosom of nature. But it is said the charge is sustained by Cousin’s doctrines on history, at least for the race, if not for the individual. What are these doctrines, and to what do they amount? So far as we understand Cousin, and we are not willing to admit we do not understand him, he teaches, first, that God has created the universe in harmony with himself. That is, the universe bears the same relation to God as intelligence that it does to God as cause, or to God as substance, or to God as being. Hence, the universe may be logically deduced from the divine intelligence. When we have once risen by psychological observation and induction to God as absolute reason, absolute intelligence, we may then take our stand in him and tell a priori, as it

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were, all that is or can be in creation. Secondly, he teaches that God creates all beings with a special nature, and by that determines each being and each race of beings to a special end. This nature, and this end, since the universe itself bears an affinity to the intelligence which creates it, must be coincident with the laws of reason, and therefore susceptible of a scientific exposition. And, thirdly, that humanity, as well as all other created existences, has received from its Maker a special nature, or constitution, by virtue of which it is what it is, and is determined to a certain end or destiny, which it is ever fulfilling. This end, and the course humanity takes in attaining it, are ascertainable and susceptible of a scientific statement. These several propositions, so far as concerns the question of fatalism, may be reduced to two. 1. God has made man and given him a mission. 2. To the fulfillment of this mission in time and space man is determined by the very laws or constitution of his nature. And these two propositions again resolve themselves into two questions. 1. As it concerns God, is he present by his Providence in all the developments of humanity? And 2. as it concerns man, is his history reducible to a science? That God is present in all the developments of humanity will hardly be denied by one who teaches that “God hath foreordained whatsoever comes to pass,”29 nor indeed by any one who really believes in the existence of God. Take away Providence and you take away all fitness, all reasonableness from religion. The God religion loves and adores is in all and over all, extending his Providence unto all, so that he numbers the very hairs of our heads, and suffers not a sparrow to fall to the ground without his notice.30 It is he who presides over the nations that rears the infant colony or overwhelms the empire, that setteth up kings and putteth down kings, that doeth according to his will in the armies above and among the inhabitants of the earth. Piety sees him everywhere, a living, acting, controlling power. Is religion deceived? Is piety mocked? Or is it a truth that God is thus present? According to the philosophy we are defending, he is really thus present, a free, uncontrolled, all-controlling will, to whom we may address ourselves as to a Father, to whom we may offer our supplications or pour out our hearts in thanksgiving and praise. Now, if we admit the presence of God by his Providence in the historical developments of humanity, it would seem no more than 29 [Ed. The substance of the idea is found in Cousin’s Cours de philosophie . . . Introduction à l’histoire de philosophie, 2 vols. (Paris: Pichon and Didier, 1828), Leçon 7, pp. 38-39.] 30 [Ed. The reference here is to Mt 10:29-30.]

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just to admit his presence to some effect. To admit him as a mere spectator is virtually to admit him not at all. He is there to fulfil a design, to accomplish his own purposes in regard to humanity; that is, to ensure the fulfillment by humanity of the mission he has given it. To this extent we must go, if we admit the doctrine of providence at all, and this is as far as Cousin goes. Is this fatalism? Then was St. Paul a fatalist when he said to his Ephesian brethren, “Work out your own salvation with fear and trembling; for it is God that worketh in you to will and to do.”31 Then is every religious man a fatalist, for no religious man believes that he of himself alone can fulfil the great purpose of God in his being. Every religious man invokes the aid of the Holy Spirit, and feels that though through Christ strengthening him he can do all things, yet he of himself can do nothing. Cousin does nothing more than draw out and state in its philosophical formula the principle here involved. Undoubtedly, there is much in the development of humanity which so far as man himself is concerned is fatal. God’s sovereignty must be everywhere admitted, whether we are able to reconcile it with man’s agency or not. How God can be absolutely sovereign, and accomplish always his purposes in all things, in every the minutest event, and man still be free, is no doubt a difficult problem to solve; but both facts are borne witness to by consciousness, and we can deny neither without denying either God or man, without destroying the basis of all knowledge, and setting ourselves afloat on the stormy ocean of universal skepticism. But if we study the universe with attention, we shall find that God has so constructed it, that the action of the several parts contributes to the action of the whole. As the revolution of the earth upon its own axis sets it forward in its revolution round the sun, so man’s action from his own free will carries him onward in accomplishing the designs of Providence. Now envious brethren may sell with evil intention a Joseph into Egypt, but God shall make it the means of preserving the whole family, and of founding a mighty nation. Ignorant and rebellious Jews may with wicked hands nail a Jesus to the cross, but God shall make it the means of saving the world. He shall make the wrath of man praise him, and the remainder of wrath he shall restrain. That is, he will suffer no perversity of man, no wickedness of his creatures, to wax so great as to thwart his purposes, or to abridge his sovereignty.

31

[Ed. The reference is to Phil 2:12-13, not to Ephesians.]

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If we admit the universal providence of God in the developments of humanity, we must admit it under the character which is essential to God. God is free and independent, but he always acts, if we may so speak, in accordance with his own nature. He is omnipotent, and yet an apostle tells us that it is impossible for him to lie. Why impossible? Because it would require him to contradict himself, and act in direct opposition to his own essential attributes. Now, then, although he is free to create and to govern the world according to his own will, he must nevertheless create it in accordance with the laws of his own being. When we conceive of God as acting, we must conceive of him as acting in harmony with himself. We cannot conceive of him as cause, without at the same time conceiving of him as intelligence; and therefore his creations and his providences must bear the same relation to him, as intelligence, that they do to him as cause. A creator being given, who is in his essence intelligence as well as cause, a universe, whose laws are coincident with the laws of intelligence, is given. A God, who is in essence intelligence as well as in his action providence, exercising a providential control over all his works, being given, a providential control coincident with the laws of intelligence is also given. Now here we get at the root of the doctrines of Cousin on history, and the condition of all science as applied to history. The laws of the universe are the laws of intelligence. Consequently the laws of humanity, since humanity is a part of the universe, are the laws of intelligence. The developments of humanity, we presume no one will question, are in accordance with, if not by virtue of, the laws of humanity. The laws of these, then, are the same with those. The subject-matter of history is the development of humanity in time and space. The laws of history then are the laws of intelligence. Then by ascertaining the laws of intelligence we can ascertain the laws of history, and give them their scientific expression. These doctrines, as we have stated them, necessarily imply, first, that the universe has its cause in divine Intelligence. Then there is in absolute intelligence a reason for its being, and in this reason is its right to be. Secondly. If there is in absolute intelligence a reason for the universe to be at all, then is there a reason for it to be what it is. Then is there a reason for each part to be, and to be itself and not another. Then is there a reason for the existence of man in time and space, with the precise nature he has, and with all his environments. If there is a reason for man and his environments, it follows, as his development, or his history is the result of these, there is a reason for his history. What then appears in history has had a reason for appear-

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ing there, and because it has had a reason for being there, it has had a right to be there. This we believe is Cousin’s doctrine. Is it true? Deny it, and what is the result? Into a universe created by absolute intelligence, absolute reason, and under the providence of an all-seeing and all-powerful God, there has entered what has had no business to enter, no reason for entering, and which therefore has had no cause. Whither will such an admission as this carry us? Is this doctrine true? We call God the creator of the world. Now he must create it out of already existing materials, out of nothing, or out of himself. The first view is condemned by the church who, in her catechism, teaches that God made all things out of nothing. Moreover, to suppose the existence of materials furnished to his hand, is to suppose an existence parallel to his own. The matter of the universe must then be independent of God; then uncreated; then absolute; then, since God is absolute, there must be two absolutes. This will not do. The catechism is right, of course; but we misinterpret its intent. When it says God made all things out of nothing, its real intent is, on the one hand, to assert the proper creation of the world by God, and, on the other hand, to deny that he created it out of preexisting matter, as the advocates of the old doctrine of the eternity of matter contended. But to say that God created the universe out of nothing, in our ordinary interpretation of the assertion, is tantamount to saying that he did not create it at all; that nothing is its creator; which is saying again, that it is not made, and therefore self-existent, or therefore nothing. There remains then only the last hypothesis, namely, God created the world out of himself; that is, he created it by virtue of his own energy. Then its stuff, so far as it has any, must be identical with his own; and stuff it must have, if it be something, not nothing. Now, we have already found God in his essence to be reason, reason in its absoluteness; that is, absolute intelligence, intelligence in its essence. The essence then of the universe, not of man only but of nature also, is intelligence; that is, intelligence in its principle, not in its relation to human consciousness. Here is, we suppose, the real meaning of Hegel’s doctrine of the identity of thought and being, of idea and object, and of Schelling’s doctrine of the identity of the ideal and real, man and nature, subject and object. Admitting these positions, it follows that the universe—nature as well as man—in its developments, must obey the general law of intelligence. Is this true with regard to nature? Metaphysics in these

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days are held in low repute, but the natural sciences rank high, and the age shows no want of confidence in them. But on what condition is natural science possible? Could the phenomena of nature be reduced to a science, if their law were not coincident with the law of mind? Nay more; we can anticipate nature, and by reasoning predict her acting. Kant stated there must be another planet in our system, long before Herschel32 discovered it by means of his telescope; and Franklin snatched the lightning from the clouds in his reasoning, before it ran down the silken cord of his kite and charged his Leyden jar. Watt and Arkwright and Fulton made their inventions in the ideal, before they did in the real.33 They reasoned and said, “It must be so;” and then they interrogated nature, who answered, “It is so.” Were this denied, all reasoning applied to nature were out of place; and it would be idle to think of making any induction of her laws, or of constructing machinery in accordance with them in the hope of a successful issue. The laws of nature then correspond, to say the least, to those of the intellectual world. Now in regard to history the same principle holds good. The man and his environments being given, who does not profess to be able to give his actions? We say, when certain things are alleged of a given individual, they are not true, he could not have done so. They would be an anomaly in his character. Who that knows the character of Plato wants arguments to prove that he was not the author of the Anabasis?34 Or who would not decide at once that the Excursion could not have been written by the author of Don Juan?35 Now what is the principle of our judgment in these and a thousand similar cases? It is the conscious or unconscious recognition of the fact that there is a propriety, a fitness, a rationality, if we may so speak, in whatever takes place. This statement must follow as a logical sequence from that, or we cannot admit it. There is a discrepancy between your two 32 [Ed. Sir William Frederick Herschel (1738-1822) was the German-born British astronomer who discovered the planet Uranus.] 33 [Ed. Brownson is probably referring to James Watt (1736-1819), a Scottish inventor whose steam engine contributed to the Industrial Revolution; Sir Richard Arkwright (1732-92), a British industrialist who invented machinery for textile manufacturing; and Robert Fulton (1765-1815), an American who developed steamboating into a commercial success.] 34 [Ed. Anabasis, a story of how Greek mercenary soldiers fought for Cyrus in his attempt to seize the Persian throne, was written by Xenophon (c. 435-355 B.C.), a Greek historian and soldier.] 35 [Ed. William Wordsworth wrote “The Excursion” (1814), a poem developing the characters of a wanderer, a poet, a solitary, and a pastor. George Gordon Byron (1788-1824) was the author of Don Juan (1819-24), a satirical poem.]

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propositions, and therefore both cannot be true. An Oberlin can no more be a Danton than a man can be a horse.36 Hence it is, we pretend, everybody, in greater or less degree, pretends to be able to decide on historical questions by a priori reasoning. Now a priori reasoning, we need not stop to prove, can apply only to matters whose laws are identical with the laws of reason. A priori reasoning is nothing but the statement of the laws of reason in their logical order. If these then can apply to the history of individuals, or of the race, it follows as a matter of necessity that the laws of reason and of history are identical. Now as everybody does attempt to apply a priori reasoning to history, and on the propriety of so applying it rests all historical criticism, it follows that everybody admits, consciously or unconsciously, the identity we contend for. We have then for it the testimony of common sense. This is something. In history there can be at work, at most, only three causes— man, nature, and providence. The facts of history must be providential, that is, revelation, inspiration, supernatural guidance; natural, that is, influence of climate, soil, geographical position; or human, that is, the action of human intelligence, passion, and volition. Providence, we have proved, is always in harmony with eternal reason, for it is the action, superintendence, and control of the eternal reason itself. Providential facts then come within the scope of the reason and are reducible to its law. Nature we have found to be the product of intelligence, and at bottom obeying the laws of intelligence. Natural facts then are reducible to the laws of the reason. Man is also a product of the infinite reason, and is constituted in harmony with its immutable laws. His actions then must be susceptible of a rational measure. The principle then of all the facts of history is intelligence—absolute reason as in Providence, or relative, finite, and defective reason as in man and nature. This established, it follows that everything in history is the product of intelligence, of reason, either in its absoluteness or in its relativeness. Then it is rational in its principle. Then it has a reason for being, and of course for being what, when, and where it is. Then it has a right to be what, when, and where it is. Then history is absolved. Humanity no longer stands arraigned as a criminal. Here is the purport of the doctrines of Cousin, and also of the new German school, so far as we understand this last, on the history 36 [Ed. Jean Frédéric Oberlin (1740-1825) was a Lutheran pastor in Waldersbach who was an activist social reformer and something of a mystic in sympathy with the thought of Emmanuel Swedenborg. Georges Danton (1759-94) was an orator and a moderate leader of the French Revolution who was guillotined because of his resistance to the Reign of Terror.]

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of humanity. Humanity has received from her Maker by her constitution a work to achieve, a mission to accomplish. She marches steadily towards her end, to her high destination. Her march is onward through the ages. Tyrants and despots cannot retard her progress; vice and crime are impotent to hold her back. She is faithful to the law of her being. Man is then acquitted, and God is vindicated. But does not this destroy the moral character of actions, and confound good and evil? Not at all. Morality is to be predicated of the individual, and consists in the motive with which the individual acts. It cannot be predicated of the race, for the race taken as a vast collective being, though it has as such a life, and a destiny, is an impersonality, incapable of volition, and therefore of a moral character. The individual is free; he may will to do right or to do wrong; and as he wills to do the one or the other, is he virtuous or vicious. This he may be, although his vice should be impotent in thwarting the purposes of God in regard to the race. The individual sins, but the race cannot sin. Nor is there in this doctrine any confusion of good and evil. We absolve humanity from crime; but we do not pretend that she is perfect. What is positive in her history, what she has aimed at, what she has labored to realize, through all the past, has been good, and from all her operations good has resulted, because all have tended to set her forward towards the completion of her mission; but she has only partially developed herself, and therefore realized only a partial good. In her systems she has always embraced some truth, but not all truth; in her deeds, some good but not all good. But this is only saying that her work is not yet done, that her development is not yet completed. With her starting point in the feebleness of infancy, surrounded by a nature with which she knew not how to place herself in harmony, made as she was, subject to passion and error, her past history could be only what it has been. That is, with the given antecedents, the consequents which have actually followed were inevitable; with the data furnished, it was impossible to draw other conclusions. So far as this is fatalism we admit it, but do not undertake to defend it, for it needs no defense. We admit it, for to deny it, were to deny Providence, and to assert that history is a mere jumble of facts, which have taken place without law, without cause either in God, man, or the nature of things. According to Cousin, then, philosophy accepts the past and trusts the future. The past was not all wrong. The past has been; and in that is its apology. But it did not attain to all perfection, to all the truth, wisdom, and goodness desirable, or attainable even, reference had to

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the capacities of the race; and therefore we should not seek to recall and make it the present. In its place it was good, and had a right to be; out of its place it has no right to be, and would be bad. In the present it would be out of its place. Herein is the condemnation of those who turn their faces from the future, look back, sigh for the return of what has been, and deem all departure from it a deterioration. And herein too is their impotence. The past never returns. Yesterday never becomes today. The Middle Ages are gone. The age of authority in matters of faith and opinion is with the ages beyond the flood. Vain is the attempt to recall it. They who seek to recall it are warring against God and humanity, and should therefore provoke not our anger, but our compassion. What are individuals in a war against humanity, and humanity’s Maker? The race is in a continual process of development. Its course is ever from the imperfect towards the perfect. Not yet has it reached its goal; not yet is its career ended. The future then must differ from the present and the past; but though differing from them it must always be superior to them. Instead then of lamenting that the past has gone, or grieving that the present must pass away, we should turn our faces with hope to the future. The office of philosophy, when applied to history, is not to rave or to weep, to praise or condemn, but simply to comprehend and explain. If it be philosophy, it is not destructive but constructive, at once radical and conservative, Janus-faced, looking before and after, historian and prophet, recounting the past and foretelling the future, complacent and hopeful, peaceful and active. It looks into all the doing and driving of the race, into all its victories and defeats, into all systems, creeds, sects, schools, and parties, with a keen, penetrating eye, without fear or prejudice; calm and impartial, tolerant but not indifferent, it seeks the part of truth in each, explains the errors in connection with which it is always found, and sets it forth in a clear light for the nourishment and guidance of the race. It is startled by no forms of error or heresy, and deterred by no misplaced reverence for the past, or attachment to the present, or apprehension for the future, by no noise of the crowd, warnings of the timid, or fulminations of the interested, from making its investigations thorough, or from calmly but firmly proclaiming its results. So much we have thought it proper to say in defense of philosophy, as we find it represented by Cousin, and as we ourselves embrace it. If there be any force in what we have thus far said, the other charges brought in the pamphlet under consideration, require no refutation. What we have said, if it prove anything, proves that the

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philosophy we are defending is sound, so far as concerns fundamental principles. Admitting then, for the sake of the argument, that some erroneous applications or unwarrantable deductions have been made, either by Cousin himself, or by individuals among ourselves, we need not be disturbed; for they will be resisted by the fundamental principles themselves, be soon detected, exposed, and therefore, as a matter of course, pass away. If your system is right, sound in its elements, you have nothing to apprehend from its applications. The race is a logician, and never draws or accepts an illogical inference. Let its premises be true, and its conclusions will be just. The reviewer questions the sincerity of the faith Cousin professes to have in Christianity. We think we have shown that one may adopt Cousin’s philosophy, and yet believe in Christianity. It perhaps would not be amiss for this orthodox reviewer to be aware that the men, who subject themselves to the reproach of bringing out new doctrines, are about as likely to be sincere in their professions, as those who take their faith from tradition, and their morals from the fashion of the day. The men he condemns have as much interest in upholding religion both for themselves and others as he has; and it is not impossible but they may see as clearly what must be favorable to religion, and what must be the tendency of their own doctrines, as he does, especially since he owns these doctrines are to him incomprehensible. Perhaps he, and they who think with him, are not all who are acquainted with the traditions of the fathers, nor all who have hearts for the beautiful and good, minds for the perception and comprehension of truth, or zeal and energy for its furtherance. He should look to it, that, while he is condemning them, and compassing sea and land to hold back the ever-advancing mind to his superannuated formulas, he be not found among those who neither enter into the kingdom of heaven themselves, nor suffer those that would to enter. They were not Jesus and his disciples who were thrust out of the kingdom, and prohibited from sitting down with Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, the wise and the good of every age and nation, but the Scribes and Pharisees, who made void the law through their traditions. Nevertheless let him take his own course, as we shall ours. We are also told that the philosophy we defend is not new, that it is identical with the philosophy which has from time immemorial prevailed in the East, that it is but a republication of the Gnostic philosophy, or the Alexandrian. The human mind is everywhere the same, and in its developments follows ever the same laws. It would be singular, then, if there should not be a sameness in all philosophy. That the philosophy we are defending has its prototype wherever

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man has philosophized, is one of the evidences of its fidelity to the mind, and therefore of its truth. All possible systems of philosophy, according to Cousin, are reducible to four, and of course the human race can only reproduce from time to time one or another, or all of them. We are now in an epoch of history, analogous to that of the first three or four centuries of our era, and therefore our philosophy ought to be analogous to Gnosticism and to the Alexandrian Eclecticism. We not only admit this, but contend that it is so. The Alexandrians were philosophers who sought to reconcile the newly developed reason with the old religious and theological traditions, precisely as French and German philosophers are seeking to reconcile reason and the church. The Gnostics were men who sought to reconcile the Christian movement, the simple faith and piety of the early Christians, with the teachings of science; precisely the work to be done at this time, as well as at that. The historical facts of our epoch being analogous, our philosophy should be analogous. But although it must be analogous, it may be superior; and it is precisely in its superiority, in its more advanced state, more perfect development, that its difference ought to consist. This superiority, this more perfect development, we apprehend will by no competent judge be denied it. In conclusion, we would say that we have thus far accepted the name Transcendentalism, although it is not one of our own choosing, nor the one we approve. So far as Transcendentalism is understood to be the recognition in man of the capacity of knowing truth intuitively, or of attaining to a scientific knowledge of an order of existence transcending the reach of the senses, and of which we can have no sensible experience, we are Transcendentalists. But when it is understood to mean that feeling is to be placed above reason, dreaming above reflection, and instinctive intimation above scientific exposition; in a word when it means the substitution of a lawless fancy for an enlightened understanding, as we apprehend it is understood in our neighborhood, by the majority of those who use it as a term of reproach, we must disown it, and deny that we are Transcendentalists.

7. THE LABORING CLASSES1 Boston Quarterly Review 3 (July, 1840): 358-95

Thomas Carlyle unquestionably ranks among the ablest writers of the day. His acquaintance with literature seems to be almost universal, and there is apparently no art or science with which he is not familiar. He possesses an unrivaled mastery over the resources of the English tongue, a remarkably keen insight into the mysteries of human nature, and a large share of genuine poetic feeling. His works are characterized by freshness and power, as well as by strangeness and singularity, and must be read with interest, even when they cannot be with approbation. The little work, named at the head of this article, is a fair sample of his peculiar excellences, and also of his peculiar defects. As a work intended to excite attention and lead the mind to an investigation of a great subject, it possesses no ordinary value; but as a work intended to throw light on a difficult question, and to afford some positive directions to the statesman and the philanthropist, it is not worth much. Carlyle, like his imitators in this country, though he declaims against the destructives, possesses in no sense a constructive genius. He is good as a demolisher, but pitiable enough as a builder. No man sees more clearly that the present is defective and unworthy to be retained; he is a brave and successful warrior against it, whether reference be had to its literature, its politics, its philosophy, or its religion; but when the question comes up concerning what ought to be, what should take the place of what is, we regret to say, he affords us no essential aid, scarcely a useful hint. He has fine spiritual instincts, has outgrown materialism, loathes skepticism, sees clearly the absolute necessity of faith in both God and man, and insists upon it with due sincerity and earnestness; but with feelings very nearly akin to despair. He does not appear to have found as yet a faith for himself, and his writings have almost invariably a skeptical tendency. He has doubtless a sort of faith in God, or an overwhelming necessity, but we cannot perceive that he has any faith in man or in man’s efforts. 1 [Ed. Brownson’s review of Thomas Carlyle’s Chartism (Boston: C. C. Little & James Brown, 1840).] 298

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Society is wrong, but he mocks at our sincerest and best directed efforts to right it. It cannot subsist as it is; that is clear: but what shall be done to make it what it ought to be, that he saith not. Of all writers we are acquainted with, he is the least satisfactory. He is dissatisfied with everything himself, and he leaves his readers dissatisfied with everything. Hopeless himself, he makes them also hopeless, especially if they have strong social tendencies, and are hungering and thirsting to work out the regeneration of their race. Mr. Carlyle’s admirers, we presume, will demur to this criticism. We have heard some of them speak of him as a sort of soul-quickener, and profess to derive from his writings fresh life and courage. We know not how this may be. It may be that they derive advantage from him on the homeopathic principle, and that he cures their diseases by exaggerating them; but for ourselves we must say that we have found him anything but a skillful physician. He disheartens and enfeebles us; and while he emancipates us from the errors of tradition, he leaves us without strength or courage to engage in the inquiry after truth. We rise from his writings with the weariness and exhaustion one does from the embraces of the Witch Mara.2 It is but slowly that our blood begins to circulate again, and it is long before we recover the use of our powers. Whether his writings produce this effect on others or not, we are unable to say; but this effect they do produce on us. We almost dread to encounter them. Mr. Carlyle would seem to have great sympathy with man. He certainly is not wanting in the sentiment of humanity; nor is he deceived by external position, or dazzled by factitious glare. He can see worth in the socially low as well as in the socially high; in the artisan as well as the noble. This is something, but no great merit in one who can read the New Testament. Still it is something, and we are glad to meet it. But after all, he has no true reverence for humanity. He may offer incense to a Goethe, a Jean Paul, a Mirabeau, a Danton, a Napoleon, but he nevertheless looks down upon his fellows, and sneers at the mass.3 He looks down upon man as one of his admirers has said, “as if man were a mouse.”4 But we do not wish to look upon 2

[Ed. Mara, a Buddhist devil, was Buddha’s temptor on several occasions.] [Ed. Jean Paul Friedrich Richter (1763-1825) was a German novelist and humorist. Honoré-Gabriel Riqueti, comte de Mirabeau (1749-91) was a French politician and orator who was a leading figure during the early years of the French Revolution. Napoléon Bonaparte (1769-1821) was a French general, First Consul (1799-1804), and emperor of France (1804-15), and one of the most celebrated persons in the history of the West.] 4 [Ed. Unable to identify quotation.] 3

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man in that light. We would look upon him as a brother, an equal, entitled to our love and sympathy. We would feel ourselves neither above him nor below him, but standing up by his side, with our feet on the same level with his. We would also love and respect the common-place mass, not merely heroes and sages, prophets and priests. We are moreover no warm admirers of Carlyle’s style of writing. We acknowledge his command over the resources of our language, and we enjoy the freshness, and occasional strength, beauty, and felicity of his style and expression, but he does not satisfy us. He wants clearness and precision, and that too when writing on topics where clearness and precision are all but indispensable. We have no patience with his mistiness, vagueness, and singularity. If a man must needs write and publish his thoughts to the world, let him do it in as clear and as intelligible language as possible. We are not aware of any subject worth writing on at all that is already so plain that it needs to be rendered obscure. Carlyle can write well if he chooses; no man better. He is not necessarily misty, vague, nor fantastic. The antic tricks he has been latterly playing do not spring from the constitution of his mind, and we must say do by no means become him. We are disposed ourselves to assume considerable latitude in both thought and expression; but we believe every scholar should aim to keep within the general current of his language. Every language receives certain laws from the genius of the people who use it, and it is no mark of wisdom to transgress them; nor is genuine literary excellence to be attained but by obeying them. An Englishman, if he would profit Englishmen, must write English, not French nor German. If he wishes his writings to become an integral part of the literature of his language, he must keep within the steady current of what has ever been regarded as classical English style, and deny himself the momentary eclat he might gain by affectation and singularity. We can, however, pardon Carlyle altogether more easily than we can his American imitators. Notwithstanding his manner of writing, when continued for any considerable length, becomes monotonous and wearisome, as in his History of the French Revolution, a work which, with all its brilliant wit, inimitable humor, deep pathos, and graphic skill, can scarcely be read without yawning, yet in his case it is redeemed by rare beauties, and marks a mind of the highest order, and of vast attainments.5 But in the hands of his American imitators, 5 [Ed. Brownson’s negative view of The French Revolution (1837) differed considerably from William Henry Channing’s positive review of that work in the Boston Quarterly Review 1 (October, 1838): 407-17.]

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it becomes puerile and disgusting; and what is worthy of note is that it is adopted and most servilely followed by the men among us who are loudest in their boasts of originality, and the most intolerant to its absence. But enough of this. For our consolation, the race of imitators is feeble and short lived. The object of the little work before us is one of the weightiest which can engage the attention of the statesman or the philanthropist. It is indeed, here, discussed only in relation to the working classes of England, but it in reality involves the condition of the working classes throughout the world, a great subject, and one never yet worthily treated. Chartism, properly speaking, is no local or temporary phenomenon. Its germ may be found in every nation in Christendom; indeed wherever man has approximated a state of civilization, wherever there is inequality in social condition, and in the distribution of the products of industry. And where does not this inequality obtain? Where is the spot on earth in which the actual producer of wealth is not one of the lower class, shut out from what are looked upon as the main advantages of the social state? Mr. Carlyle, though he gives us few facts, yet shows us that the condition of the workingmen in England is deplorable, and every day growing worse. It has already become intolerable, and hence the outbreak of the Chartists.6 Chartism is the protest of the working classes against the injustice of the present social organization of the British community, and a loud demand for a new organization which shall respect the rights and well-being of the laborer. The movements of the Chartists have excited considerable alarm in the higher classes of English society, and some hope in the friends of humanity among ourselves. We do not feel competent to speak with any decision on the extent or importance of these movements. If our voice could reach the Chartists we would bid them be bold and determined; we would bid them persevere even unto death; for their cause is that of justice, and in fighting for it they will be fighting the battles of God and man. But we look for no important results from their movements. We have little faith in a John Bull mob. It will bluster, and swagger, and threaten much; but give it plenty of porter and roast-beef, and it will sink back to its kennel, as quiet and as harmless as a lamb. The lower classes in England have made many a 6 [Ed. The English Chartists, primarily members of the working classes, sought democratic social and political reforms before and after the economic crash of 183738. They got their name from the People’s Charter, a bill drafted by the London radical William Lovett in May of 1838.]

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move since the days of Wat Tyler for the betterment of their condition, but we cannot perceive that they have ever effected much. They are doubtless nearer the day of their emancipation than they were, but their actual condition is scarcely superior to what it was in the days of Richard the Second.7 There is no country in Europe in which the condition of the laboring classes seems to us so hopeless as in that of England. This is not owing to the fact that the aristocracy is less enlightened, more powerful, or more oppressive in England than elsewhere. The English laborer does not find his worst enemy in the nobility but in the middling class. The middle class is much more numerous and powerful in England than in any other European country, and is of a higher character. It has always been powerful; for by means of the Norman Conquest it received large accessions from the old Saxon nobility. The Conquest established a new aristocracy, and degraded the old to the condition of Commoners. The superiority of the English Commons is, we suppose, chiefly owing to this fact. The middle class is always a firm champion of equality, when it concerns humbling a class above it; but it is its inveterate foe, when it concerns elevating a class below it. Manfully have the British Commoners struggled against the old feudal aristocracy, and so successfully that they now constitute the dominant power in the state. To their struggles against the throne and the nobility is the English nation indebted for the liberty it so loudly boasts, and which, during the last half of the last century, so enraptured the friends of humanity throughout Europe. But this class has done nothing for the laboring population, the real proletarii. It has humbled the aristocracy; it has raised itself to dominion, and it is now conservative, conservative in fact, whether it call itself Whig or Radical. From its near relation to the workingmen, its kindred pursuits with them, it is altogether more hostile to them than the nobility ever were or ever can be. This was seen in the conduct of England towards the French Revolution. So long as that Revolution was in the hands of the middle class, and threatened merely to humble monarchy and nobility, the English nation applauded it; but as soon as it descended to the mass of the people, and promised to elevate the laboring classes, so soon as the starving workingman 7 [Ed. Wat Tyler (d. 1381) was the chief leader of the Peasant’s Revolt in England. He presented the complaints and reform demands of the peasants to the young Richard II (1367-1400), king of England (1377-99), but Tyler was subsequently beheaded by the mayor of London, William Walworth.]

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began to flatter himself that there was to be a Revolution for him too as well as for his employer, the English nation armed itself and poured out its blood and treasure to suppress it. Everybody knows that Great Britain, boasting of her freedom and of her love of freedom, was the life and soul of the opposition to the French Revolution; and on her head almost alone should fall the curses of humanity for the sad failure of that glorious uprising of the people in behalf of their inprescriptible and inalienable rights. Yet it was not the English monarchy, nor the English nobility that was alone in fault. Monarchy and nobility would have been powerless, had they not had with them the great body of the English Commoners. England fought in the ranks, nay, at the head of the allies, not for monarchy, not for nobility, nor yet for religion; but for trade and manufactures, for her middle class, against the rights and well-being of the workingman; and her strength and efficiency consisted in the strength and efficiency of this class. Now this middle class, which was strong enough to defeat nearly all the practical benefit of the French Revolution, is the natural enemy of the Chartists. It will unite with the monarchy and nobility against them; and spare neither blood nor treasure to defeat them. Our despair for the poor Chartists arises from the number and power of the middle class. We dread for them neither monarchy nor nobility. Nor should they. Their only real enemy is in the employer. In all countries is it the same. The only enemy of the laborer is your employer, whether appearing in the shape of the master mechanic, or in the owner of a factory. A Duke of Wellington is much more likely to vindicate the rights of labor than an Abbot Lawrence, although the latter may be a very kind-hearted man, and liberal citizen, as we always find Blackwood’s Magazine more true to the interests of the poor, than we do the Edinburgh Review, or even the London and Westminster.8 Mr. Carlyle, contrary to his wont, in the pamphlet we have named, commends two projects for the relief of the workingmen, which he finds others have suggested—universal education and general emigration. Universal education we shall not be thought likely to depreciate; but we confess that we are unable to see in it that sovereign 8

[Ed. Abbot Lawrence (1792-1855) was a Boston merchant, manufacturer, and one of the largest textile magnates in the United States during the antebellum period. Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine (1817-1981), founded by William Blackwood, was a rival to Whig Edinburgh Review (1802-1929). The London Quarterly Review (1809-1967) was the Tory alternative to the Edinburgh, but the Westminster Review (1824-1914), founded by Jeremy Benthan and James Mill, was the most radical of all these journals of opinion.]

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remedy for the evils of the social state as it is, which some of our friends do, or say they do. We have little faith in the power of education to elevate a people compelled to labor from twelve to sixteen hours a day, and to experience for no mean portion of the time a paucity of even the necessaries of life, let alone its comforts. Give your starving boy a breakfast before you send him to school, and your tattered beggar a cloak before you attempt his moral and intellectual elevation. A swarm of naked and starving urchins crowded into a schoolroom will make little proficiency in the “Humanities.” Indeed, it seems to us most bitter mockery for the well-dressed and well-fed to send the schoolmaster and priest to the wretched hovels of squalid poverty, a mockery at which devils may laugh, but over which angels must weep. Educate the working classes of England; and what then? Will they require less food and less clothing when educated than they do now? Will they be more contented or more happy in their condition? For God’s sake beware how you kindle within them the intellectual spark, and make them aware that they too are men, with powers of thought and feeling which ally them by the bonds of brotherhood to their betters. If you will doom them to the external condition of brutes, do in common charity keep their minds and hearts brutish. Render them as insensible as possible that they may feel the less acutely their degradation, and see the less clearly the monstrous injustice which is done them. General emigration can at best afford only a temporary relief, for the colony will soon become an empire, and reproduce all the injustice and wretchedness of the mother country. Nor is general emigration necessary. England, if she would be just, could support a larger population than she now numbers. The evil is not from over population, but from the unequal repartition of the fruits of industry. She suffers from over production, and from over production, because her workmen produce not for themselves but for their employers. What then is the remedy? As it concerns England, we shall leave the English statesman to answer. Be it what it may, it will not be obtained without war and bloodshed. It will be found only at the end of one of the longest and severest struggles the human race has ever been engaged in, only by that most dreaded of all wars, the war of the poor against the rich, a war which, however long it may be delayed, will come, and come with all its horrors. The day of vengeance is sure; for the world after all is under the dominion of a just Providence. No one can observe the signs of the times with much care, without perceiving that a crisis as to the relation of wealth and labor is approaching. It is useless to shut our eyes to the fact, and like the

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ostrich fancy ourselves secure because we have so concealed our heads that we see not the danger. We or our children will have to meet this crisis. The old war between the king and the barons is well nigh ended, and so is that between the barons and the merchants and manufacturers, landed capital and commercial capital. The business man has become the peer of my Lord. And now commences the new struggle between the operative and his employer, between wealth and labor. Every day does this struggle extend further and wax stronger and fiercer; what or when the end will be God only knows. In this coming contest there is a deeper question at issue than is commonly imagined; a question which is but remotely touched in your controversies about United States Banks and Sub Treasuries, chartered Banking and free Banking, free trade and corporations, although these controversies may be paving the way for it to come up. We have discovered no presentiment of it in any king’s or queen’s speech, nor in any president’s message. It is embraced in no popular political creed of the day, whether christened Whig or Tory, Justemilieu or Democratic. No popular senator, or deputy, or peer seems to have any glimpse of it; but it is working in the hearts of the million, is struggling to shape itself, and one day it will be uttered, and in thunder tones. Well will it be for him, who, on that day, shall be found ready to answer it. What we would ask is, throughout the Christian world, the actual condition of the laboring classes, viewed simply and exclusively in their capacity of laborers? They constitute at least a moiety of the human race. We exclude the nobility, we exclude also the middle class, and include only actual laborers, who are laborers and not proprietors, owners of none of the funds of production, neither houses, shops, nor lands, nor implements of labor, being therefore solely dependent on their hands. We have no means of ascertaining their precise proportion to the whole number of the race; but we think we may estimate them at one half. In any contest they will be as two to one, because the large class of proprietors who are not employers, but laborers on their own lands or in their own shops will make common cause with them. Now we will not so belie our acquaintance with political economy as to allege that these alone perform all that is necessary to the production of wealth. We are not ignorant of the fact that the merchant, who is literally the common carrier and exchange dealer, performs a useful service, and is therefore entitled to a portion of the proceeds of labor. But make all necessary deductions on his account, and then ask what portion of the remainder is retained, either in kind or in its

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equivalent, in the hands of the original producer, the workingman? All over the world this fact stares us in the face, the workingman is poor and depressed, while a large portion of the non-workingmen, in the sense we now use the term, are wealthy. It may be laid down as a general rule, with but few exceptions, that men are rewarded in an inverse ratio to the amount of actual service they perform. Under every government on earth the largest salaries are annexed to those offices, which demand of their incumbents the least amount of actual labor either mental or manual. And this is in perfect harmony with the whole system of repartition of the fruits of industry, which obtains in every department of society. Now here is the system which prevails, and here is its result. The whole class of simple laborers are poor, and in general unable to procure anything beyond the bare necessaries of life. In regard to labor two systems obtain; one that of slave labor, the other that of free labor. Of the two, the first is, in our judgment, except so far as the feelings are concerned, decidedly the least oppressive. If the slave has never been a free man, we think, as a general rule, his sufferings are less than those of the free laborer at wages. As to actual freedom one has just about as much as the other. The laborer at wages has all the disadvantages of freedom and none of its blessings, while the slave, if denied the blessings, is freed from the disadvantages. We are no advocates of slavery, we are as heartily opposed to it as any modern abolitionist can be; but we say frankly that if there must always be a laboring population distinct from proprietors and employers, we regard the slave system as decidedly preferable to the system at wages. It is no pleasant thing to go days without food, to lie idle for weeks, seeking work and finding none, to rise in the morning with a wife and children you love, and know not where to procure them a breakfast, and to see constantly before you no brighter prospect than the almshouse. Yet these are no infrequent incidents in the lives of our laboring population. Even in seasons of general prosperity, when there was only the ordinary cry of “hard times,” we have seen hundreds of people in a no very populous village, in a wealthy portion of our common country, suffering for the want of the necessaries of life, willing to work, and yet finding no work to do. Many and many is the application of a poor man for work, merely for his food, we have seen rejected. These things are little thought of, for the applicants are poor; they fill no conspicuous place in society, and they have no biographers. But their wrongs are chronicled in heaven. It is said there is no want in this country. There may be less than in some other countries. But death by actual starva-

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tion in this country is, we apprehend, no uncommon occurrence. The sufferings of a quiet, unassuming but useful class of females in our cities, in general sempstresses, too proud to beg or to apply to the almshouse, are not easily told. They are industrious; they do all that they can find to do; but yet the little there is for them to do, and the miserable pittance they receive for it, is hardly sufficient to keep soul and body together. And yet there is a man who employs them to make shirts, trousers, &c., and grows rich on their labors.9 He is one of our respectable citizens, perhaps is praised in the newspapers for his liberal donations to some charitable institution. He passes among us as a pattern of morality, and is honored as a worthy Christian. And why should he not be, since our Christian community is made up of such as he, and since our clergy would not dare question his piety, lest they should incur the reproach of infidelity, and lose their standing, and their salaries? Nay, since our clergy are raised up, educated, fashioned, and sustained by such as he? Not a few of our churches rest on Mammon for their foundation. The basement is a trader’s shop. We pass through our manufacturing villages, most of them appear neat and flourishing. The operatives are well dressed, and we are told, well paid. They are said to be healthy, contented, and happy. This is the fair side of the picture; the side exhibited to distinguished visitors. There is a dark side, moral as well as physical. Of the common operatives, few, if any, by their wages, acquire a competence. A few of what Carlyle terms not inaptly the body-servants are well paid, and now and then an agent or an overseer rides in his coach. But the great mass wear out their health, spirits, and morals, without becoming one whit better off than when they commenced labor. The bills of mortality in these factory villages are not striking, we admit, for the poor girls when they can toil no longer go home to die. The average life, working life we mean, of the girls that come to Lowell, for instance, from Maine, New Hampshire, and Vermont, we have been assured, is only about three years. What becomes of them then? Few of them ever marry; fewer still ever return to their native places with reputations unimpaired. “She has worked in a factory,” is almost enough to damn to infamy the most worthy and virtuous girl.10 9

[Ed. The reference is probably to Abbot Lawrence.] [Ed. Brownson got into trouble for his reference to the Lowell “factory girls.” He had supported these working women, but some of them objected to his characterization of them in this piece. See “Factory Girls,” The Lowell Offering (December, 1840):17-19, and Brownson’s response in “To the Editors of The Lowell Offering,” Boston Quarterly Review 4 (April, 1841): 261-64, and in chapter 11 of this volume.] 10

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We know no sadder sight on earth than one of our factory villages presents, when the bell at break of day, or at the hour of breakfast, or dinner, calls out its hundreds or thousands of operatives. We stand and look at these hard working men and women hurrying in all directions, and ask ourselves, where go the proceeds of their labors? The man who employs them, and for whom they are toiling as so many slaves, is one of our city nabobs, reveling in luxury; or he is a member of our legislature, enacting laws to put money in his own pocket; or he is a member of Congress, contending for a high tariff to tax the poor for the benefit of the rich; or in these times he is shedding crocodile tears over the deplorable condition of the poor laborer, while he docks his wages twenty-five percent; building miniature log cabins, shouting Harrison and “hard cider.” And this man too would fain pass for a Christian and a republican. He shouts for liberty, stickles for equality, and is horrified at a Southern planter who keeps slaves. One thing is certain; that of the amount actually produced by the operative, he retains a less proportion than it costs the master to feed, clothe, and lodge his slave. Wages is a cunning device of the devil, for the benefit of tender consciences, who would retain all the advantages of the slave system, without the expense, trouble, and odium of being slaveholders. Messrs. Thome and Kimball, in their account of emancipation in the West Indies,11 establish the fact that the employer may have the same amount of labor done, twenty-five percent cheaper than the master. What does this fact prove, if not that wages is a more successful method of taxing labor than slavery? We really believe our Northern system of labor is more oppressive, and even more mischievous to morals, than the Southern. We, however, war against both. We have no toleration for either system. We would see the slave a man, but a free man, not a mere operative at wages. This he would not be were he now emancipated. Could the abolitionists effect all they propose, they would do the slave no service. Should emancipation work as well as they say, still it would do the slave no good. He would be a slave still, although with the title and cares of a freeman. If then we had no constitutional objections to abolitionism, we could not, for the reason here implied, be abolitionists. The slave system, however, in name and form, is gradually disappearing from Christendom. It will not subsist much longer. But its 11 [Ed. James A. Thome and Joseph Horace Kimball, Emancipation in the West Indies. A Six Months’ Tour in Antigua, Barbadoes, and Jamaica, in the Year 1837 (New York: The American Anti-Slavery Society, 1838).]

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place is taken by the system of labor at wages, and this system, we hold, is no improvement upon the one it supplants. Nevertheless the system of wages will triumph. It is the system which in name sounds honester than slavery, and in substance is more profitable to the master. It yields the wages of iniquity, without its opprobrium. It will therefore supplant slavery, and be sustained—for a time. Now, what is the prospect of those who fall under the operation of this system? We ask, is there a reasonable chance that any considerable portion of the present generation of laborers, shall ever become owners of a sufficient portion of the funds of production to be able to sustain themselves by laboring on their own capital, that is, as independent laborers? We need not ask this question, for everybody knows there is not. Well, is the condition of a laborer at wages the best that the great mass of the working people ought to be able to aspire to? Is it a condition, nay can it be made a condition, with which a man should be satisfied; in which he should be contented to live and die? In our own country this condition has existed under its most favorable aspects, and has been made as good as it can be. It has reached all the excellence of which it is susceptible. It is now not improving but growing worse. The actual condition of the workingman today, viewed in all its bearings, is not so good as it was fifty years ago. If we have not been altogether misinformed, fifty years ago, health and industrious habits, constituted no mean stock in trade, and with them almost any man might aspire to competence and independence. But it is so no longer. The wilderness has receded, and already the new lands are beyond the reach of the mere laborer, and the employer has him at his mercy. If the present relation subsist, we see nothing better for him in reserve than what he now possesses, but something altogether worse. We are not ignorant of the fact that men born poor become wealthy, and that men born to wealth become poor; but this fact does not necessarily diminish the numbers of the poor, nor augment the numbers of the rich. The relative numbers of the two classes remain, or may remain, the same.12 But be this as it may; one fact is certain, no man born poor has ever, by his wages, as a simple operative, risen to the class of the wealthy. Rich he may have become, but 12 [Ed. Edward Pessen, Riches, Class, and Power Before the Civil War (Lexington, Mass.: D. C. Heath and Co., 1973), 84-85, passim, argued that as a rule wealth bred increased wealth, and that there was in fact very little equal opportunity for increasing one’s wealth in the antebellum period—unless one already had some initial wealth. The relative numbers of the poor and rich were fairly constant.]

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it has not been by his own manual labor. He has in some way contrived to tax for his benefit the labor of others. He may have accumulated a few dollars which he has placed at usury, or invested in trade; or he may, as a master workman, obtain a premium on his journeymen; or he may have from a clerk passed to a partner, or from a workman to an overseer. The simple market wages for ordinary labor, has never been adequate to raise him from poverty to wealth. This fact is decisive of the whole controversy, and proves that the system of wages must be supplanted by some other system, or else one half of the human race must forever be the virtual slaves of the other. Now the great work for this age and the coming is to raise up the laborer, and to realize in our own social arrangements and in the actual condition of all men that equality between man and man, which God has established between the rights of one and those of another. In other words, our business is to emancipate the proletaries, as the past has emancipated the slaves. This is our work. There must be no class of our fellow men doomed to toil through life as mere workmen at wages. If wages are tolerated it must be, in the case of the individual operative, only under such conditions that by the time he is of a proper age to settle in life, he shall have accumulated enough to be an independent laborer on his own capital, on his own farm or in his own shop. Here is our work. How is it to be done? Reformers in general answer this question, or what they deem its equivalent, in a manner which we cannot but regard as very unsatisfactory. They would have all men wise, good, and happy; but in order to make them so, they tell us that we want not external changes, but internal; and therefore instead of declaiming against society and seeking to disturb existing social arrangements, we should confine ourselves to the individual reason and conscience; seek merely to lead the individual to repentance, and to reformation of life; make the individual a practical, a truly religious man, and all evils will either disappear, or be sanctified to the spiritual growth of the soul. This is doubtless a capital theory, and has the advantage that kings, hierarchies, nobilities, in a word, all who fatten on the toil and blood of their fellows, will feel no difficulty in supporting it. Nicholas of Russia, the Grand Turk, his Holiness the Pope, will hold us their especial friends for advocating a theory, which secures to them the odor of sanctity even while they are sustaining by their anathemas or their armed legions, a system of things of which the great mass are and must be the victims. If you will only allow me to keep thousands toiling for my pleasure or my profit, I will even aid you in

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your pious efforts to convert their souls. I am not cruel; I do not wish either to cause, or to see suffering; I am therefore disposed to encourage your labors for the souls of the workingman, providing you will secure to me the products of his bodily toil. So far as the salvation of his soul will not interfere with my income, I hold it worthy of being sought; and if a few thousand dollars will aid you, Mr. Priest, in reconciling him to God, and making fair weather for him hereafter, they are at your service. I shall not want him to work for me in the world to come, and I can indemnify myself for what your salary costs me, by paying him less wages. A capital theory this, which one may advocate without incurring the reproach of a disorganizer, a Jacobin, a leveler, and without losing the friendship of the rankest aristocrat in the land. This theory, however, is exposed to one slight objection, that of being condemned by something like six thousand years’ experience. For six thousand years its beauty has been extolled, its praises sung, and its blessings sought, under every advantage which learning, fashion, wealth, and power can secure; and yet under its practical operations, we are assured that mankind, though totally depraved at first, have been growing worse and worse ever since. For our part, we yield to none in our reverence for science and religion; but we confess that we look not for the regeneration of the race from priests and pedagogues. They have had a fair trial. They cannot construct the temple of God. They cannot conceive its plan, and they know not how to build. They daub with untempered mortar, and the walls they erect tumble down if so much as a fox attempt to go up thereon. In a word they always league with the people’s masters, and seek to reform without disturbing the social arrangements which render reform necessary. They would change the consequents without changing the antecedents, secure to men the rewards of holiness, while they continue their allegiance to the devil. We have no faith in priests and pedagogues. They merely cry peace, peace, and that too when there is no peace, and can be none. We admit the importance of what Dr. Channing in his lectures on the subject we are treating recommends as “self-culture.” Selfculture is a good thing, but it cannot abolish inequality nor restore men to their rights. As a means of quickening moral and intellectual energy, exalting the sentiments, and preparing the laborer to contend manfully for his rights, we admit its importance, and insist as strenuously as any one on making it as universal as possible; but as constituting in itself a remedy for the vices of the social state, we have no faith in it. As a means it is well, as the end it is nothing.

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The truth is, the evil we have pointed out is not merely individual in its character. It is not, in the case of any single individual, of any one man’s procuring, nor can the efforts of any one man, directed solely to his own moral and religious perfection, do aught to remove it. What is purely individual in its nature, efforts of individuals to perfect themselves, may remove. But the evil we speak of is inherent in all our social arrangements, and cannot be cured without a radical change of those arrangements. Could we convert all men to Christianity in both theory and practice, as held by the most enlightened sect of Christians among us, the evils of the social state would remain untouched. Continue our present system of trade, and all its present evil consequences will follow, whether it be carried on by your best men or your worst. Put your best men, your wisest, most moral, and most religious men, at the head of your paper money banks, and the evils of the present banking system will remain scarcely diminished. The only way to get rid of its evils is to change the system, not its managers. The evils of slavery do not result from the personal characters of slave masters. They are inseparable from the system, let who will be masters. Make all your rich men good Christians, and you have lessened not the evils of existing inequality in wealth. The mischievous effects of this inequality do not result from the personal characters of either rich or poor, but from itself, and they will continue, just so long as there are rich men and poor men in the same community. You must abolish the system or accept its consequences. No man can serve both God and Mammon.13 If you will serve the devil, you must look to the devil for your wages; we know no other way. Let us not be misinterpreted. We deny not the power of Christianity. Should all men become good Christians, we deny not that all social evils would be cured. But we deny in the outset that a man, who seeks merely to save his own soul, merely to perfect his own individual nature, can be a good Christian. The Christian forgets himself, buckles on his armor, and goes forth to war against principalities and powers, and against spiritual wickedness in high places. No man can be a Christian who does not begin his career by making war on the mischievous social arrangements from which his brethren suffer. He who thinks he can be a Christian and save his soul, without seeking their radical change, has no reason to applaud himself for his proficiency in Christian science, nor for his progress towards the kingdom of God. Understand Christianity, and we will admit 13

[Ed. A reference to Luke 16:13 or Matt 6:24.]

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that should all men become good Christians, there would be nothing to complain of. But one might as well undertake to dip the ocean dry with a clam-shell, as to undertake to cure the evils of the social state by converting men to the Christianity of the church. The evil we have pointed out, we have said, is not of individual creation, and it is not to be removed by individual effort, saving so far as individual effort induces the combined effort of the mass. But whence has this evil originated? How comes it that all over the world the working classes are depressed, are the low and vulgar, and virtually the slaves of the non-working classes? This is an inquiry which has not yet received the attention it deserves. It is not enough to answer that it has originated entirely in the inferiority by nature of the working classes; that they have less skill and foresight, and are less able than the upper classes to provide for themselves, or less susceptible of the highest moral and intellectual cultivation. Nor is it sufficient for our purpose to be told that Providence has decreed that some shall be poor and wretched, ignorant and vulgar; and that others shall be rich and vicious, learned and polite, oppressive and miserable. We do not choose to charge this matter to the will of God. “The foolishness of man perverteth his way, and his heart fretteth against the Lord” [Prov 19:3]. God has made of one blood all the nations of men to dwell on all the face of the earth, and to dwell there as brothers, as members of one and the same family; and although he has made them with a diversity of powers, it would perhaps, after all, be a bold assertion to say that he has made them with an inequality of powers. There is nothing in the actual difference of the powers of individuals, which accounts for the striking inequalities we everywhere discover in their condition. The child of the plebeian, if placed early in the proper circumstances, grows up not less beautiful, active, intelligent, and refined, than the child of the patrician; and the child of the patrician may become as coarse, as brutish as the child of any slave. So far as observation on the original capacities of individuals goes, nothing is discovered to throw much light on social inequalities. The cause of the inequality we speak of must be sought in history, and be regarded as having its root in Providence, or in human nature, only in that sense in which all historical facts have their origin in these. We may perhaps trace it in the first instance to conquest, but not to conquest as the ultimate cause. The Romans in conquering Italy no doubt reduced many to the condition of slaves, but they also found the great mass of the laboring population already slaves. There is everywhere a class distinct from the reigning class,

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bearing the same relation to it that the Gibbeonites did to the Jews.14 They are principally Colons, the cultivators for foreign masters, of a soil of which they seemed to have been dispossessed. Who has dispossessed them? Who has reduced them to their present condition, a condition which under the Roman dominion is perhaps even ameliorated? Who were this race? Whence came they? They appear to be distinct from the reigning race, as were the Helotae from the DoricSpartan.15 Were they the aborigines of the territory? Had they once been free? By what concurrence of events have they been reduced to their present condition? By a prior conquest? But mere conquest does not so reduce a population. It may make slaves of the prisoners taken in actual combat, and reduce the whole to tributaries, but it leaves the mass of the population free, except in its political relations. Were they originally savages, subjugated by a civilized tribe? Savages may be exterminated, but they never, so far as we can ascertain, become to any considerable extent “the hewers of wood and drawers of water” [Josh 9:21] to their conquerors. For our part we are disposed to seek the cause of the inequality of conditions of which we speak, in religion, and to charge it to the priesthood. And we are confirmed in this, by what appears to be the instinctive tendency of every, or almost every, social reformer. Men’s instincts, in a matter of this kind, are worthier of reliance than their reasonings. Rarely do we find in any age or country, a man feeling himself commissioned to labor for a social reform, who does not feel that he must begin it by making war upon the priesthood. This was the case with the old Hebrew reformers, who are to us the prophets of God; with Jesus, the apostles, and the early Fathers of the church; with the French democrats of the last century; and is the case with the Young Germans,16 and the Socialists, as they call themselves in England, at the present moment. Indeed it is felt at once that no reform can be effected without resisting the priests and emancipating the people from their power. Historical research, we apprehend, will be found to justify this instinct, and to authorize the eternal hostility of the reformer, the 14

[Ed. The Gibeonites, see 2 Sam 21:2, were not Israelites but a remnant of the Amorites, one of the pre-Israelite peoples of Palestine. Some of the Gibeonites evidently had become temple slaves (Josh 9:27) after the Israelite conquest of Canaan.] 15 [Ed. The Helots (Helotae) were a class of serfs of ancient Sparta; they and their descendants were reduced to the state of slavery by the Spartan conquest of Helos.] 16 [Ed. Brownson is referring to Young Germany, a social reform and literary movement in Germany between about 1830 and 1850 that was influenced by French revolutionary ideas and opposed to extreme forms of Romanticism and nationalism.]

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advocate of social progress, to the priesthood. How is it, we ask that man comes out of the savage state? In the savage state, properly so called, there is no inequality of the kind of which we speak. The individual system obtains there. Each man is his own center, and is a whole in himself. There is no community, there are no members of society; for society is not. This individuality, which, if combined with the highest possible moral and intellectual cultivation, would be the perfection of man’s earthly condition, must be broken down before the human race can enter into the path of civilization, or commence its career of progress. But it cannot be broken down by material force. It resists by its own nature the combination of individuals necessary to subdue it. It can be successfully attacked only by a spiritual power, and subjugated only by the representatives of that power, that is to say, the priests. Man is naturally a religious being and disposed to stand in awe of invisible powers. This makes, undoubtedly, under certain relations, his glory; but when coupled with his ignorance, it becomes the chief source of his degradation and misery. He feels within the workings of a mysterious nature, and is conscious that hidden and superior powers are at work all around him, and perpetually influencing his destiny; now wafting him onward with a prosperous gale, or now resisting his course, driving him back, defeating his plans, blasting his hopes, and wounding his heart. What are his relations to these hidden, mysterious, and yet all-influencing forces? Can their anger be appeased? Can their favor be secured? Thus he asks himself. Unable to answer, he goes to the more aged and experienced of his tribe, and asks them the same questions. They answer as best they can. What is done by one is done by another, and what is done once is done again. The necessity of instruction, which each one feels in consequence of his own feebleness and inexperience, renders the recurrence to those best capable of giving it, or supposed to be the best capable of giving it, frequent and uniform. Hence the priest. He who is consulted prepares himself to answer, and therefore devotes himself to the study of man’s relations to these invisible powers, and the nature of these invisible powers themselves. Hence religion becomes a special object of study, and the study of it a profession. Individuals whom a thunderstorm, an earthquake, an eruption of a volcano, an eclipse of the sun or moon, any unusual appearance in the heavens or earth, has frightened, or whom some unforeseen disaster has afflicted, go to the wiseman for explanation, to know what it means, or what they shall do in order to appease the offended powers. When reassured they naturally feel grateful to this wise-man; they load him with honors, and in the

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access of their gratitude raise him far above the common level, and spare him the common burdens of life. Once thus distinguished, he becomes an object of envy. His condition is looked upon as superior to that of the mass. Hence a multitude aspire to possess themselves of it. When once the class has become somewhat numerous, it labors to secure to itself the distinction it has received, its honors and its emoluments, and to increase them. Hence the establishment of priesthoods or sacerdotal corporations, such as the Egyptian, the Brahminical, the Ethiopian, the Jewish, the Scandinavian, the Druidical, the Mexican, and Peruvian. The germ of these sacerdotal corporations is found in the savage state, and exists there in that formidable personage called a jongleur, juggler, or conjurer. But as the tribe or people advances, the juggler becomes a priest and the member of a corporation. These sacerdotal corporations are variously organized, but everywhere organized for the purpose, as that arch rebel, Thomas Paine, says, “of monopolizing power and profit.”17 The effort is unceasing to elevate them as far above the people as possible, to enable them to exert the greatest possible control over the people, and to derive the greatest possible profit from the people. Now if we glance over the history of the world, we shall find that at the epoch of coming out of the savage state, these corporations are universally instituted. We find them among every people; and among every people, at this epoch, they are the dominant power, ruling with an iron despotism. The real idea at the bottom of these institutions, is the control of individual freedom by moral laws, the assertion of the supremacy of moral power over physical force, a great truth, and one which can never be too strenuously insisted on; but a truth which at this epoch can only enslave the mass of the people to its professed representatives, the priests. Through awe of the gods, through fear of divine displeasure, and dread of the unforeseen chastisements that displeasure may inflict, and by pretending, honestly or not, to possess the secret of averting it, and of rendering the gods propitious, the priests are able to reduce the people to the most wretched subjection, and to keep them there; at least for a time. But these institutions must naturally be jealous of power, and ambitious of confining it to as few hands as possible. If the sacerdotal corporations were thrown open to all the world, all the world would 17 [Ed. The Age of Reason, Foner edition, 464, where Paine says that he believes all established or organized religions are “no other than human inventions, set up to terrify and enslave mankind, and monopolize power and profit.”]

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rush into them, and then there would be no advantage in being a priest. Hence the number who may be priests must be limited. Hence again a distinction of clean and unclean is introduced. Men can be admitted into these corporations only as they descend from the priestly race. As in India, no man can aspire to the priesthood unless of Brahminical descent, and among the Jews unless he be of the tribe of Levi. The priestly race was the ruling race; it dealt with science, it held communion with the Gods, and therefore was the purer race. The races excluded from the priesthood were not only regarded as inferior, but as unclean. The Gibeonite to a Jew was both an inferior and an impure. The operation of the principles involved in these considerations, has, in our judgment, begun and effected the slavery of the great mass of the people. It has introduced distinctions of blood or race, founded privileged orders, and secured the rewards of industry to the few, while it has reduced the mass to the most degrading and hopeless bondage. Now the great mass enslaved by the sacerdotal corporations are not emancipated by the victories which follow by the warrior caste, even when those victories are said to be in behalf of freedom. The military order succeeds the priestly; but in establishing, as it does in Greece and Rome, the supremacy of the state over the church, it leaves the great mass in the bondage in which it finds them. The Normans conquer England, but they scarcely touch the condition of the old Saxon bondmen. The Polish serf lost his freedom before began the Russian dominion, and he would have recovered none of it, had Poland regained, in her late struggle, her former political independence. The subjection of a nation is in general merely depriving one class of its population of its exclusive right to enslave the people; and the recovery of political independence is little else than the recovery of this right. The Germans call their rising against Napoleon a rising for liberty, and so it was, liberty for German princes and German nobles; but the German people were more free under Napoleon’s supremacy than they are now, or will be very soon. Conquest may undoubtedly increase the number of slaves; but in general it merely adds to the number and power of the middle class. It institutes a new nobility, and degrades the old to the rank of commoners. This is its general effect. We cannot therefore ascribe to conquest, as we did in a former number of this journal,18 the condition in which the working classes are universally found. They have been reduced to their condition by the priest, not by the military chieftain. 18

[Ed. See “Tendency of Modern Civilization,” Boston Quarterly Review 1 (April, 1838): 230-38. See also EW, 3, chapter 17.]

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Mankind came out of the savage state by means of the priests. Priests are the first civilizers of the race. For the wild freedom of the savage, they substitute the iron despotism of the theocrat. This is the first step in civilization, in man’s career of progress. It is not strange then that some should prefer the savage state to the civilized. Who would not rather roam the forest with a free step and unshackled limb, though exposed to hunger, cold, and nakedness, than crouch an abject slave beneath the whip of a master? As yet civilization has done little but break and subdue man’s natural love of freedom; but tame his wild and eagle spirit. In what a world does man even now find himself, when he first awakes and feels some of the workings of his manly nature? He is in a cold, damp, dark dungeon, and loaded all over with chains, with the iron entering into his very soul. He cannot make one single free movement. The priest holds his conscience, fashion controls his tastes, and society with her forces invades the very sanctuary of his heart, and takes command of his love, that which is purest and best in his nature, which alone gives reality to his existence, and from which proceeds the only ray which pierces the gloom of his prison house. Even that he cannot enjoy in peace and quietness, nor scarcely at all. He is wounded on every side, in every part of his being, in every relation in life, in every idea of his mind, in every sentiment of his heart. O it is a sad world, a sad world to the young soul just awakening to its diviner instincts! A sad world to him who is not gifted with the only blessing which seems compatible with life as it is—absolute insensibility. But no matter. A wise man never murmurs. He never kicks against the pricks. What is is, and there is an end of it; what can be may be, and we will do what we can to make life what it ought to be. Though man’s first step in civilization is slavery, his last step shall be freedom. The free soul can never be wholly subdued; the ethereal fire in man’s nature may be smothered, but it cannot be extinguished. Down, down deep in the center of his heart it burns inextinguishable and forever, glowing intenser with the accumulating heat of centuries; and one day the whole mass of humanity shall become ignited, and be full of fire within and all over, as a live coal; and then slavery, and whatever is foreign to the soul itself, shall be consumed. But, having traced the inequality we complain of to its origin, we proceed to ask again what is the remedy? The remedy is first to be sought in the destruction of the priest. We are not mere destructives. We delight not in pulling down; but the bad must be removed before the good can be introduced. Conviction and repentance precede regeneration. Moreover we are Christians, and it is only by following

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out the Christian law, and the example of the early Christians, that we can hope to effect anything. Christianity is the sublimest protest against the priesthood ever uttered, and a protest uttered by both God and man; for he who uttered it was God-Man. In the person of Jesus both God and man protest against the priesthood. What was the mission of Jesus but a solemn summons of every priesthood on earth to judgment, and of the human race to freedom? He discomfited the learned doctors, and with whips of small cords drove the priests, degenerated into mere money changers, from the temple of God. He instituted himself no priesthood, no form of religious worship. He recognized no priest but a holy life, and commanded the construction of no temple but that of the pure heart. He preached no formal religion, enjoined no creed, set apart no day for religious worship. He preached fraternal love, peace on earth, and good will to men. He came to the soul enslaved, “cabined, cribbed, confined,”19 to the poor child of mortality, bound hand and foot, unable to move, and said in the tones of a God, “Be free; be enlarged; be there room for thee to grow, expand, and overflow with the love thou wast made to overflow with.” In the name of Jesus we admit there has been a priesthood instituted, and considering how the world went, a priesthood could not but be instituted; but the religion of Jesus repudiates it. It recognizes no mediator between God and man but him who dies on the cross to redeem man; no propitiation for sin but a pure love, which rises in a living flame to all that is beautiful and good, and spreads out in light and warmth for all the chilled and benighted sons of mortality. In calling every man to be a priest, it virtually condemns every possible priesthood, and in recognizing the religion of the new covenant, the religion written on the heart, of a law put within the soul, it abolishes all formal worship. The priest is universally a tyrant, universally the enslaver of his brethren, and therefore it is Christianity condemns him. It could not prevent the reestablishment of a hierarchy, but it prepared for its ultimate destruction by denying the inequality of blood, by representing all men as equal before God, and by insisting on the celibacy of the clergy. The best feature of the church was in its denial to the clergy of the right to marry. By this it prevented the new hierarchy from becoming hereditary, as were the old sacerdotal corporations of India and Judea. 19

[Ed. Shakespeare, Macbeth, Act 3, Scene 3, Line 6.]

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We object not to religious instruction; we object not to the gathering together of the people on one day in seven to sing and pray and listen to a discourse from a religious teacher; but we object to everything like an outward, visible church; to everything that in the remotest degree partakes of the priest. A priest is one who stands as a sort of mediator between God and man; but we have one mediator, Jesus Christ, who gave himself a ransom for all, and that is enough. It may be supposed that we, Protestants, have no priests; but for ourselves we know no fundamental difference between a Catholic priest and a Protestant clergyman, as we know no difference of any magnitude, in relation to the principles on which they are based, between a Protestant church and the Catholic church. Both are based on the principle of authority; both deny in fact, however it may be in manner, the authority of reason, and war against freedom of mind; both substitute dead works for true righteousness, a vain show for the reality of piety, and are sustained as the means of reconciling us to God without requiring us to become godlike. Both therefore ought to go by the board. We may offend in what we say, but we cannot help that. We insist upon it that the complete and final destruction of the priestly order in every practical sense of the word priest is the first step to be taken towards elevating the laboring classes. Priests are, in their capacity of priests, necessarily enemies to freedom and equality. All reasoning demonstrates this, and all history proves it. There must be no class of men set apart and authorized, either by law or fashion, to speak to us in the name of God, or to be the interpreters of the word of God. The word of God never drops from the priest’s lips. He who redeemed man did not spring from the priestly class, for it is evident that our Lord sprang out of Judah, of which tribe Moses spake nothing concerning the priesthood. Who in fact were the authors of the Bible, the book which Christendom professes to receive as the word of God? The priests? Nay, they were the inveterate foes of the priests. No man ever berated the priests more soundly than did Jeremiah and Ezekiel. And who were they who heard Jesus the most gladly? The priests? The chief priests were at the head of those who demanded his crucifixion. In every age the priests, the authorized teachers of religion, are the first to oppose the true prophet of God, and to condemn his prophecies as blasphemies. They are always a let and a hindrance to the spread of truth. Why then retain them? Why not abolish the priestly office? Why continue to sustain what the whole history of man condemns as the greatest of all obstacles to intellectual and social progress?

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We say again, we have no objection to teachers of religion, as such; but let us have no class of men whose profession it is to minister at the altar. Let us leave this matter to Providence. When God raises up a prophet, let that prophet prophesy as God gives him utterance. Let every man speak out of his own full heart, as he is moved by the Holy Ghost, but let us have none to prophesy for hire, to make preaching a profession, a means of gaining a livelihood. Whoever has a word pressing upon his heart for utterance, let him utter it, in the stable, the market-place, the street, in the grove, under the open canopy of heaven, in the lowly cottage, or the lordly hall. No matter who or what he is, whether a graduate of a college, a shepherd from the hill sides, or a rustic from the plough. If he feels himself called to go forth in the name of God, he will speak words of truth and power, for which humanity shall fare the better. But none of your hireling priests, your “dumb dogs” that will not bark.20 What are the priests of Christendom as they now are? Miserable panders to the prejudices of the age, loud in condemning sins nobody is guilty of, but silent as the grave when it concerns the crying sin of the times; bold as bold can be when there is no danger, but miserable cowards when it is necessary to speak out for God and outraged humanity. As a body they never preach a truth till there is none whom it will indict. Never do they as a body venture to condemn sin in the concrete, and make each sinner feel “thou art the man.” When the prophets of God have risen up and proclaimed the word of God, and, after persecution and death, led the people to acknowledge it to be the word of God, then your driveling priest comes forward, and owns it to be a truth, and cries, “cursed of God and man is he who believes it not.” But enough. The imbecility of an organized priesthood, of a hireling clergy, for all good, and its power only to demoralize the people and misdirect their energies, is beginning to be seen, and will one day be acknowledged. Men are beginning to speak out on this subject, and the day of reckoning is approaching. The people are rising up and asking of these priests whom they have fed, clothed, honored, and followed, What have ye done for the poor and friendless, to destroy oppression, and establish the kingdom of God on earth? A fearful question for you, O ye priests, which we leave you to answer as best ye may. The next step in this work of elevating the working classes will be to resuscitate the Christianity of Christ. The Christianity of the church has done its work. We have had enough of that Christianity. 20

[Ed. A reference to Isa 56:10.]

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It is powerless for good, but by no means powerless for evil. It now unmans us and hinders the growth of God’s kingdom. The moral energy which is awakened it misdirects, and makes its deluded disciples believe that they have done their duty to God when they have joined the church, offered a prayer, sung a psalm, and contributed of their means to send out a missionary to preach unintelligible dogmas to the poor heathen, who, God knows, have unintelligible dogmas enough already and more than enough. All this must be abandoned, and Christianity, as it came from Christ, be taken up, and preached, and preached in simplicity and in power. According to the Christianity of Christ no man can enter the kingdom of God who does not labor with all zeal and diligence to establish the kingdom of God on the earth; who does not labor to bring down the high, and bring up the low; to break the fetters of the bound and set the captive free; to destroy all oppression, establish the reign of justice, which is the reign of equality, between man and man; to introduce new heavens and a new earth, wherein dwelleth righteousness, wherein all shall be as brothers, loving one another, and no one possessing what another lacketh. No man can be a Christian who does not labor to reform society, to mold it according to the will of God and the nature of man; so that free scope shall be given to every man to unfold himself in all beauty and power, and to grow up into the stature of a perfect man in Christ Jesus. No man can be a Christian who does not refrain from all practices by which the rich grow richer and the poor poorer, and who does not do all in his power to elevate the laboring classes, so that one man shall not be doomed to toil while another enjoys the fruits; so that each man shall be free and independent, sitting under “his own vine and fig tree with none to molest or to make afraid” [1 Kgs 4:25].21 We grant the power of Christianity in working out the reform we demand; we agree that one of the most efficient means of elevating the workingmen is to Christianize the community. But you must Christianize it. It is the gospel of Jesus you must preach, and not the gospel of the priests. Preach the gospel of Jesus and that will turn every man’s attention to the crying evil we have designated, and will arm every Christian with power to effect those changes in social arrangements, which shall secure to all men the equality of position and condition, which it is already acknowledged they possess in relation to their 21 [Ed. The biblical quotation is actually a paraphrase of 1 Kgs 4:25: “And Judah and Israel dwelt safely, every man under his vine and under his fig tree, from Dan even to Beersheba, all the days of Solomon.”]

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rights. But let it be the genuine gospel that you preach, and not that pseudo-gospel, which lulls the conscience asleep, and permits men to feel that they may be servants of God while they are slaves to the world, the flesh, and the devil; and while they ride roughshod over the hearts of their prostrate brethren. We must preach no gospel that permits men to feel that they are honorable men and good Christians, although rich and with eyes standing out with fatness, while the great mass of their brethren are suffering from iniquitous laws, from mischievous social arrangements, and pining away for the want of the refinements and even the necessaries of life. We speak strongly and pointedly on this subject because we are desirous of arresting attention. We would draw the public attention to the striking contrast which actually exists between the Christianity of Christ and the Christianity of the church. That moral and intellectual energy which exists in our country, indeed throughout Christendom, and which would, if rightly directed, transform this wilderness world into a blooming paradise of God, is now by the pseudo-gospel, which is preached, rendered wholly inefficient, by being wasted on that which, even if effected, would leave all the crying evils of the times untouched. Under the influence of the church, our efforts are not directed to the reorganization of society, to the introduction of equality between man and man, to the removal of the corruptions of the rich, and the wretchedness of the poor. We think only of saving our own souls, as if a man must not put himself so out of the case, as to be willing to be damned before he can be saved. Paul was willing to be accursed from Christ, to save his brethren from the vengeance which hung over them. But nevertheless we think only of saving our own souls; or if perchance our benevolence is awakened, and we think it desirable to labor for the salvation of others, it is merely to save them from imaginary sins and the tortures of an imaginary hell. The redemption of the world is understood to mean simply the restoration of mankind to the favor of God in the world to come. Their redemption from the evils of inequality, of factitious distinctions, and iniquitous social institutions, counts for nothing in the eyes of the church. And this is its condemnation. We cannot proceed a single step with the least safety in the great work of elevating the laboring classes without the exaltation of sentiment, the generous sympathy and the moral courage which Christianity alone is fitted to produce or quicken. But it is lamentable to see how, by means of the mistakes of the church, the moral courage, the generous sympathy, the exaltation of sentiment, Christianity does actually produce or quicken, is perverted and made efficient only in

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producing evil or hindering the growth of good. Here is wherefore it is necessary on the one hand to condemn in the most pointed terms the Christianity of the church, and to bring out on the other hand in all its clearness, brilliancy, and glory the Christianity of Christ. Having, by breaking down the power of the priesthood and the Christianity of the priests, obtained an open field and freedom for our operations, and by preaching the true gospel of Jesus, directed all minds to the great social reform needed, and quickened in all souls the moral power to live for it or to die for it; our next resort must be to government, to legislative enactments. Government is instituted to be the agent of society, or more properly the organ through which society may perform its legitimate functions. It is not the master of society; its business is not to control society, but to be the organ through which society effects its will. Society has never to petition government; government is its servant, and subject to its commands. Now the evils of which we have complained are of a social nature. That is, they have their root in the constitution of society as it is, and they have attained to their present growth by means of social influences, the action of government, of laws, and of systems and institutions upheld by society, and of which individuals are the slaves. This being the case, it is evident that they are to be removed only by the action of society, that is, by government, for the action of society is government. But what shall government do? Its first doing must be an undoing. There has been thus far quite too much government as well as government of the wrong kind. The first act of government we want, is a still further limitation of itself. It must begin by circumscribing within narrower limits its powers. And then it must proceed to repeal all laws which bear against the laboring classes, and then to enact such laws as are necessary to enable them to maintain their equality. We have no faith in those systems of elevating the working classes, which propose to elevate them without calling in the aid of the government. We must have government, and, legislation expressly directed to this end. But again what legislation do we want so far as this country is concerned? We want first the legislation which shall free the government, whether state or federal, from the control of the banks. The banks represent the interest of the employer, and therefore of necessity interests adverse to those of the employed; that is, they represent the interests of the business community in opposition to the laboring community. So long as the government remains under the control of the banks, so long it must be in the hands of the natural

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enemies of the laboring classes, and may be made, nay, will be made, an instrument of depressing them yet lower. It is obvious then that, if our object be the elevation of the laboring classes, we must destroy the power of the banks over the government, and place the government in the hands of the laboring classes themselves, or in the hands of those, if such there be, who have an identity of interest with them. But this cannot be done so long as the banks exist. Such is the subtle influence of credit, and such the power of capital, that a banking system like ours, if sustained, necessarily and inevitably becomes the real and efficient government of the country. We have been struggling for ten years in this country against the power of the banks, struggling to free merely the federal government from their grasp, but with humiliating success. At this moment, the contest is almost doubtful, not indeed in our mind, but in the minds of a no small portion of our countrymen. The partisans of the banks count on certain victory. The banks discount freely to build “log cabins,” to purchase “hard cider,” and to defray the expense of manufacturing enthusiasm for a cause which is at war with the interests of the people.22 That they will succeed, we do not for one moment believe; but that they could maintain the struggle so long, and be as strong as they now are, at the end of ten years’ constant hostility, proves but all too well the power of the banks, and their fatal influence on the political action of the community. The present character, standing, and resources of the bank party, prove to a demonstration that the banks must be destroyed, or the laborer not elevated. Uncompromising hostility to the whole banking system should therefore be the motto of every workingman, and of every friend of humanity. The system must be destroyed. On this point their must be no misgiving, no subterfuge, no palliation. The system is at war with the rights and interest of labor, and it must go. Every friend of the system must be marked as an enemy to his race, to his country, and especially to the laborer. No matter who he is, in what party he is found, or what name he bears, he is, in our judgment, no true democrat, as he can be no true Christian. Following the destruction of the banks must come that of all monopolies, of all PRIVILEGE. There are many of these. We cannot 22 [Ed. The reference here is to the banks’ and manufacturers’ support for the Whigs during the campaign of 1840 when the Whigs presented presidential candidate William Henry Harrison as a “man of the people.” On the references to log cabins and hard cider during the Whig presidential campaign of 1840, see Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr., The Age of Jackson, 290-91.]

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specify them all; we therefore select only one, the greatest of them all, the privilege which some have of being born rich while others are born poor. It will be seen at once that we allude to the hereditary descent of property, an anomaly in our American system, which must be removed, or the system itself will be destroyed. We cannot now go into a discussion of this subject, but we promise to resume it at our earliest opportunity.23 We only say now that as we have abolished hereditary monarchy and hereditary nobility, we must complete the work by abolishing hereditary property.24 A man shall have all he 23 [Ed. Brownson took up the issue again in “”The Laboring Classes—Responsibility to Party,” Boston Quarterly Review 3 (October, 1840): 420-512. See also chapter 8 in this volume.] 24 I am aware that I broach in this place a delicate subject, though I by no means advance a novel doctrine. [Ed. The French Saint-Simonians held the same doctrine, as did Thomas Skidmore (1790-1832) and some of the radical representatives of the Workingmen’s Party.] In justice to those friends with whom I am in the habit of thinking and acting on most subjects, as well as to the political party [the Democratic Party] with which I am publicly connected, I feel bound to say, that my doctrine, on the hereditary descent of property, is put forth by myself alone, and on my own responsibility. There are to my knowledge, none of my friends who entertain the doctrine, and who would not, had I consulted them, have labored to convince me of its unsoundness. Whatever then may be the measure of condemnation the community in its wisdom may judge it proper to mete out for its promulgation, that condemnation should fall on my head alone. I hold not myself responsible for others’ opinions, and I wish not others to be held responsible for mine. I cannot be supposed to be ignorant of the startling nature of the proposition I have made, nor can I, if I regard myself of the least note in the commonwealth, expect to be able to put forth such propositions, and go scatheless. Because I advance singular doctrines, it is not necessary to suppose that I am ignorant of public opinion, or that I need to be informed as to the manner in which my doctrines are likely to be received. I have made the proposition, which I have, deliberately, with what I regard a tolerably clear view of its essential bearings, and after having meditated it, and been satisfied of its soundness, for many years. I make it then with my eyes open, if the reader please, “with malice prepense.” I am then entitled to no favor, and I ask as I expect none. But I am not quite so unfortunate as to be wholly without friends in this world. There are those to whom I am linked by the closest ties of affection, and whose approbation and encouragement, I have ever found an ample reward for all the labors I could perform. Their reputations are dear to me! For their sake I add this note, that they may not be in the least censured for the fact that one whom they have honored with their friendship, and in a journal which, in its general character, they have not hesitated to commend, has seen proper to put forth a doctrine, which, to say the least, for long years to come must be condemned almost unanimously. [Ed. Brownson correctly anticipated the negative reaction his proposal would create. On this, see Schlesinger, Age of Jackson, 302-03, and Thomas R. Ryan, Orestes A. Brownson: A Definitive Biography (Huntington, Indiana: Our Sunday Visitor, 1976), 171-74.]

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honestly acquires, so long as he himself belongs to the world in which he acquires it. But his power over his property must cease with his life, and his property must then become the property of the state, to be disposed of by some equitable law for the use of the generation which takes his place. Here is the principle without any of its details, and this is the grand legislative measure to which we look forward. We see no means of elevating the laboring classes which can be effectual without this. And is this a measure to be easily carried? Not at all. It will cost infinitely more than it cost to abolish either hereditary monarchy or hereditary nobility. It is a great measure, and a startling. The rich, the business community, will never voluntarily consent to it, and we think we know too much of human nature to believe that it will ever be effected peaceably. It will be effected only by the strong arm of physical force. It will come, if it ever come at all, only at the conclusion of war, the like of which the world as yet has never witnessed, and from which, however inevitable it may seem to the eye of philosophy, the heart of humanity recoils with horror. We are not ready for this measure yet. There is much previous work to be done, and we should be the last to bring it before the legislature. The time, however, has come for its free and full discussion. It must be canvassed in the public mind and society prepared for acting on it. No doubt they who broach it, and especially they who support it, will experience a due share of contumely and abuse. They will be regarded by the part of the community they oppose, or may be thought to oppose, as “graceless varlets,”25 against whom every man of substance should set his face. But this is not, after all, a thing to disturb a wise man, nor to deter a true man from telling his whole thought. He who is worthy of the name of man, speaks what he honestly believes the interests of his race demand, and seldom disquiets himself about what may be the consequences to himself. Men have, for what they believed the cause of God or man, endured the dungeon, the scaffold, the stake, the cross, and they can do it again, if need be. This subject must be freely, boldly, and fully discussed, whatever may be the fate of those who discuss it.

25

[Ed. Not able to identify quotation.]

8. THE LABORING CLASSES— RESPONSIBILITY TO PARTY Boston Quarterly Review 3 (October, 1840): 420-512

As a general rule we never reply to what is written or said against ourselves personally, or the views we from time to time put forth. We adopt this rule because we never have in what we write any regard to our own personal reputation. We write not for fame; and we cannot believe it a matter of any moment to the world what estimation we may be held in by the public generally. We manage our own conduct according to our judgment or inclination, without disquieting ourselves in the least with the opinions which others may entertain of it. If it suits them, it is well; if it does not suit them, it is perhaps just as well. We also adopt this rule because we are never so desirous of establishing any set of opinions, as we are of stimulating to free and fearless inquiry into all great and interesting subjects. We believe that we love truth better than we do our own opinions; and if truth be elicited, we care little what becomes of the opinions we may have set forth. We therefore throw out our opinions freely, perhaps rashly, and leave them to be canvassed by the public mind, confident that in the long run they will receive all the merit they deserve. But as we wish to give with fuller details our views on several important matters, we shall in this instance depart from our general rule, and reply at some length to the principal objections we have heard urged against the article on the Laboring Classes, published in this journal for July last.1 These objections we shall generalize and discuss without any reference to the individuals or publications that have urged them. I. One objection urged against us is not that the doctrines of our article are unsound, but that now is not the time for putting them forth. The public mind, it is said, is not prepared for them, and there1 [Ed. For the objections, see Schlesinger, The Age of Jackson, 302-03, and Thomas R. Ryan, Orestes A. Brownson, 171-74.] 328

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fore will not give them a favorable reception. They will bring much reproach upon him who puts them forth, and that reproach will necessarily fall, to a greater or less extent, upon his friends, and the political party with which he may be associated. This objection resolves itself into two; one relating to the proper time for bringing out one’s ideas; and the other to the obligation of a man to withhold what be believes to be great truths, for fear of compromitting a party with which he may sometimes act. We shall consider the last first. 1. For ourselves, we acknowledge no party organization as obligatory, no party usages that we are bound to support. Party with us is never supported for its own sake, and claims our attention never as an end, but simply as a means to an end. Where there are differences of opinions, there will be different parties. A certain portion of our citizens believe the public good requires one set of political measures to be adopted; another portion decide in favor of another set of measures. Those who favor the one set constitute by that fact a party; those who favor another set constitute another party. This is all the partyism we recognize as legitimate. We approve no measure because it is the measure of this or that party. It is not the party that recommends the measure, but the measure that recommends the party. Those who approve the measure unite to carry it, and act as a party; but they are bound together as a party only by the fact that they have a common end in view. We have supported the Democratic party, on some occasions, because we have approved its measures; but in so doing we have never given it any pledge of indiscriminate support, no assurance that we would support it, let it put forth what measures it might, or that we would refrain from suggesting any measures, which it might not be prepared to approve. We come to it as freemen and give it a free voluntary support where we believe it right; but we reserve to ourselves the same freedom of thought and action we should have, had we nothing to do with it. We have surrendered nothing to it; given it no right over us; and therefore no claim, as a party, to chastise us when we offend it. These remarks will disclose our general views in regard to responsibility to party. Now, we apprehend that a doctrine, opposite to this, prevails to a considerable extent. We think that many among us would organize a party, and make its members believe and feel that their chief merit, in a political sense, consists in fidelity to it. Their maxim is, “Go with your party. Everything in a free country must be managed by party. Be therefore true to your party. Adhere to its usages, and support its

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measures and its nominations.” The men who wish to stand high with their party, therefore, consult not what is truth, but what is the creed of the party; not what is true policy, but what policy the party will sustain; not who are the best and fittest men to be voted for, but who will best secure the suffrages of the party. This is the popular doctrine of party, and a doctrine, which, we need not say, we utterly detest, let it be sustained by whom or by what party it may. This doctrine makes the support of party the end and not the means; reverses the natural order of things, and leads to the most mischievous results. It strikes at the very foundation of freedom, by rendering every individual a slave to his party. No matter what our convictions are, no matter what our wishes are for our country or our race, we must lock them up in our own bosoms, till our party in its wisdom is prepared to receive them, and to act on them. Nor is this all. Let it once be understood that the members of a party are to support it, whatever the measures it puts forth, and that the great mass of the individuals composing it are never to venture any suggestions on their individual responsibility, and you leave the whole party to be wielded according to the caprice or the interest of the some half a dozen individuals, who can adroitly place themselves at its head. A party in this case is merely an army under the control and ready to follow the beck of a few, perhaps designing, unprincipled chiefs. The way is thus paved for introducing and screening the grossest corruption, corruption which shall prey upon the vitals of the body politic and threaten its very existence. But if we are to support measures because they are the measures of our party, and not the party because it supports our measures, who, we would ask, is to determine what shall be the measures of our party? Who shall dictate its measures and authoritatively declare its creed? The demagogues at its head, who are looking only to their own aggrandizement? Individuals who hold the party merely as the instruments of their will? So, doubtless, the ambitious and designing would have it; but not so would a true democrat have it. No democrat can consent to let half a dozen men cut and dry the policy they may choose, and then demand his support on peril of being branded as a renegade if he withhold it. He knows no dictators of opinions. He asks not what this president or that governor, this senator or that representative believes, in order to ascertain what it will answer for him to advance. He makes up his mind from the best lights within his reach and acts accordingly. The mere success of a party is never a legitimate end to be sought. No man then owes any allegiance to a party as such. He then needs

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never ask whether the views he puts forth will, or will not, compromit his party. He is simply bound, according to the best of his judgment and ability, to refrain from aught that may injure the cause he has at heart; and if the present success of any given party be indispensable to the success of that cause, then, and for that reason only, should he refrain from doing aught to compromit that party. But we know so little of what is or is not indispensable to the success of any great cause, we are such poor judges of what is expedient or inexpedient, that the wisest way, after all, is to speak out what we honestly believe to be just and true, without asking whom it will or will not compromit. Truth and justice are, so far as we have been able to learn, the best expedients. Ask not then how what a man has uttered will affect your sect or your party; but merely ask is what he advocates just and true? We have made these remarks to show what is the light in which we regard fidelity and deference to party. We owe NO responsibility to party. We sustain the leading measures of the Democratic party because we believe them essential to the welfare of the country; we sustain the Democratic party generally because it is through that party we hope to realize such legislative reforms as are needed to carry out into practice the great doctrine of equality, to which the American people stand pledged. So far as that party puts forth such measures as we approve, we shall support it; so far as it, in our judgment, is faithful to American principles, it may always, wherever we are, count on our fidelity, and no farther. So far as it concerns political action, if we act at all, we shall probably always act with it, as our sympathies are not likely to go with the opposing party. We speak here of action. But in the discussion of principles, in putting forth measures, we pay no regard to it; never have consulted, and never shall consult it. Here we take ground above all party, above the people even, and ask simply what is true? What is right? What ought to be? Here we follow our own convictions, speak from our own minds, without “conferring with flesh and blood” [Gal 1:16]. We here aim to exercise that freedom of mind, that “soul-liberty,” which many others so eloquently defend. For ourselves, we claim the right of free thought and free utterance. We rarely undertake to defend this right; we exercise it. And we believe it the duty of every man to exercise it, and that he is no true man who will not exercise it. We feel nothing but pity for the miserable coward who dares not utter a thought till he has obtained the license of his sect, his school, or his party. Away with such abjectness. Be men, thinking your own thoughts, and speaking your own words. No sect or party is or can be

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deserving of your support that requires you to abandon your freedom of mind, or to suppress the utterance of your own honest convictions. 2. With regard to the objection that now is not the time for bringing out such doctrines as we have advanced, we have not much to say. If now is not the time, it must be either because there are more important matters to be discussed; or because those doctrines cannot now be fairly brought out; or because their utterance at this time may bring reproach upon him who utters them. The last consideration is purely personal, and therefore does not concern the public. A man who utters a doctrine is or ought to be prepared to brave the consequences of uttering it. He, who can be deterred from publishing a truth through fear of reproach is a coward, a traitor to both God and man, and has no claim upon our sympathy or respect. We shall defend no such man. As it concerns the second consideration, no man can tell whether his doctrines will be comprehended or not, till he has published them. As a general rule it is always safe for a man to infer that what he can fully comprehend himself, may be communicated to his contemporaries. It is not well for a man to believe himself so far superior to those around him that his thoughts, clearly uttered, must be unintelligible to them. There may be more important matters than those we discussed in our article on the Laboring Classes. Of that each one must judge for himself. The less should undoubtedly be postponed to the greater. But what seems the greater to one mind, may seem the less to another. “But just at this time, when an important election is pending, it was injudicious to start a new and exciting topic of discussion.”2 Perhaps so. But we have never believed that anything we could write would have much influence on an election; and we are sure that we would never willingly triumph in an election, however important we might regard it, if our triumph could be endangered by the fearless utterance of what we held to be a great truth; although the application of that truth might be far in the distant future. A triumph won by the suppression of any truth is more dishonorable and disastrous than a defeat. The proper time for uttering a doctrine, it strikes us, is whenever we clearly perceive it, and are fully convinced of its truth and impor2 [Ed. George Bancroft certainly thought the article inopportune, to say the least. On this, see Lilian Handlin, George Bancroft: The Intellectual as Democrat (New York: Harper and Row, 1984), 180.]

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tance; when we feel it pressing heavily upon our hearts, and hear it in loud and earnest tones demanding to be uttered. The world is lying in wickedness; great social wrongs obtain; man is everywhere suffering by the hand of man; and what are they doing, who should be bold and invincible reformers? They are trimming their sails to the breeze, and crying out to him, whose soul burns with strong desire to emancipate his brethren, “Wait, wait. Now is not the time. Four months and then cometh the harvest. Be prudent, manage adroitly. You ruin everything by going too fast. Slacken your pace.” Now, we have heard enough of this timid counsel. We are indignant at it; and in the language of Jesus, we say, “Lift up your eyes, look on the fields; for, behold, they are white already to the harvest” [John 4:35]. There is the enemy, fortifying his camp and concentrating his forces; unfurl your banners; let the drums beat; march, rush, storm his entrenchments, and compel him to surrender at discretion. Always is it the time to war against sin and Satan; always is it the time to proclaim the truth, and discomfit error. A plain, open, honest avowal of truth is always the shortest, as well as the surest, road to victory. In a moral war, we have no faith in stratagems. We want no plotting and counter-plotting, no feints, no ambuscades. Raise aloft, and give to the breeze the broad banner of truth. With it you may march alone and single-handed through the enemy’s camp, and overcome it. Care not for his bullets. They may whistle about your ears, pierce your garments, and penetrate your body even; but they cannot wound you. You may be crushed to the earth, but you shall be renewed by the fall, and rise with fresh courage and energy to the combat. For, carry you not the banner of God? And does God need to plot, mine, and undermine, in order to gain his victories? No. He goes forth in his simple majesty, and terror seizes his enemies; their souls fail them; and they are as so many dead men. So in the simple majesty of truth should all go forth who would redeem the world. Away, then, with all this cant about time and place. Know that truth is her own time and place. Let the world but see her face and it is reconstructed in her image. If the doctrines we put forth in our article on the Laboring Classes were true, they were timely put forth. If you object not to the doctrines themselves, be ashamed to object to the time when they were promulgated. If you regard them as untrue, unsound, refute them; use your zeal and energy in proving them false; not in proving their publication inopportune. Rely upon it, that such doctrines will always be inopportune to those whom they indict; never to any others.

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II. A second objection urged against us is that we propose to abolish Christianity. This objection is founded on a perversion of our language, and is warranted by nothing that we have ever written in our Review. Ten years ago this very autumn, we publicly announced our conversion to the Christian Faith, and since then we have uttered, as we have entertained, no doubt of the truth of the Christian Religion. No man in this community has preached or written more, during these last ten years, to defend Christianity, and to defend it not only against the infidel, but also against the church, than the editor of this Review. It would therefore be much more modest in his traducers to distrust their own interpretation of his language than to charge him with hostility to Christianity. 1. That we distinguish between the Christianity of the church, and the Christianity of Christ, that we hold the former in low esteem, while we love and reverence the latter, we have no disposition to deny. We claim the right of interpreting Christianity for ourselves, as we readily concede to others, and to the best of our ability defend to others, their right to interpret it for themselves. That our interpretations are not precisely orthodox may very possibly be true. To a large portion of the Christian world our views are doubtless heretical. After the manner which many call heresy, we confess that we worship the God of our fathers. But that is our affair and not theirs. We have not asked them to mediate between us and our God, nor have we proposed to mediate for them. We can manage the matter of our acceptance with our Maker, without their assistance, as they doubtless can that of theirs without ours. And yet, as heretical as we may be, our writings contain distinct avowals of our belief in the divine inspiration of the Old and New Testaments; in the reality of the Christian miracles; the Deity of Christ, and of the Holy Ghost; in the Trinity; the Fall of man, and his corruption by sin; the Atonement; justification by faith; spiritual regeneration; immortality, and rewards and punishments in the world to come.3 All these doctrines have been distinctly recognized as truths, and commented on as such, in some one or other of our published writings. It would seem, then, that even in the opinion of the Christian world generally our heresies are not of the sort termed “damnable.” Furthermore; in the very article in question, we say expressly that “We are Christians, and that it is only by following out the Chris3 [Ed. Here and there Brownson asserted his belief in these doctrines, but his understanding of these doctrines would have been unacceptable to many orthodox theologians of the time.]

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tian law, and the example of the early believers, that we can hope to effect anything.”4 The second step we propose in the work of elevating the laboring classes is, we there say, “to resuscitate the Christianity of Christ.”5 We must then be pardoned, if we entertain no great respect for those pious readers, who can infer from our writings that we proposed to elevate the proletary by destroying Christianity. Christianity we have always spoken of as friendly to, as commanding even, the moral and social elevation of the laboring classes. Democracy we have often defined to be nothing but the application of the principles of the gospel to man’s social and political relations. How could we, then, with this our acknowledged view of Christianity, seek its destruction as a means of effecting the social reform for which we were contending? All, who have done us the honor to read our writings, must admit, it seems to us that our great object has all along been to Christianize the democracy, and to democratize, if we may use the word, the church. We found, when we came upon the stage, the advocates of social reform at war with religion, and the friends of religion at war with the social reformers. At first, we fell into the common error of believing this the natural state of things, and accordingly accepted it, and joined in the opposition to religion. Subsequent inquiry convinced us that this was an unnatural state of things; that the hostility, between the social reformer and the advocate of religion, was accidental and not necessary, the result of mutual misunderstanding. From that time up to the present moment, we have labored uniformly to reconcile the two. In January, 1834, the writer of the article in question, published in the Unitarian, a periodical edited by the late lamented Bernard Whitman, an article written nearly a year previous, on “Christianity and Reform” in which he “labors to prove that no salutary reform can be effected by infidelity, and that the spirit of reform is in fact the very spirit of the gospel.”6 We insert an extract which may serve to set this matter in its true light. “That infidelity and the spirit of reform have sometimes been found in alliance is not denied; but this alliance is unnatural, and has never produced anything worth preserving. Reformers have sometimes erred. Animated by a strong desire for human improvement, feeling an undying love for man, they have freely devoted themselves 4

[Ed. “The Laboring Classes,” 384. See also this volume, chapter 7, pp. 318-

19. 5

[Ed. Ibid., 388. See also this volume, chapter 7, p. 321.] [Ed. “Christianity and Reform,” The Unitarian 1 (January, 1834): 30-39; (February, 1834): 51-58. Quotation on 52. See also EW, 2:289.] 6

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to his emancipation, and to the promotion of his endless progress towards perfection; but they have not always had clear conceptions of what would be an improvement, of the good attainable, nor of the practicable means of attaining it. Their zeal may have flowed from pure hearts, but it has not always been guided by just knowledge. They have often excited needless alarm, waged needless war, declaimed when they should have reasoned, censured when they should have pitied and consoled, awakened resentment when they should have gained confidence, and attracted love. The consequence is that they have been opposed by their natural friends, and this has obliged them to league with their natural enemies. “In the contest, the reformer has excited the alarms of the religious, and armed against himself the guardians of the faith. He has met the minister of the church, commanding him in the name of God to desist, and assuring him that if he take another step forward, he does it at the peril of his soul’s salvation. When the French reformer rose against the mischievous remains of the feudal system, and the severe exactions of a superannuated tyranny, he found the church leagued with the abuses he would correct. Those who lived upon her revenues bade him retire. The anathema met his advance, and repelled his attack; and he was induced to believe that there was no place whereon to erect the palace of liberty and social order, but the ruins of the temple. “Yet his cause was most eminently a religious cause. It was not because the spirit of reform was an infidel spirit, that it was opposed by the professed friends of religion. All reforms come from the lower classes, who are always the sufferers; and they are usually opposed by the higher classes, who live by those very abuses, or who are the higher classes in consequence of those very abuses, which the reformer would redress. These classes, whether hereditary, elective, or fortuitous, whether composed of the same individuals, or of different ones, have always the same spirit, and the same interests. The old order of things is that which elevates them; and that order of things, they, of course, must feel it their duty to maintain. Hence it is that the upper classes of society, all who are under the direct influence of those classes, and all who hope one day to make a part of them, are almost always opposed to all radical changes, and consequently to all real reform. In most countries, the ministers of religion, especially the higher orders of the hierarchy, make up a part of the higher and privileged classes; and hence the reason why they oppose the reformer, and force him into the ranks of the unbeliever. They from their position feel no need of a reform in the moral and social institutions of the com-

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munity, and hope nothing from a change; and they can but oppose it. They have always done so, and always will do so, till they are made sensible that they must lose all their influence and their means of benefitting themselves or others by continuing their opposition.”7 So we wrote and published in 1834, and this essay contains the germ of all we have since published on this subject. It has been with us a leading object to bring out in as bold relief as possible the great fact that Jesus was a social reformer, that the aim of his mission was to establish the reign of equality on earth, as well as to secure salvation to the soul hereafter. If there is anything peculiar in our views, it is in the fact that they aim to reconcile the disciple of Jesus and the social reformer, to bring out Christianity as a means of social reform, and to enlist the church on the side of the down-trodden masses. We have been laboring in this country to do precisely what the Abbé de la Mennais has been laboring to do in France. Almost at the very moment he was writing his Words of a Believer, we, without knowing that there was such a man on earth, were writing our essay on Christianity and Reform, which advocates in sober prose, substantially the same doctrines that he has sent forth in his inspired poem. We have, it is true, for many years been contending for a radical reform, not in politics and government only, but in society itself. Our democracy is of the most thorough-going sort. It embraces that of the Democratic party, and sustains it; but it goes altogether beyond, and contemplates results, of which a large portion of that party have not as yet even dreamed. It goes, though not in the same direction, as far as Robert Owen or Frances Wright proposed to go. But we differ from these notorious individuals, not only in our conceptions of what would be a true reform, but in the very important fact that while they propose to remodel society without the aid of Christianity, and in opposition to it, we propose to remodel society by its aid, and in obedience to its law. We demand the most radical reforms; but we demand them not in our own name, nor, on our own authority; but in the name and on the authority of God. Perhaps this is what has most offended our conservative brethren. It is taking them, we own, at a disadvantage; and condemning them, as it were, out of their own mouths. But is this our fault? They profess to be Christians; they acknowledge the authority of the Christian law; where then is the injustice of trying them by that law? Grant that by proclaiming that law and bringing them to its test, we strip off their masks and compel them to stand 7

[Ed. “Christianity and Reform,” 36-38. See also EW, 2:294-96.]

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out before the gaze of men in their real character of infidels and sinners; are we censurable for so doing? Are we warring against Christianity when we deprive the Scribes and Pharisees of our times of the comfortable assurance that they are good Christians, and heirs of salvation, while they merely acknowledge Christ with their lips, but in their hearts, and in their lives, worship the flesh and the devil? If our course disquiets them, they ought to blame, it would seem, themselves, not us. The severity of our preaching may be in their antiChristian conduct, not in the words we use. We wish these Scribes and Pharisees, these chief priests, rulers in the synagogues, and principal men of the city, to understand that in our controversy with them we take Christian ground. In our own name we should not dare speak to them as we do; but we speak to them in the name of our Master, and rebuke them from the height of the Christian pulpit. This is the ground we have assumed. We know well its advantages, and our conservative friends may rest assured that we shall never voluntarily abandon it for the low and untenable ground of infidelity. They may dislodge us if they can; but they may rely upon it that it will always be in the name and on the authority of Christ that we shall attack them. They must vindicate their own claims to be regarded as Christians before it will answer for them to call us infidels; especially before they will have the right to infer from the fact that we oppose what they uphold, we are opposing Christianity. They may say that they are Christians; they may say that we misinterpret the Christian law; but we bid them lay their hands on their hearts, look us in the face, and say so if they can. We speak confidently here, for we have for us a witness, an unimpeachable witness, in their own breasts. Their own consciences accuse them of want of fidelity to the gospel, and assure them that between their Christianity and that of Christ there is a great gulf, as wide and deep as that which separated the rich man in hell, from the poor beggar lodged by angels in Abraham’s bosom. In the name of Christ, we have summoned the community to answer for its Christianity, to show that it is really Christian, or else to abandon its pretensions to the Christian name. Is this infidelity? Then are we infidels. Is this to prove ourselves hostile to the Christianity of Christ? Then are we hostile to it. 2. But it is said that we oppose the church, and it is very sagely inferred that a man cannot oppose the church, and be a friend to Christ. We admit that we oppose the church, as it now is; we admit that we would abolish it; nay, that we are determined to do all in our power to abolish it; but we deny that we are therefore hostile to religion, or doing any disservice to the cause of Christian truth. We

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distinguish, as we have said, between the Christianity of the church, and the Christianity of Christ. The former we have no respect for; the latter we love, and reverence, and seek to obey. The Christianity of the church is merely a human institution, resting solely on human authority, and may be treated and judged of in like manner, as any other human institution; as may be the science of chemistry, for instance, of geology, or of astronomy. We owe it no allegiance, and admit not its right to command. But the Christianity of Christ is the Word of God, and therefore rests on divine authority. To it we bow as our legitimate sovereign, and feel that we are bound in conscience to do whatever it commands. Furthermore; on what ground have we opposed the church? On the ground that it is a Christian institution, upholding and giving currency to Christian principles and influences? Never. But solely on the ground that it is an anti-Christian institution, which is at the present time a let and a hindrance to the spread of Christian truth, to the growth of God’s kingdom in the soul, and on the earth. We oppose it because we find no divine authority for it; because we cannot discover that Jesus ever contemplated such an institution; and because we regard it as the grave of freedom and independence and the hotbed of servility and hypocrisy. We oppose it because it does not recognize the spirit of Jesus, acknowledge the rights of the reason, and make it the religious duty of its members to raise up the bowed down and set the captive free. Here are the grounds of our opposition to the church; and surely we may oppose it on these grounds without forfeiting our claims to faith in the gospel, or fidelity to Christ. Were the church the true body of Christ, did it truly represent him, labor unweariedly to establish God’s kingdom, which is the reign of truth, justice, and love, on the earth, we should be the last to raise our voices against it, and foremost to give it all the support in our power. But the church has become cold and lifeless; the Holy Ghost does not dwell in her midst; she has a form of godliness, but not its power; and by her deeds can no flesh be justified. We have studied too long in the school of Jesus to be able to believe that a little psalm-singing, a little sermonizing, a little holy water, or consecrated bread or wine, can atone for sin, and enable the soul to stand up holy and acceptable in the sight of its Maker. What the church enjoins is poor stuff, at best dead works, which cannot purge the conscience, or make the comers thereunto perfect. Give us being not seeming; give us a life of true active holiness, a life that is spent in serving God by serving his children, a life that is not merely to be hereafter, but a life that now is, a true eternal life, which realizes the

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kingdom of God wherever it is lived; not your vain shows, your handwriting of ordinances and will-worship, which Jesus long ago nailed to his cross, and declared utterly worthless by the sacrifice of himself. When the church lives this life, or shows that she has power to impart it, we will be her friend; till then we must oppose her, or cease to obey the gospel. III. A third objection, which we have heard urged against our views, is that we would abolish the priesthood, and dispense with all religious instruction, and all religious worship. To this objection we reply that the inference drawn from what we have said against priests is unwarranted. We stated expressly in the article so much abused that we did not object to religious teachers, to religious instruction, nor to religious worship. We have ourselves officiated as a religious teacher, the greater part of the time for the last sixteen years, and regard ourselves now in the light of a religious teacher, as much as ever we did. We are as ready to preach now as ever we were, and trust to live and die a preacher of religion. The views, which we have lately put forth on the priesthood, and on religious worship, are precisely such as we have ever entertained, since we have had any views on the subject.8 We have preached them often, and frequently published them before. But what are our views of the priesthood? To what did we in reality object when we objected to the priesthood? These questions we can answer only by giving at some length our views of Christianity as an outward, visible institution. The mission of Jesus was twofold. One purpose of his mission was to atone for sin, and prepare the soul for heaven in the world to come. The other purpose was to found a holy kingdom on the earth, under the dominion of which all men should finally be brought. This last purpose is the only one which concerns us in our present inquiry. This holy kingdom, which Christ came to found on the earth, has been mistaken for the outward, visible church; and the church has therefore been held to be a spiritual body, a body corporate, independent in itself, and distinct from the body politic, civil society, or the state. This has given rise to a double organization of mankind; one for material interests called the state, and under the control of the civil government proper; the other for spiritual purposes, called the church, and governed by laws and officers of its own, distinct 8 [Ed. From his very earliest days, Brownson had railed against priestcraft. On this, see, for example, EW, 1:7, 25, 170-71, 310-11, 331-32.]

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from those of the state. Now to this we strenuously object. We would establish the kingdom of God on the earth; but we would not have a double organization of mankind. We would have but a single organization; and this organization we would call not the church, but the state. This organization should be based on the principles of the gospel, and realize them as perfectly as finite man can realize them. The kingdom of God is an inward, spiritual kingdom. In plain language, it is the dominion of truth, justice, and love. Now, we would build up this kingdom not by founding an outward visible church, but by cultivating the principles of truth, justice, and love, in the soul of the individual, and by bringing society and all its acts into perfect harmony with them. Our views, if carried out, would realize not a union, but the unity, the identity, of church and state. They would indeed destroy the church as a separate body, as a distinct organization; but they would do it by transferring to the state the moral ideas on which the church was professedly founded, and which it has failed to realize. They would realize that idea of a “Christian Commonwealth,” after which our Puritan fathers so earnestly and perseveringly struggled. They are nothing but the views of the first settlers of this state, developed and systematized, and freed from the theological phraseology in which they were then expressed. We are true to their idea, to their spirit, and are laboring to realize that which they most desired. We therefore remind those who profess to reverence our Puritan ancestors, that they would do well to study the history and opinions of those ancestors, and forbear to censure us, till they are prepared to condemn them.9 So much in reference to the church as an organized body, as a spiritual society distinct from the civil society, the only sense in which we have ever opposed it, or thought of opposing it. As it concerns religious worship, no man ever contended more strenuously for it than we do; but we do not, when we speak strictly, suffer ourselves to call the usual exercises of the Sabbath the worship of God. We call these exercises, in fact all the special works the church enjoins, at best mere preparations for or aids to the worship of God. “Pure worship” (for so the original should be rendered), says St. James, “and undefiled before God the Father, is to visit the fatherless and the widows in their afflictions, and to keep oneself unspotted from the world” [James 1:27]. By this we understand the practice of a pure 9 [Ed. See “Tendency of Modern Civilization,” Boston Quarterly Review 1 (April, 1838): 216-18. See also EW, 3, chapter 17.]

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and elevated morality. We worship God when we feed the hungry, give drink to the thirsty, clothe the naked, show hospitality to the stranger, visit the sick, and minister to the wants of the prisoner. We worship God when we cultivate our moral powers, develop our better nature, acquire just and holy principles, and prepare ourselves for a generous self-sacrifice in the cause of truth and humanity; when we forget ourselves, go out into the highways and byways, into the world at large, and labor to recall the erring, to enlighten the ignorant, to comfort the sorrowing, to heal the brokenhearted, to raise up the down-trodden, and to set at liberty them that are bound; when, in a word, we seek to redress all individual and social wrongs, and to establish, in our own hearts and in society at large, the reign of truth, justice, and love. Here is what we understand by the worship of God. So far as your gathering together on one day in seven, singing psalms and listening to religious discourses, being baptized or partaking of the sacrament of the Lord’s Supper, contribute to this end, so far we approve what is usually termed the worship of God; but no farther. These exercises are simply means to an end, and so far as our experience goes, not very efficient means. It is the cant of the day to praise them; to speak of them as the dear and venerable institutions of religion, without which we should all degenerate into barbarism and the grossest licentiousness; but we have no respect for this cant; and ninety-nine out of a hundred of those, whose mouths are fullest of it, have just as little. We can tolerate an open, avowed infidel; but not a canting hypocrite, whose mouth is full of the institutions of our ancestors, and the blessed doctrines of the gospel, but whose heart is harder than the nether millstone, and whose life is one mass of corruption. We wish to hear things called by their right names; and we can dignify nothing with the name of worship to God, which is not either in itself intrinsically good, or which does not contribute something to the well-being of man, to the growth of the individual, or the progress of society. So much, again, for the worship of God, which, with us, is simply being good and doing good. We turn now to the priesthood. Here we beg our readers to bear in mind what it is that we understand by the term priest. As the term is used in our article, it has two meanings. First, it means a man who acts as a sort of mediator between man and God. Secondly, it means one of a profession whose duty it is to expound to us, for hire, and authoritatively, the great doctrines of religion and morals. In the first sense, the word is rarely used in this country. There are few of our countrymen who regard a priest as capable of mediating between

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them and God. This, however, is the old sense of the word, and especially the Jewish sense; but in this sense a priest cannot be admitted under the gospel. We all unquestionably require a mediator between us and the Father, for no man can approach the Father without a mediator. But we have, as we have before said, one mediator, the man Christ Jesus, who gave himself a ransom for all. This one mediator we hold is enough. Jesus Christ is our grand High Priest, and he alone, if there be any truth in the New Testament, is sufficient. He has offered up the great propitiatory sacrifice, hath entered into the Holy of Holies for us, and forever sat down on the right hand of the Majesty on High, where he ever liveth to make intercession for us. If any man sin, he has not now to go to a priest to intercede for him, to pray for him; for Paul says, “I would that men should pray everywhere, lifting up holy hands without wrath or doubting” [1 Tim 2:8]. He wants no priest to propitiate the Deity for him; for as John says, “We have an advocate with the Father, Jesus Christ the righteous, who is the propitiation for our sins, and not for ours only, but for the sins of the whole world” [1 John 2:1-2]. It is evident, then, that Jesus, as mediator, supersedes all necessity of priests in the first sense in which we have used the term. In seeking to abolish the priestly order, then, in the sense of a mediator between God and man, we are merely following out the doctrine of the gospel, a doctrine our readers will find clearly set forth in the Epistle to the Hebrews.10 So much for the first sense in which we use the word priest. Thus far, we presume we shall encounter no very violent opposition. In touching upon the priests in the second sense, in which we have used the term, we touch upon altogether more dangerous ground, and run some risk of being crucified between two thieves. In this second sense we, of course, include the great body of the clergy of all denominations, which recognize a clergy, and therefore raise up against us a numerous and a powerful host of foes. But we are not much afraid of consequences. We are not ignorant of the fact that here “the fist of wickedness that would, is bound that it cannot smite” [Isa 58:4]; and were it not so, we still should feel quite at our ease; for we have long since learned not to fear them who kill the body, and after that have no more that they can do; but Him, who, after he hath killed, hath power to destroy both soul and body in hell. But on the point upon which we now touch, we must ask our readers to do their best not to misinterpret us. For the views we actu10

[Ed. Brownson is referring to Heb 7:1-8:12.]

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ally set forth we hold ourselves responsible, and are willing to receive whatever measure of condemnation the community in its justice, or its zeal, may choose to mete out; but we are not willing to be held responsible for what we do not believe, nor to be condemned for doctrines we should abhor to teach. We wish it therefore distinctly understood that we do not, in opposing the clergy, oppose teachers of religion, nor preachers of the gospel. We would have more preaching of the gospel, not less; more religious congregations, not fewer. We oppose not clergymen in their capacity of men and Christians, nor in their capacity of simple teachers or ministers of the gospel; but in their capacity of members of an ecclesiastical corporation, of a separate profession, authorized by law, fashion, or custom, to tell us authoritatively what we must believe and do in order to be saved, and who are to obtain their rank in society, and their means of living, by ministering at the altar. We believe the time has come when the clerical profession, as a separate profession, as a sort of trade, is no longer needed; nay, when it has become a positive hindrance to the diffusion of knowledge, and the growth of religion in the soul. We war then not against preaching the gospel, but against making the preaching of the gospel a trade, a regular business, from which a numerous class of men are to derive their revenues. And to this we have several serious objections. 1. We find no authority in the New Testament for the support of such a profession. Jesus sent out apostles, and the Holy Ghost calls men to prophesy and to teach; but not as we can discover to be clergymen or priests. Under Judaism, there was a regularly constituted priesthood, hereditary in a particular tribe and family, but nothing of this is recognized under the gospel. The old covenant, which recognized priests as mediators between God and men, was condemned, as insufficient; and God told us by the mouth of his prophet that “the days should come when he would make a new covenant with the house of Israel, and the house of Judah. I will put,” says he, “my law in their inward parts, and write it upon their hearts, and I will be their God, and they shall be my people, and they shall not teach every man his brother, and every man his neighbor, saying, Know the Lord; for all shall know me from the least of them to the greatest” [Jer 31:33-34]. Now, here is the new covenant under which we are. This new covenant recognizes but one mediator, Jesus Christ, who gave himself a ransom for us. It recognizes no priestly order, except the order of Melchizedek; that is, an order of priests, who are priests not by human appointment, or human ordinances, not by consecration with holy oil, or the laying on of the hands of the presbytery;

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but by the inward anointing of the Holy Ghost, by having God’s law within, and written on the heart. After the order of Melchizedek, the new covenant proposes to make all men priests.11 Under the gospel, all men are evidently called to be “kings and priests.” This fact is important. Under the Jewish dispensation, only the descendants of David could be kings, and only the tribe of Levi could furnish priests. In calling all men to be kings and priests, the gospel took ground directly opposite to the Jewish, and proclaimed, on the one hand, the royal and priestly nature of every man, and on the other, the abolition of all distinctions founded on birth or blood; in other words, it proclaimed the natural and essential equality of all men. Moreover, in seeking to make every man a king and a priest, the gospel, of course, seeks to dispense with everything like a separate order of kings or of priests. If all men should become kings, the effect would be the same with having no king at all; for all would be equal. If all men should become priests, it would be the abolition of the priestly order, as a separate order. In relation to that order, in the sense in which we have condemned it, we should stand precisely as if we had no priests. Now, as the gospel makes no provision for a clerical order, as it contemplates making every man his own priest, we have a right to infer, that it does not authorize a priesthood in the practical sense in which mankind understand the term. If there be any truth in the statement that we are under the new covenant, a covenant which recognizes no outward mediator, no outward priesthood, but simply the priesthood of the soul, expressed by putting the law in the inward parts, and writing it on the heart, whereby every man may be his own priest, it follows that we may oppose the clergy, in the sense in which we do oppose them, without opposing the gospel; nay, that if we would obey the gospel, we must oppose them. It is not difficult to account for the existence of the clerical body. It grew up in a great measure out of the wants of past times; because, in the general ignorance and barbarism of the ages which succeeded the first promulgation of the gospel, there was a real and useful work for the Christian priest to perform. It also in part, and especially in its priestly character, owes its origin to the old Jewish and pagan notions of a priesthood, which the primitive believers retained even after their conversion to Christ. It has doubtless done much good in its day, when it was needed; but then its day was only till the community became prepared for a truly Christian organization. 11

[Ed. On the order of Melchizedek see Ps 110:4 and Heb 5-7.]

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2. We object to the clerical profession, because it is impossible for any man faithfully and honestly to fulfil its requirements. Formerly, before the coming of Christ, the office of a priest was comparatively easy. The work the priest was called upon to perform was marked out, and so completely within the reach of ordinary skill and that any man could do it, with a little preliminary instruction. Religious duties were outward, formal duties, consisting entirely in something to be done, and which could be done mechanically, without thought or emotion. There was no need that the priest should have his mind, or his heart in what he was performing. He was not, as a general rule, a teacher of religion, of moral truth, but a sacrificator. Under Judaism, he was mainly a butcher, whose chief duty it was to slaughter the animals offered in sacrifice. He was, under a religion consisting, as all religions prior to Jesus did consist, mainly in rites and ceremonies, a very necessary and indispensable functionary. But just in proportion as religion becomes spiritualized, is made to consist in inward communion with God, he becomes less and less indispensable. In the Catholic Church, the priest has still somewhat to do, which a man may always be prepared to do. That church has an imposing cultus, a service, deemed essential to the salvation of souls, which cannot be performed without priests. Priests there are necessary to administer the sacraments, of which there are seven. In that church, we cannot marry without a priest, be born without a priest, be buried without a priest, nor be saved or damned without a priest. Some little show of propriety is there then, in the Catholic Church, in having priests, because there is a considerable work necessary to be done for the worship of God, which the individual cannot do for himself. Also, in the Church of England, the clerical order can get along very well. It has a ritual, a service, which requires the assistance of a clergyman, and which the clergyman may render mechanically. If one only have pleasant manners, a respectable personal appearance, a good voice, and a tolerable capacity as a reader, he can be a very commendable priest in the Church of England, whatever be the qualities of his mind or his heart. But in proportion as we advance on these two churches, and leave them and their Jewish and pagan traditions behind, the duties of the clergy become more arduous, and more difficult of performance; because they cannot be performed mechanically, or as a matter of routine. We go into a Calvinistic church, whether Baptist or Presbyterian, and we find very little for the clergyman to perform, which he can perform properly without the inspiration of the Holy Ghost. He may, be his heart or his mind where it may, baptize, by aspersion or

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immersion, and administer the sacrament of the Lord’s supper; but this is all. The Calvinistic churches have very properly abolished almost everything like a cultus exterior. They adopt no ritual, no liturgy, and have reduced the sacraments to two. They have spiritualized so much that they have spirited away nearly all the old work there was for the clergyman to do. In revenge they have imposed upon him new duties; and duties which infinitely surpass mortal strength. The main duties of the clergyman with us are to make pastoral visits, pray and preach on Sundays, and administer the two sacraments we have specified. The pastoral visits, the praying and the preaching, require, at the moment of their performance, the full action of the mind, and a lively glow of devotional feeling. Nothing is more painful to the really conscientious minister than to be called upon to pray, either in a private family or in public, when he has no spirit of prayer, when his devotional feelings are cold or languid. But he must go through with the forms of prayer whatever be the frame of his heart. He must take the sacred words on his lips and utter them with fervor, although no fervor he feels. This sullies the chastity of his soul, and he soon comes to perform his devotional exercises without having his heart in them. He affects in their performance a warmth he does not feel, and becomes in the end a mere actor, now appearing to weep with the mourners at a funeral, and now half an hour afterwards to make merry with a bridal party at a wedding; while he has the most perfect indifference to both. He in reality makes a mock of devotion. He feels that it is so, and loathes himself. He would do better, would be sincere, always in earnest; but it is not in his power. He goes into his pulpit today with a barren mind, with listless thoughts, cold and languid feelings. He has no life in him. But there is a congregation demanding that he shall lead its devotions, waiting for him to quicken its devout feelings, and lead it into the presence of God. Alas, he himself is by no means in God’s presence, and cannot rise to it. How then shall he lead others there? It is a moral injury to compel him in this state of feeling to go through with the forms of devotion. You force him to play the actor, the hypocrite. Then, again, you require this man to preach to you, to lay open the mysteries of religion to your understandings, to quicken within you a sense of duty, to raise your thoughts and affections to the spiritual and the everlasting. There are moments when he can do this, when his mental vision shall be clear, his heart glowing with divine love, his mind full of great and kindling thoughts, and his utterance be with power. Then it is profitable to him, and to you, that he should

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preach. Then the spirit rests upon him, and he can speak to you as it were with a tongue of fire. But how few are these moments in the lives of the best of men! They come not at our bidding. We must wait for them as waited the poor wretches for the angel to descend and trouble the waters of Bethesda. The young man has felt something of this moving of God’s spirit, and entered the ministry, trusting that he should feel it always. But soon he learns that one does not feel it always; and what is worse, the nature of his profession is such that he must act ever as if he did feel it. He is, therefore, as a preacher, early compelled to assume a state of feeling which he has not, to become an actor, and to seem to the public what he is not to himself. Who can tell the mischief thus occasioned to the moral health of both clergyman and people? This result is unavoidable. No piety, no genius, no talent, no learning, no effort can guard against it. We say, then, we do a moral wrong to tempt by our institutions young men into a profession, which exposes them necessarily to the evil here depicted, an evil which nearly the whole body of our clergy see and deplore. Indeed, who that knows anything of the human mind and its capacities, can avoid smiling at the simplicity, which exacts of a man fifty or a hundred, and in some cases a hundred and fifty sermons in a year, for thirty, forty, or fifty years in succession? And in these times, too, when the general intelligence of the people is increasing so rapidly that it requires no small effort on the part of the clergyman to keep pace with it? We ask altogether too much. Our clergymen labor hard to meet the demands made upon them, and we see their success in their broken constitutions, and early graves. It were infinitely better for them and for us, would we so arrange matters that no man should be required to lead our devotions, except when he had the spirit of prayer on him, and that no man should be called to address a public assembly, except when he had a word pressing upon his heart for utterance. 3. We also object to the present constitution of the clergy, because, we hold that no man has a right to preach unless called by the Holy Ghost, and only when he is moved by the spirit of God. God’s spirit is in the world; it moves in the hearts of men; it calls one here and another there, one to this work and another to that; it anoints one with an unction from above, and fits him for the acceptable performance of the work to which he is called. They who are designated as preachers by God’s spirit, who are fitted for their work by the anointing of the Holy Ghost, and who, therefore, can speak with authority, and a word which shall be with power, we hold have a

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right to preach; but none others. This, we believe is the doctrine of the New Testament. Now, are we to presume that the great body of the clergy of Christendom have been thus called by the Holy Ghost? If so, we must believe in very deed that “God hath chosen the foolish things of this world to confound the wisdom of the wise, and weak things to confound them that are mighty” [1 Cor 1:27]. But it is no lack of charity to say that in a vast majority of cases, the Holy Ghost has no agency in the matter; or if, at one period in the life of the individual clergyman, he had shed down some hallowing influence, he has long since been grieved, and withheld it. The truth is, and there is no use in denying it, that the greater portion of those who enter the ministry enter it not because they believe that they have any special vocation thereto, but because it promises them a respectable means of living; or because their parents or friends have insisted upon their entering it. As a general rule with us, a man enters the ministry because he has some taste for literary pursuits and serious studies; because he would have some more influential and reputable calling than that of mere manual labor. The boy is sent to school, from the school to the academy, from the academy to the college; during the last year of his college life, he usually decides what profession he will take. On leaving college, if his decision has been in favor of the law, he enters a lawyer’s office; if in favor of medicine, he goes to study with some practitioner; if in favor of divinity, he enters the Theological Seminary. There he pores, or does not pore, over a mass of antiquated volumes, fills his head with a certain quantity of dead men’s brains, and is forthwith licensed to the cure of souls. Now what has the spirit of God to do with all this? Follow this licentiate into the pulpit, follow him till he is settled in the ministry, listen to his devotions, listen to his sermons, and what hear you? A man speaking with a living voice, out of his own full heart, and from his own earnest convictions, great and kindling truths, burning from the primal source of truth itself? No; you hear a dull, wheezy drone, from which you are fain to take refuge in your own thoughts, or in sleep; or you hear a parrot repeating what some dull professor has beaten into him. Blaspheme not, we pray you, the Holy Ghost, by saying that this talking automaton is of his calling. 4. We object to the clergy because they receive at present no encouragement to preach the word of God faithfully, and are so situated that it is their interest to conceal that word, whenever it is not in accordance with the convictions and the usages of the community, or of their particular congregations.

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We are not among those who rail at the clergy. We have had some acquaintance with them, and some of our best and most valued friends are clergymen. We are far from believing that in moral or intellectual worth the clergy fall much below any other class of the community. We believe no class has ever furnished brighter or more numerous examples of a disinterested devotion to truth and duty. Individuals from their body have always been foremost in all great reforms, whether moral, social, or political. They, who stand at the head of the movement party in this country, have been bred to the church, and have officiated as clergymen. These are facts which it gives us pleasure to state. Still, the clergy, as a body, can in general be free and bold only by compromitting their support; and it needs no extensive knowledge of human nature to know that where this is the case, the prevailing spirit of the body will be that of compliance, not that of independence. There are and can be but three methods of supporting a clergy as a professional body. The first, that of a church establishment, by independent ecclesiastical revenues; the second, that of a salary, paid directly or indirectly by the civil government; and the third, what is called the voluntary system. The first system is the Catholic system, and is that which prevailed from the downfall of the Roman Empire up to the rise of Protestantism in the sixteenth century, and which still obtains, we believe, in most Catholic countries. This system has the advantage over the two others of rendering the clergy independent of both the government and the people. The priest can reprove, without fear of losing his salary, both his congregation and the state. So far his situation is desirable. Neither can call him to an account for his doctrines, or punish him for heresy. This gives him, so far as they are concerned, all the independence needed, and a moral power which has often proved salutary. If we must always have a regular clergy, a class of men whose profession it is to minister at the altar, and who are to obtain their means of living by their profession, we should prefer this system to all others. We would raise the clergy above the people, and above the state, and give them an income for which they should be dependent on neither. But we are by no means satisfied with this system. If it render the clergy independent of the state and the congregation, it in return enslaves the congregation and the state to the priesthood; and, what is almost as bad, the individual priest to the whole body of priests. The individual priest must obey the commands of his order, comply with the creed and usages of the church, or be ejected from his living, and punished for innovation and heresy. The priesthood may thus be independent, but the indi-

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vidual priest is a slave. He is as much enslaved as he can be under either of the other two systems, though not to the same master. The second system obtains in France, in Protestant Germany, and perhaps in England. We say perhaps in England. In England nothing is systematic. Everything is jumbled together, till we have a heterogeneous mass, of which it is rarely safe to affirm or deny anything without numerous qualifications and reserves. The king there is head of the church, and the creed and constitution of the church are subject to the revision and determination of parliament. This of course subjects the church to the state. But it professes to hold its revenues by certain vested rights, which transcend the legitimate reach of the civil government. It is properly therefore a combination of an independent church, like the Catholic, sustaining itself by its own revenues, and of a church supported by the state as one of its functionaries, as is the case in Protestant Germany. But be this as it may, nothing outrages our ideas of propriety more than the subjection of the church to the state; in which case the clergy must sustain the civil order which may at any time exist, or be ejected as non-jurors. If the church be anything, it is the embodiment of moral ideas. It is then by its very nature superior to the state, which embodies only material ideas. It should then, as the Roman Catholic has always contended, give the law to the state, and not receive it from the state. The priest is, if he is anything, the superior of the magistrate. To subject the church to the control of the state, strikes us then as analogous to subjecting the soul to the control of the body, mind to the control of matter. But both of these systems presuppose an establishment, either ecclesiastical or civil, on which the clergy as individuals depend for their living. The interest then of the clergy will always be to sustain that establishment. Consequently, the great body of the clergy must always be conservatives, and opposed to innovations, changes, progress. Neither system can be adopted by any one who believes that the world may be ameliorated, or a better order introduced. The first system can obtain only with those who believe in the infallibility of the church; the second only with those who believe in the infallibility of the state; but as we believe neither in the infallibility of the one nor of the other, we reject both systems of supporting the clergy. Any method of sustaining the clergy, which gives them a direct interest in upholding either the church or the state as it is, we hold to be adverse to the true interests of mankind. When you have a church that embodies the full idea of Jesus, we will consent to desist from attacking it, and from seeking in relation to it, any further progress.

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But so long as it confessedly falls far below that idea, we must needs believe that its ministers should be so situated that they may be free to labor to perfect it. When you will introduce a perfect civil order, we will consent that you shall organize the clergy in such a way that they shall have a direct interest in sustaining it; but so long as the civil organization of mankind remains in its present imperfection, it is madness to bring all the moral force of the great body of the clergy to bear, as it must if they are sustained by the state, against all who would labor to perfect it. It remains now to consider what is called the voluntary system. This system we deem decidedly, as a permanent system, the worst of the three. The first system implies the infallibility of the church, and enslaves the state and the people to the ecclesiastical order, besides enslaving each individual clergyman to the whole body of clergymen taken collectively; the second enslaves the individual clergyman and the people in like manner as the first, but subjects the church to the state; the third destroys all independency in the clergy both collectively and individually, and makes them martyrs, or time-servers. This system is the predominant one in this country. It is, however, not adopted by all our religious sects. The Methodists have adopted the Catholic system. They depend neither on the state nor on their congregations for the support of their ministers. The church invests and supports its own clergy out of its own revenues; and whenever it becomes wealthy, it will be able to enslave both the people and the state. The Methodists are the only sect in this country from which much danger to our free institutions need be apprehended. Their increase in numbers, wealth, and respectability, is rapid. They are now, we believe, the most numerous sect in the Union;12 and some of their ministers have boasted that they could control the policy of the government any day they should please. This boast is idle now; but let them increase for fifty years to come, as they have for fifty years past, and it will not be an idle boast then. We honor the evangelical zeal of the Methodist minister; we honor his indefatigable and selfsacrificing spirit; we honor his single-hearted piety, and unaffected humility; but we see in the organization of his church the very elements on which was originally based the Catholic Church, and which 12 [Ed. By 1840, the Methodist Church was the most populous church in the United States, and had by far the most ministers of any denomination. On this, see Nathan O. Hatch, The Democratization of American Christianity (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1989), 3-4. See also Roger Finke and Rodney Stark, The Churching of America, 1776-1990: Winners and Losers in Our Religious Economy (New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1992), 54-56.]

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wait only time and opportunity to reproduce that church in all its most revolting features. The Presbyterian Church also modifies the voluntary system somewhat, by adopting the Catholic system to a certain extent. It is an organized body, constituting throughout the Union a grand church establishment; not recognized by law indeed, but acting on its members with all the force of a civil government. It is controlled by the clergy as an organized body, slightly reinforced by an infusion of lay delegates. The individual church, indeed, pays its clergyman by voluntary contribution; but it has only a partial voice in selecting its pastor, and can get rid of him only by the consent of the presbytery, or by forfeiting its relation to the Presbyterian Church. Moreover, its pastor cannot enter upon the discharge of his clerical functions, till consecrated by the presbytery; and the presbytery will not consecrate him to the pastoral charge of a church, till it makes provisions for what in their judgment is a competent salary. Hence, the Presbyterian clergyman is not entirely dependent on the people of his charge. If they dislike him they cannot at once rid themselves of him, unless they would cease to belong to the church, out of which, they believe there is no salvation, or at least, no salvation easily to be come at. It is this independency of the clergy on the churches, and the strict organization of the clergy into an ecclesiastical body, and in relation to the churches, and to the clergy themselves as individuals, a ruling body, possessed of legislative, judiciary, and executive powers, that have made many of the friends of religion and liberty look on the Presbyterian Church with unpleasant forebodings. We, however, fear it less than we do the Methodist Episcopal Church; because in its organization and support, the popular voice has some slight chance of admission. The only church in this country, unless it be the Baptist, which in this respect we believe is nearly the same, that adopts the voluntary system in its purity, is the Congregational. In this church, each clergyman is dependent entirely on the congregation over which he is settled. The congregation is independent of every other congregation, and is capable in itself of managing its own affairs. It can elect, consecrate, and dismiss its own minister; and its minister, except by courtesy, or a departure from the true Congregational theory, is responsible for his ministerial conduct solely to his congregation or church. He has no authority in the church, except that which he may derive from appeals to its reason, conscience, or prejudice. The Baptist Church, we believe, departs from this theory, so far as to organize its clergy into a sort of ecclesiastical body, with the right of

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discipline over its members.13 So also does the sect called Christians, together with the Universalists. These last superadd to the voluntary system, therefore, a portion of the Catholic system, to which, by the by, there will always be, in a religious community where the voluntary system predominates, a strong tendency. Now, under this purely voluntary system, as under both of the others, or under a combination of the three, the individual clergyman is enslaved. Under the Catholic system, if he do not preach to suit the body of which he is a member, he will be deposed, and most likely excommunicated, as we have lately seen in the case of the Abbé de la Mennais. Under the second, if he do not preach to suit the state, he will have his salary withheld, and be himself ejected from his charge, and forbidden to preach; under the third, if he do not preach to suit the congregation, or rather some three or four of its most prominent and aristocratic members, he will be dismissed, and sent out into the world most likely penniless, with a stain on his reputation, and a wife and children dependent on him for that support, which he knows not, sees not, where in the world to procure. How strong then is the temptation of the preacher to conform to the wishes or the prejudices of the more influential members of his congregation. Now, if we look at our parishes throughout the greater part of New England, we shall find that very few of them would be able to support a clergyman, if some three or four of the more wealthy members should withhold their subscriptions or their pew tax. These three or four individuals, and they are always conservatives, thus dictate in most cases the course of the minister, virtually write his sermons, and determine the doctrines he shall preach, the moral and social objects he shall labor to support. If they are distillers, he must not speak of the sin of manufacturing and vending ardent spirits; if they are factory owners, the iniquities of the present factory system he must not point out; if they are merchants, he must not censure the unchristian spirit of trade which the mercantile world fosters; if slaveholders, he must labor to prove that slavery is sanctioned by all laws human and divine; if stockholders in some railroad corporation, he must laud the moral influence of railroads; if bankers, he must beware how he questions in public or in private the utility of paper money. This is no fancy sketch. Every clergyman knows, or may know, the truth of 13

The Baptist Churches, as an association, we believe, have the right of discipline over individual churches. [Ed. Brownson is incorrect here. Baptist associations had no official authority over the democratically organized local congregations.]

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what we say. We have ourselves been in the ministry and have had some opportunity of making observations. We may lay it down as a general rule that clergymen are solely dependent on their salaries for their means of living. There are undoubtedly some exceptions, but the exceptions are too few to deserve notice in our argument. It may also be assumed that very few are capable of deriving a support from any other profession. They have fitted themselves to be clergymen; they have bent all their energies towards their profession, and are in general destitute of the knowledge and the habits that would ensure their success in any other pursuits, at least a success that would sustain them in that rank in life which they occupy as clergymen. Moreover, the salaries which in this country are paid, with a few exceptions, are so meager that no clergyman can without a miserly economy which his parishioners will not tolerate, lay up anything against the reverses which may come. In a large majority of cases, the salary is probably consumed at least a quarter in advance. As a general rule, then, the clergyman is dependent on his congregation for his means of living. These means come only on the condition that his preaching pleases them; and it will please them only on the condition that it is conformed to their faith, their tastes, their wishes, their habits, and their interests. Consequently the clergyman has the strongest inducements, unless he be of a martyr-like spirit, which we have no reason to expect in the case of but a few, to conform to the views and wishes of his congregation. His main study, at least so far as concerns his public communications, will be, on all great points, on all matters of real significance, not what is true, but what will suit his people. He will cultivate, on the one hand, a spirit of compliance and study to shape his doctrines and exhortations to the prejudices of the people; and on the other hand he will cultivate the talents and manners of a demagogue. He must do this, or fail to retain his place, if he be a man of any force of character at all. There is not a congregation in Christendom that will pay a man a salary for preaching what it does not believe, for laboring to establish an order of things in either church or state, which it regards as unsound. There is, then, only this alternative before the clergyman; either to preach to suit his people, or to be sullied in reputation, and sent supperless to bed. Need we doubt which alternative the majority will take? It may be said that we represent the clergyman as affected by low and unworthy motives. Perhaps so; but we believe most men are disposed to turn an eye to their bread and butter, and few have the courage to look hunger in the face and bid it welcome to them, and

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especially to a wife and little ones they tenderly love. It is easy for a Lucullus or a Seneca to praise poverty;14 but we are not ashamed to own that we have uniformly found poverty a very disagreeable companion, and one which by no means improves by familiarity. We are not among those who sing the praises of poverty. Few poor men are. Now, these and many other considerations, which we have not room to specify at present, have induced us to believe that the purposes of the Christian ministry cannot be accomplished, without a radical change in the constitution of the clergy. We would abolish all salaried preaching, not because we have any objections to paying for intellectual labor, but because we would hold out no inducement to a man to preach as a means of gaining a livelihood, and because we would have no man hindered in the utterance of his honest convictions, by thinking of the effect such utterance may have on his supply of the necessaries of life. If a man comes forward merely to utter his word, without asking you to pay him for uttering it, without expecting any pecuniary reward for uttering it, he will speak with some sort of independence and effect. Suppose you do not believe him, suppose you are angry and close your church doors against him; you cannot starve him into its suppression. He has the means of living from another source, and like St. Paul, can “reason and dispute in his own hired house,” and say to you, “these hands have supported me, and can support me again” [Acts 28:30; 20:34]. The gospel was not promulgated and the church built up in the face of a hostile world by a salaried clergy; but by humble fishermen and tent-makers, carpenters and carpenters’ sons, men who went forth with their staff in their hand, and the love of God in their hearts, and spoke not with the enticing words of man’s wisdom, but as they were moved by the Holy Ghost. The regular clergy, the hired defenders of religion, and the servants of her altars, were foremost among their enemies and persecutors, as they will always be foremost among the persecutors of the true ministers of the gospel, men imbued with the true apostolic spirit, and determined to overthrow the kingdom of Satan, and build up that of God’s dear Son. One word in reference to our views of the manner in which a Christian ministry should be constituted, and we close this part of 14

[Ed. Lucius Licinius Lucullus (c. 117-58/56 B.C.) was a Roman general who lived a life of luxury in Rome after he had won a number of battles and then lost command of the territories he had gained. Lucullan, meaning luxurious, derives from his name. Lucius Annaeus Seneca (4 B.C.-65 A.D.) was a Roman philosopher, statesman, orator and tragedian, and Rome’s leading intellectual figure in the mid first century A.D.]

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our subject. The Society of Friends, or Quakers, makes the nearest approach to our views, on this point, of any sect with which we are acquainted. If you will carry out, in systematic consistency, to its logical results, the idea with which George Fox and William Penn originally started, you will have the constitution of both the church and the clergy, which we are desirous of introducing.15 The Quakers reject the common notions of the church; they in fact recognize no church but the invisible, spiritual church, founded by the Holy Spirit, and built up in the soul. They recognize only a single outward organization of mankind, and consequently condemn both church and state as they now are. They would organize mankind; that is, they would have a social organization of the race; but that organization must be based on the principles of the Christian religion, and the teachings of the Spirit. This is what we want. For the purposes of spiritual edification and progress, the Quaker idea subdivides the community at large into small communities, called religious meetings. These little communities, or rather families, erect each a convenient meeting-house, where they assemble as often as may be thought advisable, and spend some two hours in silent meditation, or in listening to religious discourses. We would do the same in every district, or parish, if you please, of convenient size. We would have erected a plain, substantial meetinghouse, which should be the property of the parish. Thither we would all repair, say twice a week, for religious edification. When assembled, we would sit in silent meditation, unless some one was moved by the Spirit of God to speak. This silent meditation, this being still and communing with the Spirit of God, is altogether more profitable to the soul, than is commonly imagined. The most imposing spectacle, we ever witnessed, was a whole congregation, sitting in profound silence, dead as it were to the world and its cares, and lost in sweet and mystic communion with the Father of Spirits. This silence is to us the sublimest, and we have often found it the most inspiriting, eloquence. We are too much in a hurry; we are too noisy, too clamorous; and we know not how to be still, and see the wonderful works of Providence. The lesson, we most need to learn, is that of being still, of silent meditation. 15

[Ed. George Fox (1624-91) was the founder of the Quakers or Society of Friends, emphasizing reliance upon the inner light of the living Christ. William Penn (1644-1718) was a Quaker after 1665 and founder of Pennsylvania. Brownson had earlier expressed his sympathy for the Quaker doctrine of the inner light. His admiration for the Quakers developed considerably after he read “The People Called Quakers in the United States,” chapter sixteen in George Bancroft’s second volume of his History of the United States (1837).]

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If, when we have come together, there be one in our midst who has a word pressing for utterance, whoever he be, he shall be at liberty to utter it. The only restrictions, we would tolerate, are merely those which may be necessary for the preservation of order. These restrictions, the meeting should be competent to impose, as a standing rule, or by-law, subject to such alterations as experience may find to be necessary. The Quakers, we believe, have no difficulty in preserving order in their meetings. Where the Spirit of the Lord is, there is always order as well as freedom. In some such way as is here indicated, it strikes us that we may secure all the advantages of a preached gospel, without any of the evils we have specified, without the necessity of resorting to a clerical body, or an organized priesthood. What we want is free thought and free speech, together with deliverance from a class whose interest it is, as a class, to uphold things as they are, and to do their best to roll back the ever advancing waves of truth. We want men free to think, and free to speak what they think, free to utter the truth which comes to them, and in the very tones in which it comes to them, men who will rebuke the sin they abhor, and be earnest in their demands for the reforms which they see needed. Secure us the end here implied, and you may organize the clergy as you please; we shall neither oppose you nor them. IV. Our account of the condition of the laboring classes, we have been told, is exaggerated and false. This objection would have some weight with us were it not urged exclusively by those who live by availing themselves of the labors of the workingmen, and who, therefore, have a direct interest in keeping them as they are. We are not ignorant that there is a class of our fellow citizens who stare at us as if we were out of our wits, or possessed of no ordinary malignancy, when we represent the workingman as still a slave and demand his enfranchisement. In their estimation he is already enfranchised, already a free man, in the full significance of the term; and no more dependent on the capitalist, than the capitalist is on him. These people, who think so, are, we must admit, very decent people in their way, and we desire to have for them all becoming respect. On several subjects they unquestionably have considerable intelligence and sound views. Did we wish to ascertain the rates of exchange on England or France, the prices of stocks, broadcloths, cottons, or tape, and such like matters, there are no people in the world we would more willingly consult, or with greater deference. But in questions like those which now concern us—questions which relate to the bearing of social or economical systems, the actual progress

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of civilization, or the means of advancing it—we must be held excusable if we cannot in all respects take them for our masters. If the cobbler may lend Phidias some useful hints in adjusting a slipper to the foot of his statue, he can rarely do it in molding the head and features of Jupiter or Apollo. For ourselves, we were born and reared in the class of proletaries; and we have merely given utterance to their views and feelings. We have said little concerning their condition not warranted by what we have ourselves either seen or felt. We have made no random statement, and drawn no hasty inference. We know whereof we affirm; and shall abide by what we have already affirmed; at least, until the laboring classes themselves rise up and accuse us of misrepresenting them. We have read with as much attention and patience as could be reasonably expected of us the various arguments offered by our conservative friends to prove the desirableness of the laboring man’s condition. Some of these arguments seem almost specious at first sight; but we had examined them all long before we published our article on the laboring classes, and, without claiming any credit for extraordinary abilities, we believe we could have furnished those, who urge them, arguments much more to their purpose. Our good friends would do well to brush up their ideas, purge their vision, and look a little deeper into the subject. It may be we have studied it somewhat longer and on more sides than they have; and they must not think that arguments, which would do no special honor to a clever lad of a dozen years of age, are precisely the thing with which we are to be overwhelmed. They merely amuse us with their simplicity, or grieve us with their ignorance. We are sorry to say that thus far they have shown by no means that acquaintance with the subject generally, which their pretensions to wisdom and the pains which have unquestionably been taken with their moral and intellectual culture should have led one beforehand to expect. This, however, may be easily accounted for. The class of persons, who have been loudest in their condemnation of us, are the Nouveaux riches, parvenus,16 upstarts, men who have themselves come up from the class of proletaries and who have made it a virtue to forget “the rock whence they were hewn” [Isa 51:1]. Standing now on the shoulders of their brethren, they are too elevated to see what is going on at the base of the social organization. Would you know what is going 16 [Ed. Nouveaux riches means “the new wealthy class.” These were the selfmade rich. Parvenu means “upstarts.”]

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on down there, you must interrogate those who dwell there, and feel the pressure that is on them. One would not interrogate the rider in order to ascertain the sensations the horse has in being ridden. Then, again, these persons never had any sympathy with the class of proletaries. They early adopted that convenient morality, pithily expressed in the maxim, “Look out for Number One”; and consequently have never studied their condition, except so far as they could avail themselves of it as a means of their own elevation. They have found the condition of the workingmen a very convenient help to those who are skillful enough to avail themselves of it as a means of rising to the top of the social ladder; and therefore they have inferred that it is good enough for those who are always to remain in it. Would these upstarts be willing to exchange places with the workingmen? If so let us see them do it; if not, let them be silent. Moreover, these people have risen in the social scale to be what one of their number calls “the better sort,” and they very naturally are anxious to have us understand that it has been by the blessing of God and their own virtue. They wish us to believe that they are what they are, because they are wiser, more talented, more skillful, and more virtuous than those they have left behind them. They wish to be able to say, “God, I thank thee, that I am better than these poor wretches, who toil on from one year’s end to another, and yet accumulate nothing.” This is no doubt a very pleasant manner of addressing the Deity; it puts one in admirable humor with oneself, and saves one from any compunctious twinges of conscience one might have on hearing the cry of the poor and needy. Now, if you say the proletaries are in a hopeless condition, if you say they cannot of themselves rise from their condition, you take away a considerable portion of these people’s personal merit, and lower their fancied superiority several degrees. It therefore behooves them to maintain that the condition of the proletaries is good enough. If the proletaries are poor and wretched, the fault is all their own. It is owing to their incapacity, their indolence, or their vice. Were we not once poor, and are we not now rich and respectable? We suppose by this we are to understand that all may become rich and respectable if they would. Now, do the persons of whom we speak desire us to understand them as claiming all the capacity, all the virtue, and all the respectability of the race? Pray, what evidence do they give of their exclusive claims in this respect? Has no very indifferent mechanic grown rich by availing himself of the superior skill and workmanship of his journeyman? Is the mere fact of their

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success in the accumulation of wealth a proof of their superior merit? Some crabbed old author, we once read, says, “God usually gives the greatest wealth to the greatest fools, that he may show thereby to the world its utter worthlessness”;17 and we have sometimes suspected that the old author had not spent all his life in his closet. “But we have risen and so may others.” Yes, doubtless; some others; but all others? How have you risen? By the productive industry of your own hands? By hard work. Aye, but by what kind of hard work? Has it not been by hard work in studying how you could turn the labors of others to your own profit; that is, transfer the proceeds of labor from the pockets of the laborer to your own? If you had had no laboring class, dependent entirely on its labor for the means of living, whose industry you could lay under contribution, would you ever have risen to your present wealth? Of course not. Of course, then, only a certain number of individuals of the laboring classes could, even with your talents, skill, and matchless virtues, rise as you have done. One rises from the class of proletaries only by making those, he leaves behind, the lever of his elevation. This, therefore, necessarily implies that there must always be a laboring class and of course that the means, which this or that laborer uses for his individual elevation, cannot in the nature of things be used by all of his class. But our conservative friends shift their ground, when driven to this point, and take refuge in Providence; or rather seek to make Providence the scapegoat for their social sins. They allege that Providence has ordained all these distinctions, has made some to be rich and others to be poor. It is all God’s doing. That vain pretender to piety, who grows rich out of the labors of those half-starved sempstresses, and who tells the poor girl when she asks for more wages, “My dear, I give you all I can afford; I have to pay so much now for what I have done that I can hardly live by my business, and I would throw it up, were it not a Christian duty to give employment to those who otherwise might starve or do worse—this base hypocrite, who, as the Abbé de La Mennais says, “has no name out of hell,”18 grows rich by divine appointment, does he? And you accuse us of infidelity, for uttering the natural indignation of a virtuous soul at such foul blasphemy? We have looked now and then into the up17

[Ed. Unable to identify quotation.] [Ed. Referring to a similar kind of person Lamennais wrote: “The name of the latter is Tyrant; the other has no name but in hell.” See Words of a Believer (New York: DeBehr, 1834), 13.] 18

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per classes of society, if not often, at least often enough to see their hollow-heartedness and loathsome depravity; and we assure them that not to us will it answer to preach that they are the distinguished favorites of heaven. The miserable vagrant, who has no lodging but the bare earth, and whom your police punishes for sleeping on the only bed he can procure, often surpasses in a true, manly virtue, many a loud-boasting and loud-boasted Pharisee, whose praises may be read in the public journals, and heard from the pulpit. No; “Go to, now, ye rich men, weep and howl for your miseries that shall come upon you. Your riches are corrupted, and your garments are moth-eaten. Your gold and silver are cankered, and the rust of them shall be a witness against you, and shall eat your flesh as it were fire. Ye have heaped up treasure for the last days (or the last time). Behold the hire of the laborers who have reaped down your fields, which of you is kept back by fraud, crieth; and the cries of them that have reaped have entered into the ears of the Lord of Sabbath. Ye have lived in pleasure on the earth, and been wanton; ye have nourished your hearts as in a day of slaughter. Ye have condemned and killed the just; and he doth not resist you.”19 So does an inspired apostle address you, ye rich men; and Jesus himself tells you that it is “easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle, than for a rich man to enter the kingdom of heaven” [Matt 19:24] and that “if ye would be perfect, ye must sell what ye have and give it to the poor, and follow him” [Matt 19:21].20 Have ye the effrontery then to tell a man who has the New Testament before him, and who can read it, that ye are rich by the express appointment of God as a reward for your superior capacities and virtues? Say rather through God’s forbearance and long suffering, waiting to be gracious to the sinner that repents and turns from his evil ways. A terrible book for you, ye Scribes and Pharisees, ye rich and great of this world, is this same New Testament! “Woe unto you,” it says, “for ye are like unto whited sepulchers, which indeed appear beautiful outward, but within are full of dead men’s bones, and all uncleanness; because ye build the tombs of the prophets, and garnish the sepulchers of the righteous, and say, If we had been in the days of our fathers, we would not have been partakers with them in the blood of the prophets. Wherefore ye be witnesses that ye are the children of them that 19 James 5:1-8, a good lesson for the rich. [Ed. Quote is not exactly the same as in the KJV.] 20 [Ed. Brownson takes liberties with these biblical quotations. He may be quoting from memory.]

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killed the prophets. Fill ye up then the measure of your fathers. Ye serpents, ye generation of vipers, how can ye escape the damnation of hell!”21 A terrible book, this New Testament! And did ye but believe it, there would be to you nothing but a fearful looking for of wrath and fiery indignation to devour you as the adversaries of God and his children. Be sure now and call him who reads this terrible book in your hearing an infidel, as the thief, when the hue and cry is up, is loudest in calling out “stop thief,” that he may turn the pursuit from himself. “But what would you that we should do? Do we not pay the market price for labor?” Ay, the market price; but who fixes the market price; you, or the laborer? Why do you employ him? Is it not that you may grow rich? Why does he seek employment? Is it not that he may not die of hunger, he, his wife, and little ones? Which is the more urgent necessity, that of growing rich, or that of guarding against hunger? You can live, though you do not employ the laborer; but, if he find not employment, he must die. He is then at your mercy. You have over him the power of life and death. It is then of his necessity that you avail yourselves, and by taking advantage of that you reduce the price of labor to the minimum of human subsistence,22 and then grow rich by purchasing it. Would you be willing to labor through life as he does, and live on the income he receives? Not at all. You would regard as the greatest of calamities which could befall you that of losing your property, and being reduced to the necessity of supporting yourselves and families on the wages you could receive as common laborers. Do you not then see that you condemn in the most positive terms the condition of the proletary, that you declare plainer than any words we can use, that you look upon that condition as a serious calamity? What right have you then to maintain that a condition, which you regard with horror so far as concerns yourselves, is good enough for your brethren? And why complain of us for calling upon you to do all in your power, so to arrange matters that no one shall be doomed to that condition? Why do you not, as the Christian law, of doing unto others as you would be done by, commands you, set yourselves at work in earnest to remodel the institution of property, so that all shall be proprietors, and you be relieved from paying wages, and the proletary from the necessity of receiving them? This is what we would have you do; what we hold 21

[Ed. Again Brownson quotes rather loosely from Matt 23:27-33.] The only drawback on this statement is the competition among capitalists themselves. 22

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you bound to do, and which you must do, or the wrongs and sufferings of the laborer will lie at your door, and his cries will ascend to the ears of an avenging God against you, a God who espouses the cause of the poor and needy, and has sworn to avenge them on their oppressors. This you know, if you believe at all in that gospel, which you so wrongfully accuse us of denying. It is said that we have preferred the slave system to that of free labor, and in so doing have slandered the laboring classes. We understand this objection. It is a device of the Devil. No doubt, they who thrive on the labors of their brethren, would fain make the laboring classes feel that we have wronged them, and have shown contempt for them. But this device will not succeed. It is not contempt for the workingman we have shown, but sympathy with his wrongs; and if we have pointed out the evils of his condition, it has not been to exult over him, but to rebuke the upper classes for their injustice. It has been to show the hollowness of that friendship which these classes profess for him. We have never pretended that the proletary is no advance on the slave; he is in advance of the slave; for his rights as a man are legally recognized, though not in fact enjoyed; for he is nearer the day of his complete enfranchisement, and has a greater moral force and more instruments with which to effect it. It is only on the supposition that one or the other is to be a permanent system, that we have given the preference to the slave system over that of labor at wages. We however oppose with all our might both systems. We would have neither the slave nor the proletary. We would combine labor and capital in the same individual. What we object to, is the division of society into two classes, of which one class owns the capital, and the other performs the labor. If, however, this division must always take place, we prefer the slave system which prevails at the South, to the free labor system which prevails here at the North. And we are not alone in this opinion. We have conversed with many intelligent mechanics of this city, who have resided at the South, and they all with one voice sustain the view we have here given. They all tell us that, if the present condition of the laborer here must remain forever, they should regard it as worse than that of the Southern slave. Why is it, we would ask, that so few of the real workingmen here are abolitionists? Why do they interest themselves so little in the freedom of the Negro slave? It is because they feel that they themselves are virtually slaves, while mocked with the name of freemen, and that the movements in behalf of freedom should be first directed towards their emancipation. With them we find friends and sup-

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porters in the course we take, and we become endeared to them, just in proportion as the upper classes condemn us; for they feel the truth of what we say. We know that the law declares these workingmen equal to any other members of society and the body-politic; but what avails the declaration of the law, when those, in whose favor it is, cannot take advantage of it? What avails the theoretic recognition of their rights, when they want the power to make them recognized in fact? Nor, in truth, is the law so impartial as it would seem. The laws of this Commonwealth, as interpreted by the courts, allow, we believe, the employer to inflict corporal punishment on the employed. In the State of New York, laborers have been fined and imprisoned for refusing to work at the wages offered them; or rather, for agreeing together, not to sell their labor unless at higher price than they had hitherto been paid. Yet manufacturers, flour dealers, physicians, and lawyers, may band together on the same principle, for a similar end, form their Trades Unions, and no law is violated. A rich man may get drunk in a gentlemanly way in his own house, and be carried by his servants to his bed, and the law is silent, while the poor man, who has taken a glass too much, and is seen intoxicated, shall be fined, or imprisoned, or both. A man who belongs to the upper classes, may be an habitual drunkard, and the law shall not interfere; but if a poor man is convicted of habitual drunkenness, he shall be sent to the House of Correction. A poor man accused of a crime is convicted in advance, for he is poor, and is pretty sure to be punished. A rich man accused, and convicted even, is pretty sure to get clear of the punishment. Our penal code bears with peculiar severity on the poor. In numerous cases, the punishment is fine or imprisonment. Now, in all these cases, the poor alone are really punished. The rich man, if guilty, can easily pay the fine, without feeling it. The poor can rarely pay the fine; and if they do, it is generally by surrendering all they have, and by drawing some months in advance on their labor; in which case, the punishment of a fine of twenty dollars falls as heavy on the poor man as a fine of as many hundreds would on a rich man. But generally the poor man cannot pay his fine, and consequently must be imprisoned three or six months for an offence, from which a rich man may get clear by paying five, ten, or twenty dollars out of his superfluity. This too in a land of equal laws! Then, again, the administration of justice is so expensive that the poor man is rarely able to resort to it. It costs too much. Is he injured in his person? He must give security for the expenses of the

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court, before he can have even the process for his redress commence. Are his wages withheld? It will cost him more to compel their payment, even if successful, which he can rarely count on being, than they amount to. He must pocket the insults offered him, and abandon his righteous claims, when not freely allowed.23 Is a poor man suspected of some crime, although innocent, and it shall turn out that he is innocent, he is forthwith arrested and shut up in gaol, where he must wait two, three, four, six months, or longer, for a trial. It is not long since a poor sailor died in the hospital where we are now writing,24 who had been kept in close confinement for nine months or more, on a charge of mutiny, which charge the court declared unfounded. The poor fellow’s time was lost, a robust constitution was broken down, and he merely passed from the prison to the hospital to die. But had he lived, what remuneration would he have received from society for the wrong done him? But a rich man, when arrested, can in most cases find bail, and be at liberty, and about his business, till the trial comes on. But who will bail the poor man? The poor man’s time, too, is valuable to him. His labors are necessary to the support of his family. But this is nothing. “He is cast into prison without any care for his infirm old mother, for his wife, or his children. There, in that prison, in the midst of what a corrupt society has of the most unclean and perverse, he counts painfully the days which separate him from his family. He represents to himself their tears, their sufferings, their anguish; he hears during the night, in the fever of his half-sleep, each one of them cry, ‘I am hungry!’”25 23 A calculation was made in the State of New York a few years since by which it was shown that the expenses attending the legal collection of debts, taking the state at large, amounted to more than the debts collected. In making this estimate, the loss of time, interruption of business to both parties, and to witnesses, must be taken into the account, as well as the mere legal costs of suits. We will add one item here, not added in the text, to prove the slavery of the proletaries. The great mass of these are more or less in debt to the capitalists, or employer class. This tells the whole story. The man who is in debt is a slave, and can no longer meet his creditor on terms of equality. He must submit to all the insults offered him. The feeling on this subject is expressed by a not infrequent remark, made by a poor man, when insulted by some purse-proud neighbor. “I will pay him what I owe him, and then I’ll give him a piece of my mind.” Then, imprisonment for debt is by no means abolished in any state in the Union. There is not a poor debtor in this Commonwealth, whom his creditor cannot send to gaol tomorrow, and lock him up too with felons. 24 [Ed. Brownson was the administrator of the Marine Hospital of Chelsea Hospital at the time of this writing.] 25 Abbé de la Mennais. D’Esclavage moderne. [Ed. Félicité Robert de Lamennais, De L’esclavage moderne, 59-60.]

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But what is all this to those who are reveling at their ease in their palaces at home, or gaining wealth and honors by administering the laws? But we can pursue this subject no further at present. What we have said may suffice to show that we could, were we disposed, say somewhat in defense of the account we gave of the condition of the laboring classes. But we forbear. And for our forbearance, our conservative brethren are our debtors. Were we desirous of stirring up the wrath of the laboring classes, as they say we are, they would find us speaking in somewhat other tones, and making an appeal, which would be responded to from every section of our country, in no soft, lulling strains, but with one loud burst of indignation, which should ring, as a summons to the last judgment, on the heart of every man who would lord it over his brother. But we delight not in such appeals; our ears have no pleasure in such responses. We would, if we could, unloose no angry passion. We see society as it is. We see whence it has become what it is. It is the growth of ages. No one man, and no class of men now living are wholly responsible for its vices. All classes are victims of systems and organizations, which have come down to us from the past. We know not in reality who suffer the most by the present order of things. If we deplore the condition of the laborer, we by no means envy that of the capitalist. We know not, indeed, which most to pity. All are sufferers. The cry of distress comes to us from all classes of society. All are in a false position; all are out of their true condition, as free, high-minded, virtuous men. And instead of weeping, or criminating, we would call upon all, whether high or low, rich or poor, to look at things as they are, and set themselves at work in earnest, and in good faith, to ascertain the remedy needed and to apply it. V. The great evil of all modern society in relation to the material order is the separation of the capitalist from the laborer, the division of the community into two classes, one of which owns the funds, and the other of which performs the labor, of production. This division obtains throughout the civilized world, but is less clearly marked with us than anywhere else. To a considerable extent, our agricultural population combines the proprietor and laborer in the same individual; and where this is not the case, the condition of the proletaries, or hired men, as we call them, presents its most favorable aspect, at least so far as the non-slaveholding states are concerned. The hired men in the agricultural districts are hardly distinguished from their employers. They are as well dressed, as well educated, work no harder, and mingle with them very nearly on terms of equality in the general intercourse of society.

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But this is not universally true and is becoming less and less so every year. It is said that our agricultural population is rising in wealth, intelligence, and refinement, and this is unquestionably true of landed proprietors. The proportion of what we term gentlemen farmers is, no doubt, rapidly increasing. But this, while it speaks well for the proprietor, tells a mournful tale for the proletary. Where the man who owns the plough holds it, there can be no great disparity between the employer and employed, but this disparity necessarily increases just in proportion as the owner of the plough employs another to hold it. The distance between the owner of the farm, and the men who cultivate it, is, therefore, becoming every day greater and greater. But it is in our cities, large towns, and manufacturing villages that the condition of the laboring population is the most unfavorable. The distinction between the capitalist and the proletary, in these, is as strongly marked as it is in the old world. The distance between the wife and daughters of an Abbot Lawrence, and the poor factory girl employed in his mills, is as great as that between the wife and daughters of an English nobleman, and the daughter of one of his tenants, and the intercourse less frequent. Intermarriage between the families of the wealthy factory owners, and those of the operatives, is as much an outrage on the public sense of propriety, as it was in ancient Rome between the patricians and plebeians, almost as much as it would be at the south between the family of a planter and that of one of his slaves. Still, taking our country throughout, the condition of the proletary population has been, and is altogether superior here to what it is in any other part of the civilized world. We do not, however, attribute this fact to our democratic institutions, nor to the adoption of more enlightened systems of social, political, or domestic economy, than are adopted elsewhere. It is owing to causes purely accidental, and which are rapidly disappearing. The first of these accidental causes may be traced to the original equality of the first settlers of this country. But this equality no longer exists. Fortunes are said to be more unequal with us than they are in France. The second cause, and the main one, has consisted in the low price of land. The ease with which individuals have been able to procure them farms, and pass from the class of proletaries to that of proprietors, has had a constant tendency to diminish the number of proletaries, and to raise the price of labor. But this cause becomes less and less powerful. Few, comparatively speaking, of the proletaries, in any of the old states, can ever become land-owners. Land there is already too high for that. The new lands

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are rapidly receding to the west, and can even now be reached only by those who have some little capital in advance. Moreover, these new lands are not inexhaustible. Fifty years to come, if emigration go on at the rate it has for fifty years past, will leave very little for the new emigrant. The causes removed, which have hitherto favored the workingman, and lessened the distance between him and the proprietor, what is to prevent the reproduction here, in our land of boasted equality, of the order of things which now exists in the old world? As yet, that order does not exist here in all its revolting details; but who can fail to see that there is a strong tendency to it? Our economical systems are virtually those of England; our passions, our views, and feelings are similar; and what is to prevent the reproduction of the same state of things in relation to our laboring population with that which gangrenes English society? We confess, we cannot see any causes at work among us likely to prevent it. The remedies relied on by the political reformers are free trade, and universal suffrage; by the moral reformers, universal education, and religious culture. We agree with both, and sustain them as far as they go; but they are insufficient. These measures are all good and necessary; but inadequate, unless something more radical still be adopted along with them. Alone they are mere palliatives. They may serve to conceal the sore, perhaps assuage its pain; but they cannot cure it. Universal suffrage is little better than a mockery where the voters are not socially equal. No matter what party you support, no matter what men you elect, property is always the basis of your governmental action. No policy has ever yet been pursued by our government, state or federal, under one party or another, notwithstanding our system of universal suffrage, which has had for its aim the elevation of man, independent of his relation as a possessor of property. In no instance have the rights of the proletary prevailed over the interests of the proprietor. To separate power from property, we hold to be impossible under our present system. Its interests will always predominate in the measures of government, though they may sometimes be defeated in elections. The interests of property may now and then be divided, as they were under General Jackson’s administration. The interests of the state banks, and particularly of those of New York, were then opposed to those of the United States Bank. The interests of landed property combined with those of labor are now arrayed against the banks generally; and if they are successful, it will not be because the interests of labor count for anything; but

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because the farming and planting interests are stronger than the mercantile and manufacturing interests. The proletaries, though voters in this contest, serve merely to swell the forces of one or the other party. They gain nothing by the fact that they are voters; they will gain, however, if the landed interests triumph; because, in the actual condition of our country, the interest of the laborer is mainly identified with those of land. But, let which interest will triumph, the laborer will gain nothing directly. He will only gain so far as it is impossible to separate his interest from the interest which triumphs. Still, universal suffrage is a right, and is worth something. All we mean to say is that in itself it by no means constitutes a sovereign remedy for the evils under which the laboring classes suffer. It by no means gives them that degree of political power, which theorists imagine. To be rendered efficient, it must be coupled with something like equality of fortunes. The proprietors may indeed sometimes be outvoted in an election, but their interests will invariably triumph in the legislative halls, and at the tribunals of justice. At least, this has been the experience of this country thus far. We will hope that the future will furnish a different experience. The system of free trade, so far as it has as yet been advocated in this country, we approve, as a means of social amelioration; but we cannot rely on it as alone sufficient. Because, to amount to much, the competitors must start even and with nearly equal chances of success, which cannot be, with our present constitution of property, nor, indeed, with our present constitution of human nature. Moreover, if the system of free trade be pushed to its last results, it becomes the introduction of a system of universal competition, a system of universal strife, where each man is for himself and no man for another. It would be a return to the pure individuality of the savage state, the abolition of all government, and the adoption, as the practical rule of conduct, of the maxim, “save who can.” We have not yet advanced far enough in moral or social science to adopt this rule. We would indeed restrict as much as possible the sphere of government, and enlarge that of the individual; but government, as the organ and agent of society, is a positive good, and can never be dispensed with. We have, moreover, no faith in bringing about the social order we desire by the agency of selfishness and strife. True democracy can never rest permanently on the maxim, “I am as good as you”; but it must resort to this other maxim, “You are as good as I.” The spirit, by which it must ultimately be sustained, is not the spirit that will not submit to tyranny, but the spirit that will not tyrannize.

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In universal education and religious culture, we have faith indeed; but not as final measures. Their office is to generate the moral force needed; but the generation of that force is not the reform. Mind is undoubtedly superior to matter, and all reforms must come from within; but the mental and moral reform, effected in the interior of man, will prove insufficient, unless it come out of the interior, and remodel the exterior. What we contend is not that free trade, universal suffrage, universal education, and religious culture, are not essential, indispensable means to the social regeneration we are in pursuit of; but that, if we stop with them, and leave the material order of society untouched, they will prove inadequate. We make no war on the political reformer, nor on the moral reformer. Our plan includes all they propose, and more too. Ours includes that without which theirs would accomplish little. With this view of the case, it becomes necessary to seek something more ultimate, more radical than our most approved reformers have as yet ventured upon. This something we have professed to find in the abolition of hereditary property, a measure foreshadowed in the first number of this journal,26 and implied, at least in our own mind, by almost every article we have ever written on the subject of social reform. We have long been thoroughly convinced that without resorting to some such measure, it would be useless to talk of social progress or to speak in behalf of the laborer. The doctrine we have long labored to maintain is that the work of this country is to emancipate labor, by raising up the laborer from a mere workman, without capital, to be a proprietor, and a workman on his own farm, or in his own shop. Those who have read our writings, or listened to our public lectures and addresses, must have perceived this. In maintaining this doctrine, we have been seconded by not a few. We have been censured for it by no party, and by no individuals, save a few who have never accepted the doctrine that all men are born with equal rights. Moreover, we have been associated, to some extent, with a political party, unsurpassed in this or any other country for its intelligence, and general devotion to the good of mankind, which is confessedly an anti-monopoly party; in the language of one of its official papers, penned by one of its brightest ornaments, and one of the most eloquent expounders of its creed, “The party of equality against

26 [Ed. Brownson is probably referring to “Tendency of Modern Civilization,” Boston Quarterly Review 1 (April, 1838): 200-38. See also EW, 3, chapter 17.]

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privilege.”27 From the favor with which our own doctrine has been received, and from the official declaration of a great and powerful party, we have felt that we were authorized to infer that a large portion, at least, of our countrymen, believe it the duty of every true American to labor for the utter extinction of all privilege, and for the complete emancipation of labor by raising up each individual laborer to be an independent proprietor. Now we would ask, how is it possible to gain the end here implied, without a change in the present constitution of property? We go for “equality against privilege,” say the Worcester Convention, but how can this be done without abolishing hereditary property? Hereditary property is either a privilege or it is not. If it is not, if it confer no social advantage on him who inherits it over him who does not, then there can be no harm in seeking to abolish it; for what we propose to abolish is declared to be valueless. If it be a privilege, then we must labor to abolish it, or cease to go with a party whose motto is “equality against privilege.” But hereditary property, unless the amount inherited by each individual could be rendered equal, is unquestionably a privilege. It gives, and always must give, to one portion of the community an advantage over the rest, to which they are entitled by no natural superiority of intellect, or of virtue. Will the public conscience, then, of the American people tolerate it? Will it sanction privilege? Does it not in fact harmonize with the declaration of the Worcester Convention, and therefore necessarily demand the abolition of hereditary property? The American people may be mistaken as to men and measures, but we are confident that in principle, they will all assent to the doctrine of equality. We feel confident of their unanimous support when we say that all the members of the community should have, so far as society is concerned, equal chances. But equal chances imply equal starting points. Nobody, it would seem, could pretend that where the points of departure were unequal the chances could be equal. Do the young man inheriting ten thousand pounds, and the one whose inheritance is merely the gutter, start even? Have they equal chances? It may be said both are free to rise as high as they can, one starting with ten thousand pounds in advance, and the other starting with the gutter. But it might as well be said the chances of the eldest son of 27

See the Address of the Democratic State Convention, holden at Worcester, Massachusetts, Sept. 20, 1837. [Ed. For Brownson’s earlier comments on this address, see “Democracy,” Boston Quarterly Review 1 (January, 1838): 33-74. See also EW, 3, chapter 14.]

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the Duke of Newcastle, and those of the eldest son of one of the lowest of the Duke’s tenants, are equal, since both unquestionably are free to rise as high as they can, one starting with a dukedom in advance, and the other with nothing. But to pretend this is mere jesting. But why stop with hereditary property? why not have hereditary magistrates, hereditary professors, hereditary priests, hereditary legislators, hereditary governors and an hereditary president? Hereditary distinction, that is to say, distinction founded on birth, once admitted as just in principle, we see not how can you consistently stop without pushing it to its last consequences. Be this, however, as it may; if society, so far as it depends on her—as Americans, to say the least, very generally believe—is bound to furnish equal chances to all her members, hereditary property must unquestionably be abolished; unless, what will amount to the same thing, a plan be devised and carried into operation, by which the portion inherited by each shall be absolutely equal. Again, there is no man among us who will have the hardihood to maintain in general thesis that the present horizontal division of society ought to be preserved. No Whig will maintain, we may presume, since our Whigs claim to be more democratic than the democrats themselves, that there ought always to be a class of proletaries dependent on a class of capitalists; nor can there be found one who will in just so many words deny our statement that the mission of this country is to enfranchise and dignify labor by making every man a proprietor and laborer on his own capital. Now, starting with the present division of society into capitalists and proletaries, this cannot be done without abolishing hereditary property. Under the present constitution of property, we have shown, when treating of the condition of the proletaries that individuals from this class rise, only by using the class itself as the lever of their elevation; consequently, all the individuals of the class cannot possibly rise. This point is not sufficiently considered. Because individuals are constantly rising from the class, it is rashly inferred that the whole class may rise. But in point of fact the numbers of the proletaries are everywhere on the increase. We see this in our own country; and in England they have risen since 1800, from one half to five out of every seven of the whole population. These grand manufacturing and commercial establishments and enterprises, by which so much wealth is produced and accumulated, have little other effect on the proletaries than the augmentation of their number. Assuredly, under our present system, the number of proletaries in proportion to the proprietors is constantly

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on the increase. How long, then, will it take under this system to make every man a proprietor? The proposition, for the abolition of hereditary property, it follows from these considerations, is merely a logical conclusion from the admitted premises of the American people, and, a fortiori, of the Democratic party. We have merely followed the invincible law of logic in putting it forth. We are compelled, either to abandon the American theory of government and society, or else contend for the abolition of hereditary property; and they who censure us as a rash innovator, and call us “infamous” for choosing the latter alternative, are either false in their professions of attachment to American principles, or from two given ideas incapable of inferring a third. Are we wrong? What in one word is this American system? Is it not the abolition of all artificial distinctions, all social advantages founded on birth or any other accident, and leaving every man to stand on his own feet, for precisely what God and nature have made him? Does not this system declare that society should make no distinction between the child of the rich man and the child of the poor man; that she shall neither reward the child for the virtues, nor punish him for the vices of the parent? Is this the American system, yes or no? If it be not, what mean all our boasts of equality, all our Fourth of July oratory, all our patriotic songs and national glorifications? What else is it that we are constantly throwing in the face of the old world? And on what else do we profess to found our claims to admiration and imitation? Everybody knows that this is the system, which the American people profess, and to which they stand committed before the world. We pray them, then, to tell us how with this system, which repudiates all distinctions founded on birth, they can reconcile hereditary property, which has no other basis than the accident of birth on which to rest? The logic by which they can do it is above, or below, our comprehension. But property we are told is a sacred institution. Touch it and you throw everything into confusion, cut society loose from all its old fastenings, and send us all back to the savage state, to live by plundering and devouring one another. So said the defenders of hereditary monarchy, of hereditary nobility, of an hereditary priesthood, of primogeniture and entail. Yet society survives, and, for aught we can see, looks as likely for a long life as ever it did. Now, for ourselves, we are not quite so squeamish on this subject as some others are. We believe property should be held subordinate to man, and not man to property; and therefore that it is always lawful to make such modifications of its constitution as the good of humanity requires.

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But, without insisting on the paramount claim of humanity, we will relieve the apprehensions of those who pay their devotions at the shrine of Mammon, by hastening to say, that we plant ourselves on the ground of strict right, and propose no changes in the constitution of property, which we do not think ourselves able to justify on this ground; nay, none which are not demanded by it. Man’s right to property is virtually denied by the Christian clergy generally. They contend that we are merely the Lord’s stewards, entrusted with the management of certain properties, which we hold not as our own, and which we are bound to employ not in our own service, but in the service of the church. The right is also denied, by a certain class of modern philanthropists, who say that the property, which one man calls his own, is not really his, but belongs to whomsoever has the greater need. These and the clergy, however, address themselves to the individual conscience, and not to the social conscience, and, therefore, their views, whether right or wrong, come not within the scope of our present inquiry. We, for ourselves, admit man’s right to property, and his right, within the limits of the moral law, to do what he will with it. The origin of the right to property, whether viewed historically or philosophically, is an interesting branch of inquiry, but we cannot treat it at length now, nor is it necessary for our present purpose. In relation to its origin, three theories have gained considerable currency. The first, that of the jurists, is that property is solely a creature of political or civil institutions; the second, which also finds favor with some jurists, but principally with philosophers, is that of first or original occupancy; the last is called the theory of formation, and founds the right of property on creation, production. The last theory we admit to its fullest extent. A man has a natural right to call that his, which he himself, by his own labor, has created. But this is not all the property to which he has a natural right. But to what other property, and how much, he has a natural right, we shall soon proceed to inquire. The first theory we also admit, to a certain extent, indeed to its fullest extent, so far as concerns present proprietors. The property, which the law now appropriates to an individual, he has a right to call his own, use as his own, and keep safe from the reach of the legislature. The legislature is bound to keep good faith with those for whom it legislates; it must faithfully, scrupulously fulfil its contracts. If it has committed mistakes with regard to its appropriations, it must abide by these till it can rectify them, without breaking its faith with the individual in whose favor they were committed. Whatever alter-

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ations, then, we would suggest in regard to the constitution of property, we would propose none, which should affect any present proprietor, or anyone who should be a proprietor when the alteration passed into a law. But, though we admit that the law gives a title to property good enough for present proprietors, we are very far from regarding the law as ultimate, very far from admitting that property is purely a creature of civil or political institutions, and that, therefore, society may declare what it will to be property, and adopt what rule of distribution or transmission it pleases. Society is under law, and is as much bound to consult the right as is the meanest individual, and it has no right to enact what rests not on a higher law than its will; what, in one word, is not decreed by the law of nature, or the will of God. The second theory, which, we believe, is the prevailing one, and which has the most respectable authority in its support, that of first or original occupancy, we also admit; but not to the full extent to which it seems to be admitted by the authors who have supported it. The first occupant of a thing or of a spot of land, has unquestionably a right to what he occupies, against everyone who would dispossess him, provided that his occupancy be not a prejudice to another, who has equal claims with himself. In other words, the right of the first occupant is limited by a right more ultimate still. To render this plain. Man’s right to the earth, to possess it, cultivate it, and enjoy its fruits, is divine, and rests on the will of the Creator. The evidences of this are in the Bible, in man’s constitution, in the simple fact that man is placed here under circumstances, which render his possession of the earth indispensable to his very subsistence. God gave the earth to the children of men. All admit this. But writers on this subject tell us that he gave it to them as common property. This last we deny. We recognize no such thing as common property. The very essence of property is individual, peculiar, exclusive. The Creator has made man with an original, an innate sense of property. We see man everywhere appropriating something to himself and calling it his own. The ideas of mine and thine are among the earliest developed in the human mind. Now by creating man with this innate sense of property, and endowing him with faculties for its acquisition, the Creator has plainly declared it his will that man should possess property. “Man,” says Chancellor Kent, “was fitted and intended, by the Author of his being, for society and government, and for the acquisition and enjoyment of property.” “The sense of prop-

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erty is inherent in the human breast.”28 We may, therefore, lay it down as established, or admitted that man was created not to hold property in common, but to hold individual property, as something which he might call his own, and of which no individual, nor society even, could rightfully dispossess him. Our inference from this is not that the earth was given to mankind, as a common property, but as an inheritance, to be possessed by each as individual property. The question then comes up, in what proportions shall it be possessed? That is, to how much was any one individual entitled, for his share of the general inheritance? To answer this question, it is simply necessary to ascertain what is the relation which men bear towards one another before their Maker, and what relation they ought to bear towards one another before society. Christianity answers the first, and democracy the second. As we in this country profess to be both Christians and Democrats, the answers of these are sufficiently ultimate for our present purpose. According to Christianity, all men are equal before God. This is the great truth Christianity has placed in the world, and it is the glory of the church that even in the times of its grossest corruption, it has always maintained this truth. God has made of one blood all the nations of men. The church, therefore, in its theory, has admitted no distinction of race, of bond or free, of rich or poor, and has ordered the same discipline to prince and peasant, and read the same solemn service over their ashes. Democracy, the creature of this truth, or indebted to the activity of this truth for its development, declares that all men are equal in their rights, that man measures man the world over. Now, if all men are equal before God, if God be no respecter of persons, then, he must have designed the earth to be possessed by them in equal portions; and if, as democracy asserts, all men have equal rights, then it follows, that all have a right to equal portions. That is to say, according to both Christianity and democracy, every man had a right of property to a portion of the whole, equal to that of every other man. Divide the whole by the number of men, and the quotient will be the amount which each might call his own. This is the abstract right of property to the earth as God gave it to man, and this is the right which limits the right of the first occupant. Original occupancy gives to the first occupant a right of prop28 2 Kent’s Com. Vol. II. p. 256. [Ed. Chancellor James Kent (1763-1847) was a famous New York jurist and author of the much-used four-volume Commentaries on American Law (New York, 1826-30; and fourteen subsequent editions in the nineteenth century).]

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erty to this particular thing, or this particular spot, in preference to that, provided the claim thus acquired do not stretch over more than in an equal division of the whole would have fallen to the occupant’s share. With this limitation, we admit the right of the first occupant, and that occupancy is not only the original, but a valid title to property. Speaking strictly, and keeping in view the limitations we have made, man has a right of property, 1. To that, of which he is the original occupant; 2. To that which he, by his own labor, has produced, with or without the aid of the funds of production rightfully held; and, 3. To that which society, by law, appropriates to him. This last title may not be good in morals, but is in general good against society itself, so far, at least, as concerns the present proprietor; for society has seldom the right to revoke its grants. The expectations it has itself formally and deliberately created, it is bound to satisfy. Having settled what is property, and to how much a man may have a good title, we proceed now to inquire the extent of this title. Is it unlimited, or has it a natural term of expiration? The authorities, we have consulted on this subject, pretty generally agree that the title of a man to property is necessarily extinguished at his natural death. “The title to property,” says Chancellor Kent, “resting originally in occupancy, that title ceased of course, upon the death of the occupant.”29 “Property, both in lands and movables,” says Sir William Blackstone, “being thus originally acquired by the first taker, which taking amounts to a declaration, that he intends to appropriate the thing to his own use, it remains in him, by the principles of universal law, till such time as he does some other act, which shows an intention to abandon it, for then it becomes, naturally speaking, publici juris once more, and is liable to be again appropriated by the next occupant.” And again. “The most universal and effectual way of abandoning property, is by the death of the occupant; when both the actual possession, and intention of keeping possession ceasing, the property, which is founded on such possession and intention, ought also to cease of course. For, naturally speaking, the instant a man ceases to be, he ceases to have any dominion; else, if he had a right to dispose of his acquisitions one moment beyond his life, he would also have a right to direct their disposal for a million of ages after him; which would be highly absurd and inconvenient. All property,

29

2 Kent’s Com. 263.

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therefore, must cease upon death, considering men as absolute individuals, and unconnected with civil society.”30 Jefferson says, in a letter to Mr. Madison, dated Paris, Sept. 6, 1789, that the course of reflection, in which he had engaged on the elementary principles of society, had convinced him that one generation of men has no power to bind another. “I set out,” he says, “on this ground, which I suppose to be selfevident, that the earth belongs in usufruct to the living; that the dead have neither powers nor rights over it. The portion occupied by any individual ceases to be his, when he himself ceases to be, and reverts to society.”31 Bentham says; “Property and law are born together, and die together. Before laws were made, there was no property; take away the laws, and property ceases.”32 This dictum of Bentham, if it be admitted, harmonizes with the others; by denying all natural right to property, it leaves the whole subject open to the adoption of such conventional titles, as may be judged most useful. Locke’s principle is virtually the same. He founds property on a primitive contract, which contract is of course alterable by consent of the contracting parties. Mirabeau says; “It seems to me that the difference between the right of a man to dispose of his property during his life, and that of disposing of it after his death, is not less than the difference between life and death itself. Death engulphs equally a man’s rights and himself.” “The rights of a man in the fact of property cannot extend beyond the term of his existence.”33 MM. Portalis, Tronchet, Bigot-Premeneu, 30 2 Black. Com. 9,10. [Sir William Blackstone (1723-80) was a famous British jurist who wrote the pace-setting legal four-volume Commentaries on the Laws of England (1765-69; and many subsequent editions that were expanded and revised by later authors throughout the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries), generally referred to as Blackstone’s Commentaries.] 31 Memoir, Correspondence, &c. Edited by T. J. Randolph, Vol. III. p. 27.[Ed. Memoir, Correspondence, and Miscellanies from the Papers of Thomas Jefferson, ed. Thomas Jefferson Randolph (1792-1875) (Charlottesville: F. Carr, 1829).] 32 Bentham. Theory of Legislation. Translated by R. Hildreth. Vol. 1. p. 139. [Ed. Jeremy Benthan (1748-1832), Theory of Legislation, trans. Richard Hildreth (1807-65), 2 vols. (Boston: Weeks, Jordan, 1840).] 33 Discours de Mirabeau sur l’Egalite des partages dans successions en ligne directe. Prononce apres sa mort, par l’eveque d’Autun, M. le prince Talleyrand, a l’Assemblée Nationale. [Ed. Discours de M. de Mirabeau l’aîné, sur l’égalité des partages dans les successions en ligne direct, lu, une heure après sa mort, par M. Taleyrand-Périgord, ancien Evêque d’Autun, à la séance de l’Assemblée nationale, du 2 avril 1791 (Paris: Imprimerie nationale, 1791).]

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and Malleville, in their Preliminary Discourse to the projet du code civil, presented to the government, 24 Thermidor, year VIII, say; “The right of property in itself is a direct institution of nature, and the manner of its exercise is an accessory, a development, a consequence of the right itself. But the right of property ends with the life of the proprietor.”34 Here is a very respectable string of authorities, and some of them of great weight with the conservative portion of the community. Kent and Blackstone cannot be accused of ultra-radicalism, nor of any disposition to weaken the security of property. The other authorities, we trust, will weigh somewhat with our democratic friends. The proposition in our article, which gave so much offence, is virtually the same with Jefferson’s. He says, “the portion occupied by any individual ceases to be his, when he himself ceases to be, and reverts to society.” We say, a man’s “power over his property must cease with his life, and his property then become the property of the state, to be disposed of by some equitable law, for the use of the generation which takes his place.” Jefferson merely declares what is natural law on this subject; and we, that the actual arrangements of society should be conformed to that law. This is all the difference there is between us in principle, although he, in laying down the principle, had one object in view, and we another. If there be any weight due to these authorities, the right of a man to hold and to control property ceases at death. What was his property during life is no longer his when he himself no longer exists. Property implies an owner, and it is not property, when it has no owner. Ownership must also be real, not imaginary, and demands an active agency. But at death, the owner ceases to be, and of course his estate is left without an owner. Ownership also implies dominion; but, as Blackstone says, “the instant a man ceases to be, he ceases to have any dominion.” We assume it, then, as established that a man’s natural right to property expires at his death. Then, it follows, as a matter of course that he has no natural right to dispose of it by will or testament, to be effective after his death. This is maintained by Jefferson. “But the child, the legatee, the creditor, takes it not by natural right, but by a law of the society of which he is a member, and to which he is sub34 [Ed. It is not clear what text Brownson is referring to. He may be citing from Jean-Etienne-Marie Portalis (1746-1807), Discours prononcé: sur le premier project de loi du code civil relatif à la publication aux effets et à l’application des lois en général (Paris: Imprimerie de la République, 1802). I could not locate speeches of François Denis Tronchet (1726-1806) and the others Brownson mentioned.]

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ject.”35 So Blackstone, as we have seen. “Else,” says he, “if he had a right to dispose of his acquisitions one moment beyond his life, he would also have the right to direct their disposal for a million of ages after him; which would be highly absurd and inconvenient.” The testamentary right now enjoyed by men is then a conventional and not a natural right. The man has no natural right to dispose of his property beyond the term of his natural life. At the moment of his decease, so far as natural right is concerned, what was his property is vacated, and stands in precisely the same condition the earth did, when it was open to the first occupant; at least so far as relates to its former owner. Whose then is this property? Has it any owner? Jefferson says “it reverts to society,” and Blackstone says, “it becomes publici juris once more, and is liable to be again appropriated by the next occupant.” But by natural law ought it not to descend to the children of the deceased, or in failure of these, to the next of kin? Jefferson says no. “The child takes it not by natural right, but by a law of the society of which he is a member.” Blackstone says, “The right of inheritance, or descent to the children and other relations of the deceased, seems to have been allowed much earlier than the right of devising by testament. We are apt to conceive at first view that it has nature on its side; yet we often mistake for nature what we find established by long and inveterate custom. It is certainly a wise and effectual, but clearly a political, establishment.”36 All the authorities already quoted, with the exception of Chancellor Kent, maintain the doctrine of Blackstone and Jefferson. And to these authorities we may add that of Montesquieu, in the Spirit of Laws, and of the celebrated Pascal.37 Indeed, this doctrine is admitted by all our existing legislation on the subject. If the children and other relations of the deceased have a natural right to inherit the property he leaves, then the right of the proprietor to devise his property by testament, is denied. Nature has determined the mode in which the property should be transmitted, and of course the proprietor has no option as to its disposition. Now the law in granting him the right to devise by testament to whom he pleases, and even to disinherit his children, and all his relations, ex35

Memoir, &c. p. 28. 2 Black. Com. 11. 37 [Ed. In the Spirit of the Laws, Part 6, Book 27, Montesquieu does say that the order of inheritance was established as a consequence of a political law. See Charles de Secondat, baron de Montesquieu (1689-1755), The Spirit of the Laws, trans. Anne M. Cohler, Basia C. Miller, Harold Stone (1748; New York: Cambridge University Press, 1989), 521-22.] 36

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cepting his wife, as he now legally may, evidently denies the natural right of the children and relations to inherit. If the children have a natural right to the property of the father, then the father can have no natural right to disinherit them, or to make an arbitrary disposition of his property. But again, admitting our American system, that blood should make no distinction, that society has no right to reward the child according to the merit, nor to punish him according to the demerit of the father, then it follows, that the child stands in relation to the property of the father, precisely as stands any other individual, having equal and only equal claims to the inheritance. Chancellor Kent seems to think that the descent of property to the children and relatives of the deceased “is dictated by the voice of nature.” By the voice of nature, we can hardly believe this eminent jurist means natural law. The voice of nature dictates to the parent to seek the welfare of the child. The parental instinct, which, we presume, is all the Chancellor means by the voice of nature, would no doubt lead the parent to distinguish his child, and that also to the detriment even of the children of other parents. A case of this is recorded in a law book of the very highest authority. We mean the New Testament. The mother of Zebedee’s children came to Jesus with her two sons, James and John, and prayed that they might sit with him in his kingdom, the one on his right hand, and the other on his left. Here was the voice of nature, speaking through parental instinct. The answer of Jesus is the voice of God speaking in the form of natural law. “To sit on my right hand and on my left hand is not mine to give; but it shall be given them for whom it is prepared of my Father” [Matt 20:23]. That is to say, parental affection must always be subordinated to the will of God, or what is the same thing, to natural justice, or natural law, natural right. Blackstone and others, although they abandon the natural right of children to inherit, defend hereditary property on the ground of convenience. They say it is a wise and effectual, although a political or civil establishment. For our part, we hold society bound to obey the law of nature. She has herself no lawmaking power, and is bound to consult and follow, as nearly as may be, the law enacted by the Creator. If, then, we can show that God, through natural law, has determined whose and in what proportions the property vacated by the death of its former owner really is, we have no occasion to resort to considerations of convenience or expediency. Whose then in reality is the property vacated by the death of the former proprietor?

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Jefferson says, “it reverts to society”; Blackstone, that “it becomes publici juris once more.” We have seen that it belongs not to its former owner for he has ceased to be; we have also seen that it does not belong necessarily to the children and relations of the deceased, whose claims are equal and only equal to the claims of others. Whose then is it? Evidently, it belongs to society, in like manner as the earth belonged to the human family, when approached by the first occupants. It then belongs not to society as common property, to be possessed by the whole in common, because we have already established man’s right to individual property, and shown that common property is a solecism. The individuals of whom society is composed possess then the property not as common property, but have a right to it in severalty. We have recognized three titles to property, first, original occupancy; second, production; third, law, or the award of society. As it concerns the property held by the second title, that of production, we have in our present inquiry nothing to do. What a man produces by his own labor is his own, and so long as he uses it within the limits of the moral law, it is sacred, and must not be touched by the legislature, except its quota of the necessary expenses of the state. That which is held by occupancy, except by occupancy through acknowledged fraud, together with that held by virtue of law, we would not touch in the case of any present proprietor, or in the case of any one who shall be a proprietor, at the time when the change in the constitution of property we contend for may be enacted into a law. Still, all that amount of property held by the first and third titles, we have specified, is constantly becoming vacated by the death of proprietors. Whose is this property, when it thus becomes vacated, and who has the natural right to enter upon it? To help us answer this question, let us distinguish in theory, which, however, we shall not need to do in our practical arrangements, between the property actually produced by the present generation, and that which it has inherited from past generations. Now, these two classes of property are perfectly distinct in principle. We will waive the first class, for the present; because it must become, as it will with the next generation, a portion of the second class, before it can become subject to the new law we would have enacted with regard to property. The second class includes the land, except so far as the labors of the present generation have increased its value, with all the various funds of production of every name and nature, all the accumulation of utilities under man’s material relations, which this generation has inherited from all the past. Now, suppose that this

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vast accumulation, this vast amount of utilities, had been all abandoned by the last generation at once; whose, in that case, would it have been? Who could have claimed it as theirs by right? Unquestionably it would have fallen to the new generation, who would have had the right to enter upon it as having, as Blackstone says, become publici juris once more, and to appropriate it to themselves. But in what proportions might it have been entered upon and appropriated by individuals? We have already answered this question by fixing the limits to the title of the first occupant. We have proved that the children of the proprietor have no natural right to inherit his estate. They then stand in the same condition with the rest of the generation. We have no question then to ask concerning the proportions in which individuals of the generation, now no more, possessed the property vacated. The children of the rich and the poor, therefore, have equal claims to inheritance. In what proportions, then, may the property, now vacated by the death of the generation which owned it, be entered upon by the individuals of the generation which now is? If all men are equal before God, as both reason and Christianity assert, then all men have equal claims, so far as this property may be considered the gift of God. One man can then rightfully receive no more for his share than falls to the lot of another. If, again, all men should be equal in their rights before society, as democracy asserts, and as all Americans profess to believe, then also must the claims of all be admitted to be equal. Then one man can rightfully appropriate to himself no more than in an equal division of the whole among all the members of the new generation would be his share. All will at once admit the correctness of this conclusion in the case we have supposed. Is it not equally correct in relation to the case as it actually happens? The distinction which we have made of property into two classes actually exists. The property which we include in the second class is not imaginary, it is now really possessed. But portions of this are daily and hourly becoming vacant by the death of the proprietor; and the practical question for society is, How shall this portion, which this hour is vacated by the death of the proprietor be reappropriated? Surely on the same principle that the whole should be reappropriated, were the whole to be vacated at once. This rule is the rule of equality. If there be any force in the considerations we have presented, we have demonstrated that, according to natural law, a man has no right over the property he possesses, any longer than he lives; that his children have no natural right to inherit his estate, and stand in relation to it precisely as the children of a stranger; and furthermore, that the

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property vacated by the death of its former owner, the individual members of society hold not as common property, but in severalty, and in equal shares. If we have demonstrated thus much, we have demonstrated all we undertook to demonstrate. We have shown that our proposition to abolish hereditary property, and to dispose of it by some equitable law for the use of the new generation is founded in natural right and is demanded by the law of natural justice. But we are told this scheme is impracticable. When we have demonstrated that a measure is just, we have little time to spend in proving it practicable. Those, who call justice impracticable, must remember that it is not us whom they arraign, but the Creator. To our mind, the measure we propose is feasible enough, if it only be the will of society to adopt it. But perhaps its feasibility does not strike all minds as forcibly as our own. We shall do well then to glance a moment at what it is that we really propose. We do not suppose the measure can be carried into effect immediately; we do not suppose that society will take any action on it farther than to discuss it, till more than one generation shall pass away; but we will, for the sake of illustration, suppose the measure is to be immediately enacted into a law. No change is to be made affecting any present proprietor, nor disturbing the natural expectations raised by existing laws. The measure will take effect only on such portions of property as become successively vacated by the death of their owner. These portions are not to become the property of society, nor of the state, to be held by it as public property; and capable of being used for public purposes. They do not go into the fisc. The state does not supplant the heir and become the inheritor. But these portions, as they become successively vacated, are to be reappropriated to individuals. But they must be reappropriated to individuals of the new generation, and not to the individuals of the old, to individuals commencing in life, not to individuals already established. In order to get at this, say, establish a system of universal education, at the public expense, in which all the children of the community shall be educated and supported by the community, till they are able to support themselves. Let this education be both general and special, embracing what is commonly understood by education, and also the special qualifications for some pursuit or calling in life. When the education is completed, the trade or profession acquired, and the individual scholar is ready to establish himself in life, then let him receive the portion of the property to be reappropriated, which falls to his share.

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These individuals will be constantly coming of age, and old proprietors will be constantly passing off. Hence, as property is vacated, new occupants appear, and as new occupants appear, property is vacated. The numbers of those who die, and of those who become of age, may not, indeed, be precisely equal; but statistics will soon settle the difference with sufficient accuracy for all practical purposes. In order to get at the proportion due to each, a general valuation as now of all the property of the commonwealth will need to be made. The general valuation of all the property in the commonwealth once fixed, the simple rule of division will determine how much is the portion of the new occupant. Then a valuation of that vacated will determine how much of it must be allotted to one individual. This will require about the same trouble in taking a list, and making out the valuation of the property of the commonwealth, which is now required for the purposes of taxation. The young man, starting in life, receives his portion, which serves him for an outfit, as a capital with which to commence operations. With this he goes forth into the world, and has what he can honestly acquire. If one acquires more than another, that is his gain; if less, that is his loss. The property he receives to commence with may be regarded as his share of the general inheritance. In receiving an equal share with his co-heirs, God and society have dealt equally by him. In giving, in this way, an equal share to all of what we have shown belongs in equal portions to all, society treats all her members alike. But, after having done this, which depended on her, she leaves them to fare according to their works. Society is not required to keep them equal, or to labor to make them equal. She is simply obliged to treat them as equals, so far as she is concerned. She must, in that which it belongs to her to do, treat them all alike, and give no advantage to one over another. But, if one can honestly, by his own exertions, become richer than another, that is his own affair, with which she has nothing to do. It is no part of our plan that the idle and profligate should fare alike with the industrious and thrifty. What we ask is that society shall in the distribution of that which none of the generation it concerns have had any hand in producing or accumulating, should treat all alike, for thus far the claims of all are equal. We ask this not because we contend against inequality of property, but because we would have all the inequalities, which do or may obtain, depend not on the unequal reappropriations of what comes down from another generation, but on the personal character and exertions of the individual proprietors. We have never been known in our life to contend for

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equality of possessions, nor against inequalities of property. We war solely against the unequal division which society makes of that portion of the general wealth of the community, which it is her office to distribute. It is not the inequality introduced by differences of character, of talent, or aptitude for the accumulation of property, that we object to; but that which is created by the laws. We commend this distinction to the attention of our readers generally. It will save them from much useless declamation. All we ask is that men should, so far as society is concerned, be dealt by as equals, and after that, in all that depends on themselves, be treated according to their works. It is not so now. Society gives to the child of the rich man an estate to begin with, and to the child of the poor man nothing. The property, then, which we find in men’s possession, is not a just measure of their capacity, nor of their works. This is a wrong and a wrong which brings many others in its train. But we are told that our plan would bear exceedingly hard upon the widow and the orphan. As soon as a man dies, the state takes his property, and the widow and the orphan must be sent to the almshouse. This objection, we confess, we had not anticipated. It is formidable, and appeals to our sensibilities; nevertheless, they who urge it have paid but a sorry compliment to their own inventive powers. The children, if minors, it will be seen, are provided for in the school, where they fare the same they would were the father living. If they are majors, they receive their portion, and are at work for themselves, on their own estates. As for the widow, we will hope that, if young, as soon as decency permits her to lay aside her mourning weeds, she will marry again; if old, why, she must take refuge in her jointure. But seriously, we would propose that, in the reappropriation, the distinction of sex should not play the important part it does now. In all that concerns property, woman should share equally with man, and like him be an independent proprietor, a relation which marriage should not necessarily affect. We know of no reason why the property of the wife should become that of the husband, any more than that the husband’s should become the property of the wife. The sexes are equal, though diverse, and fitted for different spheres; but the idea of dependence should never necessarily attach to the one more than to the other. Marriage, again, should never be regarded as a marriage of estates, but of persons, and hearts. Each should have the means of living independent of that relation. Then, in marriage, man and woman could come together as equals, and because they loved each other, and not because one or the other wanted an estate. Marriage would then be, what it now is not always, a sa-

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cred institution, and the relation it creates would be pure and holy, and kept by both sacred and inviolable, as it should be. But be this as it may, the objection is answered by making woman an independent proprietor, in like manner as man, and by establishing, as we propose, a system of education, which will ensure the instruction and maintenance of all the children of the community, till they are capable of maintaining themselves. We are told, again, that our proposed reform would bear exceedingly severe upon the poor workingmen, who have, from their hard earnings, saved a little, in the hopes of leaving it to their children. But along now comes a pretended friend of these workingmen, and tells them, “No, you shall not leave your scanty savings to your children you love so well. It must go to the state, and your children be left”; pray go on, and tell us how the children are to be left? Never, for the sake of truth, convert your pathos into bathos. In the first place, we reply to this objection that we propose our plan to aid the children of these poor workingmen, not to injure them. We say to these workingmen, your children have a natural and indefeasible right not to the little you can save out of your necessities to leave them, but to an equal portion with the children of the rich, of the whole property which descends from one generation to another. How much above the general average to each individual will rise the modicum you can leave your children? Will it not, in fact, fall below the general average? How much, then, will your children lose by the proposed change in the transmission and reappropriation of property? The children of the rich will inherit less than they now do; but the children of the hardworking poor will inherit more. We are told, again, that the proposed change will amount to nothing, “because a man can give away all his property just before his death, and that gift society must respect. In this way, property may descend as now.” To this we answer, first, that a man rarely knows the precise hour when he shall die, and, therefore, death may surprise him before he has made his gift, and the necessary transfer of his property. Consequently, there would always be a large number of cases that could not be affected by this objection. A gift, must be more than a gift in mente; it must be an actual delivery of the property into the possession of the donee. Now there are many men, though they believe they shall die soon, who do by no means like to part with all their property to their children, and thus render themselves wholly dependent in their old age. There are too many Regans and Gonerils, and too few Cordelias in private life, to render this always

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prudent, or safe.38 From this cause a large addition may always be looked for to the number of cases, not liable to be affected by the objection we are considering In the second place, we may distinguish between gifts inter vivos, and gifts causa mortis. The first class of gifts must undoubtedly be respected; but the second class, when made with the evident design of controlling the transmission of one’s estate, or of directing, in some sense, its disposal after one’s death, should be held void, and revocable at the will of society. We have proved that a man has no right to direct the disposal of his property for one moment after his death; if, then, he transfers his property to another before his death, for the purpose of determining its descent, he is seeking to evade the law, and, therefore, cannot call upon society to respect the transfer. He is doing indirectly what it is admitted that he has no right to do directly, and consequently, his acts are fraudulent. This distinction between gifts made between the living, from charitable or benevolent purposes, and those made with a view to a man’s death, and for the purpose of exercising indirectly a sort of dominion after his death, is broad and obvious, and is recognized, in principle, very nearly as we have stated it, by existing laws. But, it is said, waiving this objection, and assuming the practicability of the proposed change, that its effects will be bad, for it will check the spirit of enterprise, lessen the desire for the accumulation of property, consequently enervate industry, and lead to universal indolence and pauperism. Men are fruitful in objections, but they have not always regard to consistency in the objections they urge. We have seemed to ourselves to hear no little declamation from the pulpit, and elsewhere, against the general propensity of our countrymen to get money. This propensity, we have been told, is quite too strong, and the fruitful source of the greater part of the evils with which our society is afflicted. Grant, then, that our scheme will check this propensity, this, instead of being an objection, should be regarded as a recommendation. In fact, one of the strongest reasons we have for urging it is that it will check, in some degree, the action of the propensity to accumulate. 38

[Ed. References are to King Lear’s three daughters, characters in Shakespeare’s King Lear (1608). Regan is a sadistic woman who fawns on and then humiliates her father; she is eventually poisoned by her hypocritical sister Goneril. Both of the older sisters had inherited parts of Lear’s kingdom because they faked their love for him in speeches that he required of them. Cordelia, the youngest daughter, who truly loved her father, was disinherited because she refused to make a bootlicking speech to prove her love, but she ends up taking care of the king when he loses his reason.]

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Looking at society as it is, we cannot fail to perceive that the passion for wealth is quite too absorbing. A large portion of our generation pursue it to the destruction of their health, and the peril of their soul’s salvation, and the peace of the world. And why is it so? Mainly, because the propensity to accumulate is, in our present order of civilization, reinforced by the love of independence and of distinction, and sanctified by the love of offspring. Wealth, in the actual state of the world, gives independence and distinction. Poverty in itself could be endured, did it not, in general, entail neglect, dependence, and, as it were, throw a man out of the pale of civilized society. Hence it is, men, who have somewhat of a manly nature, are impatient of it, and will be guilty of almost any crime, rather than remain poor. But, in a society, where fortunes are nearly equal, wealth confers no distinction, and especially if all the children are brought up in the same way, and at the same schools, and have the same general manners, cultivation, and refinement. Distinction in such a society cannot be acquired by one’s possessions, but by what one is in oneself. Consequently, in the order of things we propose to bring about, wealth will not be sought for the distinction it confers. This will unquestionably check the action of the propensity to accumulate, to a considerable extent. At present it is also necessary to acquire wealth, for the sake of our children. We could get along very well, and find much time for mental and moral culture, were it not that we must accumulate something to give our children a start in the world. Under the proposed arrangement, anxiety for children will be somewhat diminished. We are sure, let happen what will, our children will fare as well as others, will be as well educated, and always be able, by moderate labor, to sustain themselves. This, again, will unquestionably diminish the desire to accumulate wealth. The desire to accumulate wealth, diminished by the removal of these two sources, from which it is now constantly recruiting its strength, will, nevertheless, by no means be destroyed. The portion, which will fall to the lot of the individual on commencing life, will by no means suffice for his maintenance, without his personal exertions. It constitutes merely a fund, with which to commence operations. The man must still work, or soon starve. Then, again, wealth has its positive advantages. It enables a man to gather around him objects of taste, of science, and of comfort. It is, in a moderate degree, always desirable, and will always be sought with more or less avidity. But, under the arrangement we propose, it will be sought merely for its direct, and not its incidental advantages.

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Moreover, man is an active being, and loves action infinitely more than repose. Men have an aversion to labor, because now labor is not rendered attractive, and because it is associated with ideas of servitude, dependence, and vulgarity. It is too often performed in solitude, without the encouragement of warm-hearted, and enlightened companionship. The laziest man among us will angle or hunt all day. Gentlemen, fond of field sports, often exert themselves more than the common day laborer. Boys, wholly averse to hard work, will yet delight in still harder play. Strip labor of the degrading ideas now associated with it, render it as honorable, as much in keeping with the character of the gentleman, as fox-hunting is in England, and as attractive as the active plays of boys, and nobody would shun it; almost, everybody would delight in it for its own sake. When labor once comes to be performed by the enlightened and cultivated, and by men, who own the capital on which they labor, it will be honorable in the estimation of all, and soon be sought as an agreeable pastime. The first two considerations we have mentioned will reduce the propensity to accumulate within reasonable bounds; and the last two will tend to keep it there. As to the universal pauperism so much dreaded we have no fears. The actual increase of wealth would be much greater, under the new system, than the old; because, on the one hand, there would be less waste, and on the other, more and more skillfully directed labor; for all would labor, and all laborers would be thoroughly educated, not only generally, but specially. This part of our subject, we shall have another occasion to discuss, when, in our next number, we examine a recent work by Mr. Brisbane on Association.39 And we shall be able to discuss it more at large then, than we can now. One more objection we must notice and then pass to the conclusion of this quite too protracted discussion. We are told that our proposed reforms will break up the family relation. The necessity of such a result we do not see. It touches no family instincts and in no case interferes with the affection of parents for their children, nor of children for their parents. It does not tend to separate or estrange them. Properties will be divided as they are now. All the children of the same parents will not always reside on the homestead and they do 39 [Ed. Reference is to Albert Brisbane’s (1809-90) Social Destiny of Man; or, Association and Reorganization of Industry (Philadelphia: C. F. Stollmeyer, 1840). Brownson gave a short review of the text in Boston Quarterly Review 4 (January, 1841): 127-29, and gives more extensive treatment of it in “Social Evils and their Remedy,” Boston Quarterly Review 4 (July, 1841): 267-68, and chapter 12 in this volume.]

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not now. What can be more scattered than are the different members of our families, under our present system? We find ourselves in a state, of which we are not a native, and the state, in which we were educated, was not the one in which we received our birth. We have a mother in one state, a grandmother in another, a brother in another, and another brother in a different state still.40 Our children grow up here in New England, but where they will finally settle, God only knows. They will be scattered abroad, some to the east, some to the south, some to the west, and some to the north. It would seem hardly possible to devise a system, which should more effectually separate families, than the present. What bad effect, then, will our proposition have on the family relation? The family feeling, pride of family, we have a great respect for; and we take pleasure in tracing our own lineage back to some brave “cut-throat” of the dark ages; to some border chieftain of Scottish minstrelsy;41 but we have been taught by our religion, and by our philosophy that the family is subordinate to humanity, and that, though it is the center of our affections, and the sphere in which lie our special duties, still it is in our love and action always to give place to mankind at large and to universal justice. According to Christianity, the cause of humanity is paramount to the claims of our relations, and we are to regard as members of our family, those who do the will of our Father in heaven. That the arrangement we propose would do somewhat to break up the clannish feeling, which prevails, to some extent, even in this country, we believe, and for that reason we would effect it as well as for others.

40 [Ed. Brownson was born in Stockbridge, Vermont, but was educated in Ballston Spa, New York. Brownson’s mother, Relief Metcalf Brownson, lived in Ballston Spa, New York; Oran Brownson, one of his brothers, lived in Dublin, Ohio; Daniel, the other brother, lived in Vermont. If his maternal grandmother, a Metcalf, was still alive, she resided in Keene, Cheshire County, New Hampshire. If his paternal grandmother was still alive, she resided in New Britain, Hartford County, Connecticut.] 41 [Ed. Brownson claimed to be a descendant of a John Brownson from Derbyshire, England, who immigrated to Hartford Colony, Connecticut, around 1636 and participated in the bloody Pequot War of 1637. This Brownson clan evidently came to Derbyshire from Scotland, when Mary Queen of Scots left Scotland in 1568. These claims, especially about the lineage to a troupe of Scottish minstrels, are difficult, if not impossible, to verify. On this heritage, see Brownson’s review of Henry Bronson’s The History of Waterbury, Connecticut (1858) in Brownson’s Quarterly Review 22 (October, 1860): 530, and Thomas R. Ryan, Orestes A. Brownson, 15-16.]

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We have now gone through with the principal objections, which we have heard urged against the article on the laboring classes, and offered such additional observations, as may enable the candid to catch some glimpses of our real views. The article in question presupposed nearly all that we had previously written in our journal, and, of course, was liable to be misinterpreted by those, who read it by itself alone. This may answer, to some extent, as an apology for them, who have been quite industrious in holding us up to the community, as at war with Christianity, as opposed to education, and especially to the rights of property. We are happy to find some apology for them and are sorry that we have not a more satisfactory one. They should have made themselves acquainted with our general views, and interpreted our particular remarks by our general principles, as laid down in our writings. To have done this, would have been no more than common justice; would have been only what was due to themselves, as well as to us. A moment’s reflection would have assured them that the conductor of this journal could have no stronger motives for publishing false or dangerous doctrines than have the editors of the newspapers who have so liberally abused him.42 What motive have they for respecting religion, and the established order of things, that he has not also? He has his relations in life as well as they, and, perhaps, as much at stake. The world has given him credit for some literary and philosophical ability, and he might, perhaps, would he follow the beaten track, succeed as well as most men. He has nothing to gain by publishing unpopular doctrines and running athwart popular prejudices. He may have some social feelings, and delight in friendship and society for himself and family. Why, then, shall he labor to bring upon himself censure and reproach, to forego all the common courtesies, and civilities of civilized life, compel himself to be looked upon as a sort of moral monster, and subject himself to be called “infamous,” and “a ruffian”? When a man of tolerable understanding, of passable acquaintance with the world, and some little reputation and standing subjects himself voluntarily to all this, it is fully as likely to be from a good motive as a bad one. To listen to our virtuous newspaper editors, one would think that they enjoyed a monopoly of virtue, patriotism, and religion, and that all, who chance to differ from them, are so many incarnate fiends, 42 [Ed. A large number of newspapers and journals attacked Brownson’s “Laboring Classes” essay. See, e.g., the Madisonian, August 4, 1840; Log Cabin, August 1, 1840; New York Review 1(October 1840): 512-22; Christian Review 5 (September, 1840): 419-42; Methodist Quarterly Review 23 (January, 1841): 92-122; Boston Atlas, July 21, 24, 29, 1840.]

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whose delight is in overturning all that is venerable, and in desecrating whatever is holy. But after all, who are these newspaper editors? Honorable gentlemen, it may be, but rarely as wise as Solomon, or as devout as David. They are, in general, men of routine, who have some passable skill in the use of the scissors, and in stringing together set words and phrases; but they are not men who have watched long for truth, who have studied day and night to ascertain the meaning of what is passing around them. They are rarely men of thought, never men of ideas; and, what is more deplorable still, they have in themselves no measure for the man, who does really think, who has ideas, who looks through society, and sees what is, and what should be. What do these men understand of the matters we have been discussing? Nothing, nothing at all, as their criticisms abundantly prove. Why can it not occur to them that we may know as much of the matters on which we write as they do? We have given years of intense study to the condition of the laboring classes and the means of its amelioration. No doubt we may err; but does it never occur to these sapient editors, who have never given the subject an hour’s serious thought that we are no more liable to err than they are? All we ask of them is to abandon a little of their arrogance, which by no means becomes them, and to think it possible that, though they should die, some wisdom and virtue might still survive. But enough of such small matters. We have been accused of proposing to rob the rich of their estates, and of proposing to do it by physical force. We think we have shown, in the foregoing that ours is no scheme of robbery and plunder. We have planted ourselves on the Christian idea of man’s equality to man, and on the innate sense of justice, which belongs to all men. What we have demanded, we have demanded in the name of justice. Show us that what we demand is unjust, or that it is not in accordance with natural right, and we have nothing more to say. Perhaps, however, that to some, who accuse us, the justice of our propositions is their greatest condemnation. There are people in the world, at least it is so said, whose chief apprehensions are that justice may be done. We will hope, however, that these are but few, and that their number is daily diminishing. With regard to physical force, we have not much to say. We see an immense system of wrong everywhere established and everywhere upheld. This system is the growth of a hundred ages, and is venerable in the eyes of many; but it must be overthrown. Man must be free, and SHALL be free, free to develop his lofty and deathless nature,

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and prove himself a child of God. This is in his destiny. But how can he become thus free? How can the huge system of accumulated wrongs, under which he now groans, be overthrown, and a new and better system introduced and established? Peaceably? We would fain hope so; but we fear not. We are well assured of one thing; that the reform party will not be the first to take up arms. It will proceed calmly and peaceably, but energetically to its work. It will use no arms but those of the intellect and the heart. It fixes its eye on justice, and marches steadily towards its realization. Will the conservatives yield up peaceably their exclusive privileges? Will they consent that justice shall be realized? If so, there will be no war. But we think we know the conservatives too well to believe this. A party that could collect together in this city, by hundreds, to mob a poor itinerant lecturer, and by thousands to consult on demolishing the post-office, because the postmaster insisted on obeying the laws, we do not believe will suffer the reform party to proceed quietly to the realization of its hopes.43 The proletaries will never resort to physical force; but that the masters may, for the purpose of keeping the proletaries in their present condition, we must believe, till we have some evidence to the contrary. They have already threatened it here. Distinguished members of Congress have said publicly that they would resort to force, if necessary, to effect a change in the policy of the federal administration, in case they should fail in their efforts to elect General Harrison to the presidency. And what in England, in France, throughout all Europe, but armed soldiery, sustains the existing order of things? We know the conservative spirit. It fights against all reforms; it would hold the human race back to the past, and never suffer it to take a single step forward. Hitherto, it has been only on the battlefield; a Marathon, a Platea, a Marston Moor, a Naseby,44 a Bunker’s Hill, a Saratoga, or a Yorktown, that humanity has conquered her power to advance. The past has always stood in the gate, and forbid the future to enter; and it has been only in mortal encounter that the future has as yet ever been able to force its entrance. It may be different in the 43 [Ed. The “poor itinerant lecturer” may be a reference to George Thompson, a British abolitionist who was mobbed in Boston in 1835, or to John Greenleaf Whittier who was mistaken for Thompson by the mob. On this, see Henry Mayer, All On Fire: William Lloyd Garrison and the Abolition of Slavery (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1998), 197-200. On the “postal campaign” and mob reactions see, Leonard L. Richards, “Gentlemen of Property and Standing,” 52-81.] 44 [Ed. The battle of Marston Moor (July 2, 1644) was the first major Royalist defeat in the English Civil War. In the battle of Naseby (June 14, 1645) during the English Civil War Oliver Cromwell and the Parliamentary New Model Army delivered the Royalist Army a decisive defeat.]

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future; we hope it will be. We would rather be found, on this subject, a false prophet than a true one. But we fear the age of peace has not yet dawned. Commerce has indeed spread her meshes all over the world, but she cannot hold it quiet. We need but glance at Europe, Asia, Africa, and even our own country, at the present moment, to see that no permanent peace has as yet been established. Everywhere are warlike preparations going on, and our speculators are already beginning to count on their means of turning the coming contest to their own profit. If a general war should now break out, it will involve all quarters of the globe, and it will be in the end more than a war between nations. It will resolve itself into a social war, a war between two social elements; between the aristocracy and the democracy, between the people and their masters. It will be a terrible war! Already does it lower on the horizon, and, though the storm may be long in gathering, it will roll in messy folds over the whole heavens, and break in fury upon the earth. Stay it, ye who can. For ourselves, we merely stand on the watchtowers, and report what we see. Would that we had a different report. But the war, if it comes, will not be brought about by reformers, but by conservatives, in order to keep the people out of their rights; and on the heads of conservatives, then, must fall the blame. A powerful effort has been made, by the leaders of a political party, to use our article on the laboring classes to the prejudice of the present administration.45 It has endeavored to make the administration and its friends responsible for our doctrines. If the Whig leaders had presented our doctrines truly, and then said that these doctrines are the simple logical results of the acknowledged principles of the Democratic party, we should have been content, for we say as much ourselves. What we complain of in our Whig friends is their gross perversion of our views, and after having, by misrepresentation or misinterpretation, concocted a set of doctrines, as abhorrent to us as to themselves, then charging those “horrible doctrines” upon the administration.46 The doctrines, published in Whig newspapers and electioneering hand-bills, resemble ours about as much as night resembles day. They are, in fact, not sufficiently like ours to be their 45

[Ed. In The Convert, Brownson claimed that the Whigs reprinted the “Laboring Classes” essay and “circulated it by thousands, if not by hundreds of thousands, for the purpose of damaging the party with which I was connected.” See Works of Orestes A. Brownson, 5:103.] 46 [Ed. In The Convert, as a Catholic, Brownson himself referred to the “Laboring Classes” essay as “horrible doctrines.” See Works of Orestes A. Brownson, 5:99-108.]

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caricatures. It is obviously unjust, then, to charge these doctrines, either upon us, or upon our political friends. Of this injustice, the Whigs have been guilty. But, it is no matter. The truth generally comes out at last, and they, who have misrepresented it, or sought to keep it back, are in general the principal sufferers. We would much rather be slandered than slander, be lied about than lie. Perhaps the day will come when politicians will learn to feel the same, and that a man is bound to carry into all his political discussions and exertions, the same candor, sincerity, and strict integrity, generally insisted on as requisite in private life. The abolition of hereditary property is a measure we have contemplated for a long time. We expected to be censured for proposing it; but we confess that we did not expect to find our countrymen quite so much surprised by its novelty. The question has been discussed before; but our countrymen seem not to have known it, probably because it was not discussed in England.47 However, some questions are discussed out of England; for there is some little intellectual, and, perhaps, moral power, besides what is indigenous in the Island of Great Britain. We expected the proposition would startle; but we confess that we did not expect to find people uniting to condemn what each one, taken singly, will uphold. We have never met a man who would not say that he believed it a serious injury to a young man to inherit a fortune. We have heard our rich men, very generally, remark that they regard it as by no means desirable to leave a large inheritance to their children. We have often been told by rich men, when we have referred to the destitute situation in which we ourselves were left when quite young that our “poverty was the richest legacy our father could have left us.” Now, here is admitted nearly all we contend for. We believe it a serious injury to inherit a fortune, but to receive on setting out in life a moderate capital, as a ground on which our industry may display itself, we hold to be highly desirable. Our plan avoids the evil and secures the good. Some have undertaken to accuse us of borrowing our notions from the French Radicals. The first knowledge we had of the views of the French Radicals, we obtained from their exhibition, as the original from which we copied. Our countrymen dislike whatever is French, and our conservatives like whatever is English. We will close this article, therefore, by subjoining a document, placed in our hands 47 [Ed. Brownson is referring here to the discussion of property by the French Saint-Simonians who supported private property but opposed the hereditary descent of property.]

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a few days since, by a gentleman from Liverpool. The document appears to be a sort of circular, sent out by an association, composed, we believe, of gentlemen of some eminence. The proposition it contains is as bold as ours, although, in some important features, quite different. It may be well to add that the doctrine of this circular has been substantially advocated by one of the London Quarterly Reviews. As it comes from England, we have no doubt that it will be quite acceptable to our conservative friends, who, just at this moment, are doing, consciously or unconsciously, their utmost, to bring this country into subjection to the English bankers and stock-jobbers. NO. 2, BY THE LAND REDEMPTION SOCIETY. The flagrant injustice of the Corn Laws48 will induce the people to look more closely into first principles than they have ever done as yet. MORGAN.49 The Land of England belongs to the People of England. For God said, let us make man in our image after our likeness, and let them50 have dominion over all the earth. GENESIS. And land shall not be sold forever, for the land is mine, saith the Lord. LEVITICUS 25:23. The riches of a state arise from the labor of the people. MONTESQUIEU.51 The state owes to every citizen a proper nourishment, convenient clothing, and a kind of life compatible with health. MONTESQUIEU.52 48 [Ed. The Corn Laws refer to those British regulations that governed the import and export of grain. Protective legislation for landed interests in England at the end of the eighteenth and early nineteenth century caused grain prices to rise sharply and increased the unpopularity of these laws. 49 [Ed. The reference may be to William Morgan (1750-1833) who wrote a number of tracts on British governmental policies and prepared actuarial tables for the British Equitable Assurance Society, or more likely to be Sir Thomas Charles Morgan (1783-1843), a British empirical philosopher and physician who became a strong advocate of Catholic emancipation and other liberal measures.] 50 God said them, and not a portion, or particular caste, or body of them, called landlords. [Ed. Reference is to Gen 1:26.] 51 [Ed. Probably a reference to Montesquieu’s Spirit of the Laws, Book 23.29, where he writes that “the riches of the state suppose great industry.” See The Spirit of the Laws, trans. Thomas Nugent, and Introduction by Franz Newmann; Two Volumes in One (New York: Hafner Publishing Company, 1966), 2:26.] 52 [Ed. Probably a reference to Montesquieu’s Spirit of the Laws, Book 23.29, where he writes that giving alms to a naked man does not fulfill the obligation of the “state, which owes to every citizen a certain subsistence, a proper nourishment, convenient clothing, and a kind of life not incompatible with health.” See Ibid., 2:25.]

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Labor is the source of wealth, it is the source of the revenue of the state, and of the rents of the landlords. THOMPSON.53 There is no foundation in nature, or natural law, why a set of words on parchment should give to any one the dominion of land. BLACKSTONE.54 No one is able to produce a charter from heaven, or has any better title to a particular possession of land than his neighbor. PALEY.55 Sic vos non vobis mellificatis, apes. VIRGIL.56 Have the landlords dominion in their lands? Or do they lawfully possess only the use of them? Can they do what they like with their lands? COBBETT.57 If the land of England does not belong to the people of England, to whom does it belong? Is it not evident that if the air could have been appropriated, it would have been parceled out like the land? Is not land the immediate gift of God, like air or water?58 Is it not different from all other things useful to man, seeing that it is not the product of industry? In thickly-peopled countries, heavy rents are demanded from labor; these rents are spent chiefly in ostentation, riotous excess, debauchery, and gambling. In proportion as a nation becomes skillful 53 [Ed. Probably a reference to William Thompson (?1785-1833), a wealthy landowner from Cork and a socialist political economist. He authored An Inquiry into the Principles of the Distribution of Wealth most Conducive to Human Happiness (1824).] 54 [Ed. 2 Blackstone, Commentaries, Part II, ch. l, par. 2.] 55 [Ed. William Paley treats the right of property in land in The Principles of Moral and Political Philosophy (1785), in The Works of William Paley, D.D. 6 vols. (1830; Bristol, England: Thoemmes Press, 1998), 3:77-83. The quotation is not exactly in this text, but the idea is found in Paley’s assertion that “as God has provided these things [i.e., land] for the use of all, he has of consequence given each leave to take of them what he wants: by virtue therefore of this leave, a man may appropriate what he stands in need of to his own use, without asking, or waiting for, the consent of others.” See p. 79.] 56 [Ed. Latin for “Thus you make yourselves honey, not honey for yourselves, o bees.” These lines are attributed to Vergil in Donatus’ biography. I am indebted to Stephen Beall of Marquette University’s Classics department for this identification.] 57 [Ed. William Cobbett (1763-1835) was a popular British journalist who desired to preserve traditional rural English values and who opposed many of the changes brought on by the Industrial Revolution.] 58 Rent paid to water companies is for steam engines, pipes, &c., not for the water.

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and numerous, does rent or the monopoly price of land increase, thus supplying more ample funds for the landlord’s follies.59 What do we propose? Is it to take land from one individual, and give it to another? No. Is it to rob the living possessors? No. Might not the following plan be adopted? COULD NOT THE STATE HOLD THE LAND FOR THE BENEFIT OF ALL? MIGHT NOT COMMISSIONERS BE ELECTED, IN WHOM ALL LAND MIGHT BE VESTED?60 MIGHT NOT THE PARLIAMENTARY VOTERS ELECT THESE COMMISSIONERS?61 Might not the rental of the land in England (on the death of the present holders, and their sons born before a given date) be spent on62 1. EDUCATION—of all, without distinction of rank or sect. 2. ON COMMUNICATION—railroads, harbors, &c. 3. ON DEFENSE—army, navy, police.63 4. ON JUSTICE—on courts of law, always open, and without charge. 5. ON RECREATION—gardens, museums, theaters, libraries; on improvements of towns and villages. 6. ON EMIGRATION—fitting out first rate vessels to carry out those desirous of trying their fortunes in a new land, free of charge. 59

Taxation may be reduced as population and wealth increase, but rent must rise and become a most serious tax on labor in thickly-peopled countries. Rent being the creation of the industry of all, must be devoted to the benefit of all. At home, and in our colonies, the fee simple of the land is sold forever and ever; now, no generation can sell the land forever, as the land belongs to the next generation when it grows up to manhood. 60 This is not new. In Liverpool, the rental of the town (the corporate estate) belongs to the public (the municipal voters) who elect commissioners (town councillors) every year. This estate, £50,000 per annum, is devoted by law to the public good; as also are crown lands, estates of the Greenwich Hospital, of the Universities, &c. 61 The tenure of land is of more importance than political institutions. If taxation were annihilated tomorrow, rent would exist and increase. In America, where population increases, fund will become more valuable, and a landed aristocracy will come into existence, who will constantly be plotting against popular rights. The present absurd tenure of land in the United States will overthrow their otherwise excellent political constitution. 62 The right to leave land to nephews or more distant heirs, to be abolished at once, or in a few years. 63 Taxation would thus merge into rent. Rent we cannot destroy any more than wages or profits; we can, however, appropriate it to the state. The discovery of the great principle of representation renders this possible and easy.

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Would not this expenditure of rent be better than its present appropriation to the absurd caprices, vicious indulgences, and gambling propensities of our landed aristocracy?64 Is it not the fact that previous to Cromwell, the landlords held the land of the King, as representative of the state? Our proposition, then, is not a novelty, but a return to an old system. The earth and its products belong to the living, and not to the dead; therefore no man has a right to dictate the possession of the land after his death. The law allows him; but our proposal is to alter the law.

64 Last year, a young nobleman retired to Boulogne, after gambling away £30,000 per annum (the earnings of hundreds of tenantry, and thousands of laborers), a Duke is building a conservatory covering an acre of ground; and another with £200,000 a year, is going to the Continent to recruit; a third, in Staffordshire, is wasting the hard earned rents of his tenantry in the most whimsical conceits.

9. CONVERSATIONS WITH A RADICAL1 Boston Quarterly Review 4 (January 1841): 1-41

My attention was arrested one day during a short residence in a western city by a crowd collected before the principal hotel. Wedging my way into the crowd, I soon discovered that the object of attention was a coarsely clad fellow, holding forth to the multitude from the very top of his lungs. He appeared to be speaking under strong excitement. He gesticulated rapidly and with violence. His tones were harsh and bitter; his looks were wild and haggard; and his whole figure and manner indicated a madman, or a person uttering himself on a subject, which absorbed the whole energy of his soul. “Ye make us beasts of burden”; were the first words I could make out. “Ye call yourselves the higher orders because ye can task the labors of the poor and wretched. Ye are the higher orders, are ye, because ye wear fine clothes, have long purses, live in splendid palaces, and recline on soft couches; because ye have large estates, well cultivated fields, rich harvests, groaning granaries, and crowded storehouses? By whose labor are ye what ye call yourselves? By your own? Tis false. Tis by the labor of those ye call the lower class on whose rights, feelings, and interests ye trample every moment, and for whom ye care less than ye care for your oxen or your horses. Ye strut and swell with a boasted superiority, do ye? Know ye not that ye purchase it by the tears of the widow, the wrongs of the orphan, and the blood of those ye should have loved as ye love yourselves? “The higher orders, are ye? Ay, for ye make men carry you on their shoulders; ay, for ye ride on the backs of those of your fellow beings who have too much honesty, or too much simplicity, to be riders themselves. And now, forsooth, ye raise a terrible hue and cry because we, whom ye have ridden for ages, show ourselves a little restive and unwilling to stand ready bitted and saddled, for you to vault upon our backs, and plunge your rowers deep into our flanks. Order is in danger, is it, because the horse learns his strength and 1

[Ed. Brownson adds “By a Conservative” as part of the title.] 402

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turns upon his rider? Society is to be dissolved, is it, because your oppression is to end? Vain are your threats; vain are your pictures of mobocracy and anarchy; ye shall be unhorsed. We have sworn it in the depths of our souls, on the altars of our country, in the presence of our God. We will carry you no longer. Use your own limbs. Ye may as well go on foot as we. Go build your own houses, cultivate your own fields, make your own tools, man your own ships, work your own engines. Ye may as well do it for yourselves, as that we should be poor and ignorant in order to do it for you. No longer will we toil, and sweat, and suffer, that ye may enjoy, or be corrupted by wealth and luxury. The higher orders, are ye? Puling babes, miserable victims of your own avarice or extravagance, worshipers of fashion, men forsworn, who study only to profit by the labors of others! The higher orders, are ye? Go then and form a nation of higher orders, a nation apart by yourselves, and see how long ye will maintain your elevation.” As he uttered these last words in a tone, which one must have heard, in order to form any conception of its provokingness, a stone, sent from no unskillful hand, struck him on the side of the head, and knocked him senseless to the ground. “Good!” shouted the multitude, and dispersed to their several places of business. Though provoked by the fellow’s radical nonsense, and uncalled-for declamation, I ran to ascertain the effects of the blow, and to see whether any assistance was possible or needed. I found him stunned, but not seriously injured. It is no easy matter to kill an enthusiast. His body is so completely under the control of the spirit, and so saturated with it, that it becomes itself all but spiritual and impassible. I had him conducted to my lodgings, where all needed assistance was rendered him. In a few hours he was perfectly recovered, except a slight contusion on his head, from which, however, he assured me he suffered no pain. I have not a spice of radicalism in my nature. It is true, I was a poor boy, and that for some years I had a hard struggle; but now, all my habits, my interests, and, I may add, my convictions, are with the conservatives. I do not feel it my duty to set up for a reformer, to be wiser than all who went before me, than most of my contemporaries. I am not yet capable of so much arrogance. I am content to follow on in “the path my forefathers trod.” I have aimed to check whatever tendencies I may possibly have had towards enthusiasm, and I am in general as cold and as immovable as the granite hills of my own NewEngland. Yet this ranting street orator affected me, and made me wish to examine him at my leisure. He struck me as a riddle, but also

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as a riddle worth the reading. Perhaps there is something in lofty enthusiasm, in the power of self-sacrifice, in a disposition that goes straight to its object, regardless of difficulties, or dangers, or death, however mistimed or misplaced, which cannot be witnessed with indifference; something perhaps to warm the coldest hearts, and agitate minds the best disciplined. No philosopher seems able to offer a more convincing argument for his system than to die for it. Samson destroyed more of his enemies by his death, than by his life; and the early Christians conquered the world by dying for it. There was another reason why I wished to examine this fellow who was the incarnation of radicalism. Radicalism was rife in my native city. It was threatening everything with destruction. Insubordination was becoming universal. Strikes and combinations, and trades’ unions, were paving the way for a return to the savage state. Property was becoming insecure, and there was no foreseeing what the sovereign mob might not, one day, take it into its head to do. Perhaps it would even go so far as to propose a division of property, and to distribute among the idle and vicious the fruits of the labors of the industrious and the virtuous. I wished to make myself thoroughly acquainted with the character, designs, resources, and expectations of radicalism. This fellow, whom chance had thrown in my way, might instruct me. I therefore urged him to spend a few days with me, which he readily consented to do, as he was one of those who go about doing good when they have not where to lay their heads. During his stay with me we ran over a great variety of topics, some of which we discussed with a little closeness and depth and others we merely touched upon. The principal results of our intercourse and discussions, are contained in the following conversations, which were written down immediately after, and as nearly as they occurred as possible. If I have not in all cases refuted his mischievous notions, it must be borne in mind that my chief object was not to show my own argumentative powers, which those who know me will admit to be not contemptible, nor to vindicate my own doctrines; but to draw out the radical, and make myself, if possible, acquainted with his inmost soul. My friends, I am sure, will agree with me, that his notions in general need no refutation. I soon perceived that his conversion to rationality was hopeless, and I ceased to attempt it. Whatever I said was intended to give him an opportunity to express his opinions. One by reading these conversations will hardly form an adequate conception of the radical as he really appeared. Sometimes, his manner was courteous, his tones were bland, and he showed clearly that

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he had seen good society; at other times, his voice was harsh, and his whole manner coarse and revolting. There were times when the proudest and firmest must have quailed beneath the withering scorn of his look, and the biting sarcasm of his tones; times there were too, when he seemed inspired, and you felt that you were in the presence of a God-ordained prophet. He was a mystery. Whether hate, envy, spleen, or love, high undying philanthropy governed him, I could never satisfy myself; and the only conclusion to which I have been able to arrive is that he was intended for a great man, but disappointment, misfortune, struggles with the world, and perhaps ill health, had affected his brain, and that at the time I saw him, he was in need of a strait jacket. Perhaps, however, I am mistaken. Let those who peruse the following conversations judge for themselves. Let them determine whether he should be reverenced as a prophet, dreaded as a devil incarnate, or confined as a madman. conversation i

C. That was a saucy fellow who threw that stone at your head; had he killed you, as I was afraid he had, I should have deemed it a disgrace to my country. R. If my blood could redeem my brethren and restore them to their long lost, and long forgotten rights, freely would I pour it out like water. C. You use strong language but I see nothing to warrant it. This is the land of freedom, of equal rights, where man is man and nothing more. We open the road to merit alone; and if some obtain richer prizes than others, it is because they are more deserving. Really, sir, I see no cause of excitement, or even complaint. R. You are pleasant. C. Not at all. I never treat with lightness that which is a matter of gravity with another. But I cannot avoid believing him, who complains in this blessed country, a grumbler by nature, or else out of his wits. We are all substantially equal. R. Equal! Pray, sir, where have you lived? C. With my countrymen who have at times reposed some little confidence in me, and whom I have endeavored to serve according to the measure of my ability. R. You are in easy circumstances? C. I am not what is called poor. R. You have leisure to ride about and see the country, to view the beauties and wonders of nature, the miracles of art and science, to

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cultivate your taste and enrich your mind with ancient and modern lore? C. Through the goodness of God, who has prospered me, I have something of this. R. And your friends and associates are among the fashionable and polite, the educated and refined, persons belonging to the upper classes, with leisure like yourself, taste, habits, and pursuits similar to your own? C. I rarely choose my friends from the vicious and vulgar. R. You can take your choice of schools and teachers, give your children the best education afforded by the country, and a vantage ground on commencing their active career in life? C. I am thankful that I can. R. And these advantages are worth something in your estimation? C. I certainly prize them very highly. R. How large a proportion of our whole population, do you suppose, possess the same or similar advantages? C. Probably not more than one in a hundred. R. Yet we are all substantially equal! C. Not precisely equal, I admit; but we are as nearly so as is possible or desirable. R. I know not that. I know not where the possible ends, or the impossible begins. A greater degree of equality you indeed may not desire; but what will say the ninety and nine who are not so favored as you are? C. There are indeed always some malignant spirits to envy the prosperous, and to declaim against the virtue which is above them. Such may desire a greater degree of equality, as the rascal with the halter round his neck, may desire the abolition of capital punishment. R. The ninety and nine, whom God, according to your reckoning, has not seen fit to favor as much as he has you, will no doubt feel obliged to you for likening them to the rascal with a halter round his neck, declaiming against hanging. You, who are at the top of society, are very apt to think that your opinions and your wishes are the only ones worth regarding; and you think that you have a perfect right to sneer at the views and wishes of those who are at its base. But the time has gone by when you could sneer with impunity. From time out of mind we have looked up to you as oracles; we have received your decisions as those of a god. When you told us that it was necessary that some should be rich and reverenced, and that others should

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be poor, miserable, despised, and trampled on, we believed you, and submitted to our hard fate. It did not occur to us that the advice you gave us was the advice of the rider to his horse. But now we understand you. We know the value of your opinions. When you tell us no more equality is desirable, we immediately ask ourselves, whether you ride or are ridden; whether you are those who reap all the benefits of society, or those who bear all its burdens. It is pleasant to ride, but hardly so to be ridden. It is very pleasant to reap the benefits, but not quite so pleasant to submit to the labor of producing them for others. C. But who can better judge of the value of the social system as it is, than they who are the most enlightened, and whose elevated position enables them to see it as a whole, and to mark all its workings? R. The master would no doubt tell his slave, who should question the justice or utility of slavery, that his position was too low to see its beauties. It is only the master, who stands on the slave’s shoulders, that can see the excellency of slavery. So, only you, who are at the topmost round of the social ladder, are raised high enough to see the beauty and excellence of the present order of things. But, if we are not high enough to see its beauty and excellence, we are low enough to feel its weight, and to suffer from its injustice; and we know not why we should bear this oppressive weight, and endure this injustice, merely that you alone may be elevated, and be freed from all burdens, and have nothing to do but to praise the system of things from which you alone profit. We are the many; our interests are as sacred in our eyes as yours are in yours; we desire a greater degree of equality, and as we are as ninety and nine to one, we can hardly be persuaded that what is desirable to us is upon the whole undesirable. C. You labor under a grievous mistake. It is for the benefit of the low that some should be above them. Those who are up, help raise those who are down. R. Admirable way indeed to raise a man, that of planting your feet on his shoulders! Be so good as to step off of our shoulders, and we will get up of ourselves. C. The upper classes do not stand on the shoulders of the lower. This is all fancy on your part. R. On what then do they stand? What keeps them up? Where there are several strata, one lying above another, I have always supposed the one above rested for its support on the one below. C. In physics you may be right, but in moral science things are different. The upper classes rest on their own merit. R. Very modest! Not content with depriving us of the fruits of our labors, you would monopolize all the merit in God’s universe!

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Moderate your pretensions. Merit, moral merit, is confined to no stratum of society but may be found in all, and as often in the lowest as in the highest; in the hovel as in the palace; clad in rags as in embroidery. But enough of this. Even you, notwithstanding your social position, I trust, retain some of the feelings of the man, and even you, I believe, if you would take an impartial survey of society as it is, would admit that more equality than now obtains, is desirable. C. I have seen society; I think I know what it is. R. You have seen it from a lofty position, and at a distance; come now and view it nearer by, and from a lower position. Down here, in these valleys, are many things which you may not have seen, or which you may have forgotten, or not considered. Go with me along our public works, our unfinished railroads and canals, and observe attentively this mass of abject beings whose labor constructs them. The contractors, who grow rich by working them as the teamster works his horses or his oxen, no doubt delights in their abjectness, for were they less abject, or were there fewer of them, he would be obliged to treat them better and pay them more wages, and perhaps be unable to hire them at all. Mark them, sir, kicked and knocked about by those petty tyrants, called overseers, and tell me if you see no distance between them and the nabob corporator, which it would be desirable to lessen? C. You speak of foreigners. The old world annually disgorges upon us her thousands and tens of thousands of vagabonds. I wish it could be prevented. R. These vagabonds, as you call them, are human beings; and human beings, wherever born, and whatever be the color of their fate or their skin, are to me not foreigners, but fellow citizens and brethren. But leave them; they are mostly Irish, and we are yet hardly able to reckon the Irish within the pale of humanity. Go into your factories—you may be a factory owner for aught I know—go into your factories and mark those pale-visaged girls chained to the spindle or the loom, growing “part and parcel” of the machinery on which they tend, and the bare mention of whom would make the wives and daughters of the factory owners turn up their noses, and tell me if you desire no greater degree of equality than now exists between those pale-visaged girls, and the up-nose-turning wives and daughters of the factory owners? Or go into your cities, into the back streets, dark lanes and blind courts, the damp cellars and unventilated garrets, crowded with human beings incrusted with filth and wallowing in the mire; and then go and view the mansions of the rich, fronting

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our broad, clean, and airy streets or open public squares; and tell me honestly if you see no more inequality than you deem desirable? C. That there are some degraded and suffering beings among us, I do not mean to deny; but their own vice and folly, ignorance or crime, make them so. Nobody need be poor and miserable in this country. R. Nor in any other. I thank you for the admission. If none need be poor and miserable, what mean you when you say a greater degree of equality is impossible? I had hoped to find you too clear-headed to fall into a contradiction so common. You tell me—as almost every man tells me—that a greater degree of equality is neither possible nor desirable; when I point you to instances which you cannot see without having all the better part of your nature cry out for more equality—instances of poverty which it is shocking to behold and painful to remember—you relieve yourself by saying this poverty, though not desirable, is unnecessary; it originates in the ignorance or depravity of the poor. That you may not feel any qualms of conscience for living in luxury while others are suffering for the necessaries of life, you assert that they suffer through their own fault, and that they need not be so poor. But in asserting this, you admit the possibility of producing a greater degree of equality. According to your own account, poverty then, is not necessary. Then it may be removed; then a greater degree of equality is possible. C. I mean a greater degree of equality is impracticable. We might indeed divide all the property of the community equally among all its members; but three days would not elapse before some one would dispose of his share to another, and the old inequality would soon be reproduced, and in an aggravated form. R. Admit this; it only shows that the method you mention is not the right method for introducing equality. C. But, sir, there have always been the poor, and there always will be, and the sooner we come to this conclusion the better. R. If it comes to prophesying, I may as well prophesy as you; I have as good a right to prophesy good as you have to prophesy evil. Poverty, you say, will never be cured; it requires not a little prophetic power to be able to look far enough into futurity to be certain of that. C. “The poor ye have always with you ” [Matt 26:11], said Jesus, and Moses assures us they “shall never cease out of the land” [Deut 15:11]. Whatever you may say of my prophetic power, I hope you will not call in question that of Moses and Jesus. God has in the depths of his own wisdom ordained poverty. I consider poverty an appointment, an express and beneficent appointment of God. R. Then go and give away what you have, and be poor.

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C. It is my duty to take care of what God has entrusted to my keeping. R. And so thought, I presume, the young man who came to Jesus to inquire what he should do to inherit eternal life. It is easy for you to say that poverty is a beneficent appointment of God; for in one sense it is beneficent to you; you could not be rich if others were not poor. It is their poverty that makes your wealth. You can have wealth and leisure because there are many poor to labor for you. But is poverty a beneficent appointment to the poor? Do you believe it! Why then have you ransacked heaven and earth, fire and water, sea and land to become rich? Do you believe it! Why then do you submit to the self-denial of being rich, and to the care of your huge estate? Do you believe it! Go then and take the place of him who is kicked from good society because he wears a thread-bare coat and a sunburnt face, who is made the common drudge, who must bear all the burdens of society, minister to the wants of the rich, and be despised and trampled on for it; go place yourself by the side of that poor mother weeping over her naked, freezing, starving children, and enduring the agony of a thousand deaths, as she sees them drop piecemeal into the grave; and then talk of poverty as a beneficent appointment of God! C. You are warm. Poverty is a blessed means to prepare its subjects for another world. R. What then, shall become of the rich? Do you believe this? How then do you hope to prepare yourself for another world? Shame on your base hypocrisy! Poverty a blessed means to prepare its subjects for another world! Did you not but now charge the poverty of the poor to their indolence, their vice, and their crime? Are indolence, vice, and crime the true preparations for heaven? Is he, whose every thought is racked to devise means to support the human animal, passing under the best discipline to prepare him for heaven? Away with such nonsense. It has already done injury enough to religion. You and your allies, the priests, have so effectually charged the sufferings we endure upon God that they have succeeded in filling the land with atheism. Has the poor man complained of poverty; happy is the poor man, for though poor and miserable here, he is sure of heaven hereafter, it is replied; and the priest pockets his tithe, and the tyrant sits secure on his throne. CONVERSATION II

C. You have evidently received a superior education, and yet I find you the very incarnation of radicalism. This to me is a mystery.

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R. Why so? Is there any necessary incongruity between a good education, and a sincere devotion to the interests of mankind—an unquenchable thirst to promote the well-being of the poor and the neglected? C. Perhaps not. But I have not been accustomed to look for radicals among the educated. R. Nor anybody else that knows anything. Still, education has no higher or holier vocation than that of fitting its subjects to be stern, uncompromising, and indefatigable reformers. But the educated among us belong to the more favored classes, and the more favored classes are always opposed to reform, or—if it suit you better—to innovation. A part of the educated owe their superior education to the fact that they belong by birth to the more favored classes; and the rest are placed in the category of the more favored classes by the fact that they are educated. In either case, whether educated because their fathers were rich, or whether poor boys who have contrived to get an education, they then belong to the aristocracy. And why should the aristocracy be reformers? What have they to allege against society as it is, since they have it altogether their own way; since it is altogether in their interest? A man like yourself has few inducements to be a reformer; you can hope to gain nothing by a reform. Bred to regard only yourself, inured by the habits of your life and the circumstances in which you have been placed, to a selfishness all but diabolical, tolerating no upshootings of the soul for the happiness of your fellow-beings, incapable of looking for, or tasting pleasure in doing them good, what can make you engage in the grand and glorious work of social regeneration? The man who blacks your boots and brushes your coat might engage in the work of reform, and the poor woman stewing over your kitchen fire preparing you a luxurious dinner, or a late supper, from the ill effects of which you will never recover, may be a radical. But not you; you have nothing to gain. You have drawn the highest prize; you have won the stake, and why hazard another game? You may lose, but you have nothing to hope from further winnings. You are now at the top of the social ladder. A change may place you at its foot. This is the case with nearly all the educated—or if it be not the case with all, each one trusts that it will be in a few days—and can you then wonder that so few of them are radicals? It is not because they are too wise, but because they have too great a stake in the existing order. Nor is this all. Our young men, who receive a superior education, are not educated to regard the well-being of humanity, to be reformers, the champions and servants of the people; but they are educated to get their living out of the people. None of our colleges or

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higher seminaries imbue our young men with an unquenchable zeal for human improvement, kindle up in their hearts a burning desire to set mankind forward, a disinterested love which weds itself to the cause of humanity, and pursues it through good report and through evil report, and never in the darkest hours relaxes its exertions. They train up our sons to manage the people skillfully, and to ride them gracefully and securely. Our professors are mere riding masters, giving lessons in the noble art of horsemanship. No man can be a professor unless he be an aristocrat or a conservative. C. Why not? R. Because our colleges and higher seminaries are founded by the wealthy, and are under the control of those whom the present order of things most favors, and because these will choose no man to be a professor unless he be one in whom they can confide. They can confide in no man who is in favor of any social changes, innovations, or improvements. They are men of the present, whom the present most favors, and they must naturally distrust all who do not in return favor the present. Moreover, to be chosen a professor a man must be a popular man. But the men, who are devoted to the highest and most enduring interests of mankind are never popular. He who has the misfortune to think in advance of his contemporaries, and to desire a good for mankind beyond that already attained, is necessarily unpopular. If he venture to translate his thoughts into words, and his hopes into actions, he will be branded a Jacobin, an agrarian, a leveler, an anarchist, or at best, a visionary, who, though he may mean well, is to be pitied, not trusted. Men who have faith in the future, whose mental vision sweeps a broader than the vulgar horizon, whose souls burn to raise up the low, to break the fetters of the slave, to open the prison doors to them that are bound, to preach glad tidings to the poor, hope to the desponding, consolation to the sorrowing, and life to the dead, must always count on being discarded by their own age and country. They cannot but be misinterpreted. They cannot but pass for what they are not, and would abhor to be. And how is it possible that such men should be chosen to superintend the education of our children? To be popular one must be a man of the present, uphold things as they are, never disturb the world with new views, but merely echo the sentiments he finds in vogue. He who can echo these the loudest, and with the greatest distinctness, is sure to be the most popular. Such men never trouble their age; they disturb no one’s prejudices, excite no alarm, produce no commotion. Such men always look for in colleges, and therefore never look to colleges for reformers, for

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new ideas, or for encouragement to labor in the cause of mankind. New ideas are placed in the world by those whom the world knows not, or whom it disowns if it knows them. Reforms come from the obscure and the unheeded; from a peasant and his fishermen followers, not from the popular and the honored. The weak things of this world are chosen to confound the mighty, and foolish things to bring to nought the wisdom of the wise.2 C. You do not appear to hold popular men in very high esteem. R. Not I. That is, if you mean by popular men those whom everybody praises, whose name is in everybody’s mouth, and whom their own age holds up as worthy of all imitation. I for one, claim no affinity with such men, and stay as short a time in their presence as possible. I am not of their parish. I cannot hurrah with the multitude, when they pass by, or deign to make a speech. God knows I do not envy, but pity them. Poor creatures! It is their fate to live and die without ever having felt the throe of a single idea, and without the consolation of having contributed aught to the movement of the race. With the present, pass away the popular men after whom the multitude now run; and as yesterday is swallowed up in today, so will they be lost in the generation to come, and be remembered no more forever. The future will preserve of the men now living only those who have had some forecast of that which is to come, and shooting by their own generation, have dared live, and labor, and suffer, for posterity. C. You talk strangely for a radical. I have always supposed a radical a mere compound of envy and malignity. R. And may you live long enough to repent of your error. What is there in this world to envy! I have seen all that it has to offer; I have tasted of all that which the many pursue as their chief good. I know what it is to be honored, and eulogized, to be rich and courted, to have my name in the gazette, and made the theme of the orator and the bard. It is all vanity. Wealth, fame, pleasure, pomp, place, power— they are mere shadows. I look with pity on him who sighs after them, and with unaffected sorrow on him whom they encumber. Poor things! Bask in your little hour of sunshine; make the most of its warmth, for an eternal winter of neglect and forgetfulness awaits you. Could I envy, it should be none but a Socrates drinking his hemlock, a Paul brought before Nero, a Vane at his prayers on the scaffold.3 I know not but I 2

[Ed. A reference to 1 Cor 1:27.] [Ed. The reference is to Henry Vane (1613-62), an English Puritan statesman who supported the Parliamentary cause during the English Civil War. During the Restoration he was arrested, imprisoned, tried, and executed.] 3

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might envy the martyr burning at the stake, for religion, for country, for justice, for unswerving devotion to truth, duty, God, man; but I can conceive of nothing else in this world to envy. But enough of this. To return to education. Our colleges and higher seminaries are not only instituted by, but for, the more favored classes. These classes— and you attest it—are always, taken collectively, conservative. They seek no social progress. They think, if we can keep things from growing worse, we shall do well to be satisfied. They therefore steadily oppose all radical changes in the social system. Details may be modified, but the ground work must not be touched. The rough fetters of the slave, which eat into his flesh, may be polished or converted into fetters of gold; but they must not be broken. This or that poor widow may be relieved, and the great body of the poor may have the priest come and tell them that if they will be quiet and patient here, never seeking to unhorse their riders, they shall go to heaven hereafter; but the poor, as a body, must not be elevated, and above all, must one beware how he proposes the complete and entire removal of poverty. These classes allow us to plead with all our might for the poor as individuals, for they are charitable and humane, but they forbid us under severe penalties to adopt effectual measures for the removal of the evils under which they labor. They permit us to give alms, but not to remove the necessity of almsgiving. They would mitigate the pain, for they do not delight to inflict suffering, they would mollify but never heal the wound. This being the character of the more favored classes touching the point in question, and their character presented in its best light, is it reasonable to ask them to commit the education of their children to the care of men, who have full faith in the practicability of removing all social evils, and who would do their best to communicate that faith to their pupils? I need not ask you, if you would choose a man of my opinions to be the educator of your children; for I know you would not. You would not send your children to a college of which I could be a president. My radicalism alone, without any other consideration, would prevent you from doing it. The same principle, which in this case governs you, would govern the whole of your class. I know you all. You have no wish to have your children educated to be reformers, because you have no faith in nor desire for reform yourselves. You have the instinct of self-preservation. You are not likely to be suicides; and yet it were suicidal for you to encourage reformers; for they would reform the abuses by which you are made the more favored class. Reform would deprive you of all your exclusive privileges. You would be obliged to black your own boots, sweep your own chimneys, and in all cases perform

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your own drudgery. Not willingly will you consent to this. You do not choose to be your own servants, and you will not be, so long as you can find others who will be servants to you; and not till you consent to be your own servants, will you consent to sustain professors who aim to prepare your children for the work of perfecting the social organization. As things now are, professors, who desire to perfect the social organization, must leave their professorships, or withhold their own convictions. If they choose to retain their chairs, they must consent to support the existing order of things; lecture in favor of order, not liberty; against anarchy, not against tyranny; and labor to send out every year an army of young conservatives, prepared to put down all tendencies to philanthropic enthusiasm, to crush every effort of the people to meliorate their condition and to perfect society; not an army of reformers, trained to their work, and able to bring science, and literature, and taste, and genius, and religion to their aid, and prepared to die, if need be, in obtaining for the human race an advanced position. No; they must wither the holiest affections, and chill the noblest aspirations of the young heart, and send it out dead and cold. The same influence corrupts our literature and renders it hostile to democracy. Few things are more to be deplored by a true American than what passes for American literature. It is tame and servile, so servile that it might excite the derision of an Asiatic despot. Scarcely a writer among us dares utter an original thought or breathe a noble aspiration. No writers have a more sovereign dread of radicalism than American writers. With what contempt must those Europeans who are enlightened and who understand that America stands pledged to what you call radicalism, turn over the leaves of our popular reviews and magazines! And how discouraging indeed, must it be to the friends of humanity in other countries, the noble spirits who plead with ignorance, combat prejudice, and struggle with the tyrant, to listen in vain for a cheering and strengthening word from America, the boasted land of the free! That word they hear not. Let not the reformers in other lands look to us for sympathy. Our sympathies are not with the friends of truth, freedom, justice. Our writers are the faint echos of the hired defenders of priests, kings, and nobility. The world is cursed with few periodicals—so far as they have any character—more strictly anti-radical and purely conservative than the New York and North American Reviews.4 Even Blackwood and the Lon4 [Ed. The New York Review (March 1837-April 1842) was a Whig journal of opinion; The North American Review (1815-1940) was one of the most important reviews in the United States with a large list of subscribers and distinguished authors, edited by Unitarians in the early nineteenth century.]

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don Quarterly are less so.5 The New York Review is rescued from contempt because it has courage enough to avow its real character; but the North American hardly ever dares say, good Lord or good devil, though it has a manifest longing to say good devil, having, I presume, a presentiment that it must fall into his hands at last.6 We sometimes complain that the old world does not respect us. Let us cease to complain and study to deserve respect by being true to our principles. No object is more contemptible than a democratic people apologizing for their democracy, and trying all possible methods to resemble those who are cursed with monarchies. America will never be respected till she is worthy of respect, and never will she be worthy of respect, till she shall be true to herself, and dare avow and defend the doctrine of equality on which her institutions are founded. She must have a literature in harmony with the rights of man; and her writers must draw from minds that have been formed in schools of equality, and from hearts that are large enough to embrace the whole family of man and keep them warm. Man and man only must be able to kindle their enthusiasm, and inspire their strains. They must rise above all factitious distinctions, be able to pierce beneath every garb, to discover the Incarnate God though clad in rags. They must dare speak out from full minds and hearts their free thoughts, and give them to us with all the freshness and vigor with which they come to themselves; and to send out their feelings as warm as they gush up in their own hearts, if they would make her respectable in the eyes of those whose respect is worth having. This is not the case now, and the reason why it is not, is obvious. Aside from the newspaper press, at present our only hope, all our literature is designed for the wealthy and educated, for the American aristocracy. I have told you the character of this aristocracy. It has no stars, no coronets; but it has the exclusive spirit which pervades all aristocracies, less of liberality than the aristocracies of the old world, because its tenure is less secure, and because each member of it knows that it is possible he may tomorrow be at the lowest depth of the people. They who write for this aristocracy must write to suit its views and prejudices. Most of our books, our quarterlies, and our monthlies, are designed for this portion of the community, and hence 5 [Ed. References are to Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine (1817-1981), founded by William Blackwood, a book publisher, and the London Quarterly Review (18091969), a Tory publication during the early nineteenth century.] 6 This abuse of the North American Review is very unchristian. We can bear witness that this Review never intentionally offends God, man, or the devil, and therefore should not be so abused.— EDITOR.

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their conservative character. Let one of our quarterlies admit an article which goes for the many instead of the few, and the few who are its supporters will at once stop their subscriptions. Without subscriptions the periodical cannot be continued, and subscriptions it cannot have unless it appeal to the exclusive interests of those who are expected to patronize it. Publishers have then their option, either to appeal to that exclusive interest, or to stop publishing. A book written in the interests of humanity, full of rich thoughts and noble sentiments, expressed in a style of classic elegance and purity, and with a power almost superhuman, will find few purchasers beyond the ranks of the workingmen, and even the workingmen, prone to take their cue from their supposed betters, will not venture to approve it. In this way nearly all the advantages of a free press are lost. Some of the best minds among us are silent because they can find no medium through which they can utter their thoughts. A mind conscious of great wealth, of high and generous aims, noble and kindling thoughts, will not consent to pare itself down to a saleable size in the book stall. It must be allowed to speak out, and speak out freely in its own way, and its own burning words, or it will not speak at all. How much is lost by the miserable censorship, which a sickly public opinion establishes over the American press, for which our whole nation “must fare the worse,” God only knows. And how many of the noblest and most gifted of our contemporaries lock up their thoughts in their own bosoms, and die because they cannot utter themselves, is a secret which will be known at the day of judgment. Our press is muzzled because no book can be published unless it find a publisher, and if it contain an idea, a publisher it will hardly find; because the bookseller will be afraid that the idea will render it unpopular and therefore unsalable. The pulpit is gagged in the same way. Clergymen are in some instances from the conservative class, in all cases their education, habits, and associations, tend to identify them with the aristocracy. They thus catch the aristocratic tone of thought and feeling. Restricted in their own studies principally to their professions, they depend on the better educated and wealthier members of their congregations for their views of political economy and the social state, and consequently must adopt, even with the best intentions, conservative notions. This is not, however, true of all. Some of them see the truth; but then how mighty are the temptations with which they are surrounded to conceal it! The clergyman depends on the aristocracy for friends and supporters; to receive the friendship and support of the aristocracy he must enter into their views and support their inter-

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ests. If he do not please the aristocracy of his parish, he may be dismissed supperless to bed; or sent out into the world, with a wife and children depending on him for support, and he not a penny in pocket, or in reputation with which to support them. To preach the gospel in these times, and in this country—that is, to preach it as it should be preached—one should have the spirit of martyrdom, be prepared to live alone in the world, to be looked upon with distrust wherever he goes, to be called a visionary, or a fanatic, to be familiar with poverty, to be harassed in body and in mind, to die of disappointment and grief, and leave behind a helpless widow and friendless orphans. If he would avoid this, he must temporize, form an alliance between Christ and Belial, God and Mammon, and beware how he touches a new idea. New ideas will render him unpopular. If unpopular, he cannot collect an audience; if he cannot collect an audience, he can have no salary; and if no salary, he must cease to preach, or starve. They who hold the purse, therefore, virtually write his sermons. In a vast majority of cases the clergyman is but a speaking machine, from which the aristocracy grind out just such discourses as best please them. These views, sir, which doubtless are very pleasing and encouraging to you conservatives, are very saddening to me. My heart is oppressed and filled with grief. O my countrymen—and yet why complain? No man, who does not uphold the present—though he have a heart that would take in the whole family of man, and a mind that, with a prophet’s ken, sees the future and what it demands—can obtain a hearing from his contemporaries. His own generation know him not; they neither see nor hear him. They know not how much rich thought, how much disinterested love, what power to do and dare anything and everything for human regeneration, there may be in that heart, into which they look not, and which they will not suffer to be laid open to them. When the man of new views, the reformer, is dead, men will build him a tomb, or garnish his sepulcher; but so long as he lives they leave him to be stoned. Yet let me not “bate a jot of heart or hope,”7 but bear on my way. Mankind, thou canst be saved only by crucified redeemers. Ay, it is so. The Cross is the true symbol of regeneration. He, who will go forth to defend the right, to plead for the poor and the neglected, the oppressed and the enslaved, must take up his cross and follow Jesus. He, who condemns the present—and he, who demands reform, does condemn it—must be himself condemned in return. The present attacks those by whom it is attacked. They are wolves in sheep’s cloth7

[Ed. John Milton, “To Mr. Cyriack Skinner upon his blindness,” lines 6-7.]

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ing, they, the pretended reformers, who find wind and tide in their favor, and whose bark is wafted gently forward by the breath of popular applause. The future is elaborated in the present; but its elaborators must work in dark laboratories, silent retreats, or subterranean caverns, unseen, unknown, unvisited, uncheered, unaided. It cannot be otherwise. Christ must needs suffer. They are of the future, and the future must be their reward. Their views, their ideas, their wishes, their hopes are dark mysteries to their contemporaries. They are the prophets of a new age. The world is not worthy of them. There is no world for them. They must be the builders as well as the heralds of their own world. And while they seem to those around them but the mere pullers-down of the world, in which they appear, but to which they belong not, how can they excite any other shout than that of “crucify them, crucify them.” And yet the cross is sometimes all but too heavy to be borne, and the firmest and stoutest faint beneath its weight. O it is bitter to be cursed with thoughts beyond your age, to see truths invisible to all eyes but your own, to be compelled to utter prophecies you know will not be credited, to be alone in the thronged city, a stranger in the home of your childhood, and amid faces familiar to you from your youth up. O this is a solitude in which a man agonizes, sweats as it were great drops of blood! Mankind, thou little knowest what it costs to save thee from thyself. No matter. Thou deservest to have martyrs, for thou art the child of God. But why talk I in this strain? You understand me not. I talk mysticism, fanaticism, or barbarism to your comprehension. C. You are right now. All this stuff about what the reformer suffers is all foolishness to me. R. And so, sir, must be all great truths, and pure philanthropy, and lofty enthusiasm, to you and to such as you. When you have felt a desire for human happiness for the progress of mankind, so strong that you could not sleep; when you have given years of intense study to the means of doing good, and sacrificed wealth, ease, reputation, friends, and found yourself alone, considered by one a madman, and by another an imp of hell, and found that after all your exertions, no man understands you, no bosom responds with sympathy to the holy love struggling in your own, and that you must after all die, without having finished your work; then you may sneer at the reformer, and call what he says foolishness; till then be silent, lest you be found blaspheming God.

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C. There is no ground for the distinction of which you speak. We are all workingmen. The lawyer, the physician, the clergyman, the merchant, the statesman, the philosopher works as hard, perhaps harder, than your ploughman, your ditcher, your carpenter, shoemaker, or blacksmith. R. Admitted; but the difference is this, one class works to produce, the other class works to secure for itself the proceeds of the other’s producing. The community is divided into two classes; one class, which I denominate the workingmen, are producers, the other class are accumulators of wealth. The first class create wealth, the second transfer it to their own pockets. C. But there is one thing which you radicals seem always to overlook. You either cannot or will not regard the aid which the producers receive from the skill, science, enterprise, and capital of those you call the accumulators. Your producers would be in a sad box, if they were deprived of the capital of the accumulators, and of their science to direct their mere brute labor. The labor of those heads, which to you seem idle, is doing more than all the labor of the hands of your producers, to facilitate the work of production. R. But production for whom? These accumulators with their capital and their head-work, I know, multiply productions far exceeding in amount anything we could do by our mere hand-work; but who secure the profits? You, and all the economists with whom I am acquainted, seem to take it for granted that the well-being of the producer is always in exact proportion to the amount of production; and they would be right, if every man produced for himself; but as things now are they are most sadly mistaken. The accumulators study to employ their science and capital in that manner which will give them the greatest profit; that is, so that they may derive the greatest possible amount of production from the labors of the producers. The advantages, to which you allude, then, of increased production, are advantages almost exclusively to the accumulators. C. In point of fact, you are greatly out in your reckoning. The expense of manufacturing a yard of calico bears no comparison with what it was fifty years ago. A similar change has taken place in the expense of producing almost all the articles consumed by the common laborer; and do you mean to tell me the laborer has gained nothing by this cheapness of production, and this low price he has to pay for whatever he consumes? The laboring classes are in a condition almost immeasurably above that in which they were at the ep-

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och of our Revolution. To be assured of this, you need but compare the price of labor with that of bread stuffs then, and the price of labor with that of bread stuffs now. You may also be convinced of this by observing the houses, dress, and style of living of laborers now, which in many respects are superior to what those of the rich were then. R. This mode of judging is fallacious. That there has been a general increase of wealth throughout the civilized world for the last forty or fifty years, nobody is fool enough to deny. Man’s empire over nature during this period has been greatly extended and consolidated; the powers of production of all kinds, as well as productions themselves, have been so multiplied as to baffle all efforts at calculation. The laboring classes most certainly account many things necessaries of life now, which they then accounted its luxuries. But they are not the less poor. Poverty and wealth are merely relative terms. The only true method of judging of this matter is to ascertain whether the position of the producer, relatively to that of the accumulator, be higher or lower, than it was at the epoch of the Revolution, before the marvelous powers of machinery, of science, and capital had been made to bear on production, as they have been since. Grant that a yard of calico may be purchased now at an eighth of what it cost fifty years ago; what is gained, if in order to maintain the same relative social position, the blacksmith’s wife must put seven yards more into her gown, or have eight gowns to one then? You know, sir, if you know anything about it, that, notwithstanding the general advance of wealth and the vast multiplication of the necessaries and conveniences of life, it is altogether more difficult for the common laborer to maintain the same social position now, than it was fifty years ago. The general style of living has more than kept pace with the increase of wealth. The mechanic, it may be, receives two and even three times as much, nominally, for his labor now as he did then, and is required to pay two or three times less for what he purchases; but then he must have as much more as this difference implies in order to be a man of the same consequence that he was. The blacksmith’s wife must have a carpet now, where a nicely sanded floor was enough then; and a French calico instead of a homemade, copperasdyed, towand-linen gown, which was her pride then. Then she could spin and weave, and with butternut bark, dye her husband a coat from the wool he received for blacksmithing; but now she can only do some fine needlework, and he can wear only broadcloth; both of which things demand corresponding changes in the style of living. C. And I should suppose that with your great affection for blacksmiths, and especially for blacksmiths’ wives, you would rejoice that it is so.

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R. No. My friends, the blacksmith and his wife, the shoemaker and his wife, the house wright, and the wheelwright and their wives, are all poorer than they were. Their houses may look better outwardly, but they are not so comfortable inside. They have more compared with what they then had, but less compared with what is now the general style of living. The sanded floor, the copperas gown, the checked apron, the butternut coat, and tow shirt, frock, and trousers, were good enough for them then, for they were as good as their neighbor’s had. Some little vanity or uneasiness might now and then be occasioned by the quality, the skill of the housewife in making, in dying, or in fitting, but it amounted to very little. Each family manufactured for itself, and felt itself independent; and the feeling of independence that we have within ourselves the means of providing for our own wants, is worth more than all the carpets, French calicoes, French silk, satin, lace, and the like things in the world. Those were happy times. Labor was no disgrace, for all labored; and homespun was no badge of inferiority, for all wore it. I remember how delighted I used to be when I was a boy, at evening, to seat myself on the dyetub, which stood in the corner, and hear the maid, who was doing our spinning accompany the music of her wheel with such old songs as “Jemmy and Nancy,” and “the Cruelties of Barbara Allen.”8 I have heard some famous singers in my day; but no songs have ever charmed me like those old songs sung by our neighbor’s daughter who did our spinning. What though she had but one calico gown for Sunday; what though that was often turned and altered to look unfaded and to be within hailing distance of the fashion; and what though she worked for forty cents a week, and had no gilt album or souvenir lying in her boudoir? She had health and cheerfulness, bloom on her cheek, an elastic bound in her step, heartiness in her laugh, witchery in her smile, and was as good as any of us. It was no disgrace that “she went out to work.” No young spark made any account of that. At all gatherings and merrymakings, her head was as high as any one’s, and her chance for a worthy and respectable companion was as good as hers who never worked in or out of her father’s house. Nobody complained of bad servants. The daughters of the best families would go and help the poorest if they could be spared from home. Thus was it in one of thy mountain towns, my native state, in my young days. Then the hearts of thy children were as fresh as the verdure of thy 8 [Ed. For a version of “Jemmy,” see Satis N. Coleman and Adolph Bregman, Songs of American Folks (Freeport, New York: Books for Libraries Press, 1942), 1415; for “Barbara Allen,” see Alan Lomax, The Folk Songs of North America in the English Language (Garden City, New York: Doubleday, 1960), 183-84.]

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mountains, and their spirits as free as the winds that sweep over them. I have seen many countries; I have visited lands most renowned in song or story; I have lived in cities, consorted with the great, and wedged my way into the charmed circles of the fashionable; but give me back the mountain home of my childhood, and let me hear again the wheel and our neighbor’s eldest daughter accompany the music of her spinning with the old songs of “Jemmy and Nancy,” and “The Cruelties of Barbara Allen.” In that home I was made a freeman. I drew in a love of equality with the milk from my mother’s breast. There I learned to look on man, to see the man and not his clothes; and for this I bless thee, my native state. Fame gives thee credit for no great men, but I know thou hast a great people, and my old geography yet reads, and I hope not in vain, “Vermont is an independent state.” Forgive me, sir, for this allusion to my native state, and to the home of my childhood. That home is changed now. The same blue sky bends over it, the same golden sun sheds its beams upon it; but old faces have gone, old manners have given way. The summer’s stock of cloth no longer lies bleaching on the grass plat before the door; my sister is not there with her water-pot; and to the sound of the waterfall, and the spinning-maid’s song, has succeeded the endless clack of the cotton mill. C. You are a strange radical. I knew not before that radicals ever thought of the past save to condemn it. I have always supposed that they had eyes only for the future. R. That is, you have supposed we were only half men. This is a mistake. For my part, I love the ancient and the time-hallowed. I delight to stand on spots renowned in story; amid the fragments of earlier worlds, to conjure up the dread spirit of the mighty past, and question him concerning those who were, but are not. I never had even a cane that I had carried for a long time, a knife which had done me good service that I could lose without a pang. But I have learned to sacrifice the poetical to the useful. I love the old oak which yet stands by the home of my childhood, under whose shade I have so often played when life was full, and by which I whispered the tale of my earliest and truest love; but I would cut it down sooner than I would see my children freeze, or want fuel to cook their food. C. Then you would not really destroy our factories, demolish all our labor-saving machinery, and go back to the hand-cards, the handloom, the spinning wheel, the spinning-maid, and the songs of Jemmy and Nancy and the Cruelties of Barbara Allen! R. Not I. I would never go back. If I some times give a tear to the

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past, it is never to evoke it from its tomb. No. Let it rest in peace. The past which is revived is never the past which lives in our memories. It is only the ideal past that is venerable. Those old songs would not please me now. The bloom is no longer on the maiden’s cheek who bounded at her wheel, and gone is the mischief from her eye, and the witchery from her smile. We have lost the religion of our youth. The fairies no longer keep holiday on the green knoll in the pasture, or pinch the milkmaid because she stints our supper. But I do not regret it. All changes in the end are proved to be steps forward in the march of humanity. Yet the step we have taken during the last fifty years is shorter than we pretend. We have changed the mode of production; for our neighbor’s daughter, who used to do my mother’s spinning and weaving, who nursed her in her confinement, and who was one of us, good as the best in the neighborhood, we have now the pale and sickly factory girl, who must up at the ringing of a bell, eat and sleep at the ringing of a bell, obey the whistle of a petty overseer, never leave her jail limits without permission, and whose average working life is only about four years. The one was our equal, whom the sons of our best farmers were willing and often glad to marry, and the other can get her a husband among the factory population perhaps—but rarely elsewhere. She is only a factory girl, and you know what that means. And surely here is some loss—a loss of health, cheerfulness, freedom, and social position; and what is gained to balance this loss? At best two dollars a week instead of forty cents, and which two dollars does less to satisfy her wants, than the forty cents did to satisfy the wants of the one who did our spinning. The difference between these two girls is the difference between the working classes of our country fifty years ago and now. Yet, improvements have been effected, important inventions have been made and labor-saving machinery introduced which abridges labor many thousand fold. As soon as the producers can so arrange matters as to produce for themselves, they will reap the full advantage of this labor-saving machinery, and of the increased capital of the country. At present they receive no direct profit from either. The accumulators reap the profits. This discloses the true aim of the radical. His aim is not to produce equality in property, nor in anything else, but to make every man a proprietor, so that the producer and the accumulator shall always be united in the same person. To this point, I would have governments direct their attention; all the friends of the people should keep it in view, and all legislative and educational measures should tend to it.

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C. You have now stated your object clearly. I must think of it. And tomorrow I hope you will get the better of your sentimentalism, so far at least as not to talk nonsense. CONVERSATION IV

C. Your plan is more plausible than sound and appears much better in theory than it will appear in practice. Division of labor is essential to the very existence of society. But your plan requires every man to do everything for himself. R. Not at all. The shoemaker may stick to his last, and the blacksmith may work at his forge. All the division in labor now recognized, may continue under the regulation, that every man works for himself, as well as under our present arrangement. The only division of labor to which I object, is that which assigns the head-work to one part of the community, and the hand-work to another. Since man is both soul and body, I would have no division of body-work and soul-work. Both should be as inseparable as soul and body. In the present state of things all the soul-work devolves on a distinct class of the community, and they are treated as though they were all soul; all the body-work falls to another class, and they are treated as though they were all body. But this is unnatural and unjust. The body-workers have souls as well as the soul-workers. They who do our hand-work are of the same order of being with those who do our head-work. C. That is true. But still, it is a very great advantage to the handworkers, to have the aid of the head-workers. This you radicals seem to overlook. You complain bitterly that those who work with their heads are rewarded for their labor. You are not willing to give any share of the fruits of hand-work to him who by his inventions has given to your hands a hundred fold their natural strength. Brute labor is all that you seem to regard as worthy of compensation. The philosopher, the naturalist, the mechanician, the painter, the poet, the sculptor, the musician, soul-workers as they are, must not be paid for their labors, though without their labors, life would be hardly worth possessing. R. Stop there, if you please. You mistake us greatly. We would have all these soul-workers paid. But soul-work always pays itself. If these soul-workers could have wherewithal to provide for the body while they were at work with the soul, it would be all that they would demand. No man who pursued his profession for the sake of money was ever yet a great philosopher, or a great artist. My rule is that soul must pay for soul and body for body. I object to an exchange of the products of the one for those of the other. At present, necessity may

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demand the unholy barter; but when society becomes what it should be, it will be discontinued. C. How then are these soul-workers, as you call them, to live? Are we to have no men of science, no philosophers, no artists? R. Millions to one in comparison with what we now have, I hope; but you seem very slow of apprehension. I would have every man labor for himself on his own capital, and then every man would have the time to produce all that is needed for the body; and also as much as can be devoted with any degree of advantage to moral, intellectual, and aesthetical pursuits. C. Are you sure of that? R. Some nice calculators have ascertained that if all men would labor, each three hours a day, they would produce all the material goods which they would need, or which could be enjoyed by the body. Now any physiologist will tell you that three hours labor a day is no more than is needed for the health of the body; and any man, who has any acquaintance with mental pursuits, will assure you that six hours a day are as much as any man can profitably devote to them. He, who labors three hours a day and studies six, will make much greater progress, than he who studies nine and labors none at all. This would leave every man fifteen hours a day for refreshment, social intercourse, and sleep. Under such an arrangement, you see, every man would be able to devote all the time necessary to headwork—to science, philosophy, poetry, music, painting, or sculpture. There would then be no need of a separate class for these pursuits to be paid out of the hand-work of the rest. C. I suppose then you would not pay the clergy, physicians, lawyers, nor public officers? R. No. They would need no pay. Each one would give three hours a day to labor as a matter of exercise, for health; and that would produce him all he would need for his body. His other labors being mental, would be recompensed by a mental reward. Besides, in this case, clergymen would not be needed; every man would know the Lord for himself, and be his own priest. Physicians would hardly be needed; for temperance and proper exercise would maintain almost uninterrupted health. Lawyers would not be in much request; for roguery would then hardly exist, and public officers would have but little employment. C. Upon my word, you are a beautiful dreamer! And how do you expect to realize this dream? R. As I have told you, by having every man do his own handwork and head-work.

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C. And you suppose the workingmen, mere brute laborers, can become intellectual beings, philosophers, learned men, artists. R. Why not? Are not we of the same order of being with those who think themselves above us? We care not with what contempt they look upon us, nor how contemptuously they sneer at our hopes for the future; we know that our bosoms burn, and our eyes sparkle with a fire as pure and as eternal as that which they bid us worship in their idol temples. Of the dust of the earth we indeed are, and downtrodden to the dust too we long have been; but we are also the offspring of God, and upward to our Father and our native heaven we may rise. C. You have, for six thousand years, given brave proofs of your celestial origin! One would think that in so long a series of ages your inward fire might have been kindled into a blaze. R.

Full many a gem of purest ray serene The dark, unfathomed caves of ocean bear; Full many a flower is born to blush unseen, And waste its sweetness on the desert air.9

And beware, sir, how you add insult to injury. You put out our eyes and reproach us for our blindness; make us blind and then tell us we shall tumble into the ditch unless we have somebody to lead us. In our mother’s arms the fire of intellect is smothered, and you and your caste keep watch by us ready to dash on your pailfuls of cold water whenever a symptom of its revival is discovered. Now that we have been kept in ignorance, deprived of the means of developing our powers, and obliged to conceal the God laboring in our breasts under the veil of idiocy, you have the effrontery to mock us because we are not philosophers, and to tell us that we must work hard to pay you for your great condescension in thinking for us; and you might add, for condescending to be happy for us. Base hypocrites! We understand you. We will not trust you to do our thinking; for we are suspicious that your thinking is much more to your profit than to ours. Your thinking for us amounts to little else than how to make us work to the best advantage, while you shall pocket the proceeds. You are fond of extolling the importance of head-work; but, as we have learned that you may contrive to get your living without working at all. For you do not think as much, nor do you turn out to be such profound thinkers, as you pretend. Most of the discoveries of which 9 [Ed. Thomas Gray (1716-71), Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard, lines 52-55.]

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you boast, and inventions and improvements in the arts of production, from which you derive so much profit, are the result of our thinking; and nearly all the individuals, who have saved your body from putrefaction, have been supplied from our ranks. We comprehend you; and hereafter will endeavor to do our own thinking; and if we think not so much to your interest as10 you have done, we may think perhaps more to our own, which will be still better. C. In most of your remarks you labor under a mistake. You seem to believe that there is a class in this country hostile to the workingmen, seeking to circumvent them, and to keep them from rising. All this is mere fancy. I can speak for myself, and I think for all of those whom you brand as aristocrats, that nothing would give them or me more sincere pleasure than to see the workingmen all in comfortable circumstances. We have no pleasure in poverty, no delight in seeing, and certainly none in causing human suffering. You do us great injustice, and you do a serious injury to the workingmen themselves. You stir up their jealousies, excite their hostility against those you call the accumulators, and throw the whole community into a state of intestine war. Now this is no way to bring about a reform. The rich are necessary to the poor, and the poor are necessary to the rich, and as the friend of either class, you should seek to make both live together as brothers. R. The lamb is necessary to the wolf; for without the lamb the wolf might want a dinner; and the wolf is necessary to the lamb, for without the wolf the lamb might fail to be eaten. “Therefore,” says the benevolent wolf to the lamb, “do not be hostile to us, nor excite your brother lambs against us; for you see we wolves and you lambs are mutually necessary to each other. We are as dependent on you for something to eat, as you are on us to be eaten.” “But I don’t want to be eaten,” exclaims the lamb in great trepidation. “Not want to be eaten!” replies the wolf. “Now that’s odd. You and I are very far from thinking alike, and I must needs consider you very unreasonable, and radical in your mode of thinking.” C. Do you mean to call the rich wolves? R. Apply my comparison as you please. All I mean is that the reasoning of the wolf appears to me as conclusive and every whit as just as yours. C. I anticipated nothing of this from you, who evidently have had the means of knowing better. Some ignorant workingman might have been pardoned for talking so, but you, whoever or whatever 10

[Ed. The original has “us” for “as.”]

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you are, have seen too much of the rich to believe any such thing as you assert. You must have some base and sinister purpose in supporting the workingmen. You have some personal pique to gratify, and I no longer believe you honest but mistaken, as I did at first. R. As you please. I profess to have no control over your opinions. You are not the first man whom the truth has offended, and will not be the last. But be cool. Now I know the rich; I know the accumulators of wealth in this country and in most others, and it is because I know them that I speak as I do. C. If you continue to talk thus, I must break off the conversation, and relieve myself of your company. R. As it suits your pleasure. I neither court nor avoid any man. But listen a moment. Now I have not the most distant suspicion that there is a class among us that wishes to keep down the workingmen, or that wills their poverty. The rich have no disposition to injure the poor. They are not hostile to the poor. The wolf does not by any means dislike the lamb, or wish to injure it. He only wants a dinner, and lamb is his most agreeable food. He loves lamb most affectionately. C. No more of that, sir. R. Well, well, sir, I see you do not like the comparison; you probably are afraid of the consequences. The wolf— C. I tell you I will hear no more of that. R. Very well, sir. I only wanted to say that the wolf might be afraid, if the lambs should once know that they were necessary to the wolf only for the purpose of furnishing him dinners, and that he was necessary to them only for the purpose of eating them, that they might, as they probably have no great desire to be eaten, combine against him, and thus leave him to feed on something else; but as it is disagreeable to you, I won’t say it. And besides the wolf must be very foolish to apprehend any danger from a combination among the lambs. What could they do against the wolf? By combining they would only give him an opportunity to make his dinner on the fattest instead of the leanest. But seriously, sir, your talk about the necessity of the rich to the poor is all a humbug, and fully justifies my comparison. The poor are necessary to the rich, I admit; but that the rich are necessary to the poor, I deny; and you know they are not, as you testify by your dread of my saying so. It is out of no love to the poor, no tender regard for their welfare, that you wish to have it understood that the rich are necessary to them. C. You seem to think that we are a set of selfish wretches, who detest the poor and do all we can to make them miserable.

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R. No, I do not. I acquit you of all hostility to the poor. I am even willing to admit that you have a certain affection for them, and would do your best to preserve and multiply them. C. Come, cease your pleasantry, and speak seriously. R. I am serious, and speak with all the truthfulness I can command. The wolf certainly has no disposition to destroy the race of lambs. Nor do I blame the wolf for making his dinner of lamb. It is his nature to do it. Nor do I blame the accumulator for transferring the profits of the workingman’s labor into his own pockets. It is his nature to do it. He could not be an accumulator if he did not. What I complain of is that there are wolves, or accumulators of wealth, separate from the producers of wealth. In sober earnest, you can assign but two reasons why the rich are necessary to the poor; one reason is that they may be the instructors of the poor, and the other that they may give them employment. Have you any other reasons to allege? C. Those are enough. R. But we have disposed of these already by contending that the poor should do their own thinking, and also work for themselves. There is no good reason in the world to be assigned, why one class of the community should be dependent on another for its instructors. The whole community may and should be equally educated, and every man may and should work for himself. So long as the wealth of the community is in the hands of only a certain number of individuals; or, in other words, so long as the community is divided into two classes, one of which owns the funds, and the other of which must perform the labor of production, the poor are undoubtedly dependent on the rich for employment; and since without employment, the poor must beg, steal, or starve, the rich may be said to be necessary to them. But this is the precise evil I complain of in the present social arrangement of wealth and labor. Let each man become an independent proprietor, and then the rich would not be necessary to the poor, in order to give them employment, for each man could employ himself on his own capital, and instead of working for another he could work for himself C. Every man does work for himself now. I do not know what you mean by this senseless clatter about every man’s working for himself on his own capital. Every man does so work now. One man’s capital is his farm, his workshop, or his store and goods, another’s his ability to labor, the strength and activity of his limbs. In the great copartnership of society each man invests his capital, whatever it be, and receives his share of the gains. Some invest more than others,

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and therefore receive and ought to receive a proportionally larger share. You and I too form a copartnership when I employ you as a common laborer to plough, plant, hoe, or reap for me. You are not indeed an equal partner. Your investment is less than mine. You invest merely your bodily strength and activity, while I invest house, barn, outhouses, land, oxen, horses, sheep, and hogs, together with my own labor, bodily or mental. Now as my investment is more than yours, I ought to receive a larger portion of the gains. Your share is called your wages, and when you consider that in copartnerships of this kind, I have all the vexation and labor of superintending the joint concern that I have to pay all the incidental expenses, run all the risk, and be responsible for all the debts, and to you also for your share, I think that you must admit that your wages amount to your full proportion. Certain it is that many an employer would do well to exchange places with those he employs. They in fact often run away with all the gains, and seldom suffer when the concern is a losing one. This matter of wages about which workingmen have so much to say is, after all, a thing beyond human control. A stern and unyielding necessity governs it. There is a natural ratio established between wages and the price of articles demanded for consumption, which no power on earth can alter. If wages rise, articles of consumption rise in the same proportion; if wages fall, then articles of consumption fall. Let the workingmen double their wages, and what they gain on the one hand they will find they lose on the other. They will have to pay double for everything they consume. When masons, and carpenters, and house joiners rise in their wages, house rent will rise; when house rent rises real estate will rise in value, land will bear a higher price, and of course the productions of the soil. Flour must rise; the baker then will ask more for his loaf or make it lighter; and when the shoemaker must pay more for his bread, he will charge more for his shoes, and so it will be with all the trades. This shows in a clear light the fallacy of strikes, trades’ unions, and all combinations of workingmen for higher wages, which are seldom successful; and when they are, amount to nothing. In the transition from one price to another, the trade which gets the start of the rest may gain something, but as soon as one trade rises, all the rest will rise, and then things are as they were before. When a day’s work will buy a bushel of wheat, and only a bushel, it makes no difference whether you call the price of a day’s work sixpence or five dollars. Ignorance of this fact does great harm. Mechanics in our cities become uneasy, they spend a portion of their earnings in the grog-

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shops, in oyster-cellars, in houses of prostitution, or in theaters, and finding what remains too little for their necessary expenses, they cry out for more wages, put the business part of the community to great inconvenience, often embarrassing them seriously, and subjecting themselves to loss of time and of money, when even were they to succeed nothing would be gained. No, sir; these things must be left to take care of themselves. The partner who has the smaller investment must not expect to share equally with him who has the larger, much less to possess himself, as the workingmen seem to desire, of all the profits of the firm. Let the workingmen limit their desires to what is their due, and they will have justice done them; but if they can be satisfied only by having their share, and that which belongs to the other members of the firm into the bargain, then I must for one resist them, and if I fail, society will fail to exist. Sir, let me beseech you to bear this in mind. A laboring man’s capital is his bodily strength and activity, a kind of capital which is essential to the copartnership, but which is only an item and a small item in the immense amount invested. What that is entitled to out of the general gains let him have. He works on his own capital and has what he produces; with that let him be satisfied. Nobody wishes to wrong him. Tell him so, use your eloquence to persuade him to be virtuous, economical, to avoid haunts of dissipation, to keep clear of the theater and bawdyhouses, and you will do him a real service and deserve well of the whole community. Then you would prove yourself the workingman’s true friend. I beseech you to do so, and forbear to say or do aught to stir up the laboring classes against the rich. Your present language makes me believe you a dangerous man. I beseech you to use a different language hereafter. (April 1841): 137-83 CONVERSATION V

R. That was an ingenious argument with which you closed our conversation yesterday. C. It must have shaken your theory a little. R. Perhaps so. And yet it was not quite satisfactory. Every man, of course, should draw according to his investment; but since all men are born equal, will you be so good as to inform me how it happens that one man, on commencing in life, is able to make a larger investment than another? C. All men may perhaps be born with equal rights, but they are born with very unequal capacities.

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R. And one’s superior natural capacity consists in his having houses and lands, shops and tools, sheep and cattle, ships and merchandise, to invest while another has only his bodily activity? C. I do not comprehend you. R. You claimed in our conversation yesterday, the right to a larger proportion of the income of the copartnership existing between you and your hired man, on the ground that your investment was greater than his. I ask, how you were able to make this greater investment, and you virtually answer that it is owing to the fact that you were born with a capacity superior to his. Does this superior capacity of yours consist in the possession of more capital than he has? C. My capacity is purely personal and has no relation to my external possessions. But having this superior natural capacity, I have been able to accumulate more than he, and am therefore able now to make larger investments than he can. R. You assume then that the differences one sees in wealth among men, are all owing to the differences the Creator establishes in their natural capacities? C. Certainly. R. And since the Deity must have willed these different capacities, or he would not have suffered them, and since inequality in wealth follows as a necessary consequence of inequality of capacity, you infer that it is the will of Providence that some should be rich, and others poor? C. Precisely. And therefore I contend that in seeking to bring about equality as to men’s possessions, you are warring against God. R. Some men I believe inherit wealth. These inherit, I suppose, because they are born with a superior natural capacity. The son of a rich man, then, has always a larger natural capacity than the son of a poor man? C. I do not say that. Most of our rich men were poor men’s sons. R. And yet you tell me that all the differences, which exist among men in regard to wealth, are the necessary result of their different capacities. If you are right in this, it follows as a matter of course that the children of the rich, who become rich by inheritance, inherit not because they are the children of the rich, but because they are born with superior natural capacities. C. I claim no natural superiority of capacity for the children of the rich over the children of the poor. R. Then I suppose you will modify your statement a little, and admit that those differences, which are introduced by the principle of inheritance, are exceptions to your general rule, and are not in fact the result of unequal capacities?

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C. Very well. R. I am aware that the differences introduced by the principle of inheritance are not all the differences or inequalities which do exist in regard to wealth; but still they form directly or indirectly no small portion of them. Now will you tell me on what principle you legitimate the right of inheritance? C. What! Would you deprive me of my right to leave what little I may have saved from my hard earnings to my children? What! Would you rob my children of their right to inherit the estate of their father? R. Nobody, my dear sir, has any wish to deprive you or your children of any right which nature or nature’s God may have given you or them. I am not among those who would do evil that good may come, or who would seek good at the sacrifice of right. Be just though the heavens fall, is my motto. Prove that what you call your right is your right, and I certainly will respect it. C. Have I not a right to do as I will with mine own? R. No, sir; you have no right to use your property to injure your neighbor, your country, or your fellow men anywhere; you have no right to use it for the production of a smaller good, when it is in your power to use it for the production of a larger. You are bound to be good, and to do good, and not only to be good a little, but in the highest degree possible; not only to do a little good, but the greatest amount of good possible. You see, sir, that what you call yours, is by no means yours. You are in relation to all you call yours, but God’s steward, and are bound in morals and in religion to use it as he commands, that is to say, in obedience to the commands of justice and love; and society has the right to force you to use it so. So it does not necessarily follow that you have the right to leave your estate to your children. C. But my children have a right to inherit my estate. This is a right universally acknowledged, and sanctioned by the practice of every age and nation. R. A right universally denied and sanctioned by the practice of no age or nation. The right of the father to disinherit, so far as my information extends, unless the Code de Napoleon11 furnish an exception, is universally admitted; and the right to disinherit negatives the right to inherit. C. But the hereditary transmission of property is a wise and judicious disposition of it. 11 [Ed. The Code de Napoleon was the French law of civil rights written between 1804 and 1807.]

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R. Are you sure of that? C. What is more natural or reasonable than that I should leave my property to my children whom I have loved, and whose welfare is dear to me? Or what is more natural or reasonable than that my children should remain where they were born, amid the scenes of their earliest recollection, and enjoy what they had themselves assisted in accumulating? The hope of leaving something to our children stimulates our exertions, and the desire to labor for the welfare of our children purifies our affections, and makes us greater, wiser, and better. It is this which keeps society together. Take away the need of laboring for the welfare of our children, and their dependence on us for their support, and the family bond is broken, isolation is introduced, and the very elements of society annihilated. Sir, the wildest and wickedest scheme devisable is that of the abolition of hereditary property. R. I have not proposed to abolish it; I have merely asked you to show the justice of those inequalities in our social condition, which are produced by the hereditary transmission of property. But let this pass. I am not so confident as you seem to be that the hereditary transmission of property is an advantage even to the children of the rich; nor am I by any means satisfied that that portion of industry which is stimulated by the wish to leave an estate to one’s children is at all desirable. I have heard rich men say that they considered it a very great misfortune for children to inherit a large property, and my own observation tends to prove that they are right. They who inherit a large property are rarely valuable members of the community. Moreover, children who are brought up in the expectation of wealth, of inheriting a fortune, rarely acquire moral and virtuous habits. They may have a blandness and grace of manners, fine taste in dress and equipage; but they have rarely the feelings of moral, accountable beings, who are placed here not for their own pleasure, but to be good and to do good; not infrequently are they corrupted by indulgence, by their excesses, while still in early youth, and I have sometimes thought that the rich father or mother might envy the poor widow the feelings with which she contemplated her naked, houseless, homeless, fatherless boy. These palaces of the rich, had they tongues, could tell us tales. These rich dresses, that we envy, conceal much. Nor can I believe it desirable that a man should labor for the purpose of leaving a fortune to his children. While he is amassing the estate, in nine cases out of ten, his children are acquiring the habits which least of all fit them to use it. There was an old acquaintance of mine, Jack Turnpenny. Jack was a poor boy, brought up to the trade

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of a hatter, and worked some three or four years at hat-making after he was of age. But he had no inclination to go through life as a mere mechanic. He felt that he was made to be a rich man, and that to be a rich man he must go into trade. He shut up therefore his shop, disposed of his tools, paid up his debts, and found himself at the age of twenty-five, in possession of just twenty-five dollars in money. With this capital he commenced business; after a few years, he was able with a friend to establish himself in one of our Atlantic cities, and also a mercantile house in one of the Canadas. The world seemed to favor Jack; he grew rich with great rapidity, and became a large importer from England, a wholesale dealer, a president of a bank, an alderman, an extensive manufacturer and wool grower, and a heavy land-speculator. Thus was he when I first formed his acquaintance, some dozen years ago. He was a leading man in public affairs, a man of high standing, generally courted, and envied, and often pointed out as an instance of the extreme facility with which in our country a poor man may become rich. Jack heard me one day preaching my radicalism, and having, above all, known my father and been much indebted to him for his early start in the world, invited me to his house, and finally told me his story. He was now about sixty-five years of age, had been twice married, and had ten children, five by his first wife and five by his second. His eldest son, Frank, was a boy of bright promise, born with a high order of intellect, but his early education was neglected; his father was too busy to attend to it; and he fell early into dissipated habits; and though his father was liberal, his means were inadequate to his expenses. To help himself he broke into the strong box of an uncle, and escaped the penitentiary only because both father and uncle were rich and influential, and disposed to hush the matter up. The second son was established in business with a capital of forty thousand dollars in this very city where we now are. This capital he soon sunk twice over. His father recalled him, and obtained a situation for him in South America; but all to no purpose. He keeps him now at home, and regular by prohibiting all persons from trusting him, and by refusing him a single cent of money which he may himself control. His third child was a daughter, a sweet lovely girl, but she was married to a man she could neither love nor esteem, and with whom she would not live. His next two children were, one of them like the two eldest, a drunkard, and the other, having taken it into his head to be a preacher was externally decent. The rest were still young, but promising to follow in the footsteps of their seniors. “O,” said he to me one day, “O, I have been a fool. If I had labored to train up my children in the way they

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should go, instead of laboring to leave them an establishment, I had not been desolate now in my old age, nor compelled to go down in sorrow to my grave. I have ruined my children, damned them for time and for eternity. O, I have been a fool, a fool.” Poor Jack, poor man, most wretched father, thou wast but a type of what most of us are or would be. Thy story is less tragic than many that might be told. My heart clung to him, for he was miserable. He has gone to his long home now. His estate descended to his children, who have scattered it to the four winds, and who are, as you might expect, themselves, now little better than mere vagabonds. You, I presume, are a father; would you such a fate for your children? C. Touch not that chord, I pray you. I am a father, and I too have a profligate son, but I hope to be able to reclaim him yet. R. God forgive me, sir; you too have grieved. Then there is brotherhood between us. May you be able to reclaim your son. But suppose you do, the end is not yet. There are few families in this country which retain wealth for many generations. C. That I regard as one of the best features of our system and proves that we can never have a large, overgrown, and overshadowing aristocracy. What one generation amasses the next disperses, so that the grandchildren of the rich man are generally the poor, while the grandchildren of the poor have their turn, and are the rich. R. O, sir, I begin to lose the respect for you that I felt a moment ago. Can your love descend no lower than your children? Have you no affection for your grandchildren? And is it not as great an evil for them to be left destitute, as for your children, their parents, to be so left? O, my brother, you are short-sighted and heartless. These poor grandchildren must not only endure their poverty, but their poverty must be deepened by knowing that their parents were once wealthy. It is not the least of our evils in poverty, to feel that we are poor and wretched, through the vices, the folly, the extravagance of our fathers. I am one of those grandchildren. My mother’s father was a man of great wealth, and so was my father’s father. My mother had eight sisters, and if I may judge from what they were in my early youth, they were women of rare beauty and accomplishments. The eldest married young, a worthy mechanic, and was disowned by her family, but being left a widow in about a year, was received into favor again. She married some two years after, an only son of a wealthy merchant. The son, expecting his father’s property, made no exertions of his own, but lived for some twenty years in virtual poverty, when his father died, and bequeathed his whole estate to a stranger. Thus he was at the age of forty-five, with a wife and six children,

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with habits of idleness, unfitted for any kind of business, and not worth a groat. He could not endure it, and disappeared, and we have never heard of him since, now some twenty-five years. Her second sister married a foreigner, who professed to be a gentleman, who had great expectations, which were never realized. She was a beautiful woman, and possessed of an uncommon intellect. She has been a maniac for this twenty years, and he died a sot a few years since. My mother was the third daughter, possessed of wit, beauty, and feeling. Hers was accounted a happy marriage. But she was left a widow at the age of twenty-six, with five children, of which I, the youngest, was but a few months old. My father had become bankrupt, and the portion which was our due from our maternal grandfather’s estate was seized by an uncle, who, under the character of executor, suffered none of it ever to come to us. A maiden aunt, a sister of my father, left me a small property, which enabled me to acquire a little education, and for a time to assume a decent rank in society. But that I have long since expended in my efforts at reform. Another of my mother’s sisters, the youngest, I visited a few years since. She too had married the only son of a rich man; but I found her with a family of seven children, living in a miserable hut, with only one room not more than twelve feet square, in most squalid wretchedness. Her husband was doing nothing, would do nothing but wait for his father to die. The history of the rest is of a piece with what I have given. Of the nearly fourscore grandchildren of my mother’s mother, now living, and whose history I know, not one is in the least benefitted by the wealth to which their parents were born heirs. This, sir, is merely a brief sketch of my own family. If you were to tax your memory, perhaps you might tell me as much. C. I have no wish to make you my confidant. But is there not another class of grandchildren that have come up, whose story would be the opposite of yours? R. Perhaps so; but what comfort is that to me and my cousins? Property shifts hands, I own; and there are constantly individuals rising and individuals going down; but alas, to go up is not happiness, and to go down is misery. This shifting of individuals, which seems to you so blessed a thing, serves but to augment the sum of the general misery. Every time that property is forced from the hands of one into those of another, there is untold suffering. We suffer if it is taken from us; and if we are those who take it, we suffer, if we are human, at the misery we occasion. No, do not talk to me of this system of compensations, which you conservatives applaud so much. Regarded as final, it but aggravates the wretchedness of the commu-

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nity. On this point I must read you an article which I find in one of the papers you handed me this morning. The first part of it bears on a point we discussed yesterday; the last part on the point now under consideration. It places the arguments you would use in a strong light. “RICH AND POOR”120

“‘Never was an error more pernicious than that of supposing that any separation could be practicable between the interests of the rich and the working classes. However selfish may be the disposition of the wealthy they cannot benefit themselves without serving the laborer. Let the rich proprietor improve his land; let him build houses or ships; he must employ the poor; and while it is thus certain that the rich cannot serve themselves without serving the laborer, it is evident that whenever the rich are injured, the laborer must suffer. If the laboring classes are desirous of having the prosperity of the country restored, they must sanction all measures tending to reinstate our commercial credit, without which the wealthy will be impoverished, and the needy be rendered still more necessitous.’” Prof. HART.13 “‘One of the features which society has presented within the last few years, the most fearful in its aspect, and destined if unremoved to be most disastrous in its issue, is its contentions and animosities, its divisions into parties, where the dividing line has reference not to policy or principle, but condition, where the poor are arrayed against the rich, the mechanic against the merchant, the laborer with his hands against the laborer with his head. In a community like ours, where arbitrary distinctions are not admitted, where the fluctuations of families is a necessary law of the system, where the poor of today are the rich of tomorrow, the laborer of today the capitalist of tomorrow, where few can go back more than a generation without coming to an ancestry, poor in wealth, however rich and honorable in virtue, and could they look forward as far, would see perhaps a posterity poor in both these respects, it seems strange that, in such a community, such a division should have ever been suggested or cherished.”’ Christian Examiner for July, 1837.14

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Boston Reformer, July 21, 1837. O. A. BROWNSON, Editor. [Ed. Unable to identify quotation.] 14 [Ed. S. K. Lothrop, “Existing Commercial Embarrassments,” Christian Examiner 3rd Series, 12 (July, 1837): 399.] 13

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“These two paragraphs, one from a professor of chemistry, we believe, in Philadelphia, the other from a grave divine in our goodly city of Boston, may be taken by our readers as a semi-official statement of the views of the aristocracy concerning the points of social science therein touched upon. The truth of these views may not at first sight be perceptible to all readers; we must, therefore, be allowed to occupy some little space in elucidating and verifying them. “The doctrine set forth in these paragraphs is that the interests of the working classes and those of the rich are one and the same. This must be evident to all who are capable of seeing things as they are. We may show this by taking the instance of the horse and his rider. The interest of the rider is undoubtedly to ride. It is not for the interest of the horse, however, to be ridden, you may think; but you think so only because you are short-sighted, and see only the surface of things. The interest of the horse is a stable and provender. The stable and provender are in the possession of the rider, and the horse can obtain them only by yielding his mouth to the bit, and his back to the saddle, and by consenting to be ridden. If it be the interest of the horse to obtain a stable and provender, as it unquestionably is, then it is the interest of the horse to be ridden; and as it is the interest of the rider to ride, it follows irresistibly that the interest of the horse and that of the rider are one and the same. “Now the interest of the working classes is to obtain what corresponds to stables and provender for horses. But these stables and provender are in the possession of the rich, and can be obtained only by working for the rich. If, then, it be the interest of the working classes to have stables and provender, as it unquestionably is, then it is the interest of the working classes to work for the rich. The interest of the rich is of course to have the working classes work for them; consequently it is as clear as any demonstration in Euclid that the interests of the rich and those of the working classes are identical. “Now is disclosed the wonderful insight into the workings and nature of things—of horses and laboring men—possessed by this scientific professor and this grave divine. The one must have carried into the study of political economy the searching analysis which belongs to his favorite science, and the other must have availed himself of the up-gushing and spontaneous wisdom so peculiarly characteristic of divines, in order to combine the universe into one sublime synthesis, in which all variety is swallowed up in unity, and all differences of things, all diversity between the horse and the rider, the jackass and his driver, cease to be perceptible. It is wonderful!

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“‘Society,’ says the Examiner in continuation, ‘is to be surveyed as a whole, and the parts are to be judged by their relation to the whole.’15 If society have a top, unless it be the bottomless pit we read of, it must have a bottom; if it have a right side it must have a left side; rich men, it must have poor men; the high, it must have the low; riders, then the ridden. How absurd for the bottom to claim to be the top, the left side to be the right side, the poor to be the rich, the low to be the high, the ridden to be riders (the horse would look well riding the man), one part to be another! Here, Jack, carry me over that mud hole so that I need not wet my feet or soil my finely polished boots. What, won’t you? Do you say it is not for your interest to carry me on your back through the mud? Nonsense. You are merely a part of a beautiful and sublime whole. You can have no interest contrary to, or separate from, any other part. I am also a part of this same beautiful and sublime whole, and it is my interest that you take me on your back and carry me safely over this mud-hole, so that I shall not wet my feet or soil my finely polished boots. It being settled that this is for my interest, it follows as a matter of course that it is for yours. So no more words, but take me on your shoulders instantly, for I am in a hurry, and am beginning to grow cold. This reasoning must of course convince Jack unless he be a very dunce, as it must be admitted is the case with many people. “Some plain folks might ask, how happens it that the rich own all the stables and provender in the world? And what’s the need of their owning them all, so that the working classes can have none without laboring for the rich? But it is obvious that these questions are very impertinent; and besides, they may be answered that if the rich had not all the stables and provender in the world, they would not be the rich, which is a manifest contradiction in terms. Should some ask, what need then of having rich men at all? Let them be answered in turn, if there were no rich men, who would employ the working classes and give them stables and provender for their labor? “If anybody should be so stupid as to allege that it is for the interest of the working classes to get as much stabling and provender for their labor as possible, and that it is for the interest of the rich to give as little as possible, and therefore infer that the interests of the two classes are necessarily hostile; they may be answered that we have already proved that the interests of the two classes are one and the same, and the professor thinks to maintain the contrary is the most pernicious error which can be entertained, and the divine thinks 15

[Ed. Ibid., 401.]

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nothing is more to be deprecated than such an error, and that the evils which flow from it are the greatest calamity that can befall a nation. “Should some perverse minds still persist and maintain that the existence of the two classes, one rich and the other poor, is itself inconsistent with justice and republican institutions, that so long as the classes coexist in the same community they will be mutually hostile, and that instead of useless efforts to reconcile them we should do away with them, abolish the distinctions of class altogether, and thus have neither rich nor poor, the divine is ready with his reply, the ‘order of Providence makes great distinctions in individual condition.’ The order of Providence makes the distinctions of rich and poor, and whoever would do away with these distinctions, wars against God. This reply must be satisfactory. “If, however, there should be here and there a downright infidel, not having the fear of the clergy before his eyes, to arraign the justice of the Providence which ordains these distinctions, and which some are foolish enough to deplore, the sagacious divine with a marvelous foresight, meets them with his ‘System of Compensations’—a sublime system which, if he could make good his claims to it as originator, would secure him an immortality on earth hardly less desirable than that which awaits him in the world to come. This system may be illustrated in this way: Jack strikes Sam, Sam compensates himself by striking Dick; Dick by striking Jonathan, and Jonathan by kicking Obadiah, and thus on through the whole list of Christian names. It is a system which bears some resemblance to the old play in which everyone is required to strike his next neighbor. It is possible, though we have no proof of the fact that the divine in question, may have been familiar with this play in his earlier life, and that he has taken the hint for his system from his reminiscences of it. Perhaps he may have taken a hint or two from his college recollections. Freshmen are usually (we are told, for thank God, by good fortune we escaped going to college) kicked about by the classes above them very much as they please; but in a year the Freshman enters a higher class and can then kick those below him, in like manner as he had been kicked before. “This is a beautiful and consoling system. The kickee of today may be the kickor of tomorrow. My children are poor and slighted by my neighbor Longpurse’s children; but my parental affection may be perfectly satisfied by the prospect there is that my grandchildren will treat his grandchildren as his children now treat mine. My father was rich and I am poor; but this same Mr. Longpurse’s father was

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poor and he is rich; so I ought to be consoled for my poverty, and to count it a great blessing to live in a community where ‘the fluctuations of families is a necessary law of the system, where the poor of today may be the rich of tomorrow, where few can go back a generation without coming to an ancestry, poor in wealth, however rich and honorable in virtue, and could they look forward as far would see perhaps a posterity poor in both these respects.’ What blessed things these same ‘fluctuations in families’ must be! They are almost equal to the principle of ‘Rotation in Office.’ “We hope our readers will make themselves familiar with this doctrine of ‘Compensations.’ We assure them it is thought very favorably of by quite a number of the Boston clergy, and Boston aristocracy. We are inclined to the opinion that it is the reigning doctrine of the city; if so, it is orthodox of course. It probably will require some learned dogmatist and scriptural interpreters to make it square with the great doctrine of love which lies at the foundation of Christianity; but Christianity is rather old fashioned and somewhat passe in our metropolis. The doctrine of compensations bids fair, therefore, to be in vogue for sometime to come. They who are the kickors are well satisfied with it, and as the kickees are hoping every day to get into the class of kickors, they will not contend very strenuously against it. It would be hard to rise to a kickor and then have nobody to kick.” But to leave this part of the subject; I suppose you will admit that our aim as parents should be the real good of our children. You and I both have children that we love, and that we would leave in the best possible condition when we are called from this world to another. You are rich. But are you sure that you will be able to leave your children rich? Or if you leave them rich, are you sure that they will continue so for any length of time? Or if they continue rich, are you sure that they will not abuse their riches, and prove themselves a curse to their generation? All these are questions which must pass through your mind. How do you answer them? C. I have not the surety you speak of. Man can be certain of nothing that is future. But I trust Providence, and hope for the best. R. Trust in your wealth, you should say. He who trusts in Providence, fears not to do right lest evil come to him or his. But can you conceive of no greater surety which it is possible to have than that you now have? To be brought up with the expectation of wealth, and not to receive it, is a serious evil; to have had wealth, and to lose it, is also an evil of no small magnitude. Now to both of these evils, your children or their children, as the world goes, are exposed. Would it not be better that wealth, instead of descending as now, and causing

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this vast amount of evil, which we can but deplore, it should descend by such a law that all, on starting in life, would receive an equal portion, and none more nor less than an equal portion? Then none would be brought up to expect greater wealth than they would receive; consequently no expectations would be disappointed. None would fare worse than the rest; consequently your children would fare as well as the best, and what more have you a right to ask for them? None would be rich; none would be poor; none would have enough to live without moderate labor, and none would have so little as to be obliged to live but to labor, as is now the case with the immense majority of our race. It would seem that under such a state of things, a man might lie down in the grave without a fear for the children he leaves behind. C. So you would introduce a dead level! What do you suppose would keep society in motion under such a state of things as you imagine? R. Hunger, if you can conceive no higher, holier motive. Men will be obliged to labor or starve; and they will be willing to labor, for labor will be honorable, since all will labor; and pleasant, since it will be only what is needed for exercise. C. Well, dream away, but for my part, I think your millennium would be but a “dull dunce.” R. You differ in opinion, I perceive, from the wise Agur,16 whose prayer we learned when we were children: “Give me neither poverty nor riches; feed me with food convenient for me; lest I be full and deny thee, and say, who is the Lord? Or lest I be poor, and steal, and take the name of my God in vain?”17 C. If you could abolish hereditary property, do you suppose that would cure all the ills of society? R. By no means. It would, however, pave the way for curing many of them, and the greater part of those which now weigh the heaviest upon us. CONVERSATION VI R. Bating the inequality in property traceable to the principle of inheritance, the inequalities we meet are fairly deducible, you think, from our unequal capacities? 16 [Ed. Agur was the son of Jakeh, acknowledged as a wise man in the book of Proverbs 30:1-14; his “words” had close affinities to the book of Job, emphasizing as they did the inaccessibility of wisdom for human beings, unlike the rest of the book of Proverbs.] 17 Proverbs 30:8-9.

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C. Yes. R. You told me the other day that you drew more than your hired man because you had made a larger investment; that you had invested houses and lands, shops and tools, &c., while he had invested only his bodily activity. C. True. R. And did you inherit these funds of production, as we may call them, which you have invested? C. No. I was a poor boy, and have nothing now but what I have worked hard for. R. Then on commencing in life, your investment of capital was no greater than your hired man’s? C. No. R. Then originally you were entitled to no larger proportion of the gains of the social firm than he? C. Well. R. How comes it, then, if every member of society receives in exact proportion to his investment, as you allege that you, beginning on a par with your hired man, are now able to invest so much more than he? C. I have answered your question by suggesting the primitive inequality of man’s capacities. R. I am then to infer that you claim a natural capacity superior to that of your hired man? C. Well. R. And it is owing to this superior capacity of yours that you are now richer than he? That you are wealthy and he poor? C. Well, go on. R. And have you really produced so much more than he? Or have you merely used your superior capacity in the accumulation of wealth? C. In the accumulation of wealth unquestionably. R. Do you suppose that you were ever able to produce by your own labor more than your hired man? C. Probably not. At any kind of labor, he has always been able to do as good a day’s work as I. R. Then in point of fact, you probably have performed during your life no more productive labor than he? If then he had received all that he produced, and you had received no more than you produced, you would have been no richer than he? C. Go on. R. This being so, to what end has served your superior capacity?

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Has it served any other end than to enable you to pocket the proceeds of other’s producing? C. But you forget that I have furnished the capital on which they have labored, and my share has been no more than capital ought to draw. R. But, my dear sir, I have been for sometime trying to ascertain how you came, in the first instance, by this capital to invest. You began poor you tell me; when and whence did you, who at first were entitled to no more than your hired man, obtain the capital on which you could set him at work? In point of fact, did you ever begin to prosper, to do well, that is, to make money, till you began to obtain a premium on the labors of others? C. Probably not. R. The whole question comes then to this; your hired man has had merely the capacity to produce, and he remains poor; you have had what is called a business talent, that is, the capacity to transfer to your own pockets the proceeds of other’s producing, and are rich. C. Do you mean to insinuate that a man cannot become rich without robbing the laborer? R. I mean to say, sir, that no man can become rich by trade, when he could not by an equal amount of labor in the work of production, without robbing productive labor of its just reward. If the trader, starting with the same amount of capital with the ordinary laborer, can become rich, while the laborer working equally as intense, and for as long a time, must remain poor, productive labor does not receive what it is entitled to; for a man should receive no higher wages for making a bargain, or measuring tape, than the laborer for hoeing corn. But I am not disposed to continue this discussion today. C. Why not? R. Because were I to do it, I should say some harsh things, and disturb your digestion. C. Well, and what then? R. A disturbed digestion impairs the sweetness of one’s temper, and renders him very disagreeable. C. Have you a good digestion? R. For the most part. C. Other things than indigestion then make people disagreeable? R. Not many, if any. I have known many a man praised for every virtue under heaven, who would have been counted a very devil, if anything had occurred to disturb his digestion.

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C. Would you make a man’s character depend on the state of his bowels? R. I have just listened to a course of Graham lectures,18 and I have resolved never to make up my opinion of a man’s moral worth, till I have ascertained how he digests. Dive into the secrets of a man’s digestion if you would know the secret of his character. What noble schemes of philanthropy, what strong devotion, and what sweet temperedness shall not a fit of indigestion destroy! Wry actions as well as wry faces proceed from the gripes. You shall rise in the morning, break the heart of your wife, box the ears of your favorite boy, scold your most faithful servant, and wish your cook to the devil, and yet you shall be the best and kindest of husbands, the most indulgent of fathers, the most considerate of masters, and the easiest satisfied with the cook. Whence the contradiction? You supped on tripe or turtle-soup, and did not digest well. Your Alexanders, Caesars, Napoleons, Byrons,19 Dantons, are men of a bad digestion, and the world is indebted to the irritation caused by their indigestion, for their famous exploits, whether good or ill, grand or pitiable. On the other hand your Shakespeares, Miltons, Goethes, Wordsworths, are men of a most excellent digestion. C. And yourself? Shall I not place you among the indigesters? R. That would be hardly just. And yet time was when my digestion was bad enough. Many is the time that I have been set down as an ill bred, snappish, passionate, ever-to-be-avoided fellow, simply because my bowels were not in a right state; and I can say with truth that I have never in my life done aught to be ashamed of, save when my digestion had been disturbed. When I commenced my career, my health was poor, my stomach was out of order, and the gastric juice was not secreted; I was then melancholy by fits, sometimes a little crazy, but generally short and crusty; I was most of the time mad, mad with myself and mad with the world. C. And have not got over your mad fit yet? R. Surely I have not had much to cure me. The world has treated me but scurvily, and of the people in it few are entitled to my gratitude. Still, I am not what I was. My digestion is better. The world is 18

[Ed. Sylvester Graham (1794-1851) was a leading advocate of health, diet, hygiene and sexual reform in the 1830s. Graham lectured in Boston and throughout the United States on avoiding debilitating stimulants and eating healthy foods. A cracker still bears his name in the twenty-first century. In 1839 he published his Lectures on the Science of Human Life.] 19 [Ed. George Gordon Byron (1788-1824), English Romantic poet and satrist, is probably included in this group because of his unconventional life-style.]

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less dark, and I find now and then a sunny spot, and the clouds which obscure my heavens are less dense, and here and there break away, and show a little blue sky beyond. O, sir, it is most wretched to travel over this fair creation in company with the horrors of indigestion. My coat is coarse and threadbare, and my purse is empty, but it was not always so with me, and that it is so now, I am not ashamed. Humanity is perhaps the richer for my poverty. In my younger days I was a traveler; but a traveler, suffering from a bad state of the bowels. I found nothing to please. In this country the climate was too hot or too dry, in that it was too wet or too cold; in some countries the roads, the coaches; the horses, the drivers, the taverns, the cooking; in others the language, the manners, the soil, the flocks, and herds, the mountains and valleys, the forests and pasture lands, the thunder and the lightning, displeased me. Everywhere I found cause to complain, for everywhere I carried that with me which created the world I saw; and worse than all, I was everywhere taken for an Englishman, a circumstance which has since led me to imagine that all English travelers have a most miserable digestion. C. But I can hardly believe that your digestion has much improved. R. Yes it has. I look forth on nature with other eyes. This is a glorious world. Everywhere does my heart leap to behold the beauty which surrounds me. The flowers delight me, and I turn aside my foot that I may not bruise the humblest that springs up spontaneously in my path. The birds soothe me with their wild notes, and hours do I lie in the shade listening to their gladsome song. I love nature, for all begins, ends, and is informed with love. C. You forget this when you talk of the rich, and represent them as riding or eating the poor. R. No; I do not. I love all animate and inanimate creation. All has a lesson and a charm. But I have a mission. I am called to espouse the cause of the laboring classes. I have studied their condition in this and other countries. My life is devoted to their service; for them I will live, and if need be die. My head is gray with my efforts in their behalf. I have grown old, though yet hardly a middle aged man, in seeking to elevate their condition. No matter; I devote myself to their interests without wrath or bitterness. It is not that I hate, or envy, or despise the more favored classes that I proclaim myself the champion of the less favored; but because with the workingman is today the cause of humanity. Humanity goes forward; through centuries it makes its way, overcomes one difficulty, surmounts one obstacle after another, gains one position and then another, and onward forever will

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it march towards its union with God. At other times its friends may have been called upon to contend for other specific objects. Humanity once required the Greeks to beat back the Persians at Marathon and Salamis, Alexander to overrun Asia, and mingle Western with Eastern civilization; at another that the Socratic philosophy should be kept alive, that Judaism should be destroyed, Christianity installed, Rome overthrown, and the barbarians of the North brought into the civilized family; at another, that Luther should defy the pope, and philosophers vindicate the sovereignty of reason, that kings should be decapitated, and nobility reduced to the rank of commoners; but now humanity cries out for the elevation of the hand-workers, and that the exploitation of man by man shall cease. If then I speak for the hand-worker, it is because that he today is humanity. His triumph is the triumph of the race. What humanity will demand of her servants and friends tomorrow I know not. I only know what she demands today. I hear her voice, which is to me the voice of God, and I dare not hesitate. I must speak. I am full of words, and I must utter myself. But if I speak hot, scalding words, words which go to the quick, it is because none other can do justice to myself, or to the work I am sent to perform. Grant that my words are exciting, that I provoke divisions, and set man against man, lead to a fierce, bloody, and protracted war, they proceed from love, they are full of love, and shall end in love, in love universal and perennial. But I speak in riddles to your understanding. You cannot comprehend me. To you I am a mass of contradictions which you cannot reconcile, a labyrinth of which you have not the thread, a riddle whose word is not given you. No matter. I cannot explain myself to you. A blind man cannot be made to comprehend colors. Men, good easy men of the world, are not they who can comprehend him of lofty purpose, solemn thought, and kindling enthusiasm, who feels himself called by an eternal voice to the achievement of a grand, a glorious mission. Ever must he be to them a contradiction and a puzzle. C. Not at all. All the difficulty is removed by supposing the state of his digestion varies. R. Right. That solves the mystery. Hence learn why I contend so earnestly for the improvement of the external condition of the laboring classes. C. That you may support your digestion on something better, more substantial than cold potatoes and Graham bread, I suppose. R. No. But because the state of a man’s mind and heart depends very much on his digestion, and his digestion is intimately connected with his social position.

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C. I am not prepared to admit that. R. Say, then, merely that in this mode of being, the body, whether it be the whole body, the bowels, stomach, or brain, exerts a powerful influence over the mind. This everybody knows to be true. We also know that our external condition, our social position, outward circumstances affect the body, to a great degree determine its condition, and of course the kind of influence it must exert over the inner man. What I mean is that physical circumstances do have an important influence in making up our character. C. It is the man that makes the circumstances, and not the circumstances that make the man. The man who has any inborn nobleness of soul will rise superior to his external condition; he will make everything bend to the irresistible energy of his will. Besides, virtue consists in struggling with difficulties, and in rising superior to them, not in having them cleared from our path. R. All this I understand. I shrink not from the struggle. I may have struggled as hard as most men. Do what we can and there will be the combat, and I admit that it is well that we all be inured to the camp. I have no hope of realizing in all its fairy features either the poet’s dream of the golden age, or the saint’s vision of paradise. Do the best we can, make all the improvements in our power, and earth will still bear a rugged aspect, a stern, forbidding brow; this world will always be a scene of trial, where the lesson to bear will never come amiss. But this is no reason why we should not remove as many obstacles as we can. There will always be difficulties enough, and nobody need fear that the time will come when there will be too little suffering. I have no fears of making the world so happy, so free from difficulties that there will be no room for virtue. And besides, your definition of virtue, is only a definition of what is virtue under certain relations. Virtue consists in overcoming difficulties, only when difficulties exist. It is virtue to relieve suffering, but only when there is suffering. We must not suppose virtue becomes impossible when suffering ceases, for then what should we do in heaven? The saints would have no virtue. Virtue consists in the love and realization of goodness. The form in which it is to realize it necessarily varies with time and space, with circumstances. Virtue never changes its nature, but it varies its aspects and dress. C. I understand nothing of all this. R. I am sorry for that, but let it pass. We are here for improvement, for progress. We are here to be and to do good, and it is our duty to modify, change, or remove altogether, those external circumstances which prevent us from being or doing good, which continu-

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ally lead us into temptation and abandon us to evil. Now, the inequality in men’s external condition, in their social position, is the most fruitful source—I do not say of suffering, but—of evil, vice, sin, depravity, which is known. There are few things of which we complain that have not their origin in this same inequality. C. That it holds out many temptations I admit, but moral force, religious principle, would prevent its doing any harm. R. To talk to a man suffering all the horrors of indigestion, of moral force, of religious principle, were talking to the insane man, of reason. This inequality throws men into a state in which you cannot bring religious principle or moral force to bear upon them. Religious principle, moral force, must be in the man before it can govern him or aid him. You must cast out the devil before you can form Christ within. Christ and the devil will not cohabit together. You have tried the experiment. You have preached religion and morality for ages, exhorted to virtue by a million of tongues trained to all the arts of persuasion, and what have you achieved? According to your own reckoning, though mankind were totally depraved at first, they have been growing worse ever since. What is the use of preaching religion and morality to the rich voluptuary, sunk in his sensual pleasures, when he is but doing that which everybody desires to do, and would do if he could? C. I hope you do not mean to treat religion and morality with disrespect, especially religion, for without that society could not exist. R. Have no fears on that score. Would to God that you and your caste treated religion and morality with one half the respect I do. If ye would but practice them, instead of extolling their utility in keeping the lower orders in submission, I should be thankful. But man has a body as well as a soul, and though the soul is the most important, the bodily wants are first developed and should be first provided for. Give the beggar a supper before you preach him a sermon or read him a moral lecture, and a cloak before you lead him to church, if you wish to influence him. Take away the luxury of the rich, make them feel that they are no better, no more favored than the rest of the community, if you wish their real prayers to be different from his who stood and thanked God that he was not as other men. C. You approach agrarianism now. R. What then? Do you fancy that I am to be deterred from speaking the truth through fear of a bad name? There is no charm in names now to exorcize the spirit you dread. Men there are now who pass from words to things; men there are too, who are not afraid to look Truth herself in the face, and to utter in a clear, distinct, and firm

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voice, her most startling words. Better beware of applying nicknames; they sometimes become battlecries. The wood on which you crucify the reformer becomes the sign in which his successors shall conquer. But, I am no agrarian, in the sense in which you use the term. Yet I am, as you well know, opposed to the present unequal distribution of wealth. Its consequences are most disastrous. It puffs up the rich with pride and the lust of the flesh, makes them false, hypocritical, atheistical; and it fills the poor with a sense of wrong, with envy, discontent, and useless longings; and I war against it, and will war against it, single-handed if I must, to the death, if need be. Sir, I am a follower of him whose express mission it was to bring down the high, and bring up the low—to level the mountain and fill up the valley, to make the crooked straight and the rough smooth and even.20 C. What! Have you the audacity to pretend that Jesus preached such leveling doctrines as you do? R. Ay, have I. Jesus was a sublime leveler. Ay, I repeat it, Jesus was a sublime, a God-commissioned leveler, and this is wherefore the common people heard him gladly, and the chief priests, the Scribes, and Pharisees, the aristocracy of his age and nation, crucified him between two thieves. Why do you turn pale? Did you fancy that you had Jesus on your side? Were you dreaming of entertaining him in your gorgeous palace, feasting him on your sumptuous diet, and lodging him on your bed of down? Poor man! The young child was not found in Herod’s palace, nor in the mansions of the rich, but wrapped in swaddling clothes and lying in a manger; and the Son of Man, when on earth, hath not where to lay his head.21 I see you are moved. Not to such as you comes the kingdom of heaven; not to such as you is assurance given of being lodged at last by angels in Abraham’s bosom; but of taking up your final abode in hell, with not one drop of water to cool your parched tongue. “Son, remember,” these are the words thou must hear, “that thou in thy lifetime receivedst thy good things, likewise Lazarus evil things; but now he is comforted and thou art tormented” [Luke 16:25]. Ay, rage if you will, but there is no alternative. You must either forsake Jesus, whose name you have assumed merely to take away your reproach, or submit to his doctrine, and become the bold and unflinching advocate of equality. C. I shall advocate no such disorganizing, demoralizing, and leveling doctrines, as these you are putting forth.

20 21

[Ed. A reference to Luke 3:5.] [Ed. A reference to Luke 9:58 or Matt 8:20.]

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R. Then take your place with the rich man in hell! You will not? No; nor would the young man, who came to Jesus to learn what he should do to inherit eternal life; for he had large possessions. You are too rich to be a follower of Jesus. C. You wrong me. I aim to follow him, and I desire nothing more than to obey his commands. R. Then go and sell what you have, give it to the poor, and follow him. What! Do you hesitate? You a Christian? Why, you have large possessions. C. This is nonsense. R. And did Jesus speak nonsense, when he said, “How hardly shall they that have riches be saved? Verily I say unto you, it is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle, than for a rich man to enter the kingdom of heaven” [Luke 18:24-25]? C. Surely you do not understand that passage literally? R. Ay, it comes a little too close, does it? We must call in the priest to explain it away, must we? False hypocrite, a moment ago you were chiding me for my supposed want of respect for religion, and were pluming yourself on your orthodoxy; but who is the Christian now? Who now asks that God’s word may be explained away, so that it may not rebuke his ungodly practice? There is the written word, the word uttered by him who was the Way, the Truth, and the Life, and whom you profess to take as your master. Do you believe him? Do you obey him? No; you know you do not. But you acknowledge him for your master, you own yourself accountable to him; go then and settle your disobedience with him as best you may. C. But, I ask again, do you understand the passage you have quoted literally? R. I am not wise enough, sir, to revise the language of the Holy Ghost; nor am I base enough to be willing to use any portion of the ingenuity I may possess, in smoothing away the reproof his language necessarily brings to those who worship mammon and not God, and who prefer earth to heaven, or if heaven, solely for the gold which lines its pavements. You have priests enough, trained to the work of adapting the words of God to the peculiar state of your conscience, who, in honeyed tones, can soothe it, and with right reverend unction, allay remorse, and make the respectable sinner dream that God will think twice before he damns a man of his rank and standing. I, sir, am no hireling preacher; I receive no fat salary for preaching so as not to disturb your slumbers in your softly cushioned pew. Nor is it my vocation so to preach. You are a rich man. You have become rich by the labors of others, by trade, by buying cheap and selling dear,

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that is, by cheating at both ends of the bargain; and Jesus tells you it is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle, than for a rich man to enter into the kingdom of heaven, and I leave you to draw your own inferences. C. But can no rich man go to heaven? R. Not if Jesus speaks truth. C. Still, I cannot believe that Jesus meant precisely what you infer he did. R. I understand him to assert that it was impossible for a rich man to have that spirit of self-denial, self-sacrifice, without which he could not be his follower, or engage with him, in effecting that new order of things, which he came to introduce and establish on the earth, and which is called the kingdom or reign of God. And I assert, today, that it is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle, than it is for a rich man to engage with me, in my efforts to establish the reign of justice and equality. In these efforts I have not the rich for my coadjutors. They have large possessions, and turn away sorrowful. C. Your digestion, I fear, is somewhat impaired today. You are illiberal, and altogether too censorious. R. You rich men may call us laboring men, the rabble, the vulgar, the many-headed monster, the swinish multitude, the scum and offscourings of creation, and nobody cries out against your want of charity or good taste; but let one of us call you by your right names, tell you in plain, forcible words what you are, and forthwith your Christian feelings are outraged, we are thought to be exceedingly uncharitable, venomous, and—impolite. But I tell you, ye rich men, that while I scorn to feel the least bitterness towards you, as I would towards the worm at my feet, I regard you as worshipers of mammon, as servants of the devil, of whom a wise man will expect nothing, and over whom the good man must weep with bleeding heart. C. Come, do not grow sentimental, my good fellow. R. My good fellow! Who gave you the right to fellow me? Am not I a man as well as you? And am I less a man because my coat is coarser, and my hand harder? My good fellow! So you dare speak to me, because I advocate opinions not in good repute in the gay saloons22 of the rich and fashionable. But were I rich and popular, you would stand in awe of me, and feel that you were unworthy to unloose the latchet of my shoes. C. Forgive me. I meant no offence. 22

[Ed. Brownson frequently uses “saloons” for salons.]

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R. Meant no offence! That is the greatest offence of all. Had you felt the respect I am entitled to, you could not inadvertently have said aught improper. The offence is not in your words, but in the feelings which prompt such words, or suffer you to use them. C. Say no more. It is foolish for you to be angry at my thoughtlessness. R. Angry at you? Poor worm of the dust, do not flatter yourself that you can provoke me to anger. I can be angry only at him who is my superior, or at least my equal, and my equal you are not. C. At least not in your aristocratic feelings. R. Sir, I own that if by aristocratic feelings you understand a strong sense of one’s own individuality, personal rights and independence, I have them in no small abundance, and should despise myself if I had not. I am as proud perhaps in my poverty, as you are in your wealth. Of pride I complain not. Be proud, if you will, but be proud of what you are, and not of what you have. But if you are nothing to be proud of, do not fancy that such as I will respect your pride for what you have. I can look with as much contempt on you, as you can on me, and at the curl of my lip you shall feel as much as I at yours. Mine, sir, in my estimation is not by any means the lower rank. I have not yet sunk so low as to esteem a little paltry pelf, which the moth may destroy, or the thief break through and steal, above true courage, nobleness of purpose, rectitude of heart, and the power to live, and suffer, and die for God and man. But all this is aside the mark. You think rich men may be good men. I would I could think so too. I am willing to believe that few of them know what they are about, or are conscious of the iniquity of the system they uphold. Nor am I disposed to regard them in intention, touching the motives of their conduct, as at all worse than the rest of the community. There are few among us who would not be rich if they could, and by the very means adopted by those who do become rich. Yet, sir, I hold that the possession of great wealth, the condition of the majority of mankind being what it is, is incompatible with Christianity. Look over the world, sir, behold the great mass of mankind, poor and ignorant, all directly or indirectly, laboring for a few capitalists. Their labors, in the case of each one of them, are far more intense and continued for a far longer time than the labors of the rich, and yet obtain they but the minimum of human subsistence, and not always that. They dwell in darkness, and sit in the region and shadow of death. Is their enlightenment and moral and physical elevation a

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prime motive with you? Are you thinking of doing them good when you are compassing sea and land to grow rich? Look too at these millions of young immortals daily coming into the world, and coming into the world too to run the same hopeless career of their parents. These young beings are born with noble natures, with capacities for all the eloquence of feeling, the sublimities of thought, and the majesty of virtue—of binding themselves by the sweet ties of love to their kind, and by gratitude and reverence to their Maker. Yet on them no star of science ever rises; no day of hope ever dawns; the infinity of their nature lies shrouded in night, and they grow up with low thoughts, base feelings, and groveling propensities; with no eyes for the beauty which everywhere blooms around them, no ears for the sweet music which eternally rings out from all nature, and no heart for the bounty which is strewed on either hand, even to profusion. To them, nature and nature’s God, this rich and glorious universe, on which I could gaze eternally and find fresh delight, must lie forever colorless and obscure—a mere vacancy. For them there is on earth nothing but to delve to live, and to live but to delve. O, my brother! Can you behold them born and dying, and ask for them nothing better? Was it for such a fate God created and sent them hither? C. I should be very glad to see those children decently educated, and fitted for usefulness and happiness. R. On you and such as you we depend for the means of educating them, and putting them in the way of attaining their glorious destiny. You have all the wealth of the world, and what do you do for these young immortals? What sacrifice do you make for them? Of what comfort, nay of what luxury you desire for yourself or family, have you ever deprived yourself that you might benefit them? You call yourself a Christian, and deem me censorious, uncharitable, venomous, when I tell you that you are no Christian. Now, Christianity is easy to come at. It commands us to love one another as Jesus loved us. We are to love the poorest, the meanest, the vilest of God’s offspring, well enough, if need be, to die on the cross for them, as Jesus did for us. You are no Christian unless you love these laboring masses, these ignorant and wretched children, born to no inheritance but toil, ignorance, misery; unless you feel a craving for their welfare that will enable you, though rich, to become poor for their sakes, and though held in honor, to become of no repute that you may breathe hope into their chilled hearts, and strength into their stiffened limbs, and life into their souls so long dead. You must feel such a longing for their moral, physical, and intellectual elevation

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that you shall live but for them, and find your meat and drink only in securing their redemption. Is this the case with you? Is it your constant study, how you may benefit them; your constant, burning desire to dissipate the night that hangs over them, and usher them into the glorious liberty of the sons of God? Why do I mock? You know that you have felt nothing of all this. You can live in luxury, tread on the rich carpets of Turkey, tinge the light of your halls by the purple silks of India, and feast your palates on the dainties culled from every clime, while at your next door, the poor mother, pale and emaciated, sits watching over her starving boy. You a Christian! You spending your thousands for your own gratification, steeped in selfishness, caring for the poor and needy only to use them for your own advantage, you, a Christian! You hope for heaven! God Almighty, why then didst thou make a hell, and threaten the sinner with eternal vengeance! If there be a being on earth infinitely removed from Christ, it is he who in this world of wailing and woe, listens to no calls but those of avarice; in this world of suffering, degraded humanity, is intent only on growing rich; in this world of poverty and dependence, studies the condition of the poor and dependent only for the purpose of making them the instruments of increasing his own wealth and importance. And such are our rich men. Were you to find yourselves in the possession of wealth, if you had the spirit of Christ in you, how long would you continue rich? He, though rich, for our sakes became poor, and though entitled to reverence as a god, for our sakes made himself of no reputation. If you had his spirit, you would soon impoverish yourselves that you might enrich humanity, and make yourselves of no reputation that you might raise up the poor and needy. But you do not this. The rich never can do it and continue to be rich. The rich have not then the spirit of Christ. If they have not the spirit of Christ, then are they none of his; and if none of his, on what can they rest their hopes of acceptance with God? I pass over now the means by which men become rich; I say nothing of the widows they despoil and the orphans they rob; I say nothing of the sweat and toil, the hunger and nakedness of the poor slave that toils to feed their avarice; I say nothing of the wrongs of the poor sailor, who braves the tempest and the deep, and the fiercer tempests of man’s passions, to bring you the rich stuffs out of which you coin your wealth; I pass over all this, and confine myself solely to the use you make of your wealth, when once it is accumulated. I charge you with using it for yourselves, when you should use it for humanity. I charge you with selfishness. You amass wealth to gratify yourselves; you hold it to feed your own vanity; you spend it for your

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own pleasure; you have no love of your race; no deep, burning desire to redeem man. You are cold and heartless; as polished it may be, and as impenetrable as marble. You worship the respectabilities. You may build the tombs of the prophets, and garnish the sepulchers of the righteous, but you leave the Son of Man, who comes to redeem his race, not a stone whereon to lay his head. You condemn the just and seek to impede the progress of the righteous; the man who loves his race you count your enemy, and the prophet of God a child of Satan. You take the name of Jesus on your lips, you build him costly houses, you pay liberally his professed ministers, you dress his altars in purple and scarlet, and with gold and silver, but your heart’s incense you withhold. God is not in all your thoughts; your faces never look upward to heaven; your eyes are cast down to the earth, and your souls have become of the earth earthy. Man of wealth, worm of the dust, who fanciest thou art somebody, and deemest thou hast a right to look down as from heaven upon the poor and needy, the toil-worn and the weary, speed on thy way. Speed on thy way; trust in thy shining dust, in thy respectability and high standing, and commanding influence over thy brother clay; pass on unheedingly by the houseless and friendless, or cast them a penny to make their wretchedness more palpable; but know that for all this God shall bring thee to judgment. Ere thou art aware thy career shall be cut short, and thou shalt be ushered into the presence of thy judge. There, poor and naked, must thou stand in the full blaze of eternity, and be seen and judged as thou art. There thy wealth will stand thee in no stead; there will be none to applaud thee for thy sins, because the sins of a rich man, a man of property and standing; there thou wilt receive the contempt thou deservest for having lived for thyself alone, the derision thou meritest for having fancied that thou wast the center of the universe, and that all things should conspire for thy good. Go. I can endure thy presence no longer. Conversation VII

C. Are you aware of what you do, when you charge the vices of individual character to the inequalities of our social condition? R. I charge to society what you probably charge to the individual. The depravities of individual character originate in the depravities of the social state much oftener than in the perversity of the individual will. I therefore seek to reform society as one of the means of reforming individuals.

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C. You place the cart before the horse. You should seek to reform individuals as the means of reforming society. R. That is, take the end in order to obtain the means. Society is not ultimate. Its improvement is never to be regarded as an ultimate good. The proper object, and the only proper object, of pursuit, is the perfection, or the perfecting, of human nature, in each and every individual. The perfection of society is useless after this perfection is once attained. Your notion, although a common one, is unsound. Society was made for man, not man for society. Man is paramount to society. Society is subordinate and subservient, or should be subservient, to man. It has no value aside from the aid it gives man in developing and perfecting his nature. That social state in which every individual has free and full scope for the harmonious development and play of all his faculties, is a perfect social state. The present social state is imperfect because it does not give this free and full scope, and just so far and no farther than it does not give it. C. But it is sheer folly to talk of a perfect state of society without perfect individuals. R. And not the less so, to talk of perfect individuals in an imperfect social state. An imperfect state of society can turn you out only imperfect characters. C. Not so. Man is not dependent for his virtue on the state of society in which he lives. He can attain his growth under all circumstances, and prove himself worthy of himself, in spite of circumstances. The truly great and good man grows but the more luxuriantly, the more adverse his circumstances. All that which the world most dreads and pronounces the greatest of evils, he bends under him, molds to his purposes, or converts into the means of enlarging his greatness or his goodness. No, sir; virtue comes from within, not from without; and place it in what light you will, it is but the victory of the inward over the outward. R. All this is very fine, very eloquent, and would be very true, if men only were good and great; but of what avail is it to him who is neither one nor the other? The question is not, what one in whom human nature is already largely and harmoniously developed may do; but how it is to be developed in all its energy and glory in those in whom it is now undeveloped, or but imperfectly developed. Give me the self-control, the energy of will, the moral force, of your man who masters all outward circumstances, and I too will bend all nature beneath me, and compel it to minister to my virtue; but in case I have not this self-control, this energy of will, and this moral force, how am I to get them? Here is the point which you wise men of the

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church and the world overlook. Certain it is that a large proportion of mankind are deficient in this moral power, and yet you address them all as if they already had it. Their vice consists in their not having it; and yet you tell them to make use of it as the means of curing their vice! C. You do not state the case correctly. All have it. R. If all have it, all do not exercise it; if it be in them it is undeveloped. How shall it be developed? C. Nothing tends more to develop it than these very evils of which you complain. God permits this to be a world of evil as well as of good, that the evil may be the means of calling forth our moral force and enlarging the sum of our virtue. R. Theory is worthless when unsupported by experience. In some cases the sufferings of this world unquestionably improve the character of the sufferers; but not in all. In a large majority of cases they have a most deteriorating influence. Poverty, sickness, grief, misfortune, suffering of whatever name or nature, usually hardens the heart, blunts the sensibility, sours the temper, and makes the subject of it harsh, peevish, morose, and selfish. C. It is people’s own fault if it do have that effect. They do not make the right use of the afflictions which God sends them. R. But does that remove the difficulty? Grant that it is their own fault, the question is varied, not answered. How shall we cure them of that fault? The insane man, were he only so considerate as to exercise his reason, would at once be rid of his insanity; but, unhappily, the inability to exercise his reason is his insanity. No doubt men would get along very well, were they only to make a right use of evil; but their inability to make a right use of evil is the greatest evil of all. How will you enable them to make a right use of evil? C. They can do it if they will. R. But suppose they do not will, how will you make them will? But is it quite certain that if they do will, they will be able to perform? There are some limitations to this omnipotent will of ours, about which some folks take it into their heads to talk so much. A fit of indigestion, a mistake of your tailor in the cut of your coat, a blow on your head by an angry fellow, shall suddenly bring to nought one of the finest omnipotent wills imaginable. You may will, but a stronger arm than yours may hold you back from the performance. The drunkard, sober today, resolves with the whole energy of his soul that he will never drink again; but he shall find the first gay fellow who invites him to a social glass able to upset his omnipotent will. You may throw away your tobacco-box, and swear in the very depth of

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your being that you will never taste the nauseous weed again, but two hours shall not elapse before you buy another and roll the sweet morsel in your mouth, say your omnipotent will what it may to the contrary. Alas, we are feeble omnipotents, when a little indigestion, a glass of toddy, or a chew of tobacco can make us forswear ourselves, change our firmest resolutions, and do precisely what we willed not to do! We are free to will; we may will as we please; but to do, to perform—that is quite another affair. There is a stern necessity which, while it leaves To Will unfettered, binds To Do in a chain of adamant. We are bound, and struggle as we may, we cannot break our chains. We would do good, but evil is present with us; and the good that we would, we do not, and the evil that we would not, that we do.23 We have all felt the struggle between the freedom of the will and the necessity which controls our actions. Everywhere do we meet resistance; on every side are we hemmed in, and every moment, though rising to heaven in our wills, are we dragged down to hell in our deeds. C. Where now is what you have said of man’s greatness, his godlike nature and tendency? You seem to have a most wonderful facility in contradicting yourself. R. So you may think; but the contradiction you remark exists not in my words, but in human nature. Man is at once great and small, wise and foolish, strong and feeble, a spirit and a clod of earth, a god and a devil. If you fix your eye on one side of him, you are struck with his weakness, his nothingness; if on the other, you are equally struck with his greatness, his sublime faculties and godlike tendencies. What I have just said of his weakness is true, too true, as our daily experience proves; but it is not the only truth, by no means the whole truth. Under certain relations the human will has great energy, and seems all-conquering and unconquerable. Yet the power, we then ascribe to the will, is more properly the power of faith, which brings the will into harmony with the primordial laws of the universe, and strengthens it by all the forces of nature. “If ye had faith as a grain of mustard seed,” said Jesus, “ye could say unto this mountain, be removed and planted in yonder sea, and it should obey you.”24 I am far from being able to prescribe the limits of full, undoubting, unwavering faith. Faith is thaumaturgic in its nature, always a miracle-worker, and if we could only undertake with a calm and full confidence of success, I have little doubt but the meanest of us might work greater 23

[Ed. A reference to Rom 7:21.] [Ed. A conflation of a number of biblical passages: Matt 17:20; 21:21; Mark 11:22; Luke 17:6.] 24

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miracles than any recorded in history. “If ye believe,” says Jesus, “ye shall do greater works than these ” [John 14:12]. There is something in this power of faith, which my philosophy has not yet fathomed. By it one’s eyes are often opened, and he seems to penetrate the profoundest mysteries of the universe, even to the essence of the God-head. We mark it in all our undertakings. Whatever we attempt, nothing doubting, we are almost sure to accomplish. Let me desire as a public speaker to produce a certain effect, and let me have full confidence that I shall succeed, and I am sure not to fail. Let me utter a sentence with my whole soul absorbed in it, confident that it is going right to the hearts of my hearers, and it goes there, and they are electrified. Whenever I am conscious in what I am saying of this calm, undoubting faith, I am sure of my audience. I no sooner open my lips than I have them at my command, and I can do with them as I please till I cease speaking. More than this; when I have felt this faith in what I was about to utter, I have felt even before uttering it, its effect upon the assembly, and my whole frame has been sensible of something approaching an electric shock, and that they and I were connected by a sort of magnetic chain. In conversing with a friend too, in whom I have full faith, and to whom therefore I can speak with entire confidence, I have felt the same. Our souls seem to be melted into one, to move by one will, and each is strengthened and exalted by the combined power of both. Then we rise into the upper regions of truth, far above the unaided flight of either. Heaven opens to us, and we behold the hidden things of God. Something the same is felt when one goes forth in love with nature, and yields to her gentle and hallowing influence. We inhale power with her fragrant odors, and become conscious of loftier thoughts, of nobler feelings, and we form holier resolutions. Our very eyes glow with a brighter flame, our countenances assume a heavenlier hue, our frame becomes instinct with life and energy, and our step free and firm. C. Nonsense! What seems to you so wonderful and mysterious is nothing but the power of sympathy and imagination. R. Will you be so good, sir, as to explain to me what this power of sympathy is, and this power of imagination? Let us not fancy that we have removed our ignorance by giving it a name. I know that this power is under one of its aspects called love, under another sympathy, under another imagination, under still another faith; but what it is in itself I know not. Be it, however, what it will, it is dæmonic, supernatural, an element in human nature, of which men in all ages have caught some glimpses, but of which we have as yet had only glimpses. I do not pretend to understand it. I stand in awe of it both

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when manifested in myself and in others. I regard it as the link which connects man with his Creator, and in it we may yet perhaps discover the secret of his redemption. The history of our race bristles with prodigies. These prodigies were once accounted miracles, and supposed to be wrought by the finger of the Divinity; now, an unbelieving age treats them as impostures, cheats, fabrications, proving nothing but people’s love of the marvelous, and the ease with which they may be gulled. I believe them for the most part real. I believe that there are times when man has a power over the elements, and may make the spirits obey him. Who knows but the time will come, when the law by which this power operates will be discovered, and this power, which has been hitherto irregular and transient, will become common and regular in its influence; and therefore bear the marks of a fixed law of nature? But, this power, be it what it may, is by no means identical with the human will, nor is it, in my belief, strictly speaking a property of human nature. It is an overshadowing, an all-pervading power, most likely identical with the power that creates and sustains the universe. We avail ourselves of it, not because it is ours, but by placing ourselves in harmony with it, or so that it flows as a mighty current through us. Now, although I by no means comprehend this power, I find in its reality the principle of all my efforts at reform. By its light I proceed, and by its aid I hope to be able to set the human race forward towards a higher and a more glorious destiny. Man is a complex being, the junction of two forces. He is both active and passive; he acts and is acted upon. His power to act is what I term the will. This, the proper human power, is unquestionably a reality, and must be exerted; but it is not alone sufficient. As a mere individual relying on my own strength alone, I am a feeble creature, and my strivings come to nothing. I will nobly, but perform pitiably. My will, that is, my own activity, must be brought into harmony with the activity of the universe, so that what in me are the active and the passive, free will and necessity, may conspire to the same end. When you would erect a mill, for instance, you so erect it as to bring the forces of nature to bear upon and drive your machinery. In all handiwork our study is to do the same.25 So in all our moral work25 See this finely illustrated in its bearing on art, in a late number of the Dial, in a paper entitled “Thoughts on Art”—a paper which some of our wise newspaper critics have attempted to ridicule for its absurdity, but which is quite creditable to its distinguished author. [Ed. Ralph Waldo Emerson, “Thoughts on Art,” Dial 2 (January, 1841): 367-78.]

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ings, our aim should be to place ourselves in such attitudes, that the moral forces of the universe shall work for us. “I can of mine own self do nothing; but through Christ, strengthening me, I can do all things,”26 is the testimony of an inspired apostle to the doctrine I would establish. When once by love, sympathy, faith, I have placed myself in harmony with the law of the universe, that is, the will of God, my will is reinforced by the will of Omnipotence. Then nature, man, God works in me, for me, and I can do all things. The elements then are mine; the winds are my messengers, and flames of fire my ministers; for it is no longer I, but God himself that works. This must explain to you the contradiction you have pointed out. Man acting alone, as a mere individual, is weak and pitiable; in harmony with his race, with nature, with God, is the sublime and godlike being I have called upon you to love and reverence. Understand now the first principle of all real reform. You must study to place yourself in harmony with the law of the universe, and to avail yourself of the moral forces everywhere at work in it. The law of your race, the law of nature is a transcript of the will of your Creator. Whenever you overlook the factitious distinctions of men, and place yourself in harmony with the law of humanity, you are in harmony with God, and act with his might to reinforce yours. Reformers are weak and inefficient because they go forth in their own strength, because they act from their own individuality, without regard to the will of God as manifested in the fundamental law of human nature. They have then for their aid nothing but their own individuality, which is the essence of weakness. You can do nothing for man in opposition to the law of humanity. Write if you will a book; bestow upon it all the labor, the strength of intellect, and power of genius you can, and it shall be counted a small affair, unless it meet, in some degree, the sympathies of the race, embody some of the views and wishes of mankind. It is purely idiosyncratic in its character. It may be read for the purpose of ascertaining your idiosyncracies, but for nothing else. It will exert no influence; it will not fasten itself on the public mind, and become an integral part of it. You alone produce it; it is your book. The human race does not assist at its birth, and will not contribute to its growth. No man, who stands alone, repels his race, and acts in opposition to them, can be a great man or do great things, however great he may be as an individual. A great man is one whom everybody conspires to make. If you cannot enlist the cooperation of your race, make yourself the 26

[Ed. A reference to Phil 4:13.]

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focus in which are concentered all their thoughts, wishes, sympathies, hopes, and fears, you had better give up the idea of being a great man. You cannot be a great man in spite of your race. You can do nothing unless you can secure the aid of your fellow beings. What could have been a Washington, or who could have been a Washington, without the cooperation of his race? Or a Napoleon, had he not succeeded in securing the cooperation of the party in favor of new institutions? So long as Napoleon could secure that cooperation he was invincible. He lived and acted in concert with humanity, and was the center and outlet of the general will. As soon as he lost that and sought merely an individual, a selfish good, what was he? The battle of Waterloo may answer. When humanity cooperated with him, we called him a great man; he appeared able to do whatever he willed; he overran Europe in mere pastime, took an empire with the ease with which one takes his dinner, made and unmade kings with less trouble than one shifts his dress. But the power he wielded was not his, but humanity’s. Would you learn the power of the individual Napoleon, the energy of his will as a simple individual, go see him on his Rock in the Ocean, quarreling with his jailor about the quality of his wine. All men, as individuals, are pitiable creatures, the good and great no less than the bad and little. You can be nothing unless you can avail yourself of the cooperation of humanity. To bring us or to enable us to come into this harmony, there are two forces of which we must avail ourselves. The first is our individual will, or voluntary striving, the other the influence of society, understanding the word society, in its largest sense, together with its institutions of whatever name or nature. This is the influence on man from without. The voluntary strivings must be of two kinds, or have two different directions. In the first place we must strive to get the command of ourselves, and to bring all our wishes, purposes, feelings, passions, into harmony with the law we are to obey. This is what is enjoined upon us by the clergy, and moral reformers generally, as contradistinguished from social reformers. In this we may do something, but not much, as the history of six thousand years abundantly proves, and as our own experience of the weakness of our wills but too clearly demonstrates. The other direction of our voluntary strivings must be towards society, to the molding of the institutions which act upon us. This is the direction taken by the social reformers proper. But I, who am never satisfied with anything exclusive, contend for both, and would always combine the moral reformers with the social. As a moral reformer, I must study to harmonize my own moral nature; as a social reformer, I must aim to make all the influ-

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ences, which come from without, push us towards the destiny we would accomplish. If we look at the world as it is, we shall find that the social influences, which act upon us, have a corrupting tendency. Society, as now organized, tends to develop the lower propensities of our nature, and to unfit us for obeying the higher law of humanity; stimulates from the first the passions to which we cannot yield without moral degradation. All, or nearly all social tendencies, of which we are now the victims, serve to stimulate the three passions of love, ambition, avarice. To enjoy love, in its lowest sense, to become distinguished and famous, to obtain large possessions, are what we are impelled to by the books we read, the examples we see, and the influences to which we are subjected. These are so early developed in us that if we have any largeness of nature, we are never able in after life fully to control them. If we are weak beings by nature, possessing the faculties common to our nature only in a mediocre degree we may pass along without running into any excess, or experiencing any great difficulty in maintaining what is called self-control. But if we have rich natures, the various tendencies which belong to our nature, in their highest degree, if we are born nature’s noblemen, with the strength and energy of faculties to distinguish ourselves from the common level, we either waste our lives and suffer the tortures of hell in seeking to restrain our passions, or we run into guilty excesses, and create the impression that a great man is almost necessarily a great sinner. In fact all the influences upon us from without are deleterious, and deprive us of moral strength, just in proportion as they stimulate our passions. Temptations are soon thick around us. We are beset on either hand by enemies to our virtue. We are weak and in want of help. This help society does not give. She multiplies these temptations, reinforces our enemies, then leaves us to the combat, and punishes if we do not conquer. She smooths the road to hell, and makes that to virtue steep and rugged. facilis descensus averni: Noctes atque dies patet atri janua Ditis: Sed revocare gradum, superasque evadere ad auras, Hoc opus, hic labor est.27

27 [Ed. Vergil, Aeneid, Book 6, lines 126-29: “Going down to the underworld is easy: the hell-God’s dark door is open morning and evening. The climb back to higher air, retracing your footsteps: this is the work, the struggle.”]

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Nearly all the instruction we receive tends to give the world, the flesh, and the devil dominion over us. In our infancy we are hushed by falsehood, or quieted by baubles; in youth our brains are drilled out by the priest and pedagogue; and in manhood dried up by intercourse with the world. From earliest childhood we are accustomed to see things valued in an inverse ratio to their real worth, place, wealth, or fashion control the many, and to find regarded as the nobility of the race not those who labor honestly and efficiently for mankind, but those who have been most successful in love, avarice, or ambition. A poor man who gets tipsy is brought up before your city police and fined or sent to the house of correction; a rich man may get drunk in his own house and be carried to his bed he knows not when or how, and yet be counted a gentleman. He who kills but one man is a murderer; he who can kill or cause thousands to be killed is a hero; and everything else in society is of the same stamp. Is virtue possible—I mean virtue beyond the virtue of intention—is virtue possible in such a state of society? He who would be strictly honest, unless he have some capital in advance, must beg or starve. Men live by cheating—grow rich by cheating—highminded, honorable men, by cheating. A man, by way of commerce, may rob, make poor, a thousand widows and orphans in some uncivilized island of the ocean, and yet be one of our first and most respectable citizens. And if, out of his superabounding wealth, he give a few hundreds to some benevolent society, as old sinners formerly made donations to the church, he shall be praised in all the public prints, and held up as one whom every young man should study to imitate. He who by some strange mischance finds himself encumbered with a conscience somewhat tender, and disposed to inquire into the rectitude of his doings, is counted a mere simpleton by the business world. Go on ‘Change,’ into a bank, a broker’s office, a factory, or into any of your legislative halls or courts of justice, if you would ascertain what are one’s chances of being virtuous in society as it is. Or go into the charmed circles of fashion, or into one of your popular churches, if you would learn the temptations to sin, which society furnishes and will furnish as long as it remains in its present half-civilized state. Fashion makes people afraid to act themselves and enjoy themselves in their own way, lest their fashionable acquaintances cut them; and the church makes them afraid to think freely and utter themselves honestly, lest they be turned out of the synagogue, and sent to hell before their time. C. Come, come, man, you are growing crazy. R. Would to God I were crazy. Would to God the evils I see were only the visions of my own disordered fancy. Would to God all I have

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uttered were but the ravings of the madman. But I fear, sir, that I am but too sane. I fear that it will be found that what I say is but too true. I shall not be believed now. I know my fate. I know I am doomed to utter prophecies that will not be believed. Yet I must speak. I must lay down my burden, however bitterly I may weep to foresee that it will be disregarded. No matter. I speak not in wrath; I blame not individuals; I know human weakness; I know what men have to combat, and my heart bleeds for them. If, as I glance at their conduct, I sometimes find my mind growing dark and perplexed, and a curse rises in the bitterness of my soul to my lips, I check myself, and lay the blame to systems and not to individuals. Individuals are our brothers; they are made as you and I are; they would do good; the basest of them kindles up at sight of the disinterested and the heroic; the most abandoned love virtue, and long to return to their Father’s house and hold communion with the wise and good; but alas, the temptations to sin are too strong; a false standard of worth, a wrongly organized society, mischievous social influences hurry them onward and downward to hell. O, sir, I would not censure a single human being as an individual. I know not what struggles may have torn the bosom of that poor brother they are dragging to prison, on whom that iron door is soon to be closed and those bolts are to be drawn. I know not how those, whom society brands as felons, may have struggled to be good and great, and till I do, I dare not condemn them. The hardened villain, as he was called, who, a few days since was choked to death by law, may have started in life with a noble ambition, with warm and generous sympathies, looking forward to be one of the greatest and best of the human race. Had his heart been responded to by society, had he found the influence needed to bring out in full glory and omnipotence the infant god within him, who can tell what he might not have been? Who can tell the efforts he had made, the good resolutions he had formed, and the anguish he had suffered, the fire which had burned within him, the hell which had consumed him! O, if the hearts of those, we most condemn, were laid open to our inspection, could we but see their workings, examine their scars, and judge of their conflicts with sin and the devil, and know how a word, a thoughtless word, a discouraging look, a temptation thrown in their way by that very society which condemns, hangs, or imprisons them, has proved their ruin, overpowered them, sunk them, as the feather too much broke the camel’s back, my life on it, we should find infinitely more to commiserate and forgive, than to condemn and punish.

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And yet, sir, do not fancy that I am a whit more charitable than I was yesterday. I admit men are weak rather than wicked, and the depravities of their character I am disposed to charge to the depravities of the social state, rather than to the perversity of their wills; nevertheless they are not wholly blameless. Man is not wholly a passive being. He can act as well as be acted upon. If circumstances act upon him, up to a certain extent, he can act upon them, and so modify them that their reaction upon him shall be salutary. I blame individuals, not because they cannot, by a mere effort of volition, make themselves high-minded and virtuous beings; but because they do not exert the moral power given them to mold society, so that it may be in harmony with the higher laws of man’s nature. I blame you, sir, as a rich man, that instead of making the social influences to which we are exposed favorable to the growth of moral excellence, you have been intent merely on amassing an estate. I blame the learned and the gifted, because they devote their learning and gifts, not to the improvement of man’s social condition, but to their own grandizement. I blame politicians and statesmen for their selfishness and neglect of the true end of government—the elevation of man. C. And what would you have these men you blame attempt for the elevation of man, as you term it? R. Much. But I am fatigued now, and you must wait for my answer till I am disposed to give it.

10. OUR FUTURE POLICY1 Boston Quarterly Review 4 (January, 1841): 68-112

Contrary to our wishes, but hardly contrary to our fears, we have now to record the signal success of the friends and supporters of William Henry Harrison. The Whigs are now in the ascendancy in the Union, and in a majority of the states. With the fourth of March next, commences a Whig dynasty, to last at least four years. The people have so willed, and, whatever may be our individual convictions, hopes, or fears, we must submit. Whether this result will be for the good of the country, or the evil, it is impossible as yet to decide. We have not desired it. We have had no fellowship with the Whig party, no sympathy with their methods of electioneering, and no confidence in their acknowledged principles. We have deprecated their success as a serious calamity, similar in its nature to the subjugation of a free and independent people by a foreign power, and likely to be not less disastrous in its consequences. We have honestly believed that the safety of our free institutions, the progress of liberty and social equality, demanded the reelection of Mr. Van Buren, and the success of his friends in the Union and the states. But a majority of the people, wisely or unwisely, have decided differently, and though we cannot, as yet, honor their decision, we must respect it as the law of the land till it be reversed. But however much we may fear of the worst, we owe it to ourselves to say that we by no means despair of the Republic. We are not among those, who have unbounded confidence in the actual virtue and intelligence of the people; and the recent elections have by no means tended to increase what little confidence we may have had; but we have great faith in the capacities of human nature, and we believe there is already enough of virtue and intelligence in our community to arrest any dangerous tendency in the government, before it shall be too late. Moreover, we believe firmly in an overruling Providence; and the Providence, which has selected this as the chosen land 1 [Ed. The full title of the article was, “The Policy to be pursued hereafter by the Friends of the Constitution, and of Equal Rights.”] 470

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of freedom, thus far watched over and protected us, and prepared us for the work assigned us in the progress of civilization, we cannot believe will abandon us before we have accomplished our mission. We confide with calmness in the God of our fathers, and trust that he will yet deliver us from the Philistines, and enable us to build the temple of freedom, which shall abide the ravages of time, and within which shall one day meet in peace, to pay their vows, the whole family of disenthralled and regenerated man. Moreover, in analyzing with some care the elections which have resulted in favor of General Harrison, we still find ground for hope. The people in these elections have not, in their own estimation, decided against freedom and equality; nay, they have not decided against the doctrines or measures of the Democratic party. They have not deserted, and we have as yet no reason to believe that they will desert, their ancient democratic faith. However it may have been with the Whig leaders and wire pullers, the great mass of the people whom they have carried away, have not voted against the administration because they have condemned its measures. They have asked not for a change of measures, but of men. They have looked upon the present administration, in its administrative character, as low-minded and corrupt, as deficient in both capacity and integrity, and therefore as unfit to be entrusted with the management of public affairs. Here is the secret of the recent revolution—a revolution which in the minds of the majority of the people extends only to men. The people we need not say have been deceived, woefully deceived; but the moment they become aware of the fact, they will lose no time in rectifying their mistake. If the men, they have now placed in power, undertake to carry out a policy essentially different from that which has been pursued for the last twelve years, they will hurl them from power at the earliest moment permitted by the forms of the Constitution. With this conviction, we cannot despair. We believe the present administration has been most grossly belied; but, in its purely administrative character, we have no disposition to take up its defense. In this character, it has no extraordinary claims on the affection of the people. It is remarkable neither for its sagacity nor its purity. There are, we should hope, many other men in the country who can administer the government as well as they have done. Still in justice to Mr. Van Buren, we must say that in the measures requiring legislative action, which he has recommended or sustained, he has done well, been faithful to the Constitution, and deserves, as he will one day receive, the gratitude of his country.

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Mr. Van Buren has been defeated; but he is much dearer to the American people today than he was when elected President. He has failed in his reelection, not because he has lost in popularity, but because he never was the choice of the American people. The people never willed his elevation to the presidential chair. He was elevated to that chair, not by his own popularity, but by the popularity of his predecessor, and by the management of party leaders. Since he became President, he has for the first time in his life gained a place in the affections of the American people, and he retires from the presidency, with an enviable popularity, and an honest fame which will endure. We are, however, far from regarding Mr. Van Buren as entirely free from faults, and faults which in these times cannot be without results. He strikes us as deficient in boldness and enthusiasm. He has great coolness, is firm, and will die in the last ditch sooner than abandon his avowed principles; but his better qualities rarely manifest themselves till he is put upon his defense; and, though they may spread a glory around his grave and secure him a hero’s fame, they generally come too late to retrieve the losses of his friends, or to change the fortunes of the day. His policy is to wait, to trust to time, to “the sober second thought of the people”;2 in other words to follow public opinion and events, not to lead them. His is not the bold master mind that seizes time by the forelock, that creates his own public, and bends it to his will. He may ride upon the storm, but he does not direct its course. Yet there is something almost sublime in the calmness, the composure with which he suffers himself to be carried along, whither he apparently sees not. He is not deficient in mere intellect, and his political information is respectable. In ordinary times, when passion is asleep, and reason awake, he were not ill qualified to be the president of a free people. But in these revolutionary times, his qualities are not of the sort most in demand. He wants elevation, nobility of ideas, and warmth of heart. Sober reasoning, calm reflection, mere good sense are not now the sovereigns of the world. Men’s passions are aroused, their feelings are excited, and they are moved by appeals to their sympathies rather than to their understandings. They see not clearly, but they feel intensely; and they ask for a man to go before them who fears not the darkness, whose step falters not, and who can lend them confidence not their own. Such a man Mr. Van Buren has not 2 [Ed. Fisher Ames, “On Biennial Elections” (January, 1788, in the Convention of Massachusetts) in Works of Fisher Ames, ed. Seth Ames, 2 vols. (Boston: Little, Brown and Company, 1854), 2:7.]

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proved himself. One such man we had in Thomas Jefferson; another we had in Andrew Jackson; another—we shall find him in due time. That the administration party has been defeated through its own faults, rather than through the frauds, falsehoods, and misrepresentations of the opposing party, of which there have been enough, and more than enough, for even Beelzebub’s infinite satisfaction, we suppose it would not be difficult to show. But, what were the use in attempting to do it? It is a miserable disposition, that which delights to dwell on the blunders of friends, or which can bring itself to upbraid associates with the reverses which all must share in common. Defeat like the grave levels all distinctions, and hides all faults. If things had been different, they would have been different. This is the amount of all fault-finding with the past. But things were as they were, and the result is what it is, and there is the end of the matter, and no more need be said about it. It is not the temper of democracy to weep over past errors, or to turn round and scold her friends when she chances to meet a repulse. Her face is ever towards the future, which alone is hers; and she labors to recruit her forces, and to stand ready for whatever may come. She knows that though she may be checked in her onward march for a moment, she cannot be driven back; and that though she may sometimes fail to win, she never loses. If her leaders managed badly yesterday and failed, she trusts that they will acquire wisdom from their mismanagement, and become able to conquer tomorrow. We regret, deeply regret, the ill success of the Democratic party; but we have no reproaches to cast on friend or foe. We are as ready to engage again with those with whom we fought side by side yesterday, as we should have been, had we entirely approved, as we did not, their arrangements. In this we are not alone. We express the feelings of the great body of those, who, as friends of the Constitution and of equal rights, have struggled, with what skill and bravery were in them, to sustain the administration. We have been unsuccessful, but we have not lost our temper, nor are we disposed to run foul of one another. We have by a common fate become but the more endeared to each other. Personal animosities have subsided. The democracy will hereafter be disturbed by no intestine divisions, by no personal rivalries; but will present to the enemies of liberty and social progress, an unbroken front, a closely knit body, animated by one and the same soul, and directed by one and the same will. They are now indeed a band of brothers, sworn to stand by one another; and they will stand by one another in adversity, as they did not always in prosperity; and so long as one of them can stand, liberty shall not want a defender, nor social equality an advocate.

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For the present the democracy will wait the movements of the new dynasty. They will assume not the attitude of opposition, but of watchfulness. If the Whig policy shall prove to be democratic, they will not oppose it, but give it their cordial support. But if it be at war with that which has been pursued by the administration for the last twelve years, as there is but too much ground to fear that it will, then it must count on an opposition, not factious, but calm, determined, uncompromising, whether successful or unsuccessful. The Whig party has come into power by pretending to be democratic; it has come in, to a considerable extent, unpledged, and is therefore free to adopt the democratic policy if it chooses; we must then wait its movements, and hold ourselves free to sustain or oppose as it shall prove itself democratic or not. During this period of waiting, we must not, however, be idle. We must avail ourselves of the comparative repose, with which we are favored, to fix the basis of our creed, to consolidate our policy, and to prepare ourselves to take the field again, if we must take it again, with a perfect understanding of the objects for which we are to contend, and with as entire agreement as may be, concerning the methods by which we must proceed, and by which we may hope to win. Two parties there are in this country, and two parties there always will be; a party in favor of property, whose leading object will be to facilitate the profitable investment of business capital, to make the government a mere instrument for facilitating trade; and a party in favor of man, whose leading object will be to secure to the workingman a greater share of the proceeds of his labor, and to elevate labor and make it honorable. These two parties have existed from the formation of the federal government, and they will not cease to exist under the new dynasty. Whether the Whigs in their actual policy will ultimately prove themselves the first named party or the second, we shall not now attempt to determine. For our part, we shall always be found with the second, the party of the Constitution, of equal rights, of the workingman, whatever may be the name by which it may be called, and whether it be in power or out of power. This second named party is properly the party of the Constitution, and of equal rights. It in reality comprises a large majority of the American population, and when it can be rallied, as it has not been effectually in the late contest, it is able to carry everything before it. The great aim of the friends of liberty, of social progress, and the practical realization of the principles incorporated into our free institutions, should be to rally this party, to unite in one body all

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who sympathize with it. This party has heretofore failed, because vast numbers of those, who properly belong to it, have not come to its aid. False issues have been made, and elections have not turned on the real matters in dispute. Hence this party, the true Democratic party of the country, has been divided, and friend has, unhappily, fought against friend, and natural and irreconcilable enemies have fought in the same ranks side by side. This has created no little confusion, and caused all the disasters the democracy has experienced. We must study to remedy this evil, to make up the true issue, and collect all the democrats of the country under the same banner, and keep them on one and the same side. This can be done only by falling back on first principles. The democracy is never moved by mere words, by mere shadows. It is grave, solemn, earnest. It demands realities. It asks for the substance. It supports no party because it bears this or that name, no individuals because they are called democrats. A party to gain its suffrages must be democratic; and men must be democrats, or it will not confide in them, or follow their guidance. It asks only what is just, and that it does ask. It asks for an open, straight-forward, honest policy. It has a great dislike to all maneuvering, to all crooked paths, to all underhanded methods of proceeding. It would take its ground openly and manfully, in the broad light of day, and maintain it by fair means, or not at all. It has also a great horror of half-way measures, measures, which excite all the opposition of whole measures, and yet effect nothing when carried. The timid, trimming, compromising policy, so much insisted upon by fourth-rate politicians, finds no support in the instincts or the reason of the people. Democracy abhors it, and it can find supporters only among mere party leaders themselves. Democracy demands a bold policy; measures which amount to something; which reach far and wide; and which will accomplish something worth making an effort for. Who will go to war, risk ease, wealth, life itself, when even victory secures no advantage? The leaders of the Democratic party have erred on this point. They have talked finely, but they have done little else than talk. They have eulogized liberty, declaimed about equality, and spoken of the dignity of labor, but unhappily, they have kept too far in the abstract. They have proposed little that is tangible, palpable; and the people have felt that, if all which they propose were adopted, it would effect but a slight, a scarcely perceptible mitigation of the evils of our existing social state. Some may say that our friends have failed to succeed even in the small measures they have proposed, and ask, how then could they have succeeded in greater measures? It is simply because their mea-

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sures have been small, and capable of realizing only a trifling good, that they have failed. They have failed not because they have attempted too much, but because they have attempted too little. They have proposed nothing big enough to fill the heart of the people, to enlist its affections, kindle its enthusiasm, and call forth its energy. The giant will not rouse himself to crush a fly. If you really mean to be true to the great principles of freedom and equality, if you really mean to ameliorate society, elevate the laborer, and make every man really a man, free and independent; then you must say so, and show by the measures you propose that you mean so. Show that you are in earnest, that you are contending for something, and that you have the nerve to contend for it effectually, and then you will inspire confidence, touch the nobility of human nature, the magnanimity of the people, and carry the masses in one solid phalanx with you. You must have the souls of heroes, if you wish to take the place of heroes, or reap their success. Nay, if you ask for heroic deeds from the people, you must give them a cause able to kindle the heroic spirit. If you have no inborn heroism, if you have no power to grasp the great, the noble; no courage to propose the bold and the daring; then stand aside, with your timid, half-way measures, bowing, and cringing, and praying to be admitted; stand aside and let men, who have the souls of men, the minds and the hearts of men, who fear nothing, who tremble, blench at nothing, save the mean, the wrong, the inefficient, let them take your places, and try their hand at conducting the democracy to victory. The truth is, too many who call themselves democrats, are democrats only in the abstract, only in pretty phrases, or high-sounding words, and flattering epithets. Propose anything really democratic, anything that is likely to result in making democracy something more than a splendid dream, and forthwith these sonorous democrats are frightened, they look pale, and begin to tremble for their own cushioned seats. Poor fellows! They are afraid they shall be disgigged, and thus lose their respectability. Such are not the men to lead on the democracy. Whoso loves father or mother, sister or brother, wife or children, nay, or his own life, more than democracy, is not worthy in these times to be her champion. Her cause can be promoted only by men who dare to live for her, or if need be to die for her; who can joy even in exile, in the dungeon, or on the cross, at the prospect of her success. Men love the brave spirit, the heroic soul, and they fall down and worship him who risks all that is dear to him in their cause. Why are men so attracted by military glory? Why has military prowess

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such power over the masses? Because, men delight in war and bloodshed, in hewing and mangling the bodies of their brethren, in carrying widowhood to the wife, and childlessness to the mother? Nonsense. Men are not cruel. They delight not in scenes of carnage; they hear no music in the groans of the wounded and dying, the bereaved and the disconsolate. It is because they see courage, nobility, disinterestedness, a power in the warrior that raises him above himself, above all fear of danger, or death. It is because war reveals the brave, the heroic spirit. Here too is the reason why the people always prefer the military chieftain to the mere politician. They distrust the politician because they believe him cool, calculating, crafty, selfish, cowardly, destitute of bravery and enthusiasm, as most politicians have been and are. The people care little for mere intellect. They have no faith in dry calculations, in the cool deductions of logic. Intellect to them is a god only when it is accompanied by high moral qualities, nobleness of soul, generous emotion, warmth of affection, and a contempt of difficulties and dangers. But, interposes one of our prudent politicians, you are all wrong. You ruin everything by going too fast. You must not outrun public sentiment. Away with your public sentiment! Seize the right, the true, the beautiful, the good, hold them up in their native simplicity and loveliness, and know that public sentiment is sure to be with you. The “common people” will listen to you with open ears, eyes, and mouth. They will arm in your defense, declare you their king, and take the kingdom for you by storm. It is your want of confidence in the greatness and generosity of human nature, that ruins you; it is your fear that, if you trust the people with the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth, they, like a herd of swine, will turn and rend you, that makes you powerless, mean and insignificant. Out upon you! If you are democrats, dare trust the people, dare trust them with the truth, dare trust them with all that you believe necessary to their salvation. Ask not what they believe, what they will support. Be generous, be brave, be heroic, speak the truth and support the right, at the sacrifice of your lives if need be, and know that they then believe what you believe, and support what you support. But, is there no danger of being rash, of attempting more than the people will bear? Miserable cowards, who boast that “discretion is the better part of valor,”3

3

[Ed. Shakespeare, Henry IV, Part 1, Act 5, Scene 4, Line 168.]

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we advise you to attempt nothing at all. If you have not confidence enough in the people to trust them with much, be assured that they will not trust you with little. True prudence is what you would call rashness. True prudence is never made up of timidity and selfishness, but of lofty daring, and generous confidence. This feeling that politicians have about the imprudence of attempting much, and the prudence of attempting little, arises from a mistaken notion of the true office of government. In nearly all ages and countries of the world, the office of government has been to impose burdens on the people, to force from the people a larger portion of their earnings, or to keep them quiet under an order of things from which the few alone profit. Hence the necessity of craft, of subtlety, secrecy, dissimulation on the part of the politician. It becomes necessary for him to proceed with great caution, to seem to be what he is not, to pretend one thing and to do another. Now if this be the office of government, the politicians are right. If it be their object, by the aid of government to ride the people, it is prudent for them to beware and not attempt too much at once. If the object be to impose burdens on the people, then your half-way measures, we admit, are the safest, and the only safe measures. You must not lay on too heavy a load at once, lest the animal rear up and hit you a kick, or lest you break the poor fellow’s back. But the real office of government is not to increase, but to lighten the load borne by the people. Your object should be to throw off the poor creature’s burden, and to let him go free, and graze at will on the mountain or in the valley. If this be your object, as it should be, you must show the people that what you propose to throw off will really lighten their load, if you wish them to cooperate with you, or even to stand still while you proceed in your efforts. The people do not like to be mocked. They will not thank you for removing an ounce from their burdens while you leave them bowed down under the weight of tons. In politics, as in all things else, the old maxim holds good, “nothing venture, nothing have.”5 In order then to rally the democracy and unite them all in a firm resolution to recover their rights, and to take the direction of the social and political affairs of the country, we must adopt a bold policy, 4

[Ed. Oliver Goldsmith, The Art of Poetry on a New Plan (1761), 2:147.] [Ed. The phrase comes from Emerson’s “Compensation,” in Collected Works, 2:64.] 5

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and propose bold measures. We must show that the measures we propose will do something more than merely assuage the pain of the social wound, without healing it. Palliatives will no longer answer our purpose. Mere expedients will be worse than useless. We must go to the bottom, and lay our foundation deep. We must build on ultimate, universal, and immutable right, and propose measures which will either destroy the social fabric entirely, or reconstruct it as it should be. We must be thorough; propose not what we think we can carry, but what we think we ought to carry; not what we in our wisdom may deem practicable, but what in the exercise of our better nature we deem just and desirable. We must not say, “such and such a thing is right, is desirable, but the people will not assent to it.” Party leaders may not assent to it, but the people will. Why should what appears to your better nature as right and desirable, not appear the same to them? Have you a different nature from theirs? Propose then a bold and efficient policy; one which, if carried out, will realize the ideal which the wise and good are struggling after. It is not our province, nor is it any man’s province, to say authoritatively what this policy must be; but it is our right and our duty, as it is the right and the duty of every man, to give our views of what it ought to be, and to use all the moral means in our power to determine what it shall be. We propose therefore in what follows to give to some extent our views in relation to the course which should be pursued, and the measures which should be adopted, by the friends of the Constitution, and of equal rights. We shall speak of course for ourselves, but we shall also speak what we have good reasons to believe will be acceptable to the great body of the democracy. Our motive for speaking at this time is to contribute what we can to bring about a perfect agreement among all the believers in social progress, and to give to the social and political movement of our countrymen a salutary direction. The first thing necessary to be determined is the end we are to seek. What is the end, which in our political movements we should have in view? Should we aim merely to keep things as they are? Should we be satisfied to go on as we have done for the last fifty years? Is it enough merely to maintain the forms of a free government, and to keep its administration in the hands of the Democratic party? Ought we not rather to aim at some advance? Should we not regard our free government in the light of a means to an end? Should we not feel that it is our duty to use our democratic forms of government as instruments in our hands for working out a moral and a social good? Governments, unless we have greatly erred, are worth nothing in

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themselves, are never to be supported for their own sake, as ends. They are valuable, they command our support, only as means, only for the use we can make of them. Can we make no better use of government than we have heretofore done? Can we not direct it to a higher end? Indeed is there not an end which we should always seek, towards which we should direct all governmental measures and action? What is this end? We have answered this question more than once. We contend that the mission of this country is to emancipate the proletary, to ennoble labor, raise up the laboring classes, and make every man really free and independent. Under the material relation, we ask that every man become an independent proprietor, possessing enough of the goods of this world, to be able by his own moderate industry to provide for the wants of his body; and under the spiritual relation, that he be free to develop harmoniously all his faculties, and have access to the highest culture the community can furnish. We demand for every man wealth to start with in life sufficient, if he make a proper use of it, for him to hold, so far as wealth gives distinction, an equal rank with any other man in the community. In a word we demand a state of society in which every man’s rank shall be measured by his capacities, intelligence, and virtues, and where the intelligence and virtues shall be as nearly equal as the diversities of men’s natural aptitudes will admit. There must not be a learned class and an unlearned, a cultivated class and an uncultivated, a refined class and a vulgar, a wealthy class and a poor. There shall not be one class owning all the funds, and another performing all the labor of production. There shall be no division of society into workingmen and idlers, employers and operatives. There shall be workingmen, but no proletaries; for we would have all men work each on his own capital, associated or not associated, on equal terms with his brother. This is the end we aim at; this is the mission of this country, and to this should all the measures of government directly or indirectly tend. Now we are far from supposing that this end can or will be realized in a day. We see as clearly as any of our friends that its realization is far distant in the future. Not indeed because the great mass of the people are not prepared for it; but because the leaders of parties are in no haste to reach it, and for the most part want courage to attempt it. But let this be as it may; the end we have designated we should keep ever in view, and the wisdom or unwisdom of every political or legislative measure should be tested by its tendency to carry us towards it, or to remove us from it. Government is of no value to us, except so far as we can use it for the realization of this end.

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We say here, in order to prevent misconception, that we are far from regarding government as the only means in our power for realizing the end we have proposed. Our faith in government is not unbounded. Government has no wisdom beyond the wisdom of society, and it can in this country be nothing more than the agent of society for embodying, for executing its will. It is not government that gives the law to society; but society that gives the law to government. Unquestionably our chief concern is with society, and our main endeavor should be to create a true public opinion, and that exaltation of the public sentiment which will carry society with resistless force towards the completion of its destiny. This is to be done by moral, religious, and intellectual influences. These influences are then of course more essential than governmental action. These determine the action of society and the end towards which it shall act. But still we are far from regarding government, as some one asserts, as “at best a necessary evil.”6 We look upon man as both an individual and as a member of society; and his perfection requires both individual action and social. There are some things which he can do and must do alone by himself; there are others equally necessary to be done, which can be done and must be done by society only. Man must act collectively as well as individually. Now his collective action is the action of society, that is government. If, then, we mean society shall do anything, if we recognize in any shape the necessity of associated action, we must have government. We accept it then not only as necessary but as a great good. We would indeed leave a large space to the individual, but we would not leave him entirely alone. The laissez-faire doctrine, so much in vogue with a certain class of politicians, does not meet our approbation. Men require to be governed, and coercion of some sort is indispensable. They need to be combined into a whole, and directed towards a common end, which shall be for the common good of all, and the special good of each. Hence it is that we recognize, not absolute power, but a certain power in society to control the action of her members, and to force them into a qualified submission to her will. This power is founded in right and constitutes the legitimate basis of government. We owe to society a certain obedience, and should be loyal to her whenever she steps not beyond her province. 6 [Ed. Thomas Paine, Common Sense (1776), The Complete Writings of Thomas Paine, ed. Philip S. Foner, 2 vols. (New York: The Citadel Press, 1945), 1:4. Paine actually says: “Society in every state is a blessing, but government, even in its best state, is but a necessary evil.”]

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We hold that society has the right to adopt such measures as are likely to be for the common good of all her members, and the special good of each, even against the will of individuals; nay, more, she is bound to adopt such measures at the earliest practicable moment, let the active opposition to her proceedings be what it may. If this were not so, no social progress could be made; the best and most salutary reforms could be defeated by the obstinacy, the pride, the ignorance, the prejudice, or the interested views of some half-a-dozen individuals. The whole race might be compelled to linger on in intolerable wretchedness, because a few anti-social spirits should fancy their interest was promoted by it. This will not do. Throw indeed a bulwark of sanctity around the individual, determine what are the rights of the individual, suffer society never to encroach upon them; but while you take care not to sacrifice one to all, take care also not to sacrifice all to one. The rights of the individual are sacred and so are the rights of society. Government we regard as the agent of society, the instrument by means of which society works. Our duty as individuals is to use our best influences to induce society to use this instrument wisely, effectively, and for the accomplishment of the right end. The mission of government, taken as the executive agency of society, is not merely negative. It is more than to prevent one man or one nation from encroaching on the rights of another. Its duty is positive still more than it is negative. Its business is to protect, to guide, to control, and by combining the many into one body to effect a good, which must forever transcend the reach of mere individual effort. It is often said that men are born equal, that all men are equal by nature. This, if it have reference to their rights, or if it mean that so far forth as they are men, partakers of a common nature, they are equal, we admit it; but in almost every other possible sense we deny it. Men, regarded as individuals, are by nature unequal. Some are healthy and others are sickly, some are strong and others are weak, some are cunning and others are simple, some have bold, comprehensive minds, others timid, feeble intellects, hardly capable of putting two ideas together. Now leave all these individuals free to act according to their natural capacities, and what must be the result? A state of gross inequality. All the advantages of society will be monopolized by the strong and the cunning, who will not fail to throw all its burdens upon the weak and less gifted. But even admitting that government should prevent all encroachment upon the rights of these last, we should not be satisfied. The strong ought to bear the infirmities of the weak. Government should step in and maintain between

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all the members of society that equality, so far as it may be done, which does not exist among men by nature. Government is mainly necessary in consequence of men’s natural inequality, the perpetual tendency of which is to lead to gross social inequality and its mission is to introduce and maintain an equality which does not exist by nature. Its mission is twofold. On the one hand, its duty is to protect the rights of individuals, and on the other, to force individuals to perform their duties towards one another. Government is unquestionably restricted to a limited sphere of action; but within that sphere we hold that it is imperative, and may, nay is bound to enforce its commands. We have dwelt the longer on this point, because just at present the legitimacy of all governments is questioned by a respectable class of reformers, who condemn all political action, and look upon him who hopes to accomplish any good by the agency of government, as either a very weak or a very base-minded man; and because too many of our leading democrats are in the habit of counting on only the negative agency of government. Give us, say these last, an open field and fair play, and individual skill and enterprise will do the rest. We think not. Society as well as the individual in the progress of civilization has a great work to perform, a positive as well as a negative work; and we shall find that society must often needs perform her work, as the indispensable condition of the individual’s performing his. Assuming then that society through government has a work to perform, a mission to fulfil, an end to seek, and that this end is what we have stated it to be; we must bear in mind that this work, in this country, is to be performed by the state governments, and not by the federal government. The federal government is neither a democratic nor an anti-democratic government, and was instituted for the purpose of carrying out neither the democratic nor the aristocratic principle. The constituents of that government are communities, not individuals, and it has no concern with the relations of individuals with one another.7 Its business is solely with free and independent, but associated communities, and its duties remain precisely the same, whether these communities be internally constituted according to the democratic principle, or the aristocratic. There are certain mat7 [Ed. Brownson is relying here on John C. Calhoun’s view of government as articulated, for example, in “Remarks Made During the Debate on . . . Rights of the States and the Abolition of Slavery, December 27th, 1837,” The Works of John C. Calhoun, ed. Richard K. Crallé, 5 vols (1851-56; New York: Russell and Russell, 1968), 3:140-202, especially 142-44, 166-67.]

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ters which concern all the states alike, such as their relations with foreigners, with the Indian tribes, and with one another, the general welfare and common defense of the whole. These matters and these only come within the province of the federal government. The first business of the American statesman is always to distinguish accurately between what he may attempt by the federal government, and what must be looked for from the state governments alone. Much mischief has already arisen from not having distinguished with sufficient care between the respective provinces of the two governments. Democracy and aristocracy have both attempted to carry out their respective principles by means of the federal government; and hence it is we talk of democracy and aristocracy in relation to that government, when these terms, properly speaking, have no connection with it, and can apply only to the state governments. It is unquestionably for the interests of democracy that the federal government should be kept within its province; so far democracy may apply to a party in connection with it. It is also for the interest of the anti-democratic states, in which slavery is tolerated, to keep faithful to the Constitution, for slavery rests on state legislation, and might be endangered if state rights were abandoned. These states have the same interest in regard to the federal government that the democracy have, and will in general be found acting with them. They constitute the same party in relation to the general government; but not in relation to that government by any means a Democratic party. It is a party made up of democrats and anti-democrats. It is properly a constitutional party, a state rights party, and so should it be called. As a party of the Union, we democrats of the North must support the federal Constitution. We must raise the state rights flag, or we shall not be able to maintain an open field, for the carrying out of our democratic principles, which are to be carried out solely by the agency of the state governments. In regard to the Union, then, our policy is simple. It is to maintain the Constitution, and resist all efforts of the federal government to enlarge, directly or indirectly, its powers at the expense of the states. As a party of the Union we must not call ourselves democrats or aristocrats, but strict constructionists, constitutionalists. In acting under this relation we may have often to act with those who do not sympathize with our democratic hopes and tendencies. No matter. Are they Constitutionalists? Are they opposed to enlarging the powers of the federal government? Do they go for the independency of the states? Then we and they are, as a party of the Union, of the same party, although in the states themselves we may be of opposite parties. It is not necessary that a man

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should be a democrat, or have any democratic sympathies, in order to be a constitutionalist. The truth is, it is not the aristocracy of the country that has given to the federal government its dangerous direction, but the democracy, through the mistaken notion that it was by that government it was to realize its hopes. The South which, though liberal and chivalrous, is by no means democratic, has been the main supporter of the Constitution. The old Federal party of New England, during the administration of Jefferson and that of Madison, labored indefatigably to check the federal government, and to restrict it to as narrow a sphere as possible. Massachusetts during the War carried her state rights doctrines to the utmost verge of treason to the Union, and the Hartford Convention solemnly proclaimed very nearly the doctrine subsequently contended for by South Carolina.8 If we are not much mistaken, the policy, which has so enlarged the sphere of the federal government, was forced upon it by the leading democratic states. The worst feature of this policy is the tariff. But the tariff has been uniformly opposed by the southern states, and a majority of the delegation in Congress from the New England states. No tariff has ever received a majority of the votes of New England, and none, not even the new tariff act, commonly called the compromise act of 1832 has ever received a majority of the votes of the Southern delegation. The tariff policy has been from the first sustained by the middle and western states, which have always gone for it by large majorities. The middle and western states we may certainly call the democratic states of the Union. The southern states are not democratic, for they tolerate slavery, and New England we believe has been the principal defender of the anti-democratic doctrines of the old Federal party. The Federalists, no doubt, wished for a consolidated republic, some few of them perhaps for a consolidated monarchy. But the South, in consequence of her peculiar domestic institutions, contended for state rights; for she saw at once that if all the states should be subjected to the supremacy of a central government, that her peculiar institutions would be obliged to give way before the strong anti-slavery feeling of the middle and eastern states. The small states, too, 8

[Ed. During the War of 1812 many Massachusetts Federalists opposed the war and a number of representatives of the New England states joined together at the so-called Hartford Convention (October, 1814) to express their opposition to “Mr. Madison’s War” and to make plans to protect themselves. The Republican opponents interpreted the Hartford Convention as a manifestation of treason and disloyalty to the federal government.]

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which by no means wished to be swallowed up in the large ones, being equally represented with the large states in the Convention, were able to resist effectually the centralizationists, and to preserve to the states their sovereignty. The Federalists were defeated. They attempted under Washington, and especially under the elder Adams, to obtain by construction and administrative measures what had been denied them in the Convention. But after the election of Mr. Jefferson, and especially his reelection, the policy of the New England Federalists, to say the least, was almost wholly changed. They turned themselves to the state governments, and sought to lessen the importance of the federal government. This was the policy of Otis and his associates.9 From the reelection of Mr. Jefferson to the election of John Quincy Adams, we may say to the election of Andrew Jackson, the consolidation party were not the Federalists, but the Republicans. The middle and western states had the preponderating influence, and the policy of New York and Pennsylvania has been almost from the first that of the general government. From this we infer that it by no means follows that because a man is a democrat he is not a consolidationist, or that because he is an aristocrat, he cannot be a constitutionalist. The larger states will always have a leaning towards consolidation; and when we look at the great states of the west, and see the rapidity with which they become filled with an active and energetic population, the prospects of the constitutionalists do not appear the brightest. The natural tendency of all these states will be to consolidation, because being the most powerful, they fancy that they will be able to wield the federal government in their own favor. One thing is now certain, that the increase of the powers of the federal government is unfavorable to the growth of democracy. The action of that government, the moment it steps beyond its constitutional limits, is to favor business at the expense of labor, and to benefit the capitalist instead of the operative. Hence, it follows that every Democrat ought to be a constitutionalist. The elements, which go naturally to form the Constitutional party, are then first the small states, which in a consolidated government would become insignificant; second the slaveholding states, which have no security for their peculiar institutions but in upholding state sovereignty; and third the democracy, the real friends of equal rights.

9 [Ed. Harrison Gray Otis (1765-1848) from Boston was a Federalist who after the election of Jefferson focused his attention on Massachusetts’ politics.]

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Hitherto the democracy of the middle and western states have not been constitutionalists, from the mistaken notion that it was through the federal government, and not the state governments that they were to carry out their principles. They must now look and see that the more they strengthen that government, as it can act on them only through its measures touching trade, and the currency, through its general financial operations, the more power will they throw into the hands of the capitalists and businessmen of the country, and consequently the greater the burdens they will impose upon the laborer. If our friends in those states will hold up this view, if they will present this consideration as they may, there is some hope that even in them they will be able to rally the democracy around the standard of the Constitution. The smaller states must also be made to see that it is for their interest to resist the tendency to consolidation, that their political existence depends on their supporting the Constitution. This is by no means difficult to show, and consequently it will not be difficult to rally them under the flag of state rights. The slaveholding states have, from the nature of their state institutions, a strong interest in adhering to the Constitution. If they do, we are safe, touching the Union. We call then for a Constitutional party, which shall be composed of the smaller states, the slaveholding states, and of the real democracy of the country, and by democracy we now mean the real friends of equal rights and social progress. If these all unite, as they may, on the broad platform of the Constitution, they will constitute a majority in the Union, and will be able to resist effectually the tendency to consolidation. But without the strictest union, touching all questions coming under the cognizance of the general government, of these three elements, the consolidationists will carry the day, and the consequences will be most disastrous to the whole country, and fatal to the cause of liberty. As a party of the Union, we call upon the three elements we have enumerated to unite on the ground of the Constitution, and under the flag of state rights. To the South we say, in the name of the Northern democracy, unite with us, to prevent the Northern capitalists, and businessmen of the middle and western states from encroaching on the Constitution, and we will resist all efforts of the abolitionists to reach the question of slavery through the action of the federal government. Slavery we cannot advocate, for we can see no affinity between slavery and democracy. We shall undoubtedly speak out unquestioned, and unobstructed, in favor of universal freedom to

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universal man. But if you will be faithful to the Constitution, we also will be faithful to it, and adopt no methods, countenance no methods, of interfering with slavery in your dominions, which we might not legally adopt in regard to it in the dominions of England or France. On this ground, and on these conditions, we meet you. But if you desert us, if you side with the business population of the other sections of the country, and aid them in establishing a national bank, in laying a protective tariff, and assuming directly or indirectly the state debts, all of which measures are unauthorized by the Constitution, you may rest assured that the democracy in one solid phalanx will go against your institutions. If no Constitutional barriers will hold you back, none will hold them back. They feel sore towards you now. They have defended you firmly, sacrificed much for the Constitution in which you had as much at stake as they; but they feel that you have been neither true to them nor to yourselves. This is a dangerous feeling for them to indulge, and unless you go en masse for the Constitution, you must not be surprised if they go en masse against slavery. We, for ourselves, shall recommend no such method of retaliation; nay, we shall do all in our power to prevent it. But we know enough of human nature, to know that no power on earth could succeed in preventing it. You must not think that we defend slavery on principle, that we love the institution. There is not a democrat north of Mason and Dixon’s Line, that does not loathe it, and believe it a crime against humanity. We refrain from meddling with it, simply because it is a matter which concerns states of which we are not citizens, because we can reach it by no Constitutional action, and because we believe liberty is more interested at present in preserving the Constitution, in maintaining state rights, than in attempting the doubtful good of emancipating the slave without making any provision for him after his fetters have been knocked off. But when the Constitution is once broken down, when it has become a dead letter, and the federal government has become through the triumph of the money power a consolidated government, the paramount and only efficient government of the country, what then is to hold us back? What then will avail the exhortations, the expostulations of men who have all their lives long been preaching up equal rights? The consolidationists will aim at three measures. They will seek to establish a national bank, to impose a protective tariff, and to assume the state debts, by distributing the proceeds of the public lands, as they will term it, but the surplus revenue, as we term it, among the states. In other words they will raise by high taxes a surplus revenue, which surplus they will distribute among the states to

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enable the states to pay their debts, or at least sustain their credit. Here is their policy. Now this policy the friends of the Constitution must resist. Whether the Whig party will attempt these measures, as a party or not, we pretend not to determine. But that they will be attempted by a large and powerful party, we hold to be beyond a doubt. These measures are all unconstitutional. They must then be resisted, firmly, successfully resisted, or the Union is destroyed. Look to it then, the South, look to it then, small states of the Union, look to it, Democrats, that ye be not any of you seduced into their support. We have stated what must be the principal elements of the Constitutionalists. We now say that in the present crisis their main efforts must be directed to defeating these three measures. This is our principal work. We must maintain the independent treasury, we must support free trade, afford no countenance to a national bank, suffer the federal government to form no connection directly or indirectly with the paper money system, keep down the revenues to the wants of the government, and leave the states to redeem their own bonds. This, for the present, must be the policy of the friends of the Constitution. And to this must be added, as soon as may be, two other measures of a less negative character; one a disposition of the public lands, according to some plan similar to the one recommended by Mr. Calhoun;10 the other a change in the mode of taxation, from the present system of indirect taxation, to that of direct taxation. These two measures are loudly called for, and will be found absolutely necessary if we mean to maintain a federative government and public morality. They are measures of some import, and they will be found to reach far. We shall avail ourselves of an early opportunity to discuss them at length; at present we can only indicate them, and give it as our opinion, that they must make up an integral part of the policy of that party which shall rally around the flag of the Union, and seek to preserve the Constitution in its purity and force. Will the Constitutionalists by adopting the policy here indicated, be able to succeed? Will they command a majority throughout the Union? We know not, ask not. By adopting this policy and contending for it in an open, manly manner, with earnestness and solemn intent, they will deserve success; they will be on the side of justice, in 10 [Ed. John C. Calhoun (1782-1850), United States Senator from South Carolina, gave a number of speeches in the Senate on public lands. See, e.g., his speeches of 4 and 7 February 1837 in The Works of John C. Calhoun, Crallé, 2:624-25 and especially 2:634-52.]

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the right; and it is better to be defeated with the right than to triumph with the wrong. We should rarely trouble ourselves with the question of success; if we can only be sure that we have found out the right, and done our best to sustain it, we may leave results with a calm confidence to him to whom they belong. We, however, readily admit that success will not be obtained without an effort. Apparently the consolidationists, the representatives of the money power, have now possession of the government; and we do not fancy that they will be dislodged without a long and severe struggle. As yet, history, so far as we are acquainted, presents no instance of a political contest, in which man has remained the victor over property. Sometimes commercial capital has triumphed over landed capital, plebeian wealth over patrician wealth; but simple naked humanity over wealth itself, never. If we succeed now it will be the first time in the history of civilization. Nevertheless, we are not without hope. We believe that the interests of our country are so diverse that man in this contest will not be utterly naked; but that the influence of a considerable portion of the capital of the country may be, after all, on his side. That we must struggle hard is no objection. In these dull times, it is well to have something to struggle for; otherwise we should remain children always, and never know the virtue there is in manhood. A cause is not desperate because it cannot be won without difficulty, without effort, without sacrifice. Human nature loves the effort, pants for the struggle, as the hart for the water brooks,11 and joys in the sacrifice. It asks always for an occasion to display its power to do, to dare, to suffer, to prove that its old heroic energy is not exhausted. We have great faith in the heroism of human nature, little in its selfishness. The victory which demands sacrifice is easier won than that to which interest alone prompts. Take your stand openly and truly on the side of God, truth, justice, man, and you carry all hearts with you; and the greater the opposition you have to encounter, the more enthusiasm shall you enlist in your favor. Heaven is stronger than hell, and God is a better captain than the devil. Thus far we have spoken of the policy to be pursued by the friends of the federal Constitution, the policy necessary to preserve the federative character of the Union, the independency of the states, and an open field for the friends of equal rights to adopt within their respective states such measures as they shall judge most likely to emancipate the proletary, ennoble labor, and realize equality in our social relations as well as in our 11

[Ed. A reference to Ps 42:1.]

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political relations. We turn now to the states, to the policy which should be adopted by the true friends of democracy. The Democratic party, in its character of a Democratic party, can properly in this country be only a state party, a party restricted in its operations to a single state. Doubtless the action of the democracy of one state will have no little influence on that of another, and in general the policy which the democracy may adopt in one state is that which ought to be adopted in all the states; but we in Massachusetts, for instance, can have no direct action on the policy pursued by other states, any more than on the policy pursued by foreign nations. Under the relation we are now considering them, they are foreign nations to one another, free, sovereign, independent states, in no sense responsible one to another. We may demand of all the states that they adhere to the Constitution, and adopt through the federal government the policy we have decided to be Constitutional; for in this sense they are a single body politic; but we can demand only of the citizens of our own state a democratic policy. In the bosom of our own state, we may urge the most radical democracy, and as democrats we are guilty, if we do not; but we cannot urge it any where else. As democrats then we have nothing to do with the internal policy of other states, nor are we accountable for the state policy pursued in other states by those with whom we act on questions of general policy. We know them only as a Federal party, not as a state party. We are particular in marking this distinction between a Federal party and a state party, between constitutionalists and democrats, because it is generally overlooked, and because the consequences of overlooking it are none of the best. At present the states are regarded by the great body of the people as mere departments or prefectures, of one grand consolidated republic. Few comparatively look upon the federal government and the state governments as coordinate governments. The federal government is supreme. Federal politics absorb everything; and so little is the true nature of the Union understood that we presume not a few of our readers will fancy that, when we speak of federal politics, we are talking of the views and dogmas of the old Federal party, represented by its great leader Alexander Hamilton.12 Rarely will it occur to them that with us a man may be, nay should be, both a Federalist and a Democrat—a Federalist touching the Union, a Democrat touching the states. But let this pass. The 12 [Ed. Alexander Hamilton (c. 1757-1804) was a Federalist statesman and first secretary of the treasury. Brownson interpreted his role in government as that of a protector of the money classes.]

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state counts for nothing in our political contests. In the bosom of the states themselves, of the towns and parishes even, federal politics decide everything. A man’s fitness to be a parish priest, a selectman, a pathmaster, is determined among us mainly by his views of federal politics. Rarely does the election of a state, county, or town officer, in the northern and middle states, turn on local politics. Politicians calculate the votes of a state for President by its votes for town officers, supervisors, school committee men, and constables. Nor is this all. We urge sometimes the good citizens of our state to vote for a certain candidate for President of the United States, because we are in favor of administering the government of the state economically, or because we are or are not in favor of a certain railroad or bridge, or of a certain police regulation. And then we urge the same citizens to vote for our candidates for state officers, because they are in favor of our presidential candidate, or of our views of federal policy. Admirable logic! Then again, we hold the members of a given federal party in one state responsible for the measures pursued by members of the same party in other states in regard to the action of their state government. We are not allowed to be democratic in one state, because those who agree with us in another state, on general politics, are anti-democratic in the bosom of their own state. The consequences of this are bad. The administration party, for instance, as a Federal party, has been in the main constitutional. Its measures have been just and proper; and it has deserved the support of all the friends of the Constitution. But in the bosom of the states themselves in regard to state legislation, it has been as anti-democratic as the Whigs themselves; and, perhaps, to this fact, more than to any other, should be attributed its late disastrous defeat. It has called the Whigs the bank party, and urged us to oppose them on that ground; but has it, on the other hand, been an anti-bank party? It has condemned the Whigs for advocating paper money, but has it ever opposed paper money? It has opposed a United States Bank, but on the broad ground of opposition to a paper currency? Has it not contended for state banks as strenuously, if not as openly, as have the Whigs? What, then, has availed its opposition to a national bank? Aside from certain constitutional and political reasons, what arguments can you bring against a national bank, that do not bear with equal force against state banks? Nay, once admit the policy of a paper circulation, and it is questionable whether you are not unwise in opposing a national bank. If the states are to be suffered to issue, either directly or indirectly, through institutions of their own creating, a paper currency like the one we

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now have, it may be contended with justice that a national bank is needed; nay, all but indispensable. Nothing can be worse than as many different currencies as there are states, and as many different currencies there will be, if the currency be left to state legislation. A principal reason for desiring a union of the states was that we might have a currency which should not vary with each state, but be of uniform value throughout all the states. The people, in order to secure this end, placed the whole subject of the currency under the control of the federal government. If we have decided that our currency shall be paper, assuredly it should come under the control of the federal government. The interests of trade, nay, of industry, of labor, imperiously demand that the currency of Massachusetts and of Mississippi should be of the same value. Does anybody believe this can be the case, so long as our currency is paper, and this paper is issued by state institutions, and subject to the action of the state legislatures? It may be truly asserted, that a national bank cannot, under any circumstances, do much to remedy the evil; but there is no question but it can, to some degree, mitigate it. Its own notes will pass current, at the same value, throughout the Union, and thus afford a medium of exchange between the remote sections. Now the administration party has opposed the United States Bank, without opposing paper money; it has sustained the paper money policy, while it has opposed the only measure which can possibly render that policy in any degree tolerable. This has been its error. If you have a paper currency, you are bound to place it under the control of the federal government, by subjecting it to the direct or indirect action of that government. But the administration party has said, no, we will retain a paper currency, but we will leave it to the states to furnish it. Where, then, is the sound and uniform currency, for the furnishing of which the federal government was created? Assuming that a paper currency is to be the currency of the country, Mr. Webster’s arguments on this point are unanswerable, and have been so considered by a majority of the people of the United States.13 The administration party in all the states, unless we except Massachusetts, has been as decidedly in favor of paper money as the Whig party. There is nothing against it in any of the messages of Andrew 13 [Ed. Brownson is probably referring to Webster’s speeches on the currency before the Senate on 28 September and 3 October 1837. On the speeches see, The Papers of Daniel Webster: Speeches and Formal Writings, Volume 2 1834-1852, ed. Charles M. Wiltse (Hanover, New Hampshire: University Press of New England, 1988), 155-95.]

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Jackson or Martin Van Buren; Senators Buchanan, Grundy, and King have taken unwearied pains to show that they are in favor of state banks, and what they call a mixed currency.14 Mr. Benton, the great antagonist of the Bank, has never said a syllable, as we can find, against paper money.15 The only opposition we have seen to the policy, in either branch of Congress, has come from Mr. Calhoun and some of his state rights friends.16 Leaving Congress and coming into the states, we find the administration party, as a state party, nowhere opposing paper money. In Pennsylvania, the governor,17 a friend of the administration, is also a friend of the banks; and the legislature which chartered the United States Bank of Pennsylvania, contained a majority of members friendly to Mr. Van Buren; in Ohio, the governor,18 elected by the administration party, in his message to the legislature last winter, sustained, on principle, at great length, and not without ability, the policy of paper money. Michigan has been all but ruined by banks, created while it was an administration state; Mississippi and Alabama have fared not much better, to say nothing of Illinois and Louisiana. The banking system of New York is a creation of the same party, and the whole influence of the New York banks was brought to bear against a national bank, and in favor of General Jackson and Mr. Van Buren, till the explosion of the deposit system. In our own state, no man could maintain, prior to 1837, his standing in the administration party, if he were known to be opposed to paper money, and in favor of an exclusively metallic currency. We had our democratic banks, and the leading men of the party seemed to hold that banks were good things, providing they were managed by members of the Democratic party. In fact, in no state in the Union, has the 14 [Ed. James Buchanan (1791-1868), fifteenth president of the United States, was a United States Senator (1834-45) from Pennsylvania at the time of this essay. Felix Grundy (1777-1840) was a United States Senator from Tennessee (1829-38), and William Rufus Devane King (1786-1853) was Senator from Alabama (181944).] 15 [Ed. Thomas Hart Benton (1782-1858) was a lawyer and Democratic politician, who was a hard-money Democratic United States Senator from Missouri (1821-50).] 16 [Ed. For an example of John C. Calhoun’s view, see his “Speech on the Bill Authorizing the Issue of Treasury Notes, September 19th, 1837,” The Works of John C. Calhoun, Crallé, 3:60-92, especially 74.] 17 [Ed. A reference to David Rittenhouse Porter (1788-1853), governor of Pennsylvania from 1839 to 1845.] 18 [Ed. A reference to Thomas Corwin (1794-1867), governor of Ohio from 1840 to 1842.]

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administration party assumed the character of an anti-paper-money party. Individuals there may have been, who, sub rosâ, would tell you that they were inclining to the belief that we must return to a metallic currency, but the opposition to paper money has been purely an individual, and not a party opposition. Several other matters, which have been made objections to the Whigs, have also been encouraged by the administration party. This party has favored state loans and aided in contracting those ruinous state debts, of which it now complains so much. The administration states have plunged as deeply into debt, to say the least, as the Whig states. Witness New York, Pennsylvania, Mississippi, Alabama, Illinois. Massachusetts, a thorough-going Whig state, has by no means been so rash; and furthermore, the policy of lending the credit of this Commonwealth to corporations has not been a purely Whig measure. It has been sustained by some of our most influential administration men. Now, as the confusion of state and federal politics has made the party, as a Federal party, responsible for its action, as a state party, these facts have given it the appearance of gross inconsistency. As a state party it has had nothing to distinguish it from the Whig party, unless it be professing more and aiming at less. As a Federal party, it has been tried not by the Constitution, but by its character as a state party. Its federal policy, it has been seen, retaining its state policy, would be ruinous to trade, to business, and no advantage to labor. It, therefore, has had nothing to recommend it, and the people have decided against it. The people have not decided in favor of paper money, but simply, that, if we have paper money, it shall not be left to the contradictory policy of state legislatures, but be under the control of the federal government. The federal policy and the state policy of the party have not been harmonious, but parts of opposite systems. This has lost the party. The people are excellent logicians, great advocates for consistency, and require you always to be systematic, in whatever you propose. You cannot make them support one system in relation to one subject, and another system in relation to another subject. They demand bank or no bank; a paper currency of the best character the country can furnish, or a metallic currency. They will not lean toward a metallic currency for the purpose of overthrowing a national bank, and toward a paper currency for the purpose of sustaining state banks. They cannot understand why the arguments which bear in favor of or against the one do not bear equally in favor of or against the other.

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The difficulty we have here pointed out can be removed, under our complex system of government, only by dissevering, as much as may be, the connection which has heretofore existed between the politics of the state, and the politics of the Union, and by making a man’s views on federal politics no criterion of his merits on questions of state politics. The doctrine of state rights will hardly be maintained till we have done this. The tendency to consolidation, most to be feared, is not in the action of the federal government, but in the conduct and sentiments of parties. Keeping in view the distinction we have designated, we may speak on state policy, without committing in the least the friends of the Constitution in other states, whose views are different from our own. We hold them not responsible for the policy we advocate for our own state, and they must not hold us responsible for the policy they may choose to advocate. In the bosom of the several states, we are citizens of independent nations, in no sense accountable to one another. In coming into the individual state, we can be at no loss to discover the policy marked out for the democracy. The first question claiming our attention is undoubtedly that of the currency. This in itself is a miserable question, and one likes not to meddle with it; and yet its solution must be sought. If wise men neglect it, it will fall into the hands of fools, who will make bad work with it. We cannot blink it out of sight; we must meet it, and dispose of it. What disposition shall we make of it? In the first place we assume it as a settled point that the control of the currency, so far as it falls under the action of government, is conceded by the states to the Union. The people of the United States wished, by the Union, to create for the citizens of all the states the same facilities of trade and business intercourse with one another, which they would have had, if they had all been citizens of one and the same state. They had also experienced great difficulties from the different policies pursued by the several states with regard to the currency. The states, each according to its own caprice, made what it pleased a legal tender for the payment of debts, and emitted its bills of credit almost without limit. The currency therefore was constantly fluctuating, and varied in value as you passed from one state to another. The consequences of this on trade need not be told. The debts due from the citizens of one state to those of another, were of uncertain value; and when collected must be collected in a currency from which little or nothing could be realized, that the creditor could use in his own state, or at any point out of the state to which the debtor belonged.

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The evils thus experienced the states sought to remedy, first, by surrendering the control of the currency to the federal government. By this they hoped to secure the same currency for all the states, a currency of the same value in every section of the Union. Secondly, to avoid the ruinous fluctuations of the currency, and to prevent the states from substituting any other currency than that of the Union, the states gave to the federal government no power to establish any other currency than that of gold and silver, and denied to themselves the right to create another, or to make anything else, a legal tender for the payment of debts. From these facts, we infer, first, that under our present Constitution, the subject of the currency is surrendered entirely to the federal government; and second, that the federal government has no right to establish any other than a hard money currency. Now, under our present banking system, we have virtually, if not literally, a paper currency; and this currency is furnished by the states, and not by the general government; and it is not only subject to ruinous fluctuations, but is of very unequal values, the currency of one section of the Union being at times five, ten, fifteen, even twenty percent better than that of another. Under the state bank system we have then a reproduction of the precise evils against which the framers of the Constitution intended to guard. The introduction of another than a hard money currency is permitted, and the duty of furnishing the currency is resumed by the states. In this case, of two things one; either the federal government must assume the control of these state banks, and regulate their issues by means of a grand bank of its own, or in some other way; or these banks must be given up. Given a paper money currency as the policy of the country, we agree with Mr. Webster that it should either be furnished, or what is the same thing, regulated by the federal government. But under the Constitution the federal government has no power to authorize, or to recognize in any way or shape anything like a paper currency. The only currency known to it is that of gold and silver. A national bank, or the furnishing of a paper currency by the federal government is then out of the question if we mean to retain the Constitution. Besides, the establishment of a national bank would consolidate the money power, and give to the federal government a power it was never intended to have, a power which would make it the only efficient government of the country, enable it to swallow up the states, and with them the liberties of the individual citizen. A paper currency furnished by the federal government, then, must not be thought of. But the states have no right to furnish a currency at

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all. They have surrendered that right. Then they have no right to create banks with the power to furnish it. Then the state banks, so far as they are banks of issue, are really if not technically unconstitutional, and therefore should cease to exist. There is then no course for the democracy to take, but either to consent to a national bank, or to abandon state banks. The first they will not do, and ought not to do. Then they must do the latter. Then they must take their stand openly, decidedly, and at once, against the state banks, so far as they are authorized to issue their notes as a circulation. In other words, the democracy must take its stand against paper money, and against all institutions created for furnishing it. They must go for an exclusively metallic currency. Have they the nerve for this? The people have; but whether politicians have or have not, remains to be seen. But if they have not, they may as well surrender at once to the enemies of the democracy, and no longer keep up even a show of opposition. Men on ‘Change’ will no doubt smile at our simplicity in demanding a purely metallic currency, and tell us such a currency is impracticable, and undesirable; but in return we can assure them that we rarely go on ‘Change’ to learn either democracy or political economy. The men who congregate there, are not usually the men whom God calls to enlighten the nations. They may understand the routine of business, but of the principles which lie at the bottom of their practice, their bearing on public morals and public prosperity, they know in general nothing. They are so busy in gathering up the acorns lying on the ground that they have no time to cast their eyes up to the branches from which they have fallen, much less to investigate the laws by which they have been produced. If they were wise enough to afford valuable instructions on the currency, they were not foolish enough to encourage the growth of the system they now contend for. We may be told that there is not gold and silver enough in the world to do the business with, that is now done. Very well; then do less business, and, perhaps, the world will be no worse off. But this presence is shallow, and not worth refuting. The real objection is not what our businessmen allege. The difficulty is not that there is too little gold and silver in the world, but too little in their pockets. Increase the amount in the world a thousand fold, and their embarrassments would remain undiminished. Nor is this all. The use of paper does by no means supply the place of a metallic medium. The furnishing of paper money is a mere business transaction, requiring in the last analysis and absorbing in fact as much gold and silver as any

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other kind of business to an equal amount. The paper currency is not ultimate, and ends no transaction. It serves merely to defer the time of settlement; but it can pay no balances. The payment of balances, for which alone money is needed in the transaction of business, must be paid, if paid at all, in gold and silver, in like manner as if no paper had been used; with this difference only, that these balances are rated according to the paper standard, and consequently require a larger amount of gold and silver to extinguish them than would have been requisite had gold and silver constituted the currency. The difficulty, which our businessmen seek to obviate by paper money, is by no means a recondite one. They wish to buy and sell, and amass by the operation a fortune. But they have no money, with which to make their purchases, and no property which they can exchange for money. They have simply the faculty of buying and selling. They would buy and ship to England a cargo of cotton, and not pay the planter for it till it is sold in England and the returns realized. The merchant’s means of payment must be obtained by the sale of the cotton purchased. What he wants, then, is credit. This credit, for various reasons, the planter will not give him. His simple course, then, is, to go to the capitalist, or to the bank, and borrow the means of paying the planter. It is well for him to obtain this loan, and no harm to the community. Credits to this extent are needed, and must be had, unless we would leave the whole business transactions of the world to a few moneyed men, a thing by no means desirable. Banks are unquestionably, in this view of the case, necessary, and worthy of encouragement. If the business man can obtain the loan he asks for, it is an advantage to business, and to labor, for labor in certain respects has interests in common with business. A ready market for the products of labor is of as much importance to the laborer, as to the trader. In order to command this market, for the products of labor of any one country, it is necessary to open to them the markets of the world. And to do this requires an energy, an enterprise on the part of businessmen, which can be rarely looked for, except in young men who have their fortunes to make. Facilities to these should unquestionably be extended, and for this banks, private or public, are necessary. The democracy, then, should not object to credit, nor to banks. We are willing the merchant should obtain a loan, and purchase his cargo of cotton, and not cancel his loan till the sale of the cotton has furnished him the means. All this can be assented to without difficulty. We would assign no limits to the credit he or others may obtain, but the means of those who grant it. So long as a bank loans

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only its actual capital, or real capital in its possession, we utter no complaint. Because then the planter is actually paid for his cotton, and the losses, if any, fall on the speculator and the bank, where they ought to fall. But by means of paper money, that is, by allowing the bank to loan its notes instead of loaning real money, the bank is enabled to furnish credits beyond its means of redemption. It ceases, the moment its notes exceed its actual amount of gold and silver on hand, to be a money-lender, and becomes a money-borrower, and dependent on the success of its debtors in their speculations, for the means to pay its creditors. If these speculations miscarry, the bank miscarries, and the actual loss falls, not on the speculator, for he had nothing to lose, nor on the bank, for it never furnished any real capital, but on the producer, who had exchanged his products for the notes of the bank. This is the feature in our banking system, which should be stricken out. We have instanced the case of the speculator in cotton, who, wishing to speculate in that article, can only do it on credit. Now, it may be that this speculator can obtain no credit at the bank, or it may be, that the advance on the price paid for his cotton, at which he can sell it, will not be sufficient to furnish him a living profit, and at the same time pay the interest on his loan at the bank. What now shall be done? He, and four or five more in the same situation, but engaged in different business transactions, come together, petition the legislature, obtain a charter for a bank, with a privilege of issuing their notes to as great an amount, practically, as they can keep out. They pay in the capital of the bank in stock notes, and now substituting their notes as a bank for their notes as individuals, purchase cotton and other products on their own credit. In this case they unite in themselves the character of speculators, borrowers, and lenders. They are their own bankers. The planter takes the notes of their bank for his cotton, which he sells to them as individuals, and the farmer for his wheat. But if they fail in their operations, as speculators, then they must fail as debtors of the bank, and then fail as the bank or debtors of the public, and what then has the planter and farmer received for their wheat and cotton? But one knot of four or five individuals have obtained a bank, and by its means are commanding the products of industry with the same ease they would, had they been men of real capital. Other individuals, seeing this, say, why not we have a bank also? So these other individuals petition, and obtain a bank, and go through the same process. Another set of individuals do the same, till your whole state is covered over with banks, and the land deluged with bank notes.

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During this time the rage for speculation goes ever increasing; fortunes are made in a day; men who were poor clerks yesterday are millionaires today; slow but gradual gains are despised; honest industry is condemned, and all the world rushes into trade. But this cannot last. Balances must be paid, and paid in gold and silver; but gold and silver for this there is not enough to be come at. The few individuals, who, during the fever of speculation had taken good care not to have many outstanding balances to settle off, come out with a princely fortune, while the great mass of the active businessmen find themselves where they began; and the planters and farmers find that they have nothing to show for the products they have parted with. This is the inevitable result of a system of paper money, and this is a result no honest man can desire. This is carrying the credit system to a ruinous extent, and making that, which, within its natural limits, is a great good, one of the greatest of evils. Credit to this extent is not needed, and should not be furnished. We must, then, abolish the paper money system, and compel the banks to limit their loans to their actual resources. The evil of banking begins the moment the bank becomes a borrower from the public at large, and this it does the moment it issues its notes beyond the actual amount of gold and silver in its possession. Beyond that amount its loans are loans of its credit, not of its money. Now we are willing that credits should be obtained by the businessmen to the full extent of the actual means of those who furnish them. This is the natural limit to the credit system, and beyond which it can never be safe. When extended beyond this limit, the business of the country is unnaturally stimulated, and rendered unhealthy; its frame becomes bloated, and sudden dissolution is always to be apprehended. We come, then, to this conclusion; the democracy need not oppose banking, but it should oppose paper money; it need not oppose credit, without which all business must come to a standstill, but it should oppose all artificial means for extending credits beyond the ability of those who furnish them to redeem them in gold and silver. We make no objections to banks of deposit, of exchange, transfer of credits, and of discount; we simply ask that all discounts be made in the legal currency of the country. This, if it were but the existing order, we shall be told, would unquestionably be far preferable to our present state of things. But, then, it is useless to contend for it. So large a proportion of the people are in debt that they will never submit to the sacrifice necessary for introducing it. This may be so. Yet the losses to the debtor class of the

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community, we do not believe, would be greater than they have been for the last few years. Then, again, can we not arrive at a tolerably exact estimate of the percent at which this change would appreciate the currency? Why not, then, require the creditor, in the case of all debts contracted prior to the change, and estimated in a depreciated paper currency, to deduct this percent from the nominal amount claimed? This would be just to both parties, requiring the debtor to pay only the amount of value he had stipulated to pay, and giving the creditor all the values he had ever a right to demand. But, if we go against all paper money, what shall we do with existing banks? Repeal, of course, that clause in their charters, which allows them to issue their notes as a currency, and require the immediate redemption, in gold and silver, of the notes they have now in circulation. This, we admit, is a bold measure, and cannot be adopted at once, without causing great suffering. But what of that? It is better to take a medicine, which will expel a lingering disease and restore us to health, although its immediate operation shall give us the gripes, than it is to be always sick. What is true in this respect of the individual, is of the community. It is better to feel the full shock of the evil at once, and then to be ever after free from it, than it is to be constantly debilitated by it. But be this as it may, a healthy state of business cannot be obtained at a less expense. Having disposed of the currency question, and by annihilating all banks of circulation, brought the currency to the constitutional standard, we must extirpate all monopolies, not necessarily all corporations. Corporations are useful, and answer many desirable purposes. All that democracy can ask in regard to them is that they conceal no monopoly principle, that they confer on the corporator no privileges, which he did not possess or may not possess as an individual. We would, therefore, insist that the individual property of all the corporators should be holden for the debts of the corporation. Corporations for manufacturing purposes are not strictly antidemocratic, when their charters confer no monopoly; and yet they exert an anti-democratic influence. Their tendency at present is unwholesome. Nevertheless, they are founded on a principle destined to play an important part in the business of production, that of associated labor. They are but a feeble, a most imperfect embodiment of this principle; but they contain the germ of it, and we should therefore seek to perfect them, and not to destroy them. When we can make them corporations, as we may, of operatives and employers in the same persons, and not of employers alone, they will be great blessings.

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Banks are at present monopolies, for they have the privilege of making a use of their credit, which is denied to individuals. But when they cease to be banks of issue, and restrict themselves to the ordinary functions of banking, that is, to negotiating loans and exchanges, they will not necessarily be monopolies, and may be suffered to exist. If, however, they are found to have any privilege, which an individual has not, or which he can have only by becoming a member of them as bodies corporate, they should be modified, and this principle taken away. Monopolies disposed of, many other questions will come up. The reforms we need are in very few cases political. By political reforms, we understand reforms in the organization of the state. A few of these may, perhaps, be needed. The right of suffrage needs some extension, and, perhaps, the judiciary some constitutional changes. But the principal questions which come up relate not to political, but legislative reforms. There are several of these, which we intended to specify, but we have already exceeded our limits. We can only add that we must complete the abolition of imprisonment for debt, and revise our laws relating to the collection of debts. The expenses annually incurred by the collection of debts by law exceed the amount of debts so collected. These expenses are borne chiefly by the debtor class, already embarrassed; and serve to maintain a set of legal harpies, which public morality would willingly dispense with altogether. Why should not all ordinary debts be regarded as mere individual matters, which are to be adjusted by individuals, without calling in the aid of society? Why not leave the whole subject to individual probity and honor? If so left, the demand for these virtues would be increased, and thereby public and private morality be promoted. Reforms in the criminal code are demanded. We cannot specify them now; we can only say that our criminal code should be made to harmonize with the principle that human governments have no right to punish, except for the purpose of restraint from actual violence done either to individual rights or social. In fine, we must insist upon a system of education, combining industry with science and literature. Or, in one word, a system of industrial schools, in which some branch of industry shall be pursued, in connection with literature and science. Schools of this kind are needed for ennobling labor. When all the children of the commonwealth labor, labor will be honorable. They are needed for the promotion and preservation of health. A few hours labor every day are essential to the health of the student. They are also needed in order to enable each child in the commonwealth to have access to the

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best education the community can afford. They may easily be made self-supporting schools, and cost the state nothing, and then education may be really universal. Some other things we would specify, but we have said enough. What we have said indicates that the democracy has a great work to perform, and that it cannot engage too soon, nor be too much in earnest to perform it. Doubtless, some will dissent from the policy we have marked out, the measures we have suggested. Be it so. We have merely given our own views, freely and boldly. We have told what we honestly think the democracy should attempt, stated the ground on which it should rally, and some of the measures on which it should insist. If others think us wrong, wild, rash, impracticable, or wicked, all we have to say is, let them bring forward something better. But, whatever they have to propose, let them be speedy. Time flies. The enemy is already in our midst, has already entrenched himself in some of our strong holds, and threatens to bring us under his accursed dominion. Friends of the Constitution and of equal rights, be on the alert. You have no time to waste. Now or never must you recover your kingdom, and establish your empire. Now or never must you seize upon a true democratic policy, and stake everything on one bold effort to save the Constitution, and establish the reign of justice and equality.

11. TO THE EDITORS OF THE LOWELL OFFERING1 Ladies, I have received the first and second numbers of your periodical, for which I beg you to accept my thanks.2 Your paper is conducted with spirit and ability, and I read it with pleasure. I am particularly interested in it for I am told that it is written entirely by girls employed in the mills. It is highly creditable to their talents and taste, and may turn out to be of no slight advantage to them. I perceive, ladies, that you labor under a slight mistake in regard to me. You seem to have taken it into your heads that I am hostile to you, and have slandered you. If I may be allowed to be my own interpreter, I have had no thought of speaking disrespectfully of you. My sympathies are with the laboring classes and I have done what I could to ameliorate the condition of both workingmen and working women. I have been an operative myself for no small portion of my life; I have no sympathies with the aristocracy; I have burned with indignation at the injustice done to those who are obliged to support themselves by their own labor; and this indignation I have expressed as best I could; and for expressing it, I have fallen under the condemnation of your masters and employers. This alone, it would seem, should be sufficient to satisfy you that I have had no intention of slandering you. The passage, which has offended you, I think you must have misinterpreted. I have said nothing against you; I have merely spoken of the injustice the world does you; and I have represented that injustice as great enough to “damn to infamy” the most worthy and virtuous girl, if she be a factory girl. Now, it may be possible that the feeling I have spoken of is not as strong as I have represented it; but, if you will read the article in which my remark appears,3 you will 1

[Ed. This was a letter Brownson sent to the editors on 24 March 1841, and published in the Boston Quarterly Review 4 (April, 1841): 261-64.] 2 [Ed. The Lowell Offering was a newspaper “repository of original articles written by females employed in the mills,” as the title page indicated. The prospectus for the October, 1840 issue, p. 16 outlined the paper’s objectives: “to preserve such articles as are deemed most worthy of preservation; and to correct an erroneous idea which generally prevails in relation to the intelligence of persons employed in the mills.”] 3 [Ed. The article was “The Laboring Classes,” Boston Quarterly Review 3 (July, 1840): 271. See also above p. 307.] 505

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perceive, I think that my object was to rebuke your employers and the community generally, not to speak ill of you. My offence consists solely in saying that there is in the community an unjust prejudice against girls employed in factories. Is not this true? That there is a prejudice against you I know, and that it is unjust I have not a doubt. You are, in my judgment, every way equal to the daughters of your employers, and far more useful to the community. Will those daughters treat you as equals? Do they invite you to their parties? And would their brothers be willing to select their wives from your midst, providing always that you were willing to accept them for your husbands? There is no need of words on this subject. I know, and so do you that you cannot assume that rank in society as factory girls which you could as daughters of factory owners. Moreover, in most places, you know the factory population forms a population by itself. In most factory villages, in which I have been acquainted, I have found that portion of the population not employed in factories looking down on the operatives in the mills. I have rarely known a young man, not employed in a factory, choosing a factory girl for his wife; and I know well the strong prejudice that is felt by operatives in other employments against those in factories. You cannot, as a general rule, return to your early homes, after having spent several years in the mills, without being made to feel that the phrase “factory girl” has a meaning not the most pleasant. You yourselves admit in the article4 in which you give me so severe a lecture that there is a prejudice against you, though you contend it is less than it was. I shall be happy to find it less. I have asserted the existence of this prejudice, and condemned it. I have never charged it to you as your fault, nor have I ever so regarded it. I charge it to the factory system. I am opposed to that system, and opposed to it, among other reasons, because it subjects you to the prejudice of which I have spoken. Now, my good friends, what sin have I committed against you and your sisters? I have represented you as suffering from the workings of an iniquitous system; I have condemned that system, and asked that you should be better rewarded for your labors. Is this wrong? I have asked for you a social position equal to that of the wives and daughters of factory 4 [Ed. The women of Lowell took issue with Brownson in “Factory Girls,” The Lowell Offering (December, 1840): 17-19. The article charged that Brownson’s indiscriminate characterization of all Lowell female operatives smeared the moral qualities of the good women who worked in the factories.]

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owners; is this wrong? Is this to prove myself hostile to you? I have condemned those who grow rich by your labors, while your wages are not enough to enrich you. And is this hostility to factory girls? No. I have confidence in your good sense and your love of justice. You have not understood my language in the sense I used it; but have understood it in the sense given it by those who would prejudice you against me because they fear that if I am not rendered odious to the community, I may do something to prevent them from fattening on your labors. My enemies are your enemies; and believe me, they laugh right merrily at your simplicity in condemning me. They would, if they could, prejudice you against every man who has the good sense and the firmness to speak out for the laborer. You may believe them rather than me; but you should remember that I have no interest in prejudicing you against them; while they have a strong interest in prejudicing you against me. I am contending for a social reform; I would put the “plough into the hand of the owner,”5 and also the spindle and the loom. Your employers do not wish for this change. I wish you, the operatives, to be not only operatives but owners. For this I am laboring. Do you not see then that I am laboring for you against your employers? Do not then be caught in their trap. Do not war for your natural enemies against your friends. But I am wearying your patience. I have addressed you this letter because I perceived that you felt yourselves wronged, and that I had wronged you. You were entitled to demand of me an explanation. I believe you wronged, deeply wronged; but not by me; for I have merely stated and condemned the wrong which others do you. I will merely add that touching the morals of factory girls I have rarely spoken. I saw some publications in a Boston newspaper sometime since,6 concerning the girls employed in the mills at Lowell. Those publications were not to your credit; and what is worse, they remain to this day uncontradicted. The feeble attempt of a Lowell paper to contradict merely tended to confirm them.7 For my own 5

[Ed. Unable to identify quotation.] [Ed. The Boston Daily Times, July 13, 1839, described the poor conditions under which the Lowell women worked and the immorality of some of them.] 7 [Ed. Dr. Elisha Barlett, a Lowell physician, tried to defend the Lowell women in the newspapers. For an account of his defense, newspaper reactions to it, and other reactions to Brownson’s characterizations, see Hannah Josephson, The Golden Threads (New York: Duel, Sloan and Pearce, 1949), 223-25. For a more recent study of Lowell women, see Maureen K. Conklin, “Redefining Womanhood: The Women of The Lowell Offering.”] 6

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part, I have no reason for believing the morals of factory operatives are materially different from those of the rest of the community; and certainly because some may be bad, I am not the man to infer that all are. With the population of New England factory villages I have had some acquaintance, and I have known individuals employed as operatives in the mills, to whose morals I could bear a cheerful and an honorable testimony. You, ladies, have demanded of me an answer. I have given it; and beg leave to subscribe myself, Yours very respectfully, EDITOR OF THE BOSTON QUARTERLY REVIEW.

12. SOCIAL EVILS AND THEIR REMEDY Boston Quarterly Review 4 (July 1841): 265-91

We have never pretended, and we do not now pretend, to be able to point out any specific remedy for social evils, or to show how a series of causes may be put in operation, which shall prevent their recurrence. In the greater part of what we have written in the pages of this journal, as well as elsewhere, on the subject of social evils, our main purpose has been to bring the subject itself distinctly before the minds of those among us, who give tone to thought and direction to affairs, and to engage them in its serious and earnest consideration. The remedy itself we have expected only as the result of time, and the general activity of the public mind directed to its discovery. But the subject has finally begun to arrest the attention of the community. Throughout the whole length and breadth of the land, men’s minds are busy with it. The problem has come up, and will not down till its solution, at least to a partial extent, is found. We may, then, now desist from our efforts to provoke discussion, and proceed to discuss. The audience is assembled, and a calm, dispassionate, philosophical discussion will now be listened to with eagerness and respect. Though we confess, in the outset, that we have no specific remedy for social evils to bring forward, yet we feel competent to indicate the method the inquirer must take in order to find one, and the law by which it is to be applied. And this we proceed now to do, as briefly and as clearly as we can. The end the reformer contemplates and seeks to gain is the production of harmony, the realization of order in the bosom of the individual, between the various elements and tendencies of his nature, and in the bosom of society, between its several members, and between its members and itself. The power which we have for accomplishing this end is our activity, or free-agency. This power may or may not be adequate, but it is all that we have, and we can go no further than it can carry us. 509

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But we may make of our activity a twofold application, and realize the end sought, directly, by efforts to control the appetites and passions; and indirectly, through institutions, by efforts to make them bear on our passivity, and, so far as we are passive beings, aid in molding us into the sort of beings we should be. Moral and religious teachers rely chiefly on the first application of free-agency. They proceed on the ground that direct efforts of freewill in the interior of man are adequate to the realization of order, let external institutions and influences be what they may. They have proceeded on this ground for six thousand years, and with results, which ought ere this to have convinced them that they were guilty of some mistake. In our appetites and passions, from which all disturbing forces proceed, there is at work an activity, which, strictly speaking, is not our activity, and which ours can at best control only to a limited extent. “Evil communications corrupt good manners” [1 Cor 15:33]. Institutions, moral, religious, social, civil, and political, have an almost irresistible influence in determining our characters. Within certain limits they are absolute, and mold us in spite of ourselves. Instead, then, of exhorting men to be what they ought to be, or wasting ourselves in fruitless efforts to make them what they ought to be, in spite of these institutions, against the resistance they offer, we should modify, alter, or reconstruct them, so that they shall aid in the production and maintenance of the individual character desired. We cannot carry the river over the mountain, for the law of gravitation is against us; but we can tunnel the mountain, and then the same law of gravitation which before was against us, will operate in our favor, and cause the river to flow in the direction we wish it to flow. In plain words, the doctrine we would lay down is this: individual character is the result of the combined action of freewill and necessity, and is to be made what it should be mainly by the efforts of freewill not to overcome necessity, but to avail itself of necessity; as in constructing a mill we avail ourselves of the law of gravitation to drive our machinery. The problem to be solved, then, is, how to modify institutions, whose action on us is that of necessity, so that they shall always aid the growth of individual virtue and happiness. This problem can never be completely solved. The harmony, the order we are in pursuit of, may be approximated, but we are far from believing that it can ever be fully attained. There is a necessary antagonism in human nature itself, which must forever balk and baffle our wisest and most strenuous efforts to realize perfect peace and harmony in either the bosom of the individual, or in that of society.

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Man is in his nature a limited, that is, an incomplete, an imperfect being. He has in him elements of growth, of progress, but not of perfection. He can, then, never become, in the strict sense of the word, a perfect being. If he could, he could become God. Society has its root in human nature, and can never surpass the capabilities of that nature. These capabilities reach to progress, but not to perfection; consequently, while we may hope for a continued progress of society towards perfection, we must forever despair of its attaining to perfection. Man has a twofold nature. One set of instincts and faculties, which center in himself, and another set, whose center is out of himself. By the first set, he is an individual, is affected by what immediately concerns himself, and induced to look out for himself, to assert and maintain his own personal rights, interests, and dignity. By the second, he is rendered social, capable of binding himself by love and duty to others, and of becoming self-denying, disinterested, and heroic. Between these two sets of instincts and faculties, there is, and there must be, in the very nature of things, antagonism; consequently, the struggle, the combat, the victory, the defeat. This antagonism will reproduce itself in society, and render the struggle there as permanent and as fierce as it is in the bosom of the individual. Both of these sets of instincts and faculties, or elements of our being, are in their nature indestructible and essential to man. The individual element, the abuse of which is selfishness, is not less essential to man than the social, disinterested, or heroic. It is the element of liberty and of progress. If destroyed, or denied its legitimate scope, the individual is no longer regarded; his well-being is neglected; all individuality expires; society becomes supreme, and exerts the most absolute and galling sway over all her members. On the other hand, if we destroy or neglect the social element, the disinterested, the heroic, we have no social bond, no union, no cooperation, no mutual assistance, no protection for even individuality itself. For all individuality being exclusive, infinitely repellent to every other individuality, each would seek its own gratification at the expense of another; one would prey upon another, the stronger would oppress the weaker, and we should have but one unvarying scene of wrongs and outrages, tyranny and slavery, anarchy, confusion, and war. Every scheme of reform which overlooks or neglects either of these elements, as well as every scheme which proposes a perfection beyond the capabilities of human nature, must prove abortive, and be merely a monument to the want of practical wisdom in its author. This fact reformers are prone to overlook. For ourselves, we have never yet seen a scheme proposed for either individual or social re-

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form that did not either neglect one or the other of these elements, or contemplate a perfection, to which neither human nature nor human society can attain. Mr. Fourier has given us an example of a scheme of this latter sort. His scheme, as ably and faithfully developed in Mr. Brisbane’s interesting and valuable volume on the Social Destiny of Man,1 is ingenious and striking, and at first view attractive, and even plausible. He recognizes the antagonism which actually obtains in both the individual and society, and proposes to get rid of it by harmonizing the passions. His scheme may, therefore, be called a scheme of passional harmonies, to be produced not by denying, destroying, or subduing the passions, but by affording to each its legitimate gratification. This would, no doubt, succeed, were man only a perfect being, or capable of becoming perfect. Were he so made that all his passions could be gratified, and so that he would always be satisfied when the passions had attained their special gratification, a scheme of passional harmony might be contemplated with some degree of practical wisdom, as well as with enthusiastic hope; but man, from the very fact that he is and always must be imperfect, incomplete, is incapable of having all his passions harmonized. He is a musical instrument that can neither be put nor kept in perfect tune. He was made for progress. Progress consists in overcoming disharmony; and unless it is one day to cease, implies that disharmony can never be entirely overcome. Moreover, each passion seeks its own special gratification, and can rarely obtain it without thwarting another. It is impossible, for instance, to harmonize benevolence and the love of accumulation; for one finds its gratification in giving away, the other in acquiring and hoarding. Nature, again, is no economist. She secures her ends by an excessive expenditure of means. The end she proposes to secure by any given passion is always good and sacred, but in order to secure it, she lavishes the passion in excess. Take the passion of love, given to secure the continuance of the species. Wherever this passion exists in sufficient strength and activity to ensure the end for which it was given, it exists in a degree which would push us beyond that end. It demands more than the other elements of our being, without selfdenial, can yield it. Restrain it, and it rebels, and makes a disturbance; let it go unrestrained, it becomes morbidly active, destroys 1

[Ed. Albert Brisbane ( 1809-90) was Fourier’s American disciple and author of the Social Destiny of Man (1840), which Brownson reviewed in Boston Quarterly Review 4 (January, 1841): 127-29.]

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the equilibrium of the passions, and both the moral and physical well-being of the individual. And what we say of this passion, we may say of all the passions. Nor is this all. There is no passion satisfied by possession. Each has a tendency to enlarge its desires in proportion as it obtains. On wishes, wishes grow, and one demand is no sooner complied with than another and a larger is made. The harmony of all the passions is, therefore, out of the question. The harmony of the passions, so far as attainable, is to be obtained not by gratifying the desires of each, but by denying to each its special gratification, whenever its special gratification would lead to disorder, either in the bosom of the individual or in that of society; that is, by following the Christian rule, deny thyself, which we shall find but poorly substituted by Mr. Fourier’s rule—please thyself. In fact, the pleasure of self-denial often exceeds that of indulgence. But in all self-denial there is antagonism. Mr. Owen’s community scheme is an example of a different sort. It has some good points. It recognizes the influence of institutions, of “circumstances,” in forming our characters, and for this it deserves commendation; but it overlooks several essential elements or wants of human nature. In denying the innateness and indestructibleness of the religious element of man, Mr. Owen proves himself a careless psychologist, and a superficial philosopher. This element is essential to man, and is one of the stronger elements of his being. No scheme of society is practicable that neglects it, and none were desirable, even if practicable. It must have a prominent place in every plan of social reorganization intended to be acceptable to the race, or permanent and beneficial. Mr. Owen also neglects activity, free-agency, and, therefore, strictly speaking, man himself. In his scheme, man is the mere creature of circumstances. He has, then, in himself, no active power. He cannot create or modify his Creator. What, then, can he do by way of reform? By denying free-agency, Mr. Owen denies the very instrument with which he must work, and without which it would be absurd to call upon man to be a reformer. Man is active as well as passive, and can act on and mold circumstances as well as they him. In contending for a community system, Mr. Owen depresses, if he does not wholly destroy, individuality. He seizes on the social or communal element of our nature. This is, unquestionably, the element of union, order, justice, peace; but, when taken exclusively, it makes the community everything, the individual nothing; establishes the absolute authority of the community, which cannot fail to de-

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generate into practical tyranny, under which both liberty and progress become impossible. The right of property is denied, too, by his scheme of a community of goods. A community of goods cannot coexist with property; for all property is individual, exclusive. The tenure by which property is held in some countries, and the mode of its transmission and reappropriation in all, may need some important modifications; but the right to property itself is one of our primitive rights, and is, therefore, sacred and divine. Properly speaking, man never feels himself man, till he has something to which he can point and say, “that is mine; touch it not, save as I give thee leave.” It is idle to war against this right, for it is indestructible in the human soul; it is wrong to do it, because we should respect all the rights of man, and because its recognition and security have been and ever must be a powerful agent in advancing civilization. Mr. Owen, also, in our judgment, errs, by denying the necessity of marriage laws. The actual laws on marriage, in most countries, may, doubtless, need some ameliorations, but the continuance of the marriage relation cannot be left to the discretion of the parties interested, with safety either to society or the parties themselves. Marriage is not a mere private agreement, nor civil contract even, but also a sacrament, and should, therefore, be placed under safeguard of both religion and law. The passion usually most active in leading to marriage is good and holy, as are all the passions; but reason and morality are not sufficient to keep it within bounds. All the passions have a tendency to grow tired of what is familiar, and to crave what is novel. Make the continuance of the marriage relation a mere matter of caprice, as it would be, if all laws on the subject were abrogated, and it would not be seldom that we should find a man divorcing the wife of yesterday to take another that strikes his fancy today, who will be equally distasteful tomorrow, and must in her turn give way to another. Doubtless there are evils, to which married life is now subject, that it were desirable to remedy. Marriage is not always that solace and relief to man’s estate it should be. We have ourselves, on a former occasion,2 entered our indignant protest against the unhallowed restraint which society exercises over the indulgence of the affections. But the evils complained of are the result of causes which operate before the marriage law takes effect, and are deeply seated in the 2 See “Laboring Classes,” Boston Quarterly Review, 3 (July, 1840): 358-95. [Ed. See also chapter 7 in this volume.]

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artificiality of the present social organization—in its family pride, its factitious distinctions of blood and fortunes, which interrupt the natural course of young affection, and but too often make marriage a mere legalized prostitution, a mere contrivance for uniting families and estates, or for acquiring a fortune. Abolish your factitious distinctions, do away with your gross inequalities of fortune, educate and refine all your children, make honest industry honorable, and so profitable that a young couple may always feel that they will be able to secure a comfortable living by their own labor, and that too without losing caste, and the evils now complained of will in a great measure cease to exist. Mr. Owen, paradoxical as it may seem, relies too much on reason and morality. But these are feeble barriers against passion in its vehemence. We have these now, and law to boot, and yet passion laughs us in the face, not seldom bids us defiance, and goes unwhipped of justice. They may do for those who are naturally frigid, and for those who are “too old to sin,” but to rely on them alone for the great mass of mankind, were to open the door to unbridled lust, and its whole desolating train. We should do all in our power so to reorganize society that it shall minister no unnatural stimulus to the passions, but we should also stand ready with law in our hands, to whip them back whenever they undertake to leap their bounds. This leads us to the conclusion that they who contemplate reforming society without the aid of government, or introducing a state of society in which government will be superfluous, are also far remote from true practical reformers. This class of reformers are becoming somewhat numerous in our own community. They are a class for whom we have great respect and among whom we reckon some of our warmest personal friends. They admit the present existence of the antagonism of which we speak, but they think that by a judicious system of moral, intellectual, religious, and physical culture they can overcome it. But have they reflected on what condition and at what cost they must overcome it, if they overcome it at all? They have a lively sense of individual rights, and they regard government not only as superfluous, but as an unjust restraint upon individual freedom. Now individual freedom and well-being are promoted only by what are called the selfish instincts, or rather those which lead the individual to assert and maintain his own rights and dignity. We have seen already the result to which we must come, if we take our point of departure in exclusive individuality. Exclusive individuality destroys all individuality, because one individuality cannot tolerate another. You must

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then control individuality by bringing up the social element. But in order to control it, or rather as our friends propose, subdue it, you must give supremacy to the social element. You must weaken the sense of individuality, and strengthen the sense of society. Now if this be done so far as to get rid of all antagonism, it is done only by the entire suppression of individuality. This would be, if successful, so to enfeeble, to emasculate man, that he would be utterly incapable of fulfilling the functions of his being. He would no longer seek to provide for himself, to prolong his own existence, or even to contribute to the continuance of the species. To this extent the suppression of individuality is impossible. The element will survive all efforts to destroy it, and exert itself legitimately or illegitimately. The practical effect, therefore, of the effort to destroy it and dispense with civil government, would be to reestablish a theocracy, the worst and weightiest of all tyranny. The success of our no-government friends, on either hand, would be their defeat. Seeking freedom, they would find slavery; scope for individual activity, they would find themselves without power to act; progress, they would obtain immobility; relief from the burdens of civil government, they would be pressed to the earth by the overwhelming weight of the hierarchy. These reformers proceed on the ground that what they term the lower nature of man is too active. They regard, whether aware of it or not, the selfish instincts as immoral; and they place morality in the exclusive exercise of the social, the disinterested, the heroic. These are the higher nature, those the lower. The lower should submit to the higher; and government is now necessary only because the lower are unduly active. Government, has, therefore, its necessity in human wickedness, and of course must become unnecessary just in proportion as men become upright and moral. This is the view taken of human nature by all theocrats, and is the view on which are founded the claims of supremacy set up by the church. This view, taken exclusively, depresses the body, the state, all material interests, and exalts the soul, the church, and spiritual interests generally. It generates mysticism, asceticism, contempt of the world; builds monasteries, nunneries, and establishes the unlimited authority of the priests. The evils of its dominance may be seen through all past history, and in all countries still subjected to a theocratic government. For ourselves, we protest against this exclusive spiritualism. The soul is no more holy than the body; and morality attaches necessarily no more to the exercise of what is called the higher nature than to what is called the lower nature. We may be as moral in the exercise of

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the functions of the body as in the exercise of the functions of the soul, in yielding to the selfish instincts as in yielding to the disinterested. Morality is predicable only of the motive with which we act; it matters not whether the mobile to act be furnished by one set of instincts or another. The selfish instincts, as they are called, are neither effects nor evidences of the Fall, but are as primitive in man and are as necessary to make up the glory and excellence of his character, as the disinterested and heroic. They should not be cursed, nor should there be any effort to get rid of them. According to Christianity the antithesis between body and soul, insisted upon by the old religions, is done away, and now we should write “Holiness to the Lord,” on everything. Man’s whole nature rightly exercised, is alike holy. The selfish instincts, within their legitimate sphere, are as worthy to be obeyed as the disinterested and benevolent; and it is necessary for the well-being of both the individual and the race that they be always the strongest and most active. The good of the whole is best provided for by making each individual the special guardian of his own. But if these instincts be the strongest and the most active, the others will be too weak to control them, and to prevent one individuality from occasionally encroaching on the equal individuality of another. This encroaching neither the individual nor the race can tolerate. Both morality and utility demand its suppression. Hence the necessity of society for perfecting the individual—society, which may be defined the union of all for the protection of each. Man has primitive and indestructible wants which crave society and lead to it; he has also instincts essential, as we have shown, to his very existence, and to that of the race, which must be stronger and more active than those that demand the supervision and control of society. These too are permanent and indestructible, and consequently create a permanent demand for social supervision and control. But social supervision and control is government; consequently government has an eternal necessity in the permanent and essential nature of man. Society is needed to maintain, in all its entireness, the equal individuality of each and every of her members; and government is the force needed to enable her to do this, and to enable the aggrieved party to compel her to do it, in case she neglects or refuses to do it. Now as the great work for the social reformer is to provide for the maintenance to each and every individual to his entire individuality, and as this can be done only by society, and by society through government, it follows that government, so far from being an ob-

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stacle to reform, a superfluous machine which we should throw aside, is in fact the great and indispensable agent of reform. They, then, who are warring against government, are warring against themselves, throwing away the arms without which their defeat is certain. Instead of advocating their no-government schemes, they should plunge into the science of politics, acquaint themselves with practical statesmanship, and turn the purity of their hearts, the intelligence of their minds, and the enthusiasm of their souls to the work of making government what it ought to be. We have arrived now at two important conclusions. 1. Man is to be perfected in society; and 2. Society is to be perfected, that is, enabled or compelled to discharge its office in perfecting the individual, by the agency of government. It follows also from what we have said that the office of society, so far as concerns our present inquiry, is to maintain for each individual member his entire individuality. This implies the maintenance not only of one individuality against another, but also of the individual against society itself. The maintenance of each member of society in his entire individuality is what is commonly meant by maintaining equal rights. But the phrase equal rights does not necessarily cover the whole ground. Rights may be equal without being entire. Society may maintain equal rights, that is, the same number of rights to each of her members, and yet to no one all his rights. She may maintain all the rights of one individual in relation to another, and yet deny to all their rights in relation to herself. We prefer, therefore, the statement we have adopted, which means, for us, all the rights with which the individual is endowed by his Creator, whether they relate to other individuals or to society. In contending that it is the office of society to maintain each and every individual in his entire individuality, we of course reject the old doctrine that the rights of society are made up of the rights surrendered by individuals. Men on coming into civil society do not surrender a portion of their rights for the sake of enjoying the remainder; man comes in, if the expression comes in be allowed, for the purpose of having all and every of his rights protected, even to the minutest and apparently the most insignificant. Every member of society, that is, every citizen—and everyone who is properly a man should be a citizen—has the right to demand the protection here implied, and society fails in her duty whenever she fails from any cause whatever to afford it.

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The rights of the individual may be invaded in two ways. 1. By the encroachment of one individual upon another. 2. By the encroachment of society herself. The practical political problem then is, how to organize civil society, or how to constitute the government, so as to afford an effective guaranty to all against this double invasion. Government, to meet the exigencies of the case, must be an instrument in the hands of society for protecting one individual against another, and in the hands of individuals for protecting themselves against the encroachments of society. It must then be a contrivance for governing society as well as individuals. A contrivance of this sort it is not easy to find. It presents the only really difficult problem in political science. Some have thought they found it in monarchy, some in aristocracy, some in democracy, and others in various combinations of these, or in what they have termed mixed governments. In this country the popular solution of the problem is the democratic. We fancy that we find in democracy the form of government needed, and that if we so arrange matters that the will of the people can always make itself felt and obeyed, all rights are sure to be protected, and the interests and well-being of all secured. But democracy, as popularly taught, affords the citizen no protection against society. By democracy, as a form of government, is understood generally that form of government in which the people, taken as the state or body politic, are supreme, and may, if not morally, at least in point of fact, do whatever they please. The state is then absolute, and you have an unlimited government, just as much as you would have, were your government an unlimited monarchy. Minorities and individuals have nothing but the wisdom and justice of the majority on which to rely. They are at the mercy of the sovereign, and have no resource if he choose to play the tyrant. Here is no true liberty, no effective safeguard for individual freedom, no power in the hands of the party whose rights may be invaded, except the good pleasure of the invader, with which to obtain redress. We speak here of democracy in its absolute sense, and solely as a form of government. Democracy, when understood to mean the end that government should seek, to wit, the maintenance of each individual in the free and full possession of all his natural rights as a man, is unquestionably the creed of every true American, and as one of our distinguished scholars has well said, “practical Christianity”;3 for 3 [Ed. For one Unitarian identification of democracy as practical Christianity, see George Bancroft, “Progress of Civilization,” Boston Quarterly Review 1 (October, 1838): 391-92.]

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in this sense it realizes in our social and political relations the end enjoined by the fundamental principles of the Christian religion. But the growing tendency of our countrymen is to understand by democracy a form of government in which the majority, the absolute numerical majority, may rule unrestrained. The government of this country is regarded as resting solely on the will of the majority. In the words of the late President of the United States, “a breath of the majority has made and can unmake” it.4 Hence we hear of the “democracy of numbers,” and are told on high authority that the “democracy of numbers” is the only intelligible democracy. Then the majority is always the democracy; the party in the majority is always the true Democratic party, and the principles and measures of the majority are always democratic principles and measures. Majorities are perpetually shifting. The minority of yesterday is the majority of today, and of course what was anti-democratic yesterday is democratic today, and will be anti-democratic again tomorrow. There is among us a strong tendency to sweep away every institution, every organic form, whether in the executive, judicial, or legislative branches of the government, which may have heretofore interposed an obstacle to the free and full expression of the irresponsible will of the majority. Every amendment proposed or adopted of any of our civil constitutions has a direct tendency to throw additional power into the hands of the party, which chances to be in the majority, and to remove some safeguard from the minority. The whole spirit of the American people, not of one party only, is to sweep away all barriers to the establishment of absolute democracy, which shall cause the government in its administration to feel and respond to every wave of public opinion, or popular caprice. This is easily accounted for, and is by no means an unnatural tendency; but it is perhaps time to inquire whither it is likely to lead, and whether it is likely to increase the security we demand for individual rights? We are aware that there is growing up among us a feeling that majorities can do no wrong, but we have not yet satisfied ourselves that this feeling has any warrant in theory or experience. Majorities, for aught we can see, are as liable to err as minorities. The truly wise and just man not seldom finds himself obliged to desert the majority, nay to stand alone with his single breast against an opposing world. Not seldom is he jeered and scoffed by the multitude, his name a byword and a reproach. 4 [Ed. William Henry Harrison, 4 March 1841, Inaugural Address, in Inaugural Addresses of the Presidents of the United States From George Washington 1789 to George Bush 1989 (Washington, D.C.: United States Government Printing Office, 1989), 80.]

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Our democrats, however, contend that the interests of the majority are in point of fact identical with the interests of the minority, and therefore if the majority can actually be free to promote their own, they will of necessity promote the interests of the whole. All that is necessary, then, is universal education, which shall enable all to see and comprehend their rights and interests, and the measures necessary to secure them; and universal suffrage, by which every man shall have a voice in determining the action of the government. This is plausible, but nevertheless unsatisfactory to those who look at things as they are. Admit for the present that the will of the majority, freely expressed, and rendered effective, will secure to every individual the free and full enjoyment of all his natural rights, still universal suffrage coupled even with universal education of the most approved pattern, will by no means secure the free and effective expression of the actual will of the majority. The actual majority of our countrymen are the laboring men. But universal suffrage secures not the expression of their views, convictions, and wishes. They almost uniformly vote against themselves, not through ignorance, but what is to them a moral necessity. They must have employment, or they and theirs must beg, steal, or starve. This employment they feel that they can obtain only by voting with the small minority on whom they are dependent for it. They dare not vote independently, lest they lose their employment; and consequently they are in elections little else but the servile tools of their employers. This fact is notorious, and it is no uncommon thing for a working man to shift his politics with his employer. Political leaders usually count, as so many votes for their party, the number of voters in the employ of their friends. The friends of the workingmen see and lament this, and seek, vainly, to get rid of the evil by means of the secret ballot. But waiving this, there is another obstacle, if possible still greater. We suppose that all democratic communities will divide themselves into parties, especially if under the regime of pure, unmixed, unlimited democracy, and usually into two parties of nearly equal strength. There are permanent causes for this division in the antagonism of which we have already spoken. Whatever measure is carried, must then be carried by means of a party. If your party be not in the ascendancy, you cannot carry your measure. Your first study must then be to secure the ascendancy of your party. This can be done only by means of union and concert among all its members; and union and concert can be obtained only by establishing and respecting what are termed party usages. These usages will require you to support the measures and candidates of your party.

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But these measures and candidates are rarely determined on by the spontaneous voice of the whole party. They are determined on by the few more active partisans, usually designated party leaders. These cut and dry the policy of the party. The party may not approve this policy, but it must adopt it, or endanger its success, and give ascendancy to the opposing party; which will generally be regarded as the greater evil of the two. A majority of the more active members of the party, therefore, adopt what their leaders propose, pass resolutions in its favor, and rally the whole party to its support. The party, we will suppose, succeeds, elects its men and carries its measures. Are these measures really carried by the majority of the whole people? Are they in truth expressions of the actual will of the majority? Not at all. They are in truth only the expressions of the will or the policy of the active minority of the party, which is itself but a lean majority of the whole people. If the actual opinion of those who in both parties are really opposed to them could be collected, you would not infrequently have an overwhelming majority against them. In point of fact what we call the decision of the majority in this country is rarely anything more than the decision of the active or adroit minority which controls the party that for the time being chances to be in the ascendant. Universal suffrage, then, coupled with universal education, cannot secure even the expression of the will of the majority, to say nothing of giving us assurance that the will of the majority shall always be just and right. Nor is this all. Government, as soon as it goes into operation, divides the community into two classes, and creates an inequality, and an opposition of interests between the few and the many. It collects its taxes from the whole people indeed, but it pays them out to the few. These few consequently receive more from the government than they pay to it; and the many consequently pay more than they receive from it. The interest of the many is to pay as little as possible, and of the few to make them pay as much as possible. The few are, by their position and their relation to the government, constituted a plunder party, and they are induced by all the force of selfishness, which always increases by what it feeds upon, to make the government an instrument for plundering the people to the greatest possible extent. These few have the command of the government, for they are the small minority governing the ruling party. Now against these plunderers, these wielders of the whole organized power of the community, what are single individuals, however independent in their suffrages, or however moral and enlightened in their aims? They are as the reed before the blast. They may be trampled on with impunity.

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It may be said that they may denounce the party in power, raise the cry of “retrenchment and reform,” and bring up and bring in a new party. Be it so. The chiefs of the new party as soon as in power will constitute a new plunder party, more greedy than the last, because they have for some time been keeping Lent. They will find “retrenchment and reform” difficult. The business of the country is increasing, new settlements are springing up, population is enlarging, interests and relations are multiplying, and demanding a larger number of public officers and additional expenditures. Every new party coming into power among us comes in on the cry of “retrenchment and reform”; but alas! each new one proves itself more burdensome than the last. The security we demand for individuality, therefore, is not to be found in universal suffrage and universal education, good and indispensable as both unquestionably are. No unlimited form of government will answer our purpose; because every unlimited form of government establishes the absolute rule of society, and therefore deprives the individual of all guaranty for his individuality—placing him entirely at the mercy of an arbitrary will, and as much so when that will is the will of the many, as when it is the will of the one or the few. The individual, however enlightened and moral, we have seen is too weak to withstand the cupidity of the plunder party, which the party of the government always is, and always will be. He alone cannot protect his rights or compel society to do it. In order to protect him you must league him with a part or a portion of the community, which shall make common cause with him, and have the power to arrest the action of government the moment it invades or threatens to invade his rights. The framers of our institutions have not altogether overlooked this. They have sought to protect minorities and individuals, by the separation of the functions of government into three departments, each in the main independent of the other; by dividing the legislative branch into two houses; and by the adoption of written constitutions defining the powers of each department, and of the whole government. They have had a horror of all absolute governments, and have sought to limit the government they established. They were wiser than we commonly represent them, and many of the checks and balances they introduced, which we are warring against, are of no small use in protecting minorities and individuals in their rights. They sought, in one word, to establish a CONSTITUTIONAL government, a government of limited powers, containing in itself a power

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of arresting its own action whenever disposed to transcend its legitimate bounds. This idea is fundamental and just. Constitutional government is the only government under which there can be any real liberty, any effective safeguard for the rights, the individuality of the citizen; and it will be a sad day for us, when in obedience to monarchical, aristocratical, or democratical tendencies, we are led to abandon constitutional forms of government for an absolute government. Our countrymen are in general strongly attached to constitutional forms of government, and have no intention of weakening or abandoning them, but they do not, as it appears to us, always fully comprehend the precise nature of constitutional government. It is generally admitted that the Constitution prescribes the mode and the limits within which the several departments of the government shall act; but it is not always perceived that the Constitution is in fact only so much waste paper, if it proceed from the same power which performs the ordinary functions of government and legislation. The ordinary power of government and legislation, in a government like ours, is the will or assent of the majority. Now if this same majority make the Constitution, or may unmake it at will, the Constitution can at best impose only a temporary check on its will. It is as absolute as if there were no Constitution at all. Does the Constitution emanate from the simple numerical majority of the people? Then it is nothing but a self-imposed restraint, a charter granted by the sovereign, but revocable at will. Have the majority an absolute right, or the absolute power, of interpreting the Constitution, of determining the meaning of its provisions? Then the Constitution is nothing but what the majority choose to make it, and consequently we are just as much under the absolute majority, as we should be in case we had no Constitution. Nor will it alter the case if a special umpire for deciding on the constitutionality of questions be instituted, if that umpire be appointed by the majority, or be so constituted as naturally to express the sense of the majority. It is essential to constitutional government that the Constitution be made by a different power from the one which acts in ordinary legislation, and that it rest for its support on a power which can effectively maintain it, in case the government proper manifests a disposition to transcend its limits. The people assembled in convention differs in no respect from the people assembled in the halls of legislation, as to the actual power which is at work. If the delegates chosen to the convention represent the numerical majority of the people, what do they represent but the very majority represented by

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the members of the legislature, in case that legislature be based solely on population? We want in fact in the state two powers, which shall serve to restrain each the other. One of these powers should make the Constitution, the other should operate within the limits of that Constitution in the performance of the ordinary functions of government. The Constitution is then a real check on ordinary government and legislation, the real sovereign of the country, of which government in its restricted sense is merely the agent or minister. This constitution-making power we have not in all cases provided for. In our own Commonwealth, the same power, with a slight restriction, that makes the laws, can alter the Constitution. The Constitution with us is only what the will of the majority makes it, or suffers it to be. It is in fact then no restriction on the power of the majority. It is only the restriction the majority imposes on itself during its pleasure. But how are we to obtain a constitution-making power different from the power of the majority? We must do it, if we may borrow the words of a distinguished American statesman,5 “by means of some contrivance for collecting the sense of the community through its parts.”6 By the concurrence of the several parts we form the Constitution, which must be the enumeration and limit of the powers to be exercised by the simple numerical majority. A contrivance of this sort would give us a double majority; the simple, absolute, numerical majority of the whole community, and the concurring majorities of the several parts. The concurring majorities of the parts would be the sense of a much larger portion of the community than is represented by the numerical majority, and would also embody the sense of parts, which might have interests and wishes different from those of the numerical majority. So long as this sense could be effectively expressed, no part could be injured, and the numerical majority would be obliged to confine its action to those matters and interests which were common to the whole. The concurring majorities, or the sense of the community as collected through its parts, should make the Constitution. The numerical majority should operate only within the limits of the Constitution. Take, as an illustration of this, the Constitution of the United States. This Constitution was not formed by nor does it rest on the will of the majority of the people of the United States, as contended

5

John C. Calhoun. [Ed. Unable to identify quotation.]

6

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by the late President in his Inaugural Address;7 but was formed and can be altered only by the concurring majorities of the several states. It embodies the sense of the American community as collected through its parts, without reference to absolute numbers. The sense of Rhode Island, as an independent part, counts as much in forming or amending the Constitution as the sense of New York. The majority of the whole people can therefore legitimately exert no more power than will be concurred in by the several parts, or to speak strictly no power that one fourth of the parts withhold. The Constitution is therefore an example of what we term concurring majorities, or majorities of the several parts. The law-making power of Congress, on the other hand, is an example of the absolute or numerical majority, and being limited by the Constitution, is restricted, restrained in its exercise by the concurring majorities. A contrivance analogous or equivalent to this is needed in the several states. But here it is less easy to introduce it because interests and localities are more homogeneous, and it is more difficult to organize the community into distinct parts. To introduce some distinction of the kind, some contrivance for taking, in addition to the sense of the absolute majority, the sense of the natural divisions of the community, is and should be the aim of every true statesman. Universal suffrage collects, after a sort, it is true, the sense of the parts; but these parts are simple individuals, and the simple individual is too weak, as we have shown, to constitute a sufficient barrier to the invasion of the numerical majority, or rather the plundering minority that controls it. How it shall be introduced we do not now undertake to point out. The contrivance must vary with localities and the peculiar habits, tastes, customs, and pursuits of the community. The same contrivance will not answer for every community. Nor can it anywhere be arbitrarily introduced. It must ever be merely a modification or development of what already exists. In Rome it was obtained by the establishment of the Tribunitial power. In England it is obtained by means of Three Estates, each having a negative on the others; in France they have attempted it by the same means, but have unfortunately given the balance of power to the king. In this state we formerly sought it by basing one House on valuation, and by representing townships rather than population in the other. Vermont, which is the most truly democratic in her legislation, composes her legislature entirely of delegates from townships 7 [Ed. William Henry Harrison, 4 March 1841, Inaugural Address, in Inaugural Addresses, 79-97.]

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or corporations. Each township is a distinct part, and is represented in the government, without any reference to the number of its inhabitants. The small township has the same representation with the large. This is a wise regulation, and Vermont is much indebted to it for the liberal character of her legislation, and the free and independent spirit of her inhabitants. She is never subjected to the sway of the absolute majority, but even in her ordinary legislation collects the sense of her community through its parts. The particular manner of organizing the state, so as always to have the concurrence of the parts as a check upon the absolute numerical majority, must be left to the particular state, to be determined according to its already existing natural or artificial divisions. In some states it may be done by regarding territorial divisions, in others, perhaps, by making valuation instead of population the basis; in some by taking the concurring majorities only in forming the Constitution, and in others by representing these in one House and the numerical majority in the other. The precise manner of getting at it is the question for the practical statesmen of the community it concerns. All we can add is that without some contrivance of the sort, a wise administration of government, and its beneficial working will be a matter of accident, never to be counted on with any degree of certainty. In passing, we may remark, as it concerns our own Commonwealth, the tendency has been in an opposite direction. Our Senate was formerly based on valuation; we have now based it on population; our House of Representatives was formerly based on corporations (townships); but we are every year approaching nearer and nearer to population, and have already come so near that Boston and three or four other large towns control the whole legislature. This tendency has been looked upon as democratic. Perhaps it were well to inquire if it has rendered legislation more favorable to the rights of individuals, and afforded additional protection to minorities. Many things are thought to be democratic, against which a wise statesman will set his face. It is not democracy we want, but good government, a government which secures to each individual, by effective guaranties, the free and full enjoyment of all his natural rights. These guaranties, which are the substance, may be lost, while we are in pursuit of abstractions, and theoretic unity, which are often but mere shadows. All good government is founded in compromise, and is more or less complicated. To simplify it is nothing else but to render it absolute. If we simplify so as to render all consistent with the popular idea of democracy, we only bring individuals and minorities under the absolute sway of the majority. If we simplify in favor of aristoc-

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racy, it is to subject the many to the absolute supremacy of the few. If in favor of monarchy, it is to reduce all under the dominion of one. We must take care not to simplify till we simplify away all our rights, all that government is instituted to protect. The right organization of the government, that is, such an organization of the commonwealth, of civil society, that the parts may always have a sort of suspensive veto on the whole, when its action becomes oppressive to any part, or goes beyond its constitutional limits, we hold to be the first object to be aimed at by the reformer as well as by the statesman. The first thing is to get a good government. This is the greatest of all earthly blessings to any people. Till this be obtained, there is no security for individual freedom, and consequently none for individual or social progress. The germs, or rather the outlines of a good government, each state in our confederacy has already adopted. Some modifications in accordance with various localities, ways of thinking, and pursuits, will give good governments, so far as concerns their organic forms, to all. This done, it will not be difficult to secure their wise and faithful administration, to make them in fact as well as in name, agents for protecting each individual in the free and full enjoyment of his entire individuality. We have in this paper endeavored to give a practical direction to our remarks. We have heretofore speculated not a little, and presented the subject of social reform on its ideal side, which was not amiss. For the ideal has its place, and an important one too, more important than our countrymen usually give it. But the practical has also its place; and when we come to the matter of acting, the question is never, what is in the number of future possibilities, but what is possible now, men and things being as they are, and what they are? We must come down from the ideal to answer this question, and forego our ecstasies. We must take sober views, and be after all somewhat moderate in our demands. We have also given the direction we have to our remarks, with the hope of drawing attention more directly to the importance and precise nature of constitutional government. Our countrymen are all attached to constitutional government, and so far very well; but they seem to us to be far from comprehending the real nature of constitutional government in general, and their own in particular. We would, if we could, provoke the discussion of constitutional questions. The popular textbooks and interpretations of our existing constitutions are unworthy a people engrossed in political matters as we are.8 In 8

[Ed. One of the popular textbooks was William Rawle’s (1759-1836) A View of the Constitution of the United States of America (Philadelphia: H. C. Carey and I. Lea, 1825).]

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this part of the country constitutional law is hardly recognized. We have been engaged in the discussion of merely local or temporary questions, or in attempting to define abstract democracy. We complain not of this; but we think it is time to sink our political attorneyism, and even our political metaphysics, in wise, liberal, and philosophical statesmanship. In conclusion, we would say that in appealing so directly as we do to government, and making it almost the sole agent through which we are to remedy social evils, we by no means forget religion, morality, or individual intelligence. No man can rate them higher than we do. We hold them absolutely indispensable. But they must not be imprisoned in the bosom of the individual. They must be brought out of the interior of man, and made to disclose the true end of all social institutions, and to contribute to their adoption. We would always write as the Christian and the moralist, as well as the statesman. But we would use Christianity and morality in organizing the state and shaping its measures, not less than in our private exhortations to individuals. The end disclosed by true religion, the one enjoined by morality, and that sought by the state, are one and the same; wit, the freedom and progress in virtue and happiness of every individual. Unless the state maintain freedom for the individual, religion and morality can do little besides solace him in his sufferings, and strengthen him for his trials. This is no doubt a high office, and never to be thought lightly of; but the intelligence, purity, and loftiness of soul, religion and morality are fitted to quicken, should be directed to the establishment of such institutions, and the enactments of such laws, as shall always favor truth, justice, freedom, order, and well-being.

13. EMERSON’S ESSAYS 1 Boston Quarterly Review 4 (July, 1841): 291-308.

In this journal for April last,2 we called attention to these Essays, and promised that we would take an early opportunity to speak of them more at large. The promise we then made, we proceed now to redeem. And yet we hardly know how to do it. The Essays are good and significant, but exceedingly troublesome to reviewers, for whose especial ease and convenience they seem by no means to have been written. They contain no doctrine or system of doctrines, logically drawn out, and presented to the understanding of the reader. They consist of detached observations, independent propositions, distinct, enigmatical, oracular sayings, each of which is to be taken by itself, and judged of by its own merits. Consequently, it is impossible to reduce their teachings to a few general propositions, and to sum up their worth in a single sentence. To most persons who read these Essays they will seem to be wanting in unity and coherence. They will always strike as beautiful, often as just, and sometimes as profound; but the reader will be puzzled to round their teachings into a whole, or to discover their practical bearing on life or thought. Yet they have unity and coherence, but of the transcendental sort. The author seems to us to have taken, as far as possible, his stand in the eternal, above time and space, and tried to present things as they appear from that point of vision—not in their relation to each other as seen in the world of the senses, but in their relation to the spectator who views them from above the world of the senses. This fact should be borne in mind. Mr. Emerson, to speak scientifically, is no philosopher. He is a philosopher neither in the order of his mind, nor in his method of investigation. He explains nothing, accounts for nothing, solves no intellectual problem, and affords no practical instruction. He proposes nothing of all this, and, therefore, 1 [Ed. Brownson’s review of Ralph Waldo Emerson’s Essays (Boston: James Monroe & Co., 1841).] 2 [Ed. Boston Quarterly Review 4 (April, 1841): 258.] 530

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is not to be censured for not doing it. He is to be regarded as a seer, who rises into the regions of the transcendental, and reports what he sees, and in the order in which he sees it. His worth can be determined, that is, the accuracy of his reports can be properly judged of, by none except those who rise to the same regions, and behold the universe from the same point of view. Writers like Mr. Emerson are seldom to be consulted for clear, logical, systematic expositions of any subject or doctrine, never for the purpose of taking them as teachers or guides in the formation of opinions; but for the suggestions, the incentives to thought they furnish, and the life they kindle up within us. They are thought by some to be writers without any practical value for mankind; but they have, in fact, a very high practical value; only not of the every day sort, only not that of dogmatic teachers or scientific expositors. They present new aspects of things, or at least old familiar objects in new dresses, the various subjects of thought and inquiry in new relations, break up old associations, and excite to greater and fresher mental activity. After having read them, we cannot say that we are wiser or more learned than we were before; we cannot say that we have become acquainted with any new facts in the history of man or of the universe, or that we have any new ideas in regard to the human soul or its Creator; but we feel that somehow or other new virtue has been imparted to us, that a change has come over us, and that we are no longer what we were, but greater and better. These are not the only writers we need; but they have their place, and one of high trust, and of no slight influence. Their influence is not sudden, noisy, obvious to all senses, but slow, silent, subtle, permanent, entering into and becoming an integrant part of the life of the age, sometimes of the ages. They live and exert a power over the souls of men, long after their names are forgotten, and their works have ceased to be read. They are never in vogue with the multitude, but they are admired in select circles, who inhale their spirit, and breathe it into other and larger circles, who in their turn breathe it into the souls of all men. Though they may seem to have no practical aim, and no reference to everyday life, they have in the end a most important practical bearing, and exert a controlling influence over even the business concerns of the world. Let no one, then, regard them as mere idle dreamers, as mere literary toys, with whose glitter we may amuse ourselves, but without significance for the world of reality. They appear always for good or evil, and their appearance usually marks an epoch.

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Mr. Emerson’s book is a sincere production. It could have been produced only in this community at the present moment, and only by a man who had been placed in the relations he has to society and the church. Such a book could never have emanated from a man who had not been bred a clergyman, nor from one, who, having been bred a clergyman, had not ceased to be one. We may also say that it could have been produced by no man, who had not been bred in a creed, which he had found insufficient to meet the wants of his intellect and heart, and who had not, in some measure, deserted it, without having found another in all respects satisfactory. We may say again, he must have been bred a Unitarian, and having found Unitarianism defective in consequence of its materialism, have felt and yielded to the reaction of spiritualism, and yet not sufficiently to return to any of the standard forms of orthodoxy. We would speak respectfully of Unitarianism, as we would always of the dead. It had its mission, and it has, in the providence of God, done great good in our community. But Unitarianism was not, strictly speaking, a religion, could not become a religion; and it is well known that almost always persons brought up under its influence, desert it as soon as they become seriously impressed, and desirous of leading religious lives. Men never embraced Unitarianism because they were pious, but because they would dispense with being pious. Unitarianism never spoke to the heart, to the soul; never waked any real enthusiasm, or called forth any religious energy of character. It is in its nature unspiritual, merely intellectual and material, a sort of baptized atheism. The same causes, at bottom, which produced deism and atheism in France, produced Unitarianism in New England. If the American mind had been as consequent as the French, as bold to push a doctrine to its last results, and had the church here been organized as it was in France, and been as oppressive, our Unitarians would have been avowed deists or atheists. We can find no more to feed our piety in the “Statement of Reasons,” than in the “Systême de la Nature.”3 Indeed, the author of the latter seems the more pious worshiper of the two, and betrays altogether more of peculiar religious emotion; and reverence is more readily yielded to d’Holbach’s Nature than to Norton’s Divinity. The one is living, plastic, active; the other is a stern, old mechanic, placed on the outside of nature, and troubling himself rarely with its operations; wrapping 3 [Ed. Brownson is referring to Andrews Norton’s Statement of Reasons for Not Believing the Doctrines of Trinitarians, and Paul-Henri Thiry, Baron d’Holbach’s (1723-89) Système de la nature; ou, des lois du monde physique et du monde moral (1770), an unmitigated defense of atheistic materialism.]

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himself in night and silence, neither seen nor needed by men, and would be unconceived of did he not charitably send us now and then a messenger to inform us that he really is, and no fiction—a piece of information altogether gratuitous, as it serves no useful purpose in either the economy of nature or of salvation. With this “Statement of Reasons,” Unitarianism died, and there are few mourners to go about the streets, albeit there is for it no resurrection. The old forms of faith had ceased to satisfy the minds of the generation preceding us. Calvinism could not be explained on the principles of Locke’s philosophy, and the asceticism which Puritanism had enjoined could not but be distasteful and offensive to the growing aristocracy of a prosperous country. Men politely educated, sumptuously clad, fond of good eating and drinking, full of hilarity and mirth, feeling in themselves an exuberance of life, and finding the world very well adapted to their tastes, and being, therefore, in no hurry to exchange it for another, were ill prepared to embrace the ascetic doctrines and practices of their stern old fathers, who never suffered their rigid features to relax with a smile, who thought to please God only by marring the beauty of his works, and by trampling under foot the choicest of his blessings. We do not blame them much. These old Puritans are a very unpoetic race of beings, and neither so pious nor so ascetic, so ungiven to the flesh withal, as their admirers would fain have us believe, as may be learned by whomsoever will take the trouble to consult our old church records. They were a strong race, and able to do much; but they attempted altogether more than they could do. They undertook to demolish both the flesh and the devil, and to live on earth as they expected to live in heaven; that is, in surly communion with their own thoughts, and in singing psalms, with no better accompaniment than a Jew’s harp. Peace to their ashes. They were not without their mission, and have left their track on the ages. Perhaps, with less sourness, surliness, less rigidity, and with more of the amiable, the gentle, the attractive, they could not have done their work. But the asceticism, which our Puritan fathers insisted on, can be really practiced by a people only while in the wilderness; while poor, exposed to a thousand hardships, and finding earth no resting place, but a weary land, from which any deliverance may be accounted a blessing. In proportion as the wilderness is peopled, the barren waste converted into the fruitful garden, as grow the ornamental shrubs, and blossoms the rose, and delights are multiplied around us, we take more cheerful views of the world, and of life, and seek not to mortify ourselves, but to enjoy. Asceticism must, then, give way in

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practice, if not in theory. It did give way in practice, and for years all New England presented the spectacle of a people professing one faith, and living according to another. Some saw this, and being honest, were shocked at it. These became Unitarians. Unitarianism was with us a protest against asceticism, even more than against the absurdity of Calvinism, as contemplated from the point of view of the Lockean philosophy. It was an effort of those who could not live in a perpetual lie, to reconcile their theology and their religion to their philosophy and their mode of living. For a time it could do very well; and as long as controversy could be maintained with opposing sects, it could apparently sustain some degree of intellectual life; but no longer. As soon as the orthodox ceased to controvert, threw it back on itself, left it to its own resources, it ceased to live. Inasmuch as it was a dissent from the popular faith, Unitarianism appealed to freedom of thought and inquiry. It asserted the rights of the individual reason. They who became Unitarians, then, were not bound to continue such. They had a right to examine Unitarianism, as well as the doctrines opposed to it. Such, again, was its own intrinsic deficiency, its utter inadequacy, as a religion, that the moment its own friends began to investigate it, they found they had outgrown it. They found elements in their nature it did not and could not accept, wants it did not and could not meet. They revolted against its materialism, its dryness, coldness, deadness. They fell back on the religious element of their natures, and sought refuge in a more spiritual philosophy. In this state of transition from materialism to spiritualism, from Unitarianism to a modified orthodoxy, if we may be allowed the expression, our Unitarian community now is. This transition is represented, in certain of its phases, in the book before us. It marks a movement of the Unitarian mind towards a higher, a broader, a more truly religious faith and life. In this consists its significance, and if our orthodox friends were aware of this, they would read it with avidity and profit by it. This revolt against materialism, and this return towards spiritualism, we regard as among the chief glories of our epoch, as a proof that the reign of infidelity is well nigh over, and that we are preparing a religious future. In this point of view, the men among us who represent this movement, and are for the present condemned, in no measured terms, as was to be expected, by both Unitarians and the representatives of the old Trinitarian asceticism, the old Calvinistic spiritualism, are the real benefactors of their age and country; the men, who, instead of abuse and discouragement, deserve honor and

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cooperation. But we never recognize our redeemers till we have crucified them. We cannot say of a truth that they are sons of God, till we perceive the darkness which comes over the earth as they leave it. These Essays mark among us the reaction of spiritualism. This constitutes their historical value. How far they represent truly the spiritualism that should become dominant is another question, and one which can be answered only by determining their positive value. This last can be done only by entering into a critical examination of their merits, a thing which it seems to us almost sacrilegious to attempt. They do not seem to us legitimate subjects of criticism. There is a sacredness about them, a mystic divinity, a voice issuing from them, saying to critics, “Procul, O procul, este, profani.”4 To do them justice, they should be read with reverence, with a yielding spirit, an open heart, ready to receive with thankfulness whatever meets its wants or can be appropriated to its use. The rest, what is not congenial, should be left with pious respect; perhaps there are souls which will find it wholesome food. Why should we deprive others of appropriate nutriment, because it is no nutriment to us? But Mr. Emerson sometimes descends from the seer, and assumes the reasoner. He sometimes touches on dogmas and systems, and if he adopts rarely a philosophical form, a system of philosophy lies back of his poetic utterances, and constitutes even for him the ground on which they are to be legitimated. This system we may examine without profanity. It will, moreover, be ultimately drawn out and formally taught by his disciples. His book will give it currency, and be appealed to as its authority. There can, then, be no impropriety in asking if it be true or false, complete or incomplete. This system, we say distinctly, is not scientifically taught in the book before us. We are not sure that Mr. Emerson himself is always conscious of it. We are inclined to believe that he thinks that he eschews all systems, and entangles himself in the meshes of no theory. But every man who speaks at all implies a theory, and in general the greatest theorizers are those who profess to abjure all theory. Every man has his own point of view, from which he contemplates the universe, and whence all his reports are drawn. The question may, then, always come up, is this the true point of view, the point from which the universe may be seen as it really is, and represented in all its unity and diversity? The moment this question is asked, and we

4 [Ed. Vergil, Aeneid, Book 6, line 258-59. Latin for “Leave, O leave from here, all you who are not purified.”]

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undertake to answer it, we plunge into metaphysics, and avail ourselves of system, of theory. Mr. Emerson’s point of view is, we have said, the transcendental. Can the universe, seen from this point of view alone, be truly represented? The answer to this question will enable us to determine the philosophic value of his Essays. In the philosophy against which there is, in our times, a decided movement, there is no recognition of a transcendental world, of aught that transcends time and space. Immensity is merely space that cannot be measured; eternity is merely time without end. God, as well as man, exist in time and space, and differs from man only in the fact that he fills all space, and continues through all time. Eternal life is a life in time, but merely time endlessly continued. This philosophy never, therefore, carries us out of time and space. To all persons embracing this philosophy, transcendentalists must appear mere dreamers, endeavoring to give to airy nothing, a local habitation and a name.5 Now, transcendentalism recognizes a world lying back of and above the world of time and space. Time and space belong merely to the world of the senses; but the reason—not as the principle of logic, but as the principle of intelligence—rises immediately into a region where there is no time, no space. Immensity is not space infinitely extended, but the negation of all space; eternity is not time endlessly continued, but the negation of all time. God does not exist in space. We cannot say that he is here, there, somewhere, but that he is everywhere, which is only saying again, in other words, that he is NOwhere. He exists not in, but out of time. We cannot say God was, God will be, but simply that he is, as the Hebrew name of God, I AM, plainly implies. To him there is no time. He has no past, no future. He inhabiteth eternity, dwells not in time, but in NO-time, as Watts implies, when he says, with God “all is one eternal NOW.”6 All our ideas of truth, justice, love, beauty, goodness, are transcendental. Truth is truth, independent of time and place. The just is the just at one epoch, in one country, as much as in another. The beautiful never varies; its laws, we all say, are eternal. Goodness is ever the same. The great principles of the Christian religion inhabit 5

[Ed. See Shakespeare, Midsummer Night’s Dream, Act 5, Scene 1, Lines 16-

17.] 6

[Ed. Psalm 102, part 3, verse 2 in Isaac Watts’ (1674-1748) Psalms of David. Brownson is probably quoting from memory. Watts’ verse reads: “Thy years are one eternal day.” See The Psalms and Hymns of Isaac Watts (Morgan, Pennsylvania: Soli Deo Gloria Publications, 1997), 179.]

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eternity. Hence Jesus says, “before Abraham was I am” [John 8:58], and hence he is called “the Lamb slain from the foundations of the world” [Rev 13:8], meaning thereby, that the principles of truth and duty he represented, and by which alone man can come into harmony with his Maker, were no principles of modern creation, but principles existing in the very principle of things—principles that have no dependence on time and space, but were in the beginning with God, and were God. These remarks will help us to understand what is meant by transcendentalism. Transcendentalism, in its good sense, as used in our community, means the recognition of an order of existences, which transcend time and space, and are in no sense dependent on them, or affected by them. Transcendental means very nearly what our old writers, in Shakespeare’s time, meant by the word metaphysical, from geta, beyond, and fus, koj¹ºoÂ, physical, natural, belonging to the outward, visible, material world. Transcendentalists recognize a world lying beyond or above the world of the senses, and in man the power of seeing or knowing this transcendental world immediately, by direct cognition, or intuition. All persons, who believe in God, in the reality of a spiritual world, and contend that their belief has any legitimate basis, are transcendentalists. Whoever is not a transcendentalist, must, if consequent, needs be a skeptic, or a materialist and an atheist. The early Christian fathers were transcendentalists, so were the distinguished English writers of the seventeenth century; so were Descartes, Malebranche, George Fox, William Penn, and our own Edwards; so were Price, and to a feeble extent, the Scottish School; so are nearly all the Germans, and the French Eclectics.7 Locke and his followers were not, nor were Condillac and the old French school. In fact, all real faith implies the Transcendental, and religion is an idle dream unless we admit the reality of an order of existences, a spiritual world transcending this outward, material, sensible world; and also unless we admit in man the means of attaining legitimately to faith in that reality. Mr. Emerson, by taking his stand in this transcendental region, evidently asserts its existence, and our power to take cognizance of it. 7 [Ed. Richard Price (1723-91) was a British nonconformist minister, and a moral and political philosopher who was read by many American Unitarians. Brownson considered these men as representatives of a new spiritual emphasis in philosophy. The Scottish Common Sense philosophers, like Thomas Reid, were transition figures in the new philosophy which was most clearly manifested in the thought of the German idealists and French eclectics.]

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So far his philosophy is eminently religious, and as we have demonstrated over and over again in the pages of this journal, as well as elsewhere, is sound, and worthy of all acceptation. In this consists his chief philosophical merit. In this too consists his departure from Locke and the Unitarian school proper, and his approach to orthodoxy. Thus far we go with him heart and hand, and recognize him as a fellow-laborer in that school of which we profess to be a disciple, though it may be an unworthy one. But the transcendental, or, if you please, metaphysical, or spiritual world, exists not for the senses, nor can it be inferred from data furnished by the senses. It exists only for the reason. It is ideal, as opposed to sensible, spiritual as opposed to material, but real and substantial. Its existence is indeed involved in all the perceptions of the senses, and asserted in every thought and affirmation; but we rise to the cognition of it only by means of reason, taken, as we have said, not as the principle of logic, but as the principle of intelligence. Now, by taking our stand on the reason as the principle of intelligence, which is partly analogous to what Mr. Emerson calls the “Over-Soul,”8 and attending exclusively to what it reveals, we are in danger of losing sight of the world of the senses, and therefore of suffering one aspect of the universe to escape us. The moment we rise into the world of reason, we find it altogether richer, sublimer, more beautiful, than this outward visible world. This outward visible world gradually loses its charms for us, disappears from the horizon of our vision, and is therefore very naturally denied to have any existence. We thus fall into Idealism. Again; the world of the senses is manifold and diverse, while the world of the reason is one and identical. In the transcendental world we rise to the principles of things. The principle of a thing is after all, in a certain sense, the thing itself. All principles proceed from and center in one common principle, the principle of all things—God. The diversity noted by the senses is then no real diversity, but merely phenomenal and illusory, and deserving no account from him who has risen to the perception of absolute unity, into which all is resolved at last. Diversity is therefore rejected, denied. The distinction between cause and effect ceases then to be intelligible; all difference between God and the universe to be perceptible. The universe is identical with God. God and the universe are one and the same; this is pantheism. Whoever then takes his stand exclusively in the Transcendental must fall into ideal pantheism. From the transcendental point of view 8

[Ed. For “The Over-Soul,” see Collected Works, 2:157-76.]

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alone, a correct report of the universe cannot be made out, any more than from the point of view of the senses alone. Now Mr. Emerson seems to us to verify in his own case the truth of this deduction. He falls in his philosophy, so far as philosophy he has, into ideal pantheism. He is so charmed with the world of ideas that he condemns the sensible, so struck with the unity and identity revealed by the reason that he is led to overlook and occasionally to deny the manifold and the diverse, revealed by the senses. We cannot read a page of these Essays without perceiving that the tendency of his mind is to seek unity and identity. He brings together in the same sentence perpetually persons and things, events and transactions, apparently the most diverse, by a law of association which most readers are unable to discover, and the point of resemblance between which very few are able to perceive. Yet is he in general just. The resemblance, the identity he asserts is there. His power of detecting the identical in the diverse, the analogous in the dissimilar, the uniform in the manifold, the permanent in the transitory, is remarkable, and unsurpassed in any writer of our acquaintance. He is ever surprising us by unexpected resemblances. To him all things are the same. In all this he is right. He uttered a great truth when he declared the identity of the power by which Lazarus was raised from the dead, and that by which falls the rain or blows the clover;9 also when he so shocked some of our pious people by declaring the identity of gravitation and purity of heart. This identity does run through all nature, and he has no true insight into the universe who cannot detect it. But diversity, dissimilarity, multiplicity, are no less obvious and real in the universe than unity and identity. They have their origin too in the same source. God, the cause and principle of the universe, is not a mere unity, but a unity that has in itself the principle of multiplicity—not pure identity, but at once identity and diversity— a fact shadowed forth in the doctrine of a Triune God, which runs through all religious philosophies ever promulgated. Whoever overlooks this fact must fall into pantheism. Mr. Emerson has a tendency to overlook it; and his disciples, for disciples always exaggerate the tendencies of their masters, will most assuredly overlook it. Some of them even now avow themselves pantheists, and most of the young men and maidens who listened with so much delight to these Essays 9 [Ed. Reference is to Emerson’s An Address, Delivered before the Senior Class, in Divinity College, Cambridge, Sunday evening, 15 July, 1838 (Boston: J. Munroe and Co., 1838). See reprint in Perry Miller, ed., The Transcendentalists: An Anthology (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1950), 192, and Collected Works, 1:81.]

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when they were delivered as lectures, virtually run into pantheism, whether they know it or not. The outward visible world is not the only world into which we are admitted, but it is a real world; that is, it really exists, and is no more an illusion than the world of reason; and the idealist is as exclusive and as erroneous as the materialist. The one denies the transcendental, the other the sensible. Both are wrong in what they deny, both are right in what they assert;10 and this fact, it strikes us, does not lie at the basis of Mr. Emerson’s philosophy. Hence the wrong tendency of his speculations. We are not prone to be frightened or shocked at mere words. Thank heaven, we have strong nerves, and can bear much; but we regard pantheism as an error of no less magnitude than atheism itself, and consequently must earnestly protest against every tendency to it. God and the universe are in the most intimate relation, but that relation is one of cause and effect, not of identity; and while we admit that there is this identity running through all nature, to which Mr. Emerson points us, we also contend that there is a corresponding diversity to which he does not point us. We complain not of him for not doing this, but we note the fact in order to warn our readers against taking his utterances as complete expositions of the universe. He brings up one pole of truth, the one which has been too much depressed; but in bringing up that he is not sufficiently heedful not to depress equally the other. We have revolted against exclusive materialism; let us be careful not to fall now into exclusive spiritualism; we have protested against atheism and irreligion, or the forms of religion which were in fact no religion, and we should look to it that we do not now swallow up all diversity in unity, and man and the universe in God. The latter error would turn out to be as fatal to piety and morals as the former. But after all, we have no serious apprehensions on this score. Ideal pantheism, though a fatal error, is not one into which our countrymen are likely to fall, at least to any great extent. Only a few of the cultivated, the refined, the speculative, the idle, and contemplative, are exposed to it. Men in active business, taking their part in the rough and tumble of life, coming in daily contact with one another in the market, the hustings, the legislative halls, scrambling for power or place, wealth or distinction, have little leisure, less inclination, and still less aptitude for that order of thought which ends in the denial of matter, and of the universe as distinguished from its Cre10

[Ed. A clear statement here of Victor Cousin’s Eclecticism.]

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ator. The cast of their minds is too practical, and they are of too sturdy, too robust a make to find anything satisfactory in so refined a spiritualism. Their daily habits and pursuits demand a solid earth on which to work, a providence to protect them, a sovereign to rule over them, a real God to curb their headstrong violence, and to reduce them to order and peace, to chastise them for their errors, and to solace them in their afflictions. The practical tendencies of our countrymen will save them from all danger they would be likely to incur from speculative refinements like those we have pointed out; and we are not sure but Mr. Emerson’s strong statements are needed to rectify their over-attachment to the material order. As it concerns the ethical doctrines implied rather than set forth in these Essays, we have nothing to add to the remarks we have heretofore made on the same subject.11 Mr. Emerson’s moral philosophy, reduced to its systematic element, belongs to the egoistical school; but we presume, after all, that he means little more by those expressions which imply it, and which have given so much offense, than that just self-reliance, that fidelity to one’s own nature and conscience, without which it is impossible to reach or maintain a true manly worth. In this view of the case, his essay on Self-Reliance is a noble and unexceptionable performance, and inculcates a lesson, which it were well for us all to learn and practice—a lesson which is perhaps more appropriate to the American people than to any other Christian nation, for no other Christian nation is so timid in its speculations, so afraid of solving for itself, independently, the problem of the destiny of man and society.12 We regard it as decidedly one of the best essays in the collection. We did intend to quote largely from the book itself in order to justify our criticisms, but it is not a book from which quotations can be made with much satisfaction. We could not select a paragraph that would not at once confirm and refute our general criticisms. We content ourselves, therefore, with speaking merely of its dominant tendency, as it appears to us. The book cannot be judged of without being read, and the best way to read it, will be to forget its metaphysics, and to take it up as we would a collection of poems, or of proverbs. Of the Essays we cannot speak particularly. The one on Heroism is inferior to what we expected from its author, and falls far below the general average of the book. Those on Love and Friendship are beau11 [Ed. “Mr. Emerson’s Address,” Boston Quarterly Review 1 (October, 1838): 500-14. See also EW, 4, chapter 6.] 12 [Ed. For “Self-Reliance,” see Collected Works, 2:25-52.]

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tiful and often true, but their truth and beauty proceed from the intellect and imagination rather than the heart and soul. They read not like the confessions of a lover or a friend. There are depths in the affections, into which the author does not descend, deeper experiences than any he discloses. The Essays we have liked the best are those on the Over-Soul, Self-Reliance, and History.13 These Essays are, to a certain extent, democratic; they condemn all ordinary aristocracies, and breathe much respect for labor and the laborer; but it is evident, at a single glance, that the author is at best only an amateur workingman, one who has never himself wielded spade or mattock to any great extent, and who has viewed labor with the eye of a poet, rather than with the feelings of an actual laborer. His book, though apparently radical, contains nothing more likely to give offence to the capitalist than to the proletary. One of the most serious objections we have to urge against these Essays is the little importance they assign to the state, and the low rank they allow to patriotism as a virtue. This is an error of our transcendental school generally, and results, we suppose, chiefly from the fact that its principal masters are or have been churchmen, and, therefore, not over and above acquainted with practical life. Their studies lead them to rely on preaching, persuasion, advice, appeals to the reason and conscience. Their habits and position remove them from the actual world, and its necessities, and keep them ignorant of no small part of the actual developments of human nature. Clergymen are usually able to give wholesome advice, at least, advice which will generally be regarded as canonical; but they are rarely gifted with much practical skill or sagacity. A deliberative assembly, composed entirely of clergymen, is usually a very disorderly body, and ill adapted to the speedy despatch of business. The members are all so enlightened, so wise, so good, so meek, and so conscientious that ordinary parliamentary rules are rarely thought to be necessary; and the result is not seldom confusion, angry, disorderly debate, and no little ill feeling and ill speaking. This anti-political tendency of our transcendentalists is, therefore, easily accounted for. Nevertheless, it is a false tendency. Man, as we have endeavored to prove in a foregoing article,14 is to be perfected in society, and society is to be perfected by government. More than even politicians themselves usually imagine depends on the right organization of the commonwealth. The sci13

[Ed. See ibid., for essays on “History,” 1-24; “Love,” 97-110; “Friendship,” 111-28; “Heroism,” 143-156.] 14 [Ed. “Social Evils and Their Remedy,” Boston Quarterly Review 4 (July, 1841): 261-91. See also, chapter 12 of this volume.]

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ence of politics, when rightly viewed, is a grand and an essential science, and needs always to be held in honor. Much is lost by not making it a subject of more serious study. Everybody talks about politics, and yet there is scarcely a man among us acquainted with the simplest principles of politics, regarded as a science. The proper organization of the state, the true exposition of the Constitution, and the proper administration, so as to secure the true end of government, are matters with which we, as a people, rarely trouble ourselves; and scarcely a man can be found, who can speak on them five minutes in succession, without betraying gross ignorance, both theoretical and practical. In this state of political science, our scholars are doing us great disservice by sneering at politics and the state. As mere literary productions, these Essays must take rank with the best in the language. There is now and then an affectation of quaintness, a puerile conceit, not precisely to our taste, but it detracts not much from their general beauty. In compactness of style, in the felicitous choice of words; in variety, aptness, and wealth of illustration, they are unrivaled. They have a freshness, a vigor, a freedom from old hackneyed forms of speech, and from the conventionalisms of the schools, worthy of the highest praise, and which cannot fail to exert a salutary influence on our growing literature. They often remind us of Montaigne,15 especially in the little personal allusions, which the author introduces with inimitable grace, delicacy, and effect. In conclusion, we will simply add that notwithstanding the metaphysical errors to which we have referred, the Essays make up a volume unique in its character, and which all competent judges will agree in regarding as among the most creditable productions of the American press. It must secure to the author a distinguished rank among the more distinguished writers of the age. We feel ourselves deeply indebted for his present. We receive his utterances with thankfulness and reverence, and shall wait impatiently till he permits us to hear from him again. It is not often that in our profession as a critic, we meet with a work of fewer faults, nor one that can better bear to have its faults pointed out; for it is rare that we meet with one with its positive excellencies. It is no ephemeral production; it will survive the day; for it is full of sincerity, truth, beauty. Whoso pores over its pages will find his soul quickened, his vision enlarged, his heart warmed, and his life made better. 15

[Ed. Michel de Montaigne (1533-92) was a French essayist who presented a Neo-Stoic moral theory that was scarcely influenced by his Christian and Catholic tradition.]

14. TRUTH IS NOT A LIE1 Boston Quarterly Review 4 (July, 1841): 339-53

This is an old book, but none the worse for that. All that is old is in some sort venerable; and he who can look upon anything over which has flowed the current of human affections, or rolled the tide of ages without feeling his heart stir within him is no true man. Hope in the future, efforts to work out a greater good for oneself, one’s country, or one’s race, do not require us to make war upon the past; nay, reform itself is often only a return to principles of which in our hurry and confusion we had lost sight, and to the simplicity and open-heartedness from which we did unwisely to depart. There is always hope of a man who has not lost all his reverence for what has been. He retains still somewhat of the child, and may grow in wisdom, in favor with God and with man. There is hope too of the age that goes back and explores the bygone, studies to get at its secret, and labors to reproduce it in history and in song. It shows that it has some filial piety, some loyalty, and is willing to do its own work, without calumniating those who have placed it in the world. In this matter of books, especially English books, the old is altogether better than the new. England has done little, one may say nothing, for the world of ideas since her “Glorious Revolution.” Her contributions were made in a prior period, in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. She struck out her theories then, and has since been principally engaged in the struggle to reduce them to practice. Her literature, since the accession of William and Mary, that is, since the inauguration of Whiggism, has been poor stuff, or rather has had no stuff at all. It is light, flimsy, indicating on the part of the nation no deep spiritual experiences, no sturdy grapplings with the great problems of the universe; a thin, mechanical, steam-engine sort of life; with faith only in man’s digestive organs, and hardly so much as that. 1 [Ed. Brownson’s review of William Wollaston’s The Religion of Nature Delineated (London, 1731). Wollaston (1659-1724) was a British rationalist philosopher and moralist.] 544

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This old book belongs properly to the age which preceded the Revolution of 1688, the latter part indeed of that age, but nevertheless to a period when there was still some faith in the people, some fondness for, and some power of looking into serious subjects. It is worth a number of Hartleys, Priestleys, Benthams.2 Its author was William Wollaston, whom we must not, as many do, confound with Thomas Woolston, an alleged deistical author, who wrote against the miracles and some other things.3 This Thomas Woolston, however, was not half so much of an infidel as he has been represented; he was a believer in many things, a serious sort of a man, with some insight, who had too much honesty to call that sacred which was not sacred to him, and which he could not, in any light he could view it, make even appear sacred. In his way, he tried to get some solid ground on which he could stand, and not feel every moment that it would slide from under him. Nevertheless he is classed, and rightly classed, with Morgan, Tindal, Toland, Chubbs, Mandeville, Collins, deistical writers, who flourished in England at the commencement of the eighteenth century, a superficial, narrow-minded set of writers, yet not without some respectable instincts;4 men who deserved a better fate than literary history awards them; and who have exerted a far wider and more lasting influence than we commonly imagine. England was always too full of cant, especially cant religious, to profit much by them; but they passed over into Germany, and have given rise to the Kantian philosophy and its consequences, not yet ended. 2 [Ed. David Hartley (1705-57) was an English philosopher, physician and psychologist who developed an empirical theory of the association of sensations with ideas. Joseph Priestley (1733-1804) was a scientist and Presbyterian minister who became a leader of the Unitarian movement in England and the United States. Jeremy Bentham (1748-1832) was an English philosopher and legal theorist who stimulated the rise of utilitarianism. All three men placed heavy emphasis upon the empirical.] 3 [Ed. Thomas Woolston (1670-1733), a deist, was the author of A Moderator Between an Infidel and an Apostate (1725), in which he maintained that the Virgin Birth and the Resurrection were allegories.] 4 [Ed. Thomas Morgan (d. 1743), a Welsh deist, was part of the early eighteenth century British deist controversies. Matthew Tindal (1655-1733) was famous for his deist tract Christianity as Old as Creation (1709). John Toland (16701722) published his Christianity not Mysterious (1696) to forward the deist arguments. Thomas Chubb (1679-1747) argued that reason ought to be the sufficient guide in matters of religion because religion was founded on nature. Bernard Mandeville (1670-1733) was a British physician and the author of The Fable of the Bees (1723), which maintained that all virtue was a form of selfishness. Anthony Collins (1676-1729) was a bitter critic of ministers of all denominations in his A Discourse of Freethinking (1713). Periodically Brownson referred to the deist arguments against Christianity and all revealed religion.]

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But William Wollaston did not belong to this class of writers. He was a sober, serious, religious man, never, we believe, at loggerheads with the church, though no bigot, a quiet sort of man, amiable, modest, retiring; who went through the world injuring no man, making war upon nobody, trying to save his own soul by cultivating a peaceable and devout temper, and by purifying his heart and enlightening his mind. God, man, and nature were great and solemn facts to him; realities that were something, and had a meaning, if one could but come at it. He looked at them bravely, without hurry or passion, did his best to find out what they meant; and the result we have in this old book, which many have read, some have admired, and which will be found in our antiquarian bookstores for some generations to come, at least we hope so. William Wollaston, we have said, was a religious man. He was one of those old English writers who studied Plato. He, then, we may know, had a tendency to a spiritual philosophy, or as we say in these times, to Transcendentalism. The world was not a mere appearance to him. Something lay at the bottom of it; and therefore it was no bottomless pit, not the devil’s world, but God’s. He believed that if you would penetrate deep enough, you would find it resting on something solid, permanent, everlasting; nay more, that it was no chanceworld, thrown together any how or no how, but a God-created world, made according to some plan, design; which plan or design was eternal and immutable truth as it lay in the divine mind. Therefore in its transcendental sense the world was a truth and no lie. Therefore is it man’s duty to conduct himself towards it and all pertaining to it, as if he felt it a truth and no lie, a reality and no fiction. Therefore, again, his ethical rule, act always according to truth, the truth of things. In all things there is a truth, find it out, and conform to it; treat everything as it is, and for precisely what it is. In thyself too there is a truth, discover it, and obey it. That is, be thyself, and not another, or a something else; be a reality, and not a fiction. Say in whatever you are, do, or say, that truth is truth and no lie; falsehood is falsehood and no truth, and I will none of it. Moral philosophers have criticized this rule, and attempted to show that it is inexact, incomplete, or not sufficiently definite. They may be right; and yet we fancy they would be puzzled to lay down a better. “Act according to the fitness of things,” says one. With all my heart. But wherein differs “fitness of things” from “truth of things?” Is not that which is true always “fit?” Is that which is false ever “fit?” “Follow nature,” says another. The false appearances, the shows, shadows, or the truth of nature; nature as a reality, as firm, immutable

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truth, or as a splendid lie? “Seek perfection,” cries out still another. All very good. But wherein lies perfection? In being false to the truth of things, to the truth of thy own nature, or in being true to it? “Seek order; universal order, as the highest, the only good,” hear we again. All well. But order, what is it, but conforming to the real truth of things; adjusting all particular truths to the universal truth? “Obey the will of God, and send philosophy about its business,” enjoins the priest. Good still. But the will of God, is it a truth or a lie? What is the truth of nature, the truth of man, but the will of God? Is there any truth at war with God’s will, any falsehood in harmony with it? After all, we see not but Wollaston’s rule, like Aaron’s rod, swallows up all the others, and upon the whole is as good a formula, if formula we must have, as we can invent or discover. It has the advantage of not being an empty formula. It has substance in it, and would, if obeyed, never lead to a false result. Be true, not false, a reality, not a fiction; be what you seem; treat God, nature, man, as they are; live a true life, not a false; according to the reality of things, not according to the shows of things. Get always at the heart of the matter. If this be the devil’s world and not God’s, then treat it as the devil’s; if it be God’s world, and not the devil’s, then treat it so, treat it and all that pertains to it as God’s. But be this rule metaphysically exact or not, we cannot help believing that it would go much better with man, with all men, individuals and society, if they would adopt it, at least follow it whether they consciously adopted it or not. The world is dreadfully given to lying. One would almost think that men had come to a general understanding to give up truth altogether, and to use in its stead some painted semblance of it. As paper representations of gold are thought by some to be far preferable to gold itself, so is it thought that the pretensions to truth are far preferable to the reality. Look at individuals: the last thing you shall get from them shall be the truth; and for the very good reason, truth is the last thing they get for themselves. Into the heart of whatever is to them a matter of concernment they rarely look; they see not the thing as it is, and for it they give you some semblance, at best only an outward hull, husk, or covering, when the kernel was what you wanted. Ever do they even for themselves eat husks with the swine. Go to them with the truth, they shall stare at you, as if you were a madman; and they will know not your truth either by sight or by taste. They have been living all along in a vain show, have lied so much, repeated their falsehoods so often, that they have even come in some sort to believe them, and to reverence the bottomless as if it had a bottom.

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All this we may see exemplified in a thousand ways. Perhaps just now there is nothing in which men are falser than in their religion. Their faith is a no-faith; their worship a make-believe. Not that worship itself is to be condemned, not that the doctrines professed and contended for are not true. The falsity is not in the doctrines, but in men’s pretending to believe them, and even persuading themselves that they do believe them, when they do not. The evil lies not in the fact that there are places of worship, that men, women, and children congregate there, that the minister prays and preaches; but in the fact that all this is mere empty form, that men do not worship, that they have no heart in the matter, and are all the while only making believe. Far be it from us to say that no true worshipers of God can be found in our churches. In the worst of times God reserves to himself seven thousand, who bow not the knee to Baal.5 But men have now lost, at least with us, their faith in religion, their faith in churchgoing. They do not regard the doctrines the church proclaims as great and solemn realities, as awful facts, which a man should not listen to without having his whole soul stirred. They do not feel that what they call divine service is an offering up of the heart, the solemn, awful sacrifice of oneself to the everliving God. In it there is no devoting of oneself to the service of God, truth, duty, humanity, justice, mercy, liberty. It is a cold, heartless service, a mere mockery, which men hurry through, because they fancy it decorous to do so, because perhaps it is proper to do so by way of keeping the peace, because—God save the mark!—it is setting a useful example to the poor, the less cultivated, the less enlightened! Now all this is false, false as the bottomless pit. We assuredly mean neither to speak against religious worship in general, nor any form of worship in particular. True religious worship is the noblest act of the soul. When the soul truly worships it is in its sublimest state; it calls up and pours forth all that is noble, generous, loyal in its nature. The soul that never worships is a dead soul, not a living; and deserves not to be named a soul. It has abandoned its birthright, abdicated its divinity, foresworn its sweetness, and is a mere dry, withered, hard, dead, and deadening thing, as incapable of a worthy act, a generous emotion, a spiritual function, as a stock or a stone. Nor matters it so much what the form of worship is. All forms are good, so long as the worshipers themselves can find substance in them. It is not easy for a devout soul to express all that it feels towards the everliving God. The emotions, which rise in a true soul when com5

[Ed. A reference to 1 Kgs 19:18.]

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muning with the invisible, are unutterable. All speech fails us and our most expressive language is in general silence. The various forms of worship are the various manners, modes, through which the soul struggles to utter what it feels, and which it never but imperfectly utters. All true feeling lies too deep for utterance. When two meet who really love, they are silent, and leave their hearts to flow into each other in their own mysterious way. Words seem almost a profanation. Nevertheless, there are times when utterance becomes a necessity. The mode and manner of it, is a matter of little moment, if it be sincere, if, as far as it goes, it express what is really passing in the depths of the heart. We therefore find fault with no man’s form of worship; that is always best to any given man, which best expresses what is best and purest, truest, loyalest in his nature. The evil is in adopting a form, observing a form, which has no longer any significance to him who observes it; which has no longer any capacity of expressing what he feels. Then he is false, sincerity has died out of his heart, his worship is a mockery, and if he believes it essential that God will approve him for it, he believes God is a lie, and an approver of lies. All such observance of the forms of worship is solemn blasphemy. In this sense they are right who tell us that the prayers of the wicked are an abomination to the Lord.6 Here is the falsehood in which our community walk in regard to religion, a dry, hard, unspiritual community, wanting faith even in the devil; yet putting on with great solemnity the forms of faith and piety; making grimaces and genuflections; garnishing the tombs of the prophets; speaking with a sanctimonious twang; dealing forth their condemnation in no measured terms upon the luckless wight, who, believing no more than they, has the bluntness to say so. Here they are, talking of the great utility of the Bible; of the blessed institutions of religion; the blessings of a preached gospel; the shocking wickedness of infidelity; the awful condition of those who are living without God and Christ in the world. Out upon this miserable cant. Look into their souls, and you shall not find faith enough to save even the soul of a mosquito from damnation. Their very truths become falsehoods; and of all infidels they are the worst. Miserable canters, worshipers of mere forms, who think by fair words, and pious tones, to pave the way over hell to heaven, remember God is truth, not a lie; that no lie can pass current with him; no makebelieve supply the place of reality. Be what you seem; either worship in deep, solemn earnest, which is best; or give up your pretensions, 6

[Ed. A reference to Prov 15:18; 21:27; 28:9.]

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stand out, and say in just so many words, without any circumlocution or reticence, what you now say by your actions, that this is not God’s world, but Satan’s. Religion is the practical view which a man takes of his relations to the invisible. It concerns the state of his soul, his inner man, out of which streams all that he is, whether good or bad. It is too serious, too solemn, too awful a matter to make a jest of. Whoso meddles with it at all, should do it in deep earnest, in sadness of spirit; engage in it as in a struggle of life and death. It is, when once it really comes up, the one all-absorbing question, and there is no rest for us till we get at the bottom of it; till we come out victorious. When, in the soul of any man, the awful question arises, how stand I to the invisible? there is a downright earnestness, and intenseness of feeling, which, as fire the flax, consumes the hay, wood, and stubble of your vain presences, hollow forms, and cant, and hypocrisy. Nothing then will answer but the truth, the real truth, God’s truth. There can be then no pretending to believe. The world is giving away, all things are vanishing, he himself is sinking, and he cannot think of upholding this or that doctrine for the good of the community; he cannot talk of upholding truth at all; he feels, all over and within, tremblingly feels, that truth must uphold him, or he falls, falls where there is no bottom. Then he does not fear that truth will fall through unless he sustain it, but that he shall fall through unless truth shall sustain him. This earnest soul may attend church, may bring an offering and lay it upon an outward altar; but he does it not because it is decorous to do so, because he feels it necessary to countenance religion, support it, for the sake of order and good example; but because there is a necessity laid upon him, because he needs must go there on his own account, and would go there, though nobody went there; because he must needs worship there to relieve his own heart, and bring peace, serenity, and joy into his own soul. He goes there because he meets God there. It is with him a serious, solemn, truthful act. But to go there as the world does is mockery. A man who can go into one of our fashionable or unfashionable churches, compose himself quietly to sleep while the minister discourses on the awful realities of the unseen world, and then come home feeling that he has been performing an act of worship, that he has a right to regard himself and to be regarded as upon the whole a religious man, a Christian, one of God’s worshipers, is one of the most impudent liars we can conceive of. He is false from beginning to end, from top to bottom, inside and out, given over, as one may say, to believe a lie, be a lie, live a lie, that

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he may be damned. Stay at home, go into the fields, ride out for your pleasure, work in your shop, your counting room, or on your farm; anything by which you can act out any particle of truth there may be in you, is better, and less offensive to your Maker. No man does or can overrate the importance of a preached gospel. But this wheezy drone, this sanctimonious drawl, these rhetorical mouthings, which greet us from most pulpits, are the farthest remove possible from the gospel. No doubt the words the minister utters are good words enough in themselves, and the doctrines are true enough; but the fact is, nothing is said, nothing is preached. The minister means nothing, the people catch no meaning. Had he comprehended his own words, had they meant anything for him, his own soul would have been stirred, and he would have stirred the souls of others. But it was all a form with both him and them, and which both were glad to get through with. This is what we complain of. This is the falsehood; calling that the gospel which is no gospel to those who extol it; calling that excellent for which they, who call it excellent, have no respect in their hearts. He who preaches the gospel truly is in sober earnest. Out of the depths of his own sad experience, he speaks words of lightning, which rive and shatter the hearts of whomsoever hear him. His tongue is touched with a live coal from God’s altar, and he speaks always with power, as one having authority. Whoso can so speak, let him speak. There will be a whole evangile in every word he utters. You will have no occasion to speak of the blessedness of his preaching. You will rarely think of his excellence. You will not praise him; you will curse him rather. But some how or other he will lodge a word or two in your heart, where they stick fast, and where stick they will, fight and wrangle as ye may; and you will soon find that you have business enough of your own to attend to, without concerning yourself with him. Never a true word fell to the ground. It lodged somewhere, and the world has not seen the last of it. No doubt it is a blessed thing to have the gospel preached, to have Sabbaths, churches, public fastings and prayers, and all that, and much more; but there is that which is more blessed still, TO PREACH THE GOSPEL, AND LIVE IT. Give us the thing itself, not your praises of it. These praises are rather dull when the thing itself is kept out of sight, and go far towards making one doubt whether the thing be at all. Show us the beauty and worth you talk of, and spare yourselves your panegyrics. If it be true beauty and worth, as no doubt it is, give yourselves no uneasiness; our love and reverence for it may be as great as yours, whether we adopt your mode of utter-

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ing them or not. Good people, you are quite too noisy about religion; a little more devout reverence, true religious feeling, and you would find silence your most expressive praise of the invisible and unnameable. This same general falsehood men carry into their doctrines. We have said their doctrines are in general true. So they are. But the doctrine is not the truth itself, but the form with which the understanding has clothed the truth. All doctrines are then in fact symbolic, mere symbols of the truth. All the great doctrines of the church, no doubt, cover a great and sacred truth, essential to man’s spiritual well-being; but it is that truth, not its doctrinal form that is essential, that is needed. The true believer is not he who holds fast to the form and bids you swear by that; but he who has taken the truth itself up into his heart and life. To get at this truth is what we call getting at the heart of the matter; and it is only by getting at the heart of the matter that we can become true believers. Yet our religious people overlook this; or if not, throw every possible obstacle in the way of your doing it, and fancy that God will love them and save them for holding on to the mere form, husk, hull, or covering. In this sense the doctrine is no truth, but a lie, and they hope to go to heaven for believing a lie. That is, they believe, practically, that the world is a lie, that God is a lie, and that salvation comes by lying. These doctrines are emblems of truth; all nature is an emblem of truth; truth springs up in each blade of grass, unfolds in each flower, shines out in each star, peals in the thunder, flashes in the lightning, descends in the rain, falls in the dew, whispers in the breeze; but what then? You receive not the truth, unless you perceive that all nature is emblematical of it. The falsehood lies in the fact that you take the emblem as an emblem, and yet as emblematical of nothing. You see the shadow, take it as a shadow, and yet admit no substance of which it is a shadow. These doctrines of which we speak, people see clear enough, are mere husks, hulls, coverings, but covering nothing. The doctrines themselves stand in the minds of the great mass of the people for no great facts in their own experience, in the life of humanity, or in that of the universe. They are seen and felt to be mere dead idols; and yet are they insisted on with tenacity, contended for with vehemence, as if they covered, for those who contend for them, great, universal, and permanent facts. This is the falsehood. These doctrines once covered great and essential truths. These truths remain, and are as essential now as ever. They shine out to some as clearly through the doctrinal forms the church has adopted as ever they did; but to the majority they are no longer symbolized by those forms. Those forms have become to them opaque, silent, uttering

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nothing. To contend for them is not then to contend for the truth, and the great mass feel that there is no truth in them, find no truth in them, and yet contend that God will damn us, that we are “damnable heretics,” if we do not swear they are God’s truth. Said we not truly that the people practically believe God is a lie, and that salvation comes by lying? No doubt a man is sanctified only through the truth, saved only through believing in the truth; but before you call a man an infidel, be sure that you know what he believes. Perhaps, without your forms, he has after all got at the heart of the matter, and believes with all his mind and soul in the very truth once shadowed forth by your doctrines, and which would be shadowed forth by them to you now, were they to you anything but dead forms, mere hulls that have no longer any kernel. He may, after all, be the believer, and you the infidel; than which stranger things have happened. If he have the kernel, he is better off than you with the empty hull. Get at the kernel; no doctrine is a truth to you, or the emblem of a truth that does not cover for you some fact of your own experience, some real law of nature, or of providence, manifested in either the outward world or the inward; and to contend to the contrary is to contend for falsehood. Into society and the political world we might go and find still further illustration of the general falsity that prevails. But in these the fact is very generally admitted. That the majority of the social institutions of all countries are based upon falsehood, founded on a lie, as well as the greater part of people’s social and political conduct, will at this late day hardly be questioned. The devil is a lie, and the father of lies,7 and he, we have scriptural authority for calling “prince of this world.”8 Moreover, we have heretofore spoken very freely of social and political falsehoods, and therefore need not to do it again. The echo of what we said last July, when treating of the laboring classes, has not yet died away. In passing to our conclusion, we would signalize one trait of honesty in the present dominant political party. They claim more loudly than any other party among us, the name of democrats; but to their praise be it said, they have had the honesty to tell us that they claim the name, not for what it signifies, not because they are the true friends of political and social equality, but because they wanted to get into power, and to get into power under any other name, in this country, was out of the question.

7

[Ed. Reference is to John 8:44.] [Ed. Here, Brownson may be thinking of John 12:31, 14:30, or 16:11.]

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But it is time to end our homily. Yet we cannot do it without taking a little notice of our literary friends, the men who speak to the public, whether through books or other mediums. They come under the general censure. They are not true men. They do not tell their honest thought, speak out boldly, without circumlocution or reticence, what they honestly believe. They do not believe in truth; they dare not rely on truth. Some of them are afraid that truth will make a disturbance, turn society topsy turvy, upset everything, and dethrone God himself. Others dare not rely on truth for themselves; if they tell it, they shall lose caste, incur reproach; perhaps be exposed to suffering and want. Truth is unable to sustain them, and so they must appeal to falsehood! God is not able or willing to take care of those who are true to him, so we must call in the devil to help us! Pitiable! Suppose it to be so; which is better, to be false, a base, cringing, sycophant, afraid to say your soul is your own, and have bread and butter, and say a gig to boot; or to speak out your own honest thought as a true man, and starve? Better, a thousand times better, to starve, being a man, than to live and flutter, having belied your manhood. To starve, well suppose you do starve, what then? Is there an end of you? Has truth deserted you? Know that whosoever has had virtue enough in him to compel a lying world to deny him a place whereon to lay his head, and to compel him to starve, has had enough to render him immortal. He lived truth, a true life, and no true life can ever die. The words he uttered were words of God, which sound out through all space, and fetch their echoes from eternity. Some eminent writers compromise the matter. They tell the truth, at least so that they and those who knew it before hand, can detect it in their words; but so that the uninitiated cannot; they for whose sole benefit they were called upon to tell it at all. This is an attempt to get round both God and the devil. From God they demand wages for doing his work, telling the truth, that is, eternal life; and of the devil they demand the good things of this life, for doing his work, that is, not telling the truth. They should be scorned by both God and the devil. But enough. There is but one course in any sphere of life, becoming a man, that is to be true to himself, to act out the truth of his own nature; in such way as he can, to bear witness to the fact that he believes in truth, is not afraid to rest himself on it, come it to his mind and his heart in what form it may. God has no enemy but falsehood. The devil is no reality, he is from the bottomless pit itself, and he is the antagonist power to God. If we believe that falsehood can prevail over truth, the devil over God, hell over heaven, and that that which is bottomless, resting on nothing, is firmer grounded than

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that which rests upon absolute reality, then we may continue our general system of falsehood, we may be false in our words, our deeds, our lives, for then the world were the devil’s, and our duty were to serve him. But if we believe the world is a reality and no fiction, that God is, and not a phantom, that there is something in the universe at all on which there may be reliance, then we should say avant to the devil, cast all lies and lying behind our backs, declare that no falsehood can be a truth, and go forth with such hearts, minds, instincts, hopes, aspirations as we have, and in such speech as is given us, be it articulate or inarticulate, doing, or being, or silence, utter the truth, whatever of truth, though it be the veriest infinitesimal of truth, there may be in us. No matter what reception we meet. If the world treat us well, so much the better for the world; if not well, so much the worse for it. No harm can come to us. The God of truth is with us, and we are children of the truth. We may be cast into the fiery furnace, heated to seven times its usual heat, but there shall be not so much as the smell of fire on our garments. Curses may be heaped upon us, our names vilified, our characters traduced, our bodies crushed, and our bones cast out to bleach under heaven’s rains and dews; but the truth we had, and have, survives, works its own work, scatters in due time the devil’s legions, dissipates the mists of falsehood, and shines forth in radiance the God it was and is.

15. EXECUTIVE PATRONAGE1 Boston Quarterly Review 4 (July, 1841): 353-70

It is not our intention to enter into any elaborate criticism of this Address from the President of the United States. As an important state paper, it falls far below that of Mr. Tyler’s immediate predecessor. General Harrison’s Inaugural Address has been underrated,2 and unjustly accused of being non-committal. A President, on entering upon the duties of his office, ought not to be expected to go into a detailed statement of the measures or the policy he will recommend, or to which he will or will not give his official sanction. All he can do with decency is to state his views of the principles of the government he is called to administer, and the spirit in which he proposes to administer it. This General Harrison did as fully as could be required. The fault of his Address was not in its no-meaning, but in its wrong meaning; in embodying in their exaggerated form, the principal errors which have obtained, or do obtain, in regard to the nature of the federal Constitution and government. These errors may all be summed up in the one fundamental error of regarding the federal government as instituted by, and resting on, the will of the majority; as a government which, in the words of General Harrison, “a breath of the majority has made and can unmake.”3 If this were true, the some seven large states containing a majority of the population would have the constitutional right to govern at will, the other nineteen. The local interests of these would rightfully rule, regardless of the diverse interests of all the rest. But it is well known that the Constitution is not made by the will of the simple majority, but by the concurring majorities of the several states, and the government can never exercise, without usurpation, any power which more than one fourth of the states choose to withhold. Conse1 [Ed. Brownson’s review of John Tyler’s Address to the People of the United States (Washington, D.C., April, 1841).] 2 [Ed.William Henry Harrison, 4 March 1841, Inaugural Address, in Inaugural Addresses, 79-97.] 3 [Ed. Ibid., 80.]

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quently, the government must, in practice, confine itself to what concerns all the states in common, and leave those matters and interests, which are peculiar to each, to the exclusive supervision and control of the state governments. It was losing sight for a moment of this important fact that led Mr. Madison to adopt the rule for determining the constitutional powers of the government, now so strenuously insisted on by the party in power. Mr. Madison in his justification of himself for having signed the bill incorporating the late Bank of the United States when he had opposed a bank on the ground of its unconstitutionality alleged that a “power repeatedly exercised by Congress, and acquiesced in by the people, should be taken as constitutional.”4 A more dangerous rule it is not easy to conceive of. If the stress be laid on the acquiescence by the people, it virtually abrogates the Constitution; for it leaves the majority free to pass any law they please that the people will tolerate; which is precisely what the case would be, were there no Constitution at all. If the stress be laid on the repeated exercise of the power, it asserts that wrong by repetition becomes right. If on the repeated exercise by Congress, it claims for the simple majority in Congress the power of determining what the Constitution shall be, of altering or amending it, a power which, according to the Constitution itself, belongs only to the concurrence of the several states, or at least to three-fourths of them. The adoption of this rule by Mr. Madison, we presume, accounts for the fact that he is now the pattern statesman with those who could once hardly find in the English language words of sufficient force to express their abhorrence of him and his measures; and the fact that he is now the pattern statesman with these, should teach the old Republican, States Rights party, that they have too feebly protested against the rule to which he, in an evil hour, gave his high authority. Mr. Madison was a great and a good man, whose services to his country are not easily measured; but the injury he occasioned, in this instance, to the cause of constitutional liberty, is one from which we shall be long in recovering. It was indeed one of those mistakes, to which the wisest and best of men are liable in cases of perplexity and emergency; but it is one which the earliest opportunity should be seized of correcting. 4 [Ed. The substance of the argument, but not the exact quotation, is found in James Madison to Charles J. Ingersoll, June 25, 1831, in Legislative and Documentary History of the Bank of the United States, comp. M. St. Clair Clarke and D. A. Hall (1832; New York: Augustus M. Kelley Publishers, 1967), 778-80.]

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Mr. Tyler and his party have adopted this fatal rule for determining the constitutional powers of the government; we trust that we shall, therefore, be pardoned for having entered our protest against it, as a rule which virtually abrogates the Constitution, converts the federal government into a government of unlimited powers, and gives to the simple majority, acting through Congress, freedom to pass any law they please, providing the people will acquiesce, and not rise in rebellion and plunge the country into the horrors of civil war. Mr. Tyler and the party now in power, so far as we can collect, appear to believe that the great danger to our liberties lies in the “tendency of power to concentrate in the hands of a single individual”5; and, therefore, that the evil, we should most studiously guard against, is executive usurpation and the extension of executive patronage. But in our judgment this belief of theirs is founded on a superficial view of the actual tendencies in our own country. They do not seem to us to have noted with sufficient care the wide difference there is between our confederacy and one of the small city-republics of antiquity. The tendency they dread is resisted by the vast extent of our territory, and its division into separate, sovereign states; by the diverse interests, and institutions of different sections; the multiplicity of rival candidates, with nearly equal pretensions and abilities; and by the general equality of our citizens. No one man, however eminent his talents or his services, can ever succeed in commanding the suffrages of all the states. Always will there be entire states in the opposition; and one state, under our system, is always competent to bring the government back, in any of its departments, within constitutional limits. The danger Mr. Tyler dreads so much can exist only in small communities, where the interests are homogeneous, but where the population is divided horizontally, and parties are noble against ignoble, or rich against poor. There indeed rival parties may aid the concentration of power in the hands of their respective leaders, because each may find it necessary to do so in order to secure its triumph over the other. But with us parties are not and cannot be formed according to the horizontal 5 [Ed. In “To the People of the United States” (April 10, 1841), in A Compilation of the Messages and Papers of the Presidents, comp. James D. Richardson, 10 vols. (New York: Bureau of National Literature, 1897), 4:1890, Tyler actually wrote: “In view of the fact, well avouched by history, that the tendency of all human institutions is to concentrate power in the hands of a single man, and that their ultimate downfall has proceeded from this cause, I deem it of the most essential importance that a complete separation should take place between the sword and the purse.”]

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division. The trial has been made and without success. Our population is all noble; and though we have rich and poor, neither party takes in all the rich or all the poor. Our population also has an innate jealousy of power, when exercised by a single individual, an hereditary hostility to it, which has come down to them from their ancestors, who warred against monarchy, to the knife, in the family of the Stuarts. This innate dread, this hereditary hostility to this concentration of power, which characterizes nearly the whole of the American people, is no mean safeguard, and deserves altogether more reliance than Mr. Tyler and his party seem disposed to give it. Then, again, our Presidents are in the main simple executive officers. Saving a conditional veto, they are neither makers nor judges of the law. The President, it is true, commands the army and navy; but he cannot declare war; he cannot unsheathe the sword till the people, through their representatives, command him. He perhaps, in a certain transcendental sense, may be said to hold the purse, but he cannot open it or take a cent therefrom, till the law gives him leave, and tells him what to do with it. His usurpations, from the nature of the case, must be open, palpable, and therefore easily guarded against; and be they what they may, as they are always ministerial usurpations, they can always be remedied by a simple change of administration. The real danger to which our liberties are exposed lies, we apprehend, in legislative usurpations rather than in executive. Against legislative usurpations, our people are not so much on their guard; and these are always usurpations which receive the sanction of the majority; for no law can pass the two Houses of Congress without the consent of the majority through their representatives. The opposition to them comes only from the minority. They must then always be hard to resist, and still harder to redress. New elections, or the gradual enlightenment of the people, will not redress them; because they are demanded by the interests of the majority, and the majority will return representatives pledged to sustain them. Legislative usurpations, furthermore, are rarely looked upon in the light of usurpations by the great mass of the people. They have the sanction of the majority, and it is no easy matter to convince the people that what has the sanction of the majority is or can be a usurpation. The prevailing creed of the country asserts, with scarcely any but moral limitations, the absolute right of the majority to govern. We also retain the memory of the struggle of our fathers with the monarchs of England, when all power, conquered from the monarch by the parliament, was thought to be so much gained to liberty. We

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go on the supposition that all power exercised by the legislature, freely chosen by the whole people, is exercised by the people themselves; and that all power exercised by the people themselves is coincident with freedom. We have not yet learned that the people, taken as individuals, may be completely enslaved to the people taken as the body politic, or civil society; that to establish the absolute freedom of the people, as a body politic, to do whatever they please, is to establish the absolute subjection of the whole people taken as individuals. The ambiguity of the word people deceives us, and leads us to infer that where the popular sovereignty is complete, there is absolute freedom, when in fact there is and can be only absolute subjection. But recognizing always the popular sovereignty in the acts of the legislature, and identifying popular sovereignty with freedom, we rarely fear legislative usurpation, and in general suffer without alarm the legislature to grasp powers which it has no right to exercise. Here is the real danger. There is a wide difference between popular sovereignty and true freedom, and the people as a body politic, as civil society, may be as tyrannical in their acts as any despot, and encroach on the rights of the individual citizen with far greater impunity, and with far less danger of insurrection, rebellion, or revolution. We regret that Mr. Tyler, when discoursing on the dangers to which our liberties are exposed, did not see proper to remind us that power could concentrate in the hands of Congress, as well as in the hands of the President, and that the true policy of the country should be to guard against this concentration in the hands of either branch of the federal government. Our fears of legislative usurpations, so far as concerns the federal government, are by no means imaginary. The federal legislature is steadily usurping powers not delegated to it, and bringing under the action of the federal government matters of which its framers never intended it should take cognizance. Already has it engrossed the chief business of legislation, and become in fact the only important legislative body in the country. If its usurpations be not checked, and more effectually than they were under even the administrations of Jackson and Van Buren, it will not be long before consolidation is consummated. Mr. Van Buren’s administration, as far as it went, was in the main unexceptionable; but somewhat deficient in boldness and nerve. The hand that guided had its cunning, but not quite all the vigor desirable. A little more of the rough energy of Jackson would have been an improvement. Nevertheless, the country may count itself not a little favored by Providence, if it do not long have to regret the defeat of that much calumniated administration, if it soon

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find another as good, as faithful to the Constitution. We know of but one remedy for the evil we have here pointed out, and that consists in a hearty return to the fundamental idea of the federal government, to the states rights principles of the old Republican party of ‘98; in understanding that our maxim, the majority must rule, can apply to the federal government only within the limits prescribed by the Constitution; that the Constitution is paramount to the will of the majority, and rests on the concurrence of the several states, each of which is, for itself, its own judge of the grant of powers it has made to the Union. This will prove a peaceable and an efficient remedy; and between this and complete consolidation there is, so far as we can see, no stopping place. But although we regard the chief danger as lying in legislative usurpation, we are still inclined to regard the executive patronage as too great, as dangerous, and requiring to be curtailed. But here again we are under the necessity of differing from Mr. Tyler. He seems to fancy that the evil lies in the active interference, as individual citizens, of office-holders in elections, and therefore seeks to guard against it by declaring such interference a disqualification for holding office. He tells us that no man shall hold office under him, who takes an active part in politics. But the evil, in our judgment, does not lie in this interference; nor is it one that can be reached by Mr. Tyler’s rule of non-interference. The rule is itself a flagrant instance of its own violation. It is, to say the least, no mean stretch of executive authority. It strikes at the rights of the states, by presuming to say what part certain of their citizens may or may not take in their political contests. It brings the patronage of the government into direct conflict with the freedom of elections, by enabling the executive to control them by all the force derivable from men’s love of office, or desire to share in government plunder. It enables him to make every office-holder in the land his servile tool, and furnishes him the means if disposed to use them, of buying up every prominent political opponent he can induce to accept of an office, and thus often to distract, and in the end discomfit, the party opposed to his administration. Is there no executive encroachment in this? Is this the efficient way of curtailing executive patronage? Then again, the rule is unequal, and will operate only on political opponents. No administration will ever dismiss a faithful and efficient officer because he uses his best exertions, as a citizen, to sustain it. Mr. Tyler could not have supposed his constituents would credit his assertion, that he would apply the rule equally to his friends

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and opponents. Has he done it? Has he removed any of his friends who held office under the late administration? Are we to infer that none of them took an active part in the late presidential election? We presume not; and yet we have not heard that any of them have been removed. Nor will Mr. Tyler remove any officer of his own appointing, however active or zealous a politician, if not found wanting as a faithful and efficient officer. No administration can afford to dismiss its friends for doing what of all things it most desires them to do; and Mr. Tyler should have respected the good sense of the American people too much to have pretended to the contrary. He should have spared them at least that insult. For himself, though blessed with his usual “good luck,” we can assure him that long before his term of office expires, his administration may need the active and zealous support of all the friends it can retain or make, whether they be in office or out of office. Mr. Tyler’s rule encroaches, also, on the rights of the man and the citizen. The man and the citizen are not sunk in the officer. An office-holder may do whatever he has a right to do as a man and a citizen not incompatible with the faithful discharge of his official duties. In what manner he exercises these rights is no concern of the federal executive, for he is accountable for their exercise to another tribunal. To inquire how he votes, how many speeches he makes, or how much money he spends for electioneering purposes, is as extrajudicial, if we may say so, as it would be to inquire whether he lives in a framed house or a log-cabin, drinks hard cider or champagne, eats white bread or brown, and sleeps on a feather bed or on a pallet of straw. The relation between the executive and the office-holder is purely official, and no question transcending that relation can be rightfully entertained. If the officer neglect his official duty, he should be removed, not for taking part as a citizen in politics, but for neglecting the duties of his office; if he transgress the laws of the state in which he resides, he should be turned out, not for electioneering, but because every government is bound to see that its agents respect the laws of the sovereign within whose dominions they reside. The rule, furthermore, is indefinite. What is interfering in elections, “active partisanship,” as it is called? He who goes quietly to the polls and deposits his vote is an active politician, compared with one who votes not at all; and a partisan, for he most likely votes for one party or another. Shall the citizen be deprived of his right to vote, because he is an office-holder under the federal government? We have not heard this pretended. Where then will you stop? May not the officer, without forfeiting his office, tell his honest convictions to his

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neighbor on political matters? If not, you abridge the freedom of speech, a thing which no branch of the federal government can attempt without violence to the Constitution. If he may tell his honest convictions to one man, why not to as many as choose to listen to him? If in one place, in one position, why not in another? Where then will you draw the line between simple non-interference at all, and the most active interference compatible with official fidelity, the laws of the state, and general morality? But the evil does not lie in the part the office-holder, in his simple capacity of a citizen, takes in the politics of the state or confederacy. The citizen loses, in general, more than he gains by the officer. The man who holds an office has, as is well known, almost always less influence when he addresses his fellow-citizens on political subjects than he would have were he wholly disconnected with office. If he sustain the administration, he is regarded as personally interested in its success, as wishing to keep the administration in power for the sake of retaining his place; if he oppose the administration, he is regarded as ungrateful, as cursing the hand that feeds him, and so has little influence. That administration cannot be very oppressive, which keeps men in office who use their best exertions to overthrow it. In a word, an office-holder taking part, as a citizen, in politics, goes out before his fellow-citizens under disadvantages rather than advantages, and can rarely if ever, exert with the mass his legitimate share of influence. There is then no need of Mr. Tyler’s rule. The evil does not lie here, but elsewhere. It lies not in any interference of the officer, as a citizen, but in his official interference. No office-holders, except such as have patronage to bestow, can cause any portion of the evil; and those who have patronage to bestow, cause it not by voting, writing, or lecturing, but by bestowing their patronage, not with reference to fitness for office, but with reference to services rendered or to be rendered to the party. A collector of the customs, for instance, brings his office to bear on elections, when he appoints to office, or removes from office, with reference to these services. His duty is to select his officers with sole reference to the public service, and he transcends the line of his duty when he has reference to anything else. Other things being equal, he may no doubt select his personal or political friends in preference to those who are neither one nor the other; but he interferes officially, whenever in his appointments he leaves it to be understood that the persons appointed, in addition to faithful officers, are to be also active partisans; or when he removes a faithful and efficient officer, who is not an active partisan and appoints to his place one who is. The supreme executive,

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however, causes the chief part of the evil and is guilty of direct official interference, when, on his accession to power, he removes from office those who had opposed his election, and fills their places with the most active and least scrupulous of his partisans.6 The real cause of complaint seems to us to lie in the fact that a change of administration involves a general change of office-holders throughout the country. Not because one set of men are turned out and another set put in, for in this alone we see no great harm; but because so long as it is so, office-holders must feel that their chance of retaining their places depends solely on keeping their party in power; and because office-seekers, a much hungrier and more numerous herd, must see that their chance of obtaining office depends on ousting that party and putting in another. The effect of this is to bring into our elections elements which should always be foreign to them; is to make them contests for place, perhaps even more than for principles. Here is the evil. These removals, which make so much noise, do not disturb us; the public good is rarely promoted by keeping a man in office, who would be essentially injured by being removed. But any policy on the part of the administration, which has a direct tendency to bring personal and selfish considerations into our elections, should be avoided as much as possible. The stability of popular institutions, in a great measure, depends on the purity of elections, and on making them contests for principle, and not for place. On this point the late presidential campaign should read us an instructive lesson, a lesson which should be all the more deeply impressed on our minds and hearts, from the fact that a righteous Providence has already taken to their reward several of the prominent actors in it. The country can bear much, but not the frequent repetition of the scenes enacted during the last year by the present dominant party. Such demoralizing scenes as they enacted to the bacchanalian shouts of “hard cider” and “log-cabins” are poorly atoned for by their present extraordinary pretensions to piety and virtue. Mr. Tyler may well call upon the country to fast, not indeed because an infirm old man, who had filled up his three score years and ten, has been removed from a post for which he had scarcely a single qualification, but for the arts his party resorted to in order to win their victory, the falsehoods they circulated, the deceptions they practiced, the low and sinister motives to which they appealed, and by which they were governed. A few more such victories, won by similar means, 6 [Ed. When William Henry Harrison won the presidential election Brownson lost his job as steward of the Chelsea Marine Hospital, a political patronage position.]

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and it will be time for even the most sanguine among us to begin to despair of the republic. We pretend not to say that desire to obtain office led to all the extravagant and mischievous proceedings by which the present dominant party succeeded in raising itself to power. There were other and more powerful causes at work; there were men who wanted not the government so much for the sake of office, as to aid them in their speculations, to pay their debts, and raise the price of stocks lying dead on their hands. Here were the more active causes of that disgraceful scramble, which will hand down the name of Whig to everlasting infamy. Still the love of office had its influence, and served to swell the tide of corruption. The remedy, the means of separating the scramble for office from our election contests, is far from being easy to find or to apply. It may perhaps be found, to some extent, in lessening the emoluments of office, so that they shall not be worth scrambling for. This would do somewhat. If office-holding should, in a pecuniary point of view, fall below the general average of business, so as to demand a sacrifice on the part of the officer, it would not be sought after. But in this case could offices be filled by men worthy to hold them? In addition to this, if consistent with an efficient executive, which we must always have, and with which we must not dream of dispensing, we may make the appointing power and power of removal the same; that is, in all cases, where the consent of the Senate is necessary to complete the appointment, it shall be necessary to the removal. The President should have only the power of suspending, during the recess of the Senate, such officers as may be unfaithful, inefficient, or incapacitated. For ourselves, we incline to the opinion that the power of removal is incident to the power of appointing and should be so regarded. Furthermore, we might make all appointments for a term of years fixed by statute, and all officers during that term, excepting those whose political opinions necessarily have a direct bearing on the administration, irremovable, except for causes previously specified by law. The end we aim at is preventing a change of administration from involving any general change in the incumbents of office; to get rid, in a word, of the “spoils” principle and with it the influence which love of office has now in our elections. If this be desirable, as we hold it is, we see not how it can be done without taking away a portion of the discretionary power of the executive. As a first principle in political science, we should leave the executive as little discretionary power as is compatible with its efficiency. These two mea-

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sures would take away the greater part of its discretionary power, not over appointments, but over removals, and give to the office-holder, so long as faithful and efficient, a certain independence of the administration. This would add much to the dignity of office-holding and enable us to fill public offices with men of worth and independence, men who are reluctant to take an office, when they know that the first revolution of the political wheel may throw them out. In the ordinary course of events, offices could not all become vacant at once, but successively; consequently, a change of administration could not involve the general change we have complained of. The term of years should unquestionably be short, not exceeding four years at most, because all offices ought to be frequently vacated, so as to prevent the growth of corruption, and to give the appointing power an opportunity of making such changes in regard to their incumbents as the public good may seem to require. New appointments, however, should be made at the pleasure of the appointing power, from the old incumbents or from new applicants. In this way you secure the advantages of rotation in office, without its odiousness and want of legal sanction. Embody always in law that public opinion which you would have reign. These two changes, it strikes us, will prove an effectual remedy for the evil we have pointed out, so far as in the nature of things a remedy is possible; and against them we are unable to discover any insurmountable objection. No doubt the members of the cabinet and the principal fiscal officers should entertain similar political views with those of the President, but these would in general be men who would resign in case of any wide discrepancy of opinion between them and the executive; if not, make them an exception to the general rule. So far as it concerns the great mass of office-holders, it matters not to the public, though it may to party, what their political opinions are, provided they are good officers; and good officers they may be, with one political creed as well as with another. Some of our friends fear that these changes would impair the efficiency of the executive; if so, they ought not to be adopted. But unless we would have despotism, we must place some limit by law to the executive power; and no limit would, in our judgment, be too strict that should leave it room for the prompt and faithful execution of the laws. The inability to remove a faithful and able officer for a mere difference of opinion, when that difference could not interfere with official conduct, it would seem need not impair executive efficiency; and beyond this we do not propose to go.

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Others again object to the interposition of the Senate in removals, on the ground that the Senate is an aristocratic body, and we ought therefore to be on our guard against swelling its importance, or enlarging the sphere of its action. We do not sympathize with them either in their views of the Senate, or in their fears of the aristocracy. We never, if we can help it, suffer ourselves to be misled by mere words; and these terms, aristocrat and democrat, have been bandied about so much that they now stand for anything or nothing, according to the temper of those who use them. Ever since the Senate had the audacity to place itself in opposition, on certain occasions, to General Jackson’s administration, it has been, with some, a mark of democracy to stigmatize it as an aristocratic body. We are sorry to see this, as it evinces a tendency from which we have much to dread for our liberties. The nature of all popular masses is to make war upon whatever interposes an obstacle to the immediate realization of their projects. If their favorite executive finds an obstacle in the Senate, then it is, down with the Senate; if a favorite legislature is frustrated in its attempts to carry some popular measures by the executive veto, then it is, down with the veto; if the cry of liberty is up, and men are bent upon freeing the slave, but find the Constitution in the way of the kind of action they would adopt, then it is, down with the Constitution; human rights are older than constitutions, and shame on the coward, who would be deterred from vindicating them by fear of a piece of musty parchment. This is a dangerous tendency and the one against which we should always be on our guard. The institution we would sweep away because it is unfavorable to the realization of the project we have at heart today, may turn out to be the only institution by which we can realize the still dearer project we may entertain tomorrow. The Senate, which interposes a barrier today to a popular executive, and therefore seems to be aristocratic, may tomorrow interpose a barrier to executive usurpations. This tendency, we speak of, is encouraged by many good men, because they confound what should always be kept distinct, popular sovereignty and the freedom of the citizen. They call alike democracy, the absolute sovereignty of the people, and the maintenance of the individual citizen in all his natural rights. Their theory is, establish the first, and the second is secured. Hence, whatever opposes in any instance the popular sovereignty is termed by them aristocratic, and unfavorable to liberty. We repeat to them what we never cease to repeat, and what we have ever occasion to repeat, that between popular sovereignty and individual liberty there is a wide difference; and that to clear the way for the free, unobstructed dominion

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of the people as civil society is but clearing the way for anarchy or despotism. The people, as a body politic, are as supreme in this country as they ought to be. The liberty we should now struggle for, is not, strictly speaking, democratic liberty, that is, the liberty of the people, but individual liberty, or securing to each and every citizen the free and full enjoyment of all his natural rights. And this is to be done, not by shouting “aristocracy” or “democracy,” but by wisely organizing the state so that it shall have no power to encroach on the individual, but be always able and obliged to protect him. Liberty with us is to be carried out, not by the heavings to and fro of a lawless mob, but by the orderly workings of constitutional government. In this country we are permitted to seek no reforms but in accordance with and through constitutional government. Our first duty to liberty, to the inalienable rights of man, is to establish and maintain constitutional order. Consequently, every attack we make on the sacredness of constitutions is a stab at the very heart of liberty. With this view of the method we must adopt to promote true liberty, we cannot view with indifference the attacks which some of our friends make on the Senate. The Senate is unquestionably a conservative body, and woe to the state that has not somewhere in its organization a conservative body. Without the conservative element embodied in the Senate, our federal government would soon fall to pieces. The Senate represents the states, in their sovereign capacity, and tends to preserve their independence. It no doubt now and then serves as a check upon the will of the majority; but this is one of its recommendations. It preserves the government from yielding to every burst of popular passion, and from being swayed by every undulation of popular caprice. It therefore gives stability and something of systematic unity to the action of the government. The Senate is an essential part of the federal Constitution, and unless we would destroy the Constitution itself, we should beware of throwing suspicion on it. For our part, we are satisfied with the Constitution as it is. It is to us a miracle of wisdom. We see clearly the hand of Providence in it, and we have a sort of religious veneration for it. We do not believe it needs amendment, or that we are capable of amending it. The less we attempt to alter or amend it, the better will it be for us, and all who are to come after us. Let us encourage then no disparagement of any of its provisions. Let us take it as it is, and make it the guide of our political action; and therefore let us leave the Senate standing. Destroy the Senate, and the independence of the states will fail to be recognized, the American community will

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become a consolidated mass, whom whoso can may ride by the grace of God, as king or kaiser. “But the Senate is an aristocratic body.” What then? Perhaps your state is none the worse for that. Solomon exhorted men in his day not to be religious over much; if he lived now, he could not fail to exhort us not to be democratic over much. We do little but scream democracy from morning till night, and from night till morning; and those of us who scream the loudest are by no means the truest friends to real equality. Aristocracy is a natural element of every society, and should be recognized in every state, unless we mean by aristocracy institutions or doctrines, which create artificial distinctions between man and man, subordinating the many to the few. Whatever opposes the maintenance of all the natural rights of every citizen, should be opposed; but we are aware of nothing in the Senate, either in its Constitution or the mode in which its members are selected, that makes it in the least more hostile to these natural rights, than is the House of Representatives; nor do we discover that the Senate has ever shown any more disposition to abridge the natural freedom of the citizen, than is commonly shown by our state legislatures. We believe some of the most distinguished advocates of equal rights the country can boast are to be found at this moment in the Senate. If such men as Mr. Calhoun, Mr. Walker, Mr. Wright, Mr. Buchanan, Mr. Benton,7 not to mention any more, are aristocrats, where are our democrats, in any sense in which it would not be a misfortune to be a democrat? It will hardly do to call a body, of which such men as these are leading members, aristocratic. That aristocracy which consists in the possession of eminent talents, in being distinguished by the performance of eminent services to one’s country, is honorable, not censurable, and deserving of confidence, not distrust. But we close. We have introduced this objection mainly for the purpose of protesting against the tendency in our community of which we regard it as one of the symptoms. We would warn our countrymen against this tendency, a tendency of which they who are governed by it are in general unconscious. With this, we leave the suggestions we have thrown out, to go for what they are worth.

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[Ed. At the time of this writing, Robert John Walker (1801-69) was United States Senator from Mississippi (1836-45); Silas Wright (1795-1847) was Senator from New York (1832-45).]

16. ORATION OF ORESTES A. BROWNSON1 The story of the American Revolution has often been told and need not be repeated on this occasion. There is a deeper meaning in that enterprise than the mere political independence of the colonies from the crown of Great Britain. What is that meaning? What place holds the Revolution in the general history of mankind? What are the duties it imposes on us? It strikes me that this is an appropriate question. God has created this world according to a plan and in every part of nature one thing answers to another; and it is so in the moral world; and it would be discovered in the history of humanity that everything which took place was according to some plan; every event belonged to the general scheme of Providence, and had a signification—a meaning in it. Our Revolution was one of these events. It was not an event of chance; it was not the creation of a few individuals, nor did it grow out of a few local causes which could be answered only then and by that event. We are too much in the habit of taking too low views of the American Revolution, and of considering the question in a light altogether inferior to its real merits. It was not only a question between the colonies and the mother country; it was a question between the past and the future, and when the troops met in battle, as on Bunker’s heights, or Saratoga’s plains, it was entire humanity struggling to decide the question whether humanity should continue where she was, or continue her march onward toward freedom and union with God. 1

[Ed. Delivered at Washington Hall, July 5th, 1841 (New York: n.p., 1841). The oration is preceded by the following: “We lay before our readers one of the most brilliant orations it has ever been our good fortune to listen to, on the 4th of July. It will no doubt be read with no small pleasure by every mind which unfolds for itself the pages of truth, and who, like the author, is controlled by God alone. A full audience met at Washington Hall, among whom were a number of ladies. Mr. Brownson appeared at the appointed time, and was applauded as soon as he ascended the stage. It is the opinion of Mr. B. that all political reform should have its foundation in religion; or, in other words, that true religion is the ground-work of everything that is beneficial to the human race. He opened the meeting with prayer; after which, the Declaration of Independence was read; and then Mr. Brownson delivered his address. G.W.D.”] 570

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Power always goes with property, and it ever has been so; and if you see how the property is placed, you can see where is the power. Go back to other ages, and you will find that power went with the soil, and the first struggles in the cause of freedom were to wrest power from the nobility, and give it to the industrious and toiling laborers. All were counted ignoble, not only the peasant and the artisan, but the merchant also—all but the landholder, who was free from slavery and oppression, the only one who was respected. Wealth did not give nobility, unless the property was in the soil. The most successful and enterprising merchants submitted, loyally, at any moment, to be ruled by feudal barons. The first struggles to wrest this power from the nobility were carried on by the mercantile and manufacturing portion of society—the only portion who could struggle with any success. Their first struggle was marked by the enfranchisement of the towns of Italy and Holland. If you come down to the British Revolution in 1600, you find that the commons had gained an equality with the nobles; but under these was another class—the simple laborers. The merchant had acquired wealth, and his claims were admitted; but the simple laborer who had no capital of his own, and no means of obtaining property but by his own hands, was left without influence in the social state. The American Revolution operated in favor of this class. The great principle involved in the American Revolution, and the mission of this country, was the alleviation of the condition of the laborer, giving to him an equality of rank with the mercantile and feudal lords, so that man should every where be recognized as man; differing from his brother only in so far as he differs in his own capacity. It is this which gives to the American Revolution its spirit and its importance in my view. There was lofty heroism displayed in the war unsurpassed, but not unequaled. The Revolutionary patriots were men of great worth; but perhaps that, viewed as mere individuals, no greater than have elsewhere been. Yes! there was one greater than all the past; greater, not in some few traits, but in his whole character; greater than all in the completeness and symmetry of his character; so symmetrical indeed that we look long and contemplate long before we confess that there was so great a man. I need not mention his name, for it is on every tongue—you know that I mean Washington. Yet, notwithstanding all this, that Revolution would lose much of its spirit if it was nothing more than a Revolution in favor of political independence. That Revolution had deeper meaning in it—the emancipation of the laborer. Great is the work of modern history, preparing for the reign of those just principles, first proclaimed some 1800 years ago, by one

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who, to all human appearance, was a Jewish peasant, and caught up by a few fishermen followers, who promulgated them through persecutions, death, and opprobrium, and published them throughout the world where they took root and thrived, though rudely trampled upon by nobles, hierarchies, and tyrants of all descriptions: for the principles involved in the American Revolution were but the application of those political associations involved in the principles taught by Jesus Christ, whom it is the glory of our nation to worship as the Son of God; and it was with an instinct of this sort that our fathers engaged in battle, in deep religious solemnity; so that it may be said that they marched under the banner of God, and that the God of battles was with them. It was with these feelings that, when they had declared the independence of the colonies, they appealed to the sovereign ruler of the universe; and had there not been some connection between the principles for which they were contending and those which God himself had revealed through his Son, they would not have dared to stand up and declare themselves free and independent of one of the most powerful nations on the face of the earth. We often hear people speak of the American Revolution as if it were opposed to Christianity; but had not Jesus lived, and preached, and died for man, there had been no American Revolution: and if there had been one, it would have been but like so many other revolutions where men contend which shall have the right to plunder their brethren. It was those great principles which were then taught, that were preached by the humble Nazarene, and for which he was crucified between two thieves, silently working their way, which brought about that Revolution. It was but the natural working of those principles which Jesus sealed with his blood on the cross. Therefore, let us remember, in this day, from whom those principles came. It was those principles which drove our fathers to this country. Why were they leaving their homes, and coming to a savage world? That they might live in peace in the enjoyment of those principles for which their Master was crucified. The world had long called itself Christian, and the teachers of religion had become like the Scribes and Pharisees of old, whited sepulchers, fair without, but inwardly full of corruption— like the Pharisees of old, neither entering into the kingdom of heaven themselves, nor suffering others to enter it. The pilgrims had the Christian idea of freedom, and it was that which brought them here—the deepest and broadest kind of freedom, that freedom of the mind that we, indeed, extol with words, by what we acknowledge this day, but what we can sneer at in the expectation of a profitable adventure. For such the workman builds palaces; them he supplies with luxuries, and with splen-

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did pictures hung up in their halls, they fancy themselves greater than the artist because they are able to purchase what his skill and genius have created! Our fathers left home for a principle, the abstract principle of the right of conscience, and though landed on the barren rock of Plymouth, it took root, and in spite of a New England winter, it flourished, it grew; and this same principle our Revolutionary fathers had in view. What is man without this freedom of mind? We meet today to commemorate, in part, our political independence; but what is it to me that my country is free from England, if I have the chain on my mind, and the padlock on my hand? You may bind my limbs, but if you leave my mind free, I may still be a man: and though you bind my limbs with cords like the green withes with which Samson was bound, yet if a man dare to think, he will not be long a slave. Carry free thought to the down trodden millions of Europe; thrones would totter and hierarchies would tremble, and nobility would vanish to nothing. We should see man standing up in the image of his Maker and looking forth upon a world of beauty. This was the abstraction our fathers brought to this country and this was the abstraction which Jesus mentioned to the Jews—“Ye have heard that it hath been said by them of old time an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth; but I say unto you that ye resist not evil” [Matt 5:38]. The freedom which the apostles claimed when they were imprisoned by the magistrates for curing the man that was lame, “Whether it is right to hearken unto you more than unto God, judge ye” [Acts 4:19]. There have been examples of appealing unto God rather than men at a later day. Luther made this appeal from the spiritual authority of the popes. Our fathers resorted to it, and by resorting to it, they founded this western empire. If you mark the progress of events, you will find that all which has elevated mankind and improved their condition, has been reared upon this foundation, and that all things are tending to this end. Look into the old world where we find that those distinctions are giving way— hereditary nobility is prostrated in France and losing its hold in England. The humble despised chartist dares to utter the equality of the human race. Coarse and threadbare may be his coat, his hands may be begrimed with the dust of labor, yet in that feeble voice is the voice of omnipotence, for it demands justice, and so long as the world is under the dominion of a just God, it never makes its demand in vain. The progress of democracy during the last 1800 years has still been onward. Wealth has departed from the landed noble. Wealth has, in many instances, been divided among the industrial classes. A power has grown out that wealth cannot command—the power of

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thought, which has well been called, by some one, the “fourth estate.” Literature speaks a tone which it never before spoke. In this country it is high treason to speak a sentiment that was read here today—that all men are born free and equal. High treason here: but in French and German literature, in those monarchical countries, they dare speak even of agrarianism and infidelity. The literature of the old world is becoming thoroughly democratic. Literature is a power never to be despised—a power that will, one day, come up and dispute dominion with your money bags—a power planting itself on the indestructible rights of the human race will gain strength, and money shall be its servant. You may turn to the most popular literature of Paris at this moment: you will find that thousands are unwilling for Americans to read it—why is this? Not because it is impure, not because it is demoralizing, but because it is democratic!— because it speaks in favor of the humble proletan—dangerous literature for worn out hierarchies and old systems of oppressions, but noble for young humanity, green with the fresh verdure of heavenly instincts. Even England dares to utter its voice; even the London Quarterly, the organ of Toryism, inserts articles which your New York Quarterly would not dare to publish; but, thank God, the Boston Quarterly dare. [Great applause.] I do not mention the New York Quarterly with disrespect. It is not the New York Quarterly alone, but the character of our literature of which I speak. Byron has also been condemned. Bryon had his faults; but it was not for them that he was condemned, for others having the same faults are in high favor. But Byron was condemned for his detestation of cant, for his love of freedom displayed both in words and deeds. Others have greater faults; but it was Byron’s free sentiments which caused his unpopularity. Look even at Scott.2 Fond as he was of the old feudal nobility, and desirous of reviving the dead past, with his halls hung round with casques and ancient armor, and weapons worn by the men of other ages, yet even he when he would paint a hero, must go down to an Edie Ochiltree,3 and thus were his heroes taken from the common level, and not from the titled and the dignified. You see that the most lovely exhibition of a virtuous and nobleminded woman was taken from the despised and down-trodden race of the Jews—Rebecca; and the truest man he ever drew was

2 [Ed. Sir Walter Scott (1771-1832) was a Scottish poet and novelist who developed the genre of the historical novel.] 3 [Ed. Edie Ochiltree is a major character in Scott’s The Antiquary (1816).]

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Gurthrid the swineherd.4 Even Scott can move to advantage no farther than he teaches the Christianity of liberty. And Wordsworth, from whence does he draw his inspiration? Its source rests in the universal instincts of the many. Even we, too, are becoming bolder in our speech—freer in our thought. The time-serving literature for which Americans were sneered at has seen its day. Even the old humdrum style of the pulpit is passing away; and subjects of greater interest are substituted, although many of the speakers may be, like Peter, unpolished, and ignorant of what the world calls knowledge. You may hear an ignorant person speak, but if he speaks in a tone of sincerity, it will find its way to the human heart. All this, I say, indicates that the progress is going onward. I recollect well the time— and I am not an old man—when there was no party in this country that would not spurn the name of democrat. Last war, the party which were in favor of the war, spurned that appellation, and insisted on being called republicans. I have lived to see not only that party, but the party which called them democrats in derision, swearing that they are more democratic than all others. I do not think that either party has too great a claim to it, but this shows that democracy has become popular. One must either be a democrat or make the people believe that he is one. Already do we find it proclaimed that this is the crisis of the country. Onward is the democrat’s watchword! What is democracy? Some tell us that democracy is merely that form of government in which the people rule. That is one of its meanings, I admit. They tell us it is the great experiment in civil government— that we are testing the experiment that will show if man is able to govern himself. If I thought democracy no more than this—if I thought democracy was no more than the trial whether a people can do without kings and nobles, then I would have nothing to do with it. I understand by democracy, not so much the form of government which is established, as a feeling of the need of a government which is established for the protection of each and every individual in the full and free enjoyment of all his natural rights. If nine-tenths of the people are deprived of their natural rights, I care not whether the government is aristocratic, democratic, or monarchical in its form. We find, in all history, that the great mass have been deprived of their rights. In all countries but this, they are deprived of their political rights; they have no voice in the choice of their rulers. By depriving them of their political rights, it gives the few who control them, 4 [Ed. Rebecca and Gurthrid are characters from Scott’s Ivanhoe: A Romance (1819).]

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power to control as they please. Although we have nominally given them equal rights, yet, even here, in point of fact, they do not exist. The great mass are slaves. I speak not of Negro slaves. When you go into your homes, your dark holes, your unventilated garrets, which the Negro slave dreams not of, you feel that there is more than one form of slavery. I speak not even of them. Men who seem to have more than the human form are dependent for employment on those who make them go and vote for measures which they in their hearts believe will be injurious, because they believe it will be better for them to endure a few plague-spots than to want for a home. Every man is a slave so long as he is dependent on another for the means of living. So long as a man makes not his own price, that which gives him employment exercises over him the absolute power of life and death; for let him close that price, and I fail in obtaining employment, and must rob, beg, steal, or die. There are not so many cases of this kind here as there are in the old countries, but one great mission of this country is the emancipation of these. Give them freedom that they may have the effective power to protect themselves, without the aid of others. Much have we to do, in order to carry out this. Much have we to carry out these the principles of Christianity here. This I call the signification or the meaning of the Revolution. We have not yet realized that. That freedom does not yet exist. Look into the history of this country. The simple laborer has no influence. I care not which party has triumphed at the polls, I tell you that the interest of capital has always triumphed. I say not this to stir up the laborer against the capitalist. I know that in this country there is no danger of exciting him against the capitalist. I know their respect for property. Throughout all ages the laboring classes have been noted for respecting the property of others. I say not that they may not have torn down a flour store and scattered a few barrels of flour about the streets; but I say that there is no country which is not celebrated for the plans contrived by the rich to rob the poor. If you look at history impartially, you will find that the poor never demanded their rights. Go back to Wat Tyler who led on their thousands—“when Adam delved and Eve spun, where was then the gentleman.”5 He submitted to all the vexations which the lords imposed upon them, and when they had the army in their power they 5 [Ed. The reference is to the Peasants’ Revolt of 1381 in England. Wat Tyler was one of the leaders of the rebellion. The quotation is generally attributed to John Ball, another leader of the insurrection.]

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required but the following conditions: “We demand simply that if we work for these lords, they do pay us wages.” This simple demand carried trembling into every place throughout England. The tyrant heard the awful voice of God summoning him to judgment. How is it now? Let but a man go up and speak a single word in favor of equality, and forthwith every pulpit sounds an alarm, and marks him as a man dangerous to the community. Oh! there is something in conscience that makes cowards of us all. The wrong doer feels that it is all over with him. I speak not this to excite the poor against the rich. I have no disposition to do it: both because of its inhumanity, and because the poor of this country have not yet received the full benefit of the Revolutionary doctrine that “all men are created free and equal.” I say that this declaration has a deep and significant meaning. There are many who refuse to read it, because, they say, it is old fashioned, and out of date. In the town from which I came, the reading of it was deemed injudicious and unnecessary. When I glance my eyes to the spot where is seated the assembled wisdom of the nation, and see what measures are foisted upon the country, I am almost disposed to believe that the Declaration of Independence is out of date. I do not want to utter a word to arouse party feelings, but, this day, freedom woke and asked for justice or a Brutus’ dagger. We have not yet carried out this freedom—this is what we are to attempt. It is a Constitution for democracy which we have established. The Constitution recognizes the independence of these states. Every exercise of power beyond those enumerated in the Constitution is an invasion of the rights of the people. But what do we see? Men professing to be in favor of the working men, endeavoring to violate the Constitution by placing a tax on the laborer. Who pays your taxes? They are paid by the producer of the North—that is the laborer, and at the South they are paid, it is the Southern planter who pays, as he raises the produce. They are the Southern planter and the Northern workingmen who pay the debt of thirty millions or more, for the benefit of whom? I hardly know—perhaps for the benefit of the hundred thousand who are flowing into Pennsylvania Avenue in search of office. This is their dependence—the office holders and expectants of office, and the tax payers must bear the burden—and this is called relief. And this is not the only relief—but we are to have a bank and paper money—a most ingenious method for fertilizing the rich man’s fields by the poor man’s toil and sweat. Again, see the thousand million of acres which are to be mortgaged to English and American stockjobbers, and their dependents. When I look at these things, I almost feel that the Declaration of Independence is out of date. Who

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feels that we are independent of England, when the Secretary of State is acting as counsel for a British subject.6 [Here a strong sensation was excited among the audience. Several persons raised a hiss, but the overwhelming applause which was, at the same time, given to the sentiments of the speaker, drowned the hisses entirely.] I say not this because I want war with the British, or injustice done toward any nation; but because I want the government of this country to speak every country as an equal, and acknowledge no inferiority to Great Britain. Speak to John Bull the language of men, and he acts like a man: but he always takes all he can get. If you show him that you are afraid of a war with him, he will be sure to kick up a war. I am opposed to war; my interest in humanity induces me to hope that there will be no war. There will be none, if we demand only what is just; and resent, with a firm, indignant spirit, whatever is wrong. But though these are dark times, they are not so gloomy as when our fathers met in Philadelphia and pledged their sacred honor, and their lives and fortunes, and appealed, for the justice of their cause, to heaven. The enemies of liberty are in power; but they have been in power before; and have not we too the nerve of our fathers, to hold certain truths self-evident as they did? We too can appeal to the righteous judge, and pledge our lives and sacred honor. In this day, it is best to renew our resolves and pledge ourselves again to the great principles which our fathers proclaimed and fought to defend. In this day, we should ever renew those pledges. Let every man cultivate this freedom in his own heart, to be prepared to act, not by a lawless mob, but by well-directed, constitutional actions, and then we shall find that our country will rise from the difficulties in which the enemies of liberty have placed her. If not defeated, a way will be found out for overcoming them, till the glorious mission be fulfilled— what the prophet foresaw that they should not destroy in all the holy mountains of the Lord. Man shall be free to speak the dictates of his own conscience, and there will be none to molest or make him afraid. After all, we must bear in mind that it is not the free government which makes the free people; but free people make a free government. Be free yourselves: have the true spirit of democracy alone in your own hearts—the spirit of Christ; or, if you must die, you can set the world an example that tyrants will forever dread. Renew your 6 [Ed. The reference is to Daniel Webster (1782-1852) who was Secretary of State (1841-43) under Presidents William Henry Harrison and John Tyler. In 1842 Webster was negotiating with England’s Alexander Baring, Lord Ashburton, on the Maine boundary issue.]

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pledges to labor for the cause of democracy that declares it to be the duty of government to protect all mankind. When this is done, on this soil the mission of this country will be fulfilled, and the principles of the American Revolution will be carried out: and again shall the sons of God shout for joy as they did on creation’s morn.

17. TRANSIENT AND PERMANENT IN CHRISTIANITY1 Boston Quarterly Review 4 (October, 1841): 436-74

This Discourse is a favorable specimen of an order of sermonizing, which we should like to see more generally cultivated in our churches. Its style is rich and flowing; its imagery appropriate and striking; its tone earnest and reverent; its thought philosophic and profound; and its effect, when delivered, must have been for the most part pleasing, and even thrilling upon the audience. Its chief fault, if fault it have, is, perhaps, in putting forth some propositions new to the community generally, without accompanying them with the developments and proofs necessary to render their reception easy and certain by those, who might be previously unprepared to adopt them. He, who brings forward views not generally entertained, should support them in the onset with arguments and demonstrations, that in some degree prevent resistance, and silence objectors. Nevertheless this is but a slight fault, and one which after all chiefly concerns the preacher himself. Taken as a whole, the Discourse can hardly fail to secure to the author a high literary rank, and to place him among the ablest and most successful of our preachers. The Discourse itself may be regarded as a bold, eloquent, and manly appeal for the truth of Christianity, the reality and permanence of religious faith. We feel while reading it that it is the outpouring of a soul filled and overflowing with a living faith in the Infinite, the Unseen, and the Eternal; in the permanence, reality, and surpassing glory of the spiritual world. The author has no doubt, no secret misgiving; he speaks with full assurance, and as one who knows that whereof he affirms. It is not a little cheering, in this age of halffaith, and of no-faith, when even learned professors and scientific defenders of religious belief, reduce all our certainty to merely a high 1 [Ed. Brownson’s review of Theodore Parker’s A Discourse on the Transient and Permanent in Christianity, preached at the Ordination of Mr. Charles C. Shackford, in the Hawes-Place Church in South Boston. May 19, 1841 (Boston: Printed for the Author, 1841).] 580

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degree of probability, to hear from the pulpit a voice speaking in the tone of strong conviction, and recalling to our memories the faith that overcomes the world. Mr. Parker selects for his text the words of Jesus, recorded by the Evangelist Luke, in the twenty-first chapter and second verse of his Gospel; “Heaven and Earth shall pass away, but my WORDS shall not pass away.” His purpose apparently is to establish the truth of the assertion contained in the latter clause of this passage, to show that the WORD of Jesus, that is, Christian truth, Christianity, is eternal and unalterable TRUTH; and that it always has been, and always will remain, the law of the soul’s perfection, of its redemption from sin, and its union with God. Forms of worship may alter, theological doctrines, or the forms with which men clothe their conceptions of Christian truth, may pass away, and be as if they had not been; but Christianity itself shall remain ever the same, unaffected by time and its mutations, ever fresh and vigorous in its eternal youth. This is the leading thought of the Discourse; and it seems to have been intended as a rebuke to those dreaming spirits, at home and abroad, who are rashly predicting a period when Christianity will be outgrown and superseded. But in speaking of Christianity, we must distinguish between Christianity as it lies in the divine mind, and Christianity as it lies in our conceptions, in our doctrines, or systems of theology. The first only is permanent, the last is transient. Christianity, as it lies in the divine mind, and was borne witness to by Jesus and his apostles, is the law of the soul’s growth and perfection. Man by virtue of the fact that he exists as a specific being, has a specific nature, or Constitution. This Constitution imposes upon him a law, obedience to which is essential to his existence, and the fulfillment of his destiny as a human being. Christianity taken absolutely is this law. God in making man made him to exist, grow, and attain the end of his being by the principles of the Christian religion. These principles then constitute the law after which God made man; the only law by observance of which man can fulfil the great purposes of his being; or, what is the same thing, find acceptance with his Maker. Hence, it is written “there is no other name given under heaven among men whereby we must be saved” [Acts 4:12]. Every organic being, animate or inanimate, is organized in accordance with some specific scheme or plan, which scheme or plan, idea or ei-doj; in the language of Plato, is its law, the condition of its existence, and of its attaining to the end for which it was made. Just so far as the being departs or is removed from this law, it ceases to be

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itself, which is the same thing for it as ceasing to be at all. The law of the oak is in the acorn; but the acorn becomes the oak only on condition of fulfilling it. The lion is a lion only on condition of conforming to the law of its species; and man is man, properly speaking, only on condition of fulfilling the law after which he was created. If he depart from that law under its physical relations, he suffers physical death; if under its spiritual relations, he sins, or dies a moral death. “The wages of sin is death” [Rom 6:23]. “In the day thou eatest thereof thou shalt surely die” [Gen 2:17]. If he conform to this law in the first view of it, he enjoys physical health and vigor; if in the second view of it, he enjoys spiritual health and vigor, or, in the language of Scripture, “life,” “eternal life.” Christianity, strictly defined, is then this law of man’s nature, after which man was created under both of these relations, and is therefore the law of man’s life in God. In its practical sense, it is called the “bread of life,” the living bread, which came down from heaven and gives life to the world. Hence, says Jesus, “except ye eat, ye have no life in you” [John 6:53]. “He that eateth shall not die, but live forever” [John 6:58]. Christianity taken in this sense, absolutely, is what Mr. Parker terms the permanent in Christianity. Thus viewed, it cannot pass away, nor change, so long as man continues to be man, or God’s will remains unaltered. But, this law of our being, owing to the limited nature of our faculties, is never but imperfectly comprehended by us. We cannot embrace it in its entireness. Ever will it on all sides escape us. This is true, in regard both to our powers of original discovery, and also in regard to our capacity to receive and comprehend supernatural revelation. Finite beings cannot comprehend infinity, nor imperfect beings perfection. Christianity, by our own unassisted efforts, could never have been discovered. Our natural powers are not equal to its discovery. But although assisted, although a revelation of it be made to us, still the revelation actually made must always be measured by our capacity to receive it. Say, Jesus saw and comprehended the whole of this law, all it implies, that is, the whole of Christian truth, and embodied a complete view of it in his words, he could have so embodied it only to the apprehension of his own mind; ours could take in no more of it than our capacities were equal to. His words, though containing to a perfect mind all truth, to our imperfect minds would even then contain as much less than the whole, as our minds fell short of the perfection of his. Now, as we are all confessedly limited, imperfect beings, it follows that our conceptions of Christian truth, whether regard be had to it as contained in the words of Jesus, or as

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written in the original constitution of our nature, must always be incomplete, altogether inadequate. But owing to the fact that we are progressive beings, as well as limited, imperfect beings, we are ever outgrowing the systems in which we embody our conceptions of this law. Our conceptions are ever enlarging, and taking in more and more of Christian truth; and hence the systems of theology, which satisfy us at one epoch, fail to satisfy us at another; like the dwelling of the sons of the prophet, they are ever becoming too strait for us to dwell in, and the prophet must give directions for enlarging them. Hence, theology, like all human sciences, is subject to successive modifications, perpetual alterations. Christianity itself remains unchanged, but our scientific expositions of it change ever, and pass away. Systems of theology are all of human construction, merely the forms with which the understanding clothes its conceptions of Christian truth; and are therefore transitory in their nature. These are what Mr. Parker calls the “Transient in Christianity.” Men embody their conceptions of Christian truth in their systems. They must do this. The soul is never satisfied with a vague conception. The artist catches a glimpse of the beautiful, and seeks forthwith to transfer it to his canvass or his marble; so the soul, when it grasps a portion of the true, seeks to bring it home to itself, to determine its place in a general system of truth. It is only in this way that the soul can render it practically available, stamp its value, and fit it for general circulation in the commerce of life. But the greatest and best of men embody in their conceptions but a feeble portion of Christian truth; it escapes them, as we have said, on all sides, spreads out to infinity, beyond their clearest and most comprehensive visions; yet we are prone to conclude that the truth which escapes us does not exist; that all views of truth that we cannot compress within our systems are false, and worthy of no confidence; that beyond the narrow horizon of our vision there is nothing save the inane. But truth, reality is boundless. Beyond that horizon, on which we gaze as the verge of the universe, there is reality no less than within it; and were our vision but strong enough, we should behold the presence and glory of God there as well as here. Through the operations of the mind’s own powers, and the providential aid which we receive from God himself, who never ceases to act, if we may so speak, the part of an educator, the human race is ever advancing, purging its vision, enlarging the horizon of its observation, and making to itself new conquests from the unknown. We have passed beyond the barriers which arrested the progress of our predecessors; and who shall say

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that those who shall come after us will not overleap the barriers at which we are compelled to stop? Is it anywhere written in the book of providence, nature, or grace, to man in his progressive career, “Thus far shalt thou come, but no farther?”2 What then shall prevent our systems, formed indeed with infinite pains, from sharing the fate of all their predecessors? Where is the warrant that exempts them from the general doom of all that is human? The ingenious systems of the Subtle Doctors, of Doctors Angelic, and Doctors Seraphic,3 have passed away, dissolved as “the baseless fabric of a vision”;4 and what shall preserve our systems and explications from a like fate? Nothing; not one of them shall endure. It is with systems as with men, one generation goeth and another cometh, but the earth abideth forever; so one system goeth and another cometh, but Christianity remains. This is the view which, we believe, Mr. Parker takes of theology, or the scientific explications adopted by the understanding for the better realization of our conceptions of Christian truth, and which are for him the transient in Christianity. Thus far he has advanced nothing new, marvelous, or heretical.5 We all know that systems of theology are transitory, perpetually changing from age to age, from individual to individual, and even in the same individual, from one epoch in his life to another, and that too when the form of words in which they are embodied remains unaltered. Catholicism retains but a slight resemblance to what it was in the age of Leo the Tenth, and still less to what it was in the time of Gregory the Great;6 Calvinism is another gospel with our modern orthodox from what it was with our stern old Puritan Fathers; Edwards advances on Calvin, as Calvin advances on Saint Augustine; and Stuart and Beecher overshadow Hopkins and Dwight; Oberlin rivals Princeton and Andover; Taylorism wrestles, not without prospects of success, with Tylerism; and Transcendentalism, in some of its modifications, is fast swallow-

2

[Ed. A reference here to Job 38:11.] [Ed. The references are to John Duns Scotus (c. 1266-1308), Thomas Aquinas (c. 1224-74), and Bonaventure (c. 1217-74), three of the most renowned medieval theologians.] 4 [Ed. The phrase, “the baseless fabric of this vision,” is from Shakespeare, The Tempest, Act 4, Scene 1.] 5 [Ed. Brownson had held such a position since at least 1834, ever since he began reading Benjamin Constant.] 6 [Ed. Leo X (1475-1521) was pope from 1513 to 1521; Gregory the Great (c. 540-604) was pope from 590 to 604.] 3

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ing up the Unitarianism of Priestley and Belsham.7 Every year modifies the popular faith, though it leaves the old terminology standing. Our conceptions of Christian truth are not what they were; and even the doctrines, to which we have solemnly subscribed, mean for us no longer what they did when we subscribed to them. Our own experience, life and its vicissitudes, which have hardened or softened our hearts, enlarged or restricted our views, have modified the meaning we give to the words we early adopted. No word has the same meaning for us in mature age that it had in early life. Time and eternity, life and death, as well as our familiar household terms, become to us, as we grow older, words of far graver import than they were, when we looked forth on a world all new to us, all untried, and everywhere charming by its freshness and youth. The leading doctrine of this Discourse, as we have thus far stated it, is unquestionably sound, and worthy of all acceptation; and thus far we presume it has given general satisfaction. But as much cannot be said of certain applications which Mr. Parker made of it. Proceeding on the principle that, though Christianity itself is permanent, yet all theological doctrines are necessarily evanescent, he has ventured to specify certain doctrines, now entertained, which must ultimately pass away. Among these may be enumerated three, as the more prominent. 1. The inspiration of the Scriptures; 2. The authority of the Scriptures; 3. The person, character, and authority of Jesus. Under these three heads Mr. Parker was understood by some to deny that the Scriptures of the Old and New Testaments were given by divine 7 [Ed. Brownson’s thumbnail sketch of the history of New England theology, of course, places Transcendentalism in the advance guard. References are to the following: Lyman Beecher (1775-1863), a conservative Calvinist Congregationalist and Presbyterian pastor in Litchfield, Connecticut, Boston, and Cincinnati, and president of Lane Seminary in Cincinnati; Samuel Hopkins (1721-1803), a New Divinity theologian who followed and revised the theology of Jonathan Edwards; Timothy Dwight (1752-1817) a theological conservative who defended orthodox Christian doctrines against the Deists and taught Stuart and Beecher; Oberlin Seminary in Ohio reflected the thought of revivalist theologian Charles Grandison Finney (1782-1875); Princeton and Andover Seminaries, although not in agreement theologically, represented the theology of conservative Presbyterians and Congregationalists who opposed the tactics of Finney’s revivalism; Nathaniel William Taylor (1786-1858) was an innovative theologian within the Edwardsian tradition, but emphasized free will, which that tradition had rejected; Bennet Tyler (1783-1858) was president and professor of the Theological Institute of Connecticut, represented a traditional approach to the Calvinist tradition and opposed the Taylorism of New Haven; Joseph Priestley and Thomas Belsham (1750-1829) played major roles in developing theological arguments in support of British Unitarianism.]

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inspiration; that they are to be appealed to as an infallible standard of truth; and that Jesus, as to his character and authority as a teacher from God, is in anywise separated from the great family of reformers, ever appearing from age to age for the redemption of the race.8 Being so understood, it is alleged that he cannot be a believer in Christianity, and is at best nothing more than a Deist.9 For ourselves we interpret this Discourse differently, and certainly should not commend it, if we did not. But even admitting this interpretation of it, we must still contend that it does not necessarily follow that its author is a Deist, or that he cannot be a Christian in the highest and best sense of the term. A Deist is one who, while he admits the existence of one God, denies all supernatural revelations from him to man. The essence of deism consists in this denial. We therefore do not call a Jew a Deist, though he denies the inspiration of the New Testament, for he admits that of the Old Testament; nor the Mahometan, though he denies the inspiration of both the Old Testament and the New, for he admits that of the Koran; nor indeed the Quaker, though he rejects the inspiration of the written word, in the received sense of the church, for he admits a revelation of the Spirit made directly to the human soul. Now, for aught that appears in this Discourse to the contrary, Mr. Parker may adopt the views of George Fox and William Penn, and therefore be a believer in supernatural communications from God to man. If so, he cannot with any propriety be termed a Deist. Nor are we prepared to assert that a man cannot deny the authority and inspiration of the Scriptures, and still be a Christian in faith and practice, deny in fact all Mr. Parker is said to have denied, and still be literally, really a Christian. 8 [Ed. One Unitarian layman who heard Parker’s sermon wrote in the Boston Courier, “I would rather see every Unitarian congregation in our land dissolved and every one of our churches occupied by other denominations or razed to the ground than to assist in placing a man entertaining the sentiments of Theodore Parker in one of our pulpits.” On this and other kinds of opposition from Parker’s fellow ministers, see John White Chadwick, Theodore Parker: Preacher and Reformer (Boston: Houghton, Mifflin and Co., 1900), 102f.] 9 [Ed. In 1843, Nathaniel Langdon Frothingham (1793-1870), Unitarian minister of the First Unitarian Church of Boston, presided over a “heresy trial” of Parker, declaring that his views were “vehemently deistical” and “subversive of Christianity as a particular religion.” On this, see John White Chadwick, 116. The charge was made against Parker’s A Discourse of Matters Pertaining to Religion (1842), but it reflected what other conservative Unitarians had been urging against Parker since his 1841 sermon on the “Transient.” Brownson made analogous charges in 1842 when he reviewed Parker’s Discourse. See EW, 6, chapter 9.]

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We have defined Christianity to be the law of the soul’s life and perfection in God, that law which lay in the divine mind, when he made man, and after which, as the heavenly pattern, he made him. It comprises the great principles of justice and love, righteousness and peace, which God has made it essentially necessary for us to possess and observe, in order to fulfil the purposes of our being; that is, to be true men. These principles are not mere creations of our fancy, but divine realities, which exist independent of us. They lie off in the spiritual world, and their dominion is identical with what we understand by the reign or kingdom of God. He who believes in these divine realities, truths of religion, is in the strictest sense of the word a believer in Christianity. He believes in what Abraham and Moses, David and Isaiah, Peter and James, Paul and John, believed in, and wherefore not a Christian then in his belief? Whoso believes these truths, lives them, that is, obeys them in his practice, is a Christian in both his faith and his life. These great spiritual realities are not dependent for their existence on the theories or the facts assumed to account for their revelation. They constitute the original law of the soul. Christianity is older than the cradle of Bethlehem, older than prophets and Scriptures, older than Moses and Abraham, old in one word as the divine intention to create man. Prophets and Messiahs may have disclosed it, or borne witness to it; but they have not made it. It exists independent of all the messengers who have proclaimed it, or martyrs that have died for it. It is obvious, then, that it is something different from the facts with regard to the Bible and Jesus, denial of which is supposed to be infidelity. It is independent of all these facts, for it exists the same, whether men know it, believe it, or not. It would have been precisely what it now is, regarded in itself, if we had had no Bible, no Jesus, taken as the Son of Mary; and would continue to exist precisely the same, even should the Bible be lost, and all traces of the Messiah in his humanity be obliterated; for God is the same yesterday and forever, and man’s nature is unchangeable. The relation, then, between God and man is ever the same. Then the same duties are always obligatory, and the same principles are always necessary to be observed by man, in order to attain his growth and perfection; that is, to be a man. This is not only a rational, but it is a scriptural conclusion. Paul never regarded the religion he was teaching as a new religion. He argues against the obligation of the Jewish law, that Christianity, which he calls the “Promise,” was made to Abraham, and that the gospel was preached four hundred and thirty years before the promulgation

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of the law, and was not and could not be annulled by the law.10 In the figurative language of the New Testament, it is called “the Lamb slain from the foundations of the world” [Rev 13:8]; and Jesus speaking in its name, says, “before Abraham was, I am” [John 8:58]; and John giving us its history tells us it was in the beginning with God, and that by it, or after it, was everything made that was made.11 Now, admitting this, and admitting that belief in Christianity is belief in the great truths it involves, which is the sense in which we understand belief in Christianity, there is and can be no difficulty in conceiving it possible for a man to believe in Christianity, although he should not believe in the inspiration and authority of Jesus and the Scriptures in the commonly received sense. But although the original and independent nature of Christian truths be conceded, we shall be told that without the inspiration and authority of Jesus and the Bible we should never come to the knowledge of it. So we may say that without the scaffolding, the builders could never erect the Temple; and yet the scaffolding is no part of the temple, and serves but to conceal its symmetry and beauty, when once erected. The facts supposed to be denied are no part of Christianity itself; they are at best only the economy Providence has seen proper to adopt for making us acquainted with it. If we do but become acquainted with it, it matters little by what means; nor are we sure that we are warranted in saying that it is only through the “written word” that we can come to a knowledge of the truth. How did Abraham come to a knowledge of it, and become able to rejoice and be glad in it? How did Moses, and David, and the apostles themselves come to the knowledge of it? Not through the pages of the written word, but through “open vision,” through the inspiration of God to their own souls. And why not we come to a knowledge of it, in the same way? Is all intercourse between God and the human soul broken off? Or are we less near to God than they were? But we shall be told again that we do never rise to direct cognition of the truths of Christianity themselves, the realities lying off in the spiritual world; but merely to certain accounts or representations of them made in the name of God by certain authorized messengers or teachers. The Christian truth which is the direct object of our faith is not the spiritual reality itself, but the agreement of the authorized account with it. This is a definition of Christian truth different from the one we have given. We define belief in Christianity to be 10 11

[Ed. The reference here is to Gal 3:17.] [Ed. Reference is to John 1:1-3.]

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belief in the spiritual realities themselves; they who dissent from our view, define it to be a belief that the representations, professedly given of them in the Old and New Testaments, were given on divine authority, and therefore must be exact. According to this last definition it is undoubtedly true that to deny the inspiration and authority of the Scriptures would be to deny the Christian faith. But this last definition of Christian faith is founded on a defective and therefore a false philosophy of the human mind, on the hypothesis that we never perceive the object itself, whether of the natural world, or the spiritual, but a certain idea, mental representation, or picture of it. A sounder philosophy explodes this fanciful idealism, and teaches us that it is the object itself that we perceive, not certain images of it in the mind. Hence we contend that revelation is a real revelation; that it actually reveals to us the spirit and objects themselves, and not merely communicates to us certain representations of them, of the exactness of which we have and can have no means of judging. On our view of the case, we have always the means within our reach, of testing the exactness, or inexactness of the representations; for we have a knowledge not only of what is told us concerning the spiritual world, but we perceive the objects of that world itself, and therefore can know whether they are what they are represented to be, or not. On any other view, religious faith itself can have, so far as we can see, no solid foundation. The reality of the objects of the spiritual world must ever remain problematical, and the exactness of the representations absolutely indeterminable. But we must take the reality of the objects, and the exactness of the representations on the authority of the teacher. This might answer our purpose perhaps, could we but once establish the sufficiency of that authority. If we could prove that the teacher speaks by divine authority, his authority would no doubt be a sufficient warrant of belief in all he should say. But unable to rise to cognition of the heavenly itself, how can we establish the essential fact that the teacher speaks by divine authority? By the fact that he works miracles? On the ground we take, miracles would unquestionably be a legitimate proof of the divine commission of the miracle-worker. “Master, we know that thou art a teacher come from God, for no man can do the works thou doest, except God be with him” [John 3:1]. But this presupposes in us the capacity to detect the presence of God in the miracle. The error of those who contend strenuously for the miracles is not in alleging that the miracles were performed, nor in alleging that they are a legitimate and a sufficient proof that the miracle-worker speaks by the

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authority of God, for thus far we hold with them; but in so alleging when they have denied to us all capacity to perceive spiritual truth itself. The miracles are unquestionably a branch, and an important branch, as we are more and more inclined to think, of Christian evidence; and they serve precisely the purpose alleged by their advocates; but only on the condition that we know enough of God beforehand to be able to recognize him when he appears in the miracle. “If I do not the works of my Father,” says Jesus, “believe me not” [John 10:37]. But if we have no power of perceiving spiritual truth, how can we determine what are or are not works of the Father? Grant us this power, and then the miracles are legitimate, because then we can tell whether they are wrought by the very finger of God or not. But if this power be conceded us, as it must be, or all pretensions to any rational grounds of religious faith be given up, we can go the full length of our proposition. The power to detect God in the miracle implies the power to know God; not merely that there is a God, but so much of his character and essence, as to be able to recognize his workings wherever we see them. This then implies a direct perception of spirituality, of the realities of the spiritual world. If we can know God himself, surely we can know the great principles which constitute Christianity; for they are but the manifestation of his will. Then it is possible to know Christian truth, the truths of religion, and to believe in them, independently of the “written word.” In coming to this conclusion, we depart less from what has always been the sense of the church than some may suppose. We do not find that among the early Christians all means of attaining to a knowledge of the truths of religion were supposed to be confined to the written word. “The disciples were called Christians first at Antioch” [Acts 11:26]. No one will question that they were called so with justice; and yet they had not our Christian Scriptures; and therefore could believe neither in their inspiration nor their authority. Some of the early Greek Fathers contended that the lo,goj, Logos, which inspired Moses and the Prophets, Jesus and the apostles, was the same speech, discourse, or reason of God, which inspired the old poets, philosophers, and mathematicians. The Latin Fathers by no means confine themselves to our sacred canon. The fourth Eclogue of Virgil is according to them a Christian prophecy, and they raise the Cumaean Sybil to an equal rank with Deborah and Huldah.12 12 [Ed. For the Fourth Eclogue, see Virgil’s Works: The Aeneid, Eclogues, Georgics, trans. J. W. Mackail (New York: The Modern Library, 1950), 274-75. In the Fourth Eclogue, Vergil speaks of the Cumaean Sybil predicting a Golden Age that will

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Origen even speaks contemptuously of the written word, and will not allow it to be of any authority, till interpreted by a light coming from another source, which he calls philosophy.13 The whole Catholic Church has always asserted a means of arriving at spiritual truth, beside the Bible, and even denied the sufficiency of the Bible, without an authoritative expounder, to make us wise unto salvation. Fenelon, the Quakers, and Jonathan Edwards, all assert the reality of the inner light, that the soul may hold direct communion with the spiritual world.14 All our evangelical Protestant sects hold that, in what they term “religious experience,” God speaks directly to the soul, and reveals himself to it. The church, saving a few latitudinarians and rationalists, have always borne witness to a means of attaining to a perception of Christian truth aside from the written word. We may assert, then, that in the opinion of the church generally, as in fact, a man may attain to a knowledge of Christian truth, without the written word, and therefore be a Christian though denying its inspiration and authority. So much we have thought proper to say in defense of Mr. Parker’s Christianity, even on the supposition that he denies what he is said to deny. We recognize religion under various forms and disguises, but it is always one and the same religion. There is, and there can be, but one religion, taken absolutely, because God is always one and the same, and the relation between him and us never varies. The human race has but one law of growth and perfection. The good man of one age or country is good on the same principles, by obedience to the come when the virgin gives birth to the child who will bring in the new age and the serpent will perish. Deborah and Huldah were Old Testament prophets and thus Brownson argues that the Latin Fathers appropriated Vergil’s Fourth as a Christian prophecy. For an examination of how some of the early Church Fathers used and interpreted the Fourth see Jérôme Carcopino, Virgile et le Mystère de la IVe Églogue (Paris: L’Artisan du Livre, 1930), and especially, pp. 214-18 for an index of the patristic and classical uses of the Fourth.] 13 [Ed. In On First Principles, Book I, Preface, par. 8, Origen most certainly indicates that the spiritual sense of the Scripture cannot be understood by everyone, but only by those on whom the grace of the Holy Spirit is bestowed. The Holy Spirit conveys wisdom and knowledge, but Origen says nothing of the role of philosophy in the understanding of Scripture and he does not speak contemptuously of the written word. See Origen on First Principles, trans. G. W. Butterworth (New York: Harper Torchbooks, 1966), 5.] 14 [Ed. Periodically Brownson referred to Jonathan Edwards as a precursor of Transcendentalism because of his emphasis on the inner light. After he read George Bancroft’s second volume of the History of the United States (1837), he became more and more interested in the Quaker new light doctrine. Like a number of other Unitarians, Quakers, and some Evangelicals, moreover, Brownson also became interested in the spiritualist thought of the Catholic archbishop of Cambrai, France, François de Salignac de la Mothe Fénelon (1651-1715).]

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same law, as the good man of another. The Jew, the Moslem, the Hindoo, the Chinese, the North American savage, so far as they fulfil the purposes of their being, do it by conformity to the Christian law, and are Christians in the same sense he is a Christian, who among us fulfil, to the same extent, the purpose of God in making him a man. Heaven is not so narrow a place as we sometimes fancy, nor is it peopled solely with a colony from our own communion. God is not the God of the hills only, but of the valleys also; not of the Jews only, but also of the Gentiles. All nations are before him, and “he is no respecter of persons, but in every nation whoso feareth him and worketh righteousness is accepted with him” [Acts 10:35]. They shall come from the north and the south, from the east and the west, and shall sit down in the kingdom of God with Abraham, and Isaac, and Jacob, Peter, and Paul, and James, and John, and Fenelon, and Edwards; while many of us, who have considered ourselves its rightful heirs, shall be thrust out. We cannot repeat too often that there is for the whole earth but one God, one mediator, one faith, one baptism. But we do not understand Mr. Parker to deny the inspiration of the written word. In his zeal against some exaggerated views of its inspiration, he has spoken of the Bible in terms we do not commend; but we cannot find that he has uttered a word against its supernatural inspiration. He unquestionably controverts what theologians call “plenary inspiration,” and refuses to admit that every word in the Bible, from the beginning of Genesis to the end of Revelation, is dictated by and written under the controlling influence of infallible inspiration. But this is the case in fact with everybody. Theologians may tell us that they believe in this infallible inspiration, but they deceive themselves, if they think they believe so in the full sense of the words. No small portion of the labor of all commentators, from Origen down to the author of “Academical Lectures,”15 is to prove that there is not a word of truth in numerous passages of the Bible. Common sense revolts at the plain, obvious import of more than one passage. No man can believe that the Lord literally met Moses at an inn and sought to kill him; nor that Moses actually rebuked the Lord, and virtually shamed him, if we may so speak, out of some of his hasty resolutions, as we find related in the Pentateuch.16 It is by no means easy for us to believe that the Lord repents, is grieved, angry, and rightly termed “a man of war” [Exod 15:3]. Most men, 15 [Ed. Brownson is probably referring to John Gorham Palfrey’s Academical Lectures on the Jewish Scriptures and Antiquities (Boston: J. Munroe, 1838), a book that Theodore Parker reviewed in “Palfrey on the Pentateuch,” Boston Quarterly Review 1 (July, 1838): 261-310.]

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say they what they will to the contrary, find some difficulty in admitting that the Spirit of God dictated the denunciatory part of the Psalms, or suggested certain images, figures of speech, and voluptuous allusions in the Song of Songs. No doubt an ingenious commentator may extract edifying truths from these and other similar passages, as bees may honey from noxious plants, or as a roving imagination may find images of beauty in the clouds, or the lovesick maiden see the form of her lover in the glowing embers on the hearth. But did the writer himself have any conception of the meaning we give to his words? One thing is very certain, commentators of all communions take great liberties with the Bible, liberties which cannot be reconciled with belief in its “plenary inspiration”; and so long as they continue to take such liberties they must pardon us for suspecting that their faith does not extend quite so far as they imagine. Nor is this all. By means of biblical criticism and exegesis theologians contrive, as one may say, to use up pretty much the whole Bible. One denies the inspiration of Moses, but asserts that of the prophets; another denies the inspiration of the prophets, but asserts that of Moses. Others deny the inspiration of both. One trenches most of the miracles of the Old Testament; and another two or three of the more important recorded in the New. In regard to the New Testament itself, one class of critics exclude, as interpolations, the first two chapters of Matthew, and the first of Luke. Some question the genuineness and authenticity of John’s Gospel, others the general epistles of James and Jude, the second epistle of Peter, the epistle to the Hebrews, and the Apocalypse; some deny all inspiration to the historical parts of the New Testament, that is, to the Gospels and the Acts, and others deny it to the epistles of Paul. So between them all, the whole goes, both Old and New. And yet all the writers, to whom we allude in these statements, contend for the inspiration and authority of the Scriptures as the only ground of faith in Christianity, as the only safe and sufficient rule of faith and practice!17

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[Ed. Probably references to Exod 4:24 and, among others, Num 16:13-16.] [Ed. The rise of biblical criticism in the United States is reflected in these comments. Brownson was aware of various Calvinists, Unitarians, and Transcendentalists who had accepted some parts of biblical criticism in the early nineteenth century. He had published Theodore Parker’s article on it in the first issue of the Boston Quarterly Review. See “Palfrey on the Pentateuch,” Boston Quarterly Review 1 (July, 1838): 261-310. For a good historical study, see Jerry W. Brown, The Rise of Biblical Criticism in America, 1800-1870: The New England Scholars (Middletown, Conn.: Wesleyan University Press, 1969).] 17

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The truth is, and it is useless to attempt to disguise it, nobody in reality believes in the “plenary inspiration” of the Old and the New Testaments; and nothing but a fear of consequences—not to be wholly condemned, by-the-by—hinders it from being generally admitted to be so. Men worship the Bible, as the man of Mount Ephraim did the gods which he had made and set up in his house,18 because they must worship something; and they feel that if it should be taken away— and the denial of its infallibility would be to take it away, as they view the matter—they should have nothing left; that they would be obliged to exclaim, “ye have taken away my gods which I made, and the priest, and ye are gone away; and what have I more” [Judg 18:24]? But we could reply to them, Your own soul is left; the great law of duty written as with the point of a diamond on your own hearts— and especially the great and ever living God himself, he who speaks unto all men in all ages and climes, and “unto every man in his own tongue wherein he was born” [Acts 2:8]. So be not utterly disconsolate. Ye would still have the substance left, though ye had lost the shadow. We could so reply, and with truth. The true view to be taken of the inspiration of the Bible, we presume, is that which is given us by the Bible itself. “Holy men of old spake as they were moved by the Holy Ghost” [2 Pet 1:21], and what they spake “is profitable for doctrine, for reproof, for correction, and for instruction in righteousness” [2 Tim 3:16]. It is not all of equal value; but it is all profitable to him who would approve himself a man of God, thoroughly perfected in all things. This inspiration is the moving or influence of the Holy Spirit on the hearts of good men, and therefore keeps the spirit and affections of the inspired in harmony with the will of God; but it does not always extend to words, arguments, illustrations; nor to matters which belong solely to what we may term the acquired judgment; and therefore by no means preserves the inspired from falling into errors. David was inspired, and yet he committed many sins; Peter was inspired, and yet he erred, and Paul tells us that he blamed him for he merited blame; and Paul himself, though inspired, had a thorn in his side, a cause of mortification for some moral or intellectual delinquency.19 But we shall be told that this view of inspiration places the writers on a par with all men of equal piety and worth, and really awards them no inspiration, but the natural inspiration of piety and good18

[Ed. A reference to Judg 18:13.] [Ed. Brownson is referring here to 2 Sam 11-12; Gal 2:11-14, and 2 Cor 12:7-9.] 19

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ness. Perhaps so. But in our view of the case the inspiration is strictly, literally, and really supernatural. We have contended for the power of the soul to perceive the realities of the spiritual world. This power we do not hold to be a natural, though it is a universal power. It results not from the natural and spontaneous nor the reflective exercise of our proper faculties, but is the infusion of light from a source foreign to us. The fountain of this light is not in man, is no part of man, but every man is in relation with it. We are inspired by the WORD of God, the divine speech, discourse, reason, the Logos of the apostle, which is the manifestation of God, the mediator between him and our intelligence, and which enlightens every man that cometh into the world. Now it is by the inshinnng of this divine intelligence that we are able to perceive the realities of the spiritual world, that we are capable of religion, of having a rational basis for our religious faith. Now this inshining is supernatural. Supernatural means not only what is supersensual, but what is above nature; that which surpasses all the proper powers of the being in question. Then since this intelligence is not ours, is not of our procuring, is in no way subject to our volitions, is, in relation to us, impersonal, though personal, in relation to God, who is its personality; and since it shines into us by virtue of its own laws, or, which is the same thing, the immediate will of God, we say with the strictest truth that it is supernatural and authoritative. It is true, all men in a certain degree are inspired, and therefore the writers of the Bible belong to the great brotherhood of the race; but as the inspiration is supernatural, it is also true that the Scriptures are really, and truly, supernaturally, divinely inspired. But admitting that this inspiration is supernatural, divine; it will perhaps be alleged, since it is insufficient to preserve the subjects of it from all error, that it by no means gives to the Bible that authoritative character, which Christians usually ascribe to it, and which is necessary to constitute it an infallible standard of doctrine. This is partly true, and partly false. It does not give so high an inspiration to the Bible as is usually contended for in words, but all that is ever admitted in fact. Inspiration is always authoritative to the full extent to which it intervenes. The authority of the Bible, so far as it is inspired, is ultimate in all matters of doctrine, whether of faith or practice. To a greater extent than this it is never admitted, save in words, to be authoritative. There is and can be no authority sufficient to make a man believe a proposition to be true, which does not commend itself to his own apprehension of truth. No man believes, or can believe, what he does not understand. The proposition that escapes his un-

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derstanding is, just so far as it escapes his understanding, to him as if it were not. If he understand it, and it appears to him reasonable and just, he may believe it; but if unreasonable, and unjust, he does not believe it, cannot believe it, not even if he knows that by believing it he can gain heaven, or by disbelieving it he shall incur the certain doom of hell. The Bible then never is, never can be, sufficient authority for us in relation to any proposition which we do not understand, or which does not commend itself to our own sense of right, to our own reason, judgment, and conscience. Beyond this, whatever we may pretend, whatever we may fancy, we never do believe on the authority of the Bible. Consequently, while contending, as we often do, in words, for the authority of the Bible, we in point of fact, never bow to that authority, save when and where we see it in the truth, or at least the reasonableness of its assertions, and to our apprehension, fitness and apparent probability of its teachings. Jesus tells us that to be worthy of him, we must hate father and mother, sister and brother, and our own life also.20 Does any man believe this? Does any one really believe that hatred of parents, brothers, and sisters, and one’s own life, is a Christian duty? We are to love our neighbor as ourselves. Supposing that we hate ourselves, what will become of this command? Jesus prohibits his disciples, when sending them forth, from going into any city of the Gentiles; “for,” says he, “save to the lost sheep of the house of Israel, am I not sent” [Matt 10:6]. Who believes, from this plain positive declaration, that the mission of Jesus was therefore confined to the Jews, and that God did not send him to redeem the race? We shall be told that these passages, and others like them, are susceptible of an easy interpretation, in perfect accordance with the intuitions of reason. No doubt of it. But when you come to interpretations, what do you do with the authority of the Bible? And where is your infallible standard of doctrine? The whole now rests on the justness of our interpretations, and the Bible can have no higher authority and no more infallibility than properly belong to these interpretations. Admit the plenary inspiration of the Bible, admit that in itself it is an infallible standard of faith and practice, still it can be to us only what we interpret it to mean. The Bible is to me as if it were not, till I have read it, construed it, and fixed in my own mind the meaning of its words. Who will vouch for the correctness of my interpretation, that the meaning I assign to it is the meaning with which it 20

[Ed. A reference to Matt 10:37.]

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was written? This meaning is not authoritative, and yet it is all the Bible to me. The Bible can be to me only what it means to me. Its authority then is only the authority of my interpretation of it. Just as authoritative; just as infallible then and no more, as is my mind in interpreting it, is the Bible authoritative and infallible. To get beyond this, I must have, as the Catholics have always alleged, an authoritative, an infallible interpreter. But have we this infallible interpreter? Say he is the supreme head of the church, the Pope. We trust we are not wanting in proper respect for his Holiness; but even his interpretations of the Bible can be to us only what we understand them to be; and as our understandings are confessedly fallible, what shall preserve us from misapprehending them? An infallible interpreter of the interpretations and decisions of his Holiness would then be as necessary, as an infallible interpreter of the Bible itself. Nor will it help us to leave his Holiness, and resort to councils, presbyteries, synods, assemblies, conventions of the church. Grant that the acts of these reverend bodies are infallible; yet they need interpreting; and it is no easy matter to interpret them even to one’s own satisfaction. The Augsburg Confession, the Decisions of the Synod of Dort, the Westminster Confession of Faith, the Thirty-nine Articles, are not comprehended at a glance, nor to say the least much more easily than the Bible itself.21 We must have then an infallible guide in our study of them, or we may mistake their true intent and meaning. Shall we, as a last resort, take to our grammars and lexicons, and put our trust in erudition and criticism? Alas! men, fallible men, have made the grammars and lexicons, and made them very imperfect too, as many of us know by sad experience. Moreover both are constructed in accordance with the meaning put by the grammarian and lexicographer upon the very works we are to interpret by their aid. So we shall hardly arrive at infallibility through grammar and lexicography. The fact is, and there is very little wisdom or piety in seeking to disguise it, the authority of the Bible, as of all other books, addressed to the reason and conscience of men, is in its truth, not its truth in its authority. This is the ground on which we all really proceed in regard to it. It is authoritative to us, in the interior operations of our souls, 21 [Ed. The Augsburg Confession (1830) was a Lutheran creedal statement; the Synod of Dort (1618-19) reflected the beliefs of strict Calvinists against Arminians; the Westminster Confession of Faith (1648) articulated the orthodox Presbyterian standard of faith; the Thirty-nine Articles (1563, 1571) was the doctrinal formulae of the Church of England.]

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and these are all that really concern us; for these constitute the criterion by which God judges us, just so far as we have within us the witness that it speaks from God, that is, speaks truly, and no farther. It may be said that this is to deprive it of its character as a standard, is to transfer the character of a measure of truth from it to our own minds. If it be so, we cannot help it. God has made us as he has, and so made us that we cannot both believe and disbelieve the same proposition at the same time; that is, cannot admit and really believe on the authority of the Bible, what we reject and really disbelieve on the authority of our internal light, reason, or intelligence. This may be our misfortune, but if it be, it must be put up with, and borne with as good a grace as possible. The whole difficulty arises from the folly of man in laying claim to a measure of truth, which must forever exceed his capacity. So long as he is an imperfect being, his judgments must be fallible; and so long as his judgments are fallible, he can never make any but a fallible use of even an infallible measure. So it may after all be as well to abandon our pretensions to infallibility, and own that all our interpretations, that is, to say our judgments of truth, whether of truth as written in nature, in books, or in our own hearts, must always want in exactness all that we ourselves want in perfection. Nevertheless, we are not utterly hopeless. God does not abandon us. He is himself our teacher, although we but imperfectly comprehend his lessons. His light, which is true and infallible, shines into the hearts of all men. We may be dazzled by it, may but dimly perceive it, or may perceive it not all; yet there it shines. This is what we call inspiration, and this becomes for us the judge and interpreter of the inspiration of the writers of the Bible. Without this, we could not appreciate, could not establish, could not comprehend, nor even conceive of their inspiration. Inspiration itself, whether in us or in the Bible writers, is unquestionably infallible and authoritative. This the human race always feels and admits. The inspiration, however, in either case is only partial, and is far from extending to all matters on which judgments are necessary. So far as individuals are inspired, they of course cannot err; but beyond that point the individual is as liable to err, as if uninspired; for beyond that point he is uninspired. We do not, therefore, speaking of the entire intellectual life of any one man, claim infallibility for him, or exemption from error. So of the Bible. Up to a certain point, however, we claim it for both. Hence, up to a certain point, we claim for the human race the means of arriving at a wellgrounded faith.

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This claim we do not rest solely on either the inspiration of the Bible or that of the human soul, taken singly, but upon both combined. By the interior inspiration, we detect that of the written word, and by that of the written word, we in part, determine and limit the interior inspiration. In the correspondence of the two, in their united testimony, which is the testimony of two independent witnesses, we have our highest degree of certainty. From this it will follow that we cannot take one part or another of the Bible to be inspired or uninspired, as may suit our caprice. The witness within us, is an independent witness, independent of us, and we are obliged to receive his testimony. Such parts as he deposes to we must receive, whether it suits our taste, our wishes, desires, caprices, or not. Whatsoever portion of the Bible finds a witness to its inspiration, in the inspiration within us, we are to call inspired. The rest we cannot call inspired; but we must not infer its falsity or want of truth, unless actually contradicted by the Spirit. Then we cannot help believing its falsity, even if we would. The authority of the Bible then is merely in its truth, and its truth must be perceived and determined by the aid of the inspiration which is vouchsafed by the Spirit, as we have already shown, to each one of us. This is all the authority it deserves, it is all that it claims for itself, all that is really, in the facts of the soul, ever ascribed to it; and all, save in words, with the present constitution of the human mind, that can be conceded to it. It is all too that need be contended for, because this affords us as perfect, as infallible a measure of truth, as we with our limited natures are capable of using. But, we must not confound this interior light with mere feeling, impression, or affection of the sensibility. Were it a mere feeling, a mere affection of the sensibility, it would be of no authority. Nothing is more variable than feeling. It is never for two successive moments the same in any one individual, and is always different in one individual from what it is in another. Reduced to this as a standard of truth, we should be obliged to take all our vague fancies, all our distempered dreams, all the incoherent ravings of fanaticism, enthusiasm, or artificial exaltation of sentiment or passion, as eternal and unalterable truths. Sentiment is no rational ground of faith. It is personal, diverse, manifold, and indefinitely variable; and if taken as evidence of truth, would make truth vary precisely as vary our feelings, as vary the feelings of different individuals; being one thing with one man, another thing with another, one thing this moment, and a totally different thing the next.

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By inspiration we must understand light, not sentiment. Sentiment often, perhaps always, accompanies it; but is never it. Inspiration belongs solely to the intellect. It is the inshining of the divine logos, or intelligence, and is impersonal and independent in relation to us, personal and dependent in relation to God. God is its personality, as we are the personality of our own thoughts. It is then like the divine will, without variableness or shadow of turning. It may be termed, as we have sometimes termed it, the spontaneous activity of the reason; but only when reason is taken absolutely, as God’s reason, and not as man’s. It is to be known by its character of uniformity, fixedness, and universality, making it the same at all times, in all places, and with all individuals; and especially by the tone of authority with which it always speaks, commanding at once our assent, and making us feel that no man can resist it without blame, and therefore that we have a right to require all men to assent to it. It will be perceived by this that we avoid the danger to which it is often apprehended that we should be exposed, were we to rely on this inward light. They who object to it confound it with an affection of the sensibility, and regard it as a mere vague, indeterminate, inward impression. In this sense it would be liable to all the objections usually urged against it. But by distinguishing it from feeling, which it is not, by bearing in mind that it is the inshining of a light which is itself without variableness or shadow of turning, we may see that it must be uniform and stable in its judgments, and that, taken as a rule for determining what is from God, whether the question be of ourselves, nature, or the written word, it must lead to results uniform and stable, in proportion to the sincerity and faithfulness with which it is applied. More than this, we presume, it will not be contended that imperfect, limited beings, like us, can under any circumstances aspire to. The true light may shine, but if the organ of vision be not properly used, or if it be imperfect in itself, the objects on which it shines will be but imperfectly seen. We pass now to the last branch of our subject, namely, the person, character, and authority of Jesus. So far as the authority of Jesus, regarded in his humanity, that is, as a man, is concerned, what we have already said will suffice. The remarks, we have made on the authority of the Bible writers, are as applicable under this point of view to him as to them. His authority as a teacher is in the truth of his teachings; that is to say, the authority which we always ascribe to truth. Once satisfied that a proposition is true, we are satisfied of its authority. All truth is authoritative, and we never seek, as we never need an authority back of truth, to sustain or enforce its obligation.

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The authority of Jesus is the truth then of what he taught; and the truth of what he taught is to be ascertained and determined in precisely the same way that we have pointed out for ascertaining and determining what is, and what is not inspiration in the Bible; to wit, by the inspiration made immediately to our own souls. “If I do not the works of my Father, believe me not” [John 10:37]. “Why even of yourselves judge ye not what is right” [Luke 12:57]? This is the rule which he himself lays down, and which we, who admit his authority, are bound to follow. The person and character of Jesus have been the subject of so much controversy, and are surrounded by so many associations, holy and unholy, that it is no easy matter to disentangle them, and present them in a true light corresponding to our intimate convictions of truth and the records of the Evangelists. One is almost at a loss to determine what is, or what has been, as well as what should be, the belief of the church in regard to Jesus. We think, however, that we are safe, in saying that the church universally, with some insignificant exceptions, regards Jesus, as a twofold being, fulfilling the office of mediator between God and man, and by virtue of this fact, the Redeemer and Savior of the world. In the sense of the church, he is 1. A man, a proper and complete man, as much so as any other human being, and made like unto his brethren, partaker of flesh and blood like them, and subject to all their infirmities, sin excepted. 2. He is truly and properly God, very God of very God, and therefore the one living and true God. In this sense, all that may be affirmed of God may be affirmed of him. 3. He is the union of the divine nature and of the human, of both natures in their completeness and entireness, a mysterious union, which though intimate, yet leaves both natures distinct, without any intermingling or confusion of essence. 4. It is in this union, that is, as God in mysterious union with humanity, that he is the mediator between God and man, and the Redeemer and Savior of mankind. Viewed solely as God, he does not save, nor viewed solely as man; but in his character of the union of the two. These statements comprise, we believe, the whole faith of the orthodox church on this article of the creed; at least so far as after a diligent study we have been able to collect it. Now, if we examine attentively these four statements, we shall find that the essential points involved are, 1. God was really and truly in union with humanity in the man Jesus, without, in consequence of that union, ceasing to be God; and 2. That it is God, in his mysterious union with humanity, that is in fact our Redeemer and Savior.

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Now, if we take the name Jesus, as expressive of this union, then to deny the proper Divinity of Jesus will be heresy; and if we take the name Jesus to signify merely a man, and still regard him as the Savior, it will also be heresy; because it will be ascribing to man what the church affirms is true only of God in mysterious union with man. From this it follows, what we suppose will not be disputed, that in the belief of the church, Jesus always stands, when contemplated and reverenced as the Savior of the world, for God in his connection or relation with humanity. God, in this connection, is word become flesh, or God incarnate. Jesus is, then, as to his Divinity, the Logos of the apostle, and is, therefore, according to the church, distinguishable, though not separable, from God, as the reason of a man may be conceived of in distinction from the man himself. Viewed in this sense, he may be said to be generated, for the idea of God logically precedes the idea of his reason or discourse; but, as the idea of God without reason, that is to say, the idea of an irrational or unintelligent God, is inadmissible, the idea of the eternal generation of the Logos must be asserted. Though an eternal generation, still the Logos may be conceived of as generated. Then we have first, God unbegotten, ungenerated; and second, God begotten, generated, who in mysterious connection with humanity is the mediator. God thus united is not dead, inactive, but efficacious, and his efficacy in this union is God the Holy Ghost, or third person of the Christian theodicy. But God in his connection with humanity is identical with the Absolute God, is in fact the one living and true God, merely considered in a special relation; of course the efficacy proceeding forth from him in this union, and therefore said in the schools to proceed forth from both the Father and the Son, God ungenerated, and God generated, is the power or efficacy of God himself. Hence, the three are strictly and absolutely one. Thus far the church. But in all this it is plain to be seen that it is always God in his connection with humanity, “God manifest in the flesh,” that constitutes the real Savior; and the identity of God in this sense, whether viewed merely in the simple connection itself, or in the efficacy resulting therefrom, with the one living and true God, is that which the church insists upon, and will not suffer to be called in question. We may now then determine at once, what it is we must admit in order to escape the charge of heresy on this article of the Christian faith. It is simply what we have said, 1. that God is really united with humanity, 2. and from this union results the efficacy that redeems and saves us.

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Now, we must not suppose, however the church may have expressed herself, that it is necessary to ascribe to God, viewed in this mysterious union, a separate personality, from God the unbegotten.22 Indeed, the church prohibits us from doing anything of the sort, by commanding us to assert the absolute identity of God in this relation with the one living and true God. To ascribe to God manifest in the flesh a personality distinct from that of God not so manifest, would be to assert two Gods instead of one. Hence, the church, though adopting for convenience’ sake the word person, has always felt, and always admitted, that it was not strictly applicable. God thus manifest is unquestionably a person; but his personality is the one personality of God. So the Holy Ghost is unquestionably a person; but not a separate personality, but the one personality of the infinite and ever-living God. This must be the real meaning of the church, for she has never admitted three Gods, but has always asserted that there is one God, and only one God.23 We may now proceed a step farther. We have ascertained that God in his connection with humanity is still God. He then loses by this connection nothing of his Divinity. Then, when we assert the proper Divinity of Jesus, we do but assert the proper Divinity of the Divinity itself; for then we take the name Jesus for God, and not for man. God manifest in the flesh is God, strictly, absolutely God. This is what is meant by the proper Divinity of Jesus. Now nobody believes that Jesus, taken as a man, in his humanity, is this one absolute God. Jesus, in the sense in which he is man, is not God; nobody ever pretends that he is. Suppose then we separate in our minds, and in our speech, Jesus as a man, from Jesus as God, wherein would be the heresy? In his humanity, he was not God; nor did he by his union with God lose his humanity, or any portion of his humanity. This the church asserts, in asserting his proper humanity, on which she insists as strenuously as she does on his proper Divinity. Then in his humanity Jesus was a man, a proper man, and may be thought of and 22 [Ed. Brownson leaves out of his view of orthodoxy the understanding of the hypostatic union of the divine and human natures in the person of Christ. Either he does not understand or does not accept this view of orthodox Christian theology.] 23 [Ed. Brownson has a modern, post-Cartesian, understanding of person, as a self-conscious and free center of identity; he does not have the traditional understanding of person as the principle of individuation or an individual substance of a rational nature. In traditional Christian understanding the three persons in one God are not three active subjects, each with its own fullness of knowledge, freedom and life, or three independent centers of self-consciousness.]

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spoken of, as we would speak of any other man of equal piety, worth, and goodness, providing such other man can be found. But what! Have we started with the orthodox doctrine of the church, and run into the Unitarian heresy? Not by any means. The heresy of the Unitarian does not consist in his asserting that Jesus was a man, literally and truly a man; but in taking Jesus, in his character of a man to be the Redeemer and Savior of the world, in resting thus upon an arm of flesh, and ascribing to man the glory due to God alone. This is precisely the charge, which the church has brought against Unitarianism, and on which she always and everywhere insists. In this sense, as a man, Jesus is no more the Savior of the world than any other great and good man; and this again is precisely what Mr. Parker has asserted in the passages of his Discourse concerning Jesus, to which exceptions have been taken. He spoke of Jesus as a man, and as a man only, and viewing him in his simple humanity, he denied that he was the Redeemer and Savior of the world, precisely as all the Christian world, with the exception of the Unitarians, always have done, and continue to do. But is not Jesus, by virtue of his connection with the Divinity, really and truly the Redeemer and Savior of the world? Not at all. God, we have determined, by virtue of his connection with humanity is the Savior. This is the essential point in the creed of the church. It is God become man, that is, God manifest in the flesh, that saves; not man become God, or man in union with God. The whole history of the controversies on this article of faith proves it. To deny this, to assert that it is the humanity by virtue of its relation with Divinity, that mediates, redeems, saves, is to fall into the precise error of the Unitarians, to rely on an arm of flesh, and to ascribe the glory of our salvation to man. Jesus then, viewed simply in his humanity, is not our Savior, is but simply one of the numerous ministers of God’s providence in the education of the human race. This is the real sense of the church, though not very obvious, because she has seldom regarded Jesus in his humanity alone. She has understood, by the Jesus of whom she has spoken, not Jesus the man, but Christ the Lord, God incarnate, or in his relation with humanity. This is the Jesus that mediates, redeems, saves. But Jesus in this sense is God, the one living and true God. This the church has always declared it heresy, even “damnable heresy,” to doubt. Then it is God, not man, that saves, according to the church. Then it is, as we say, the sense of the church, that Jesus as man, in his humanity, is not the Savior. Mr. Parker, then, in the view he has given us of Jesus—for it is not of the Savior,

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but the man Jesus, that he speaks—is guilty of no heresy, but is true to the sense of the church, as far as he goes. As Christians, however, our minds should be fixed on Christ the Lord, and not on Jesus the mere man. By Christ the Lord, we understand the one living and true God in his connection with humanity, that is, God manifest in the flesh. This is the living Christ, which was to be with us unto the end of the world, our advocate with the Father, the wisdom of God, and the power of God unto salvation. This is the Christ that appeared to Paul, the Christ which was ere ever the world was, the same yesterday and today and forever. This too is the Christ the church celebrates in her hymns, to whom she erects her altars, and on whom she relies with a faith that overcomes the world. But Christ, in this sense, is one with God, is God, in the strictest sense of the word, only not God abstracted from humanity, placed off in the unapproachable depths of eternal night and silence, but God brought near to us, living and manifesting himself in relation to human nature itself. The difficulties many have felt on this point arise from supposing that the mysterious union of the divine and human natures was true only in the case of one man, Jesus of Nazareth. But the union we recognize there is but the type of the union, which exists between the two natures everywhere. The church admits this, for she always calls it a union of the two natures, of Divinity with humanity, never, in reality, so far as we can perceive, a union of God with one individual only. His union with one individual would have been the redemption of that individual only; but the redemption for which the church contends is always a redemption of the race. This is the secret of her doctrine of a federal head, in which Jesus stands at the head of redeemed humanity, as Adam did at the head of fallen humanity. It is the sense of Paul when he says, “as in Adam all die, even so in Christ shall all be made alive” [1 Cor 15:22]; and “as we have borne the image of the earthy, so shall we bear the image of the heavenly” [l Cor 15:49]. All Scripture, bearing on the point, plainly teaches, and all Christians really believe that we may become united with God as Jesus in his humanity was, be sons of God in the sense in which he was a son of God, and joint heirs with him of the heavenly inheritance.24

24 [Ed. Brownson makes the hypostatic union universal and denies its uniqueness. He does not distinguish the hypostatic union from the union with God by sanctifying grace. What Brownson asserts here was not, of course, what all Christians believed.]

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John, in writing the history of the Logos, in its special union with the Son of Mary, begins by asserting, first, its identity with God, and then, that it is the life and light of men, and not only light but the true light which lighteth every man that cometh into the world; warning us, therefore, not to infer from the fact that he is about to treat specially of its union with humanity in one individual that it is united with that individual only; for it is the life and light of all men.25 This is the great, the crowning truth of the gospel. It is the 25

The meaning of this proem [Ed. Brownson refers to John 1:1-14] often escapes us, in consequence of our not attending to the particular design of the Apostle in writing it. It is not only an appropriate introduction to the gospel history, which John proposed to write, but a complete, though brief, summary of what we may term the Christian Theodicy; and is stated in the form it is for the double purpose of presenting a true Theodicy and negativing a false. The translation of the Greek term lo,goj in our common version is by no means felicitous. The lo,goj is not a person, or u`po,jta.jij, separate from the being or personality of God; nor is it the word of God, except in a highly figurative and poetical sense, or in a sense nearly related to that in which some of our old writers use the word discourse; but is properly the reason or intelligence of God; or, if you please, God viewed as reason or intelligence, in distinction from God viewed as pure essence, and God viewed as pure cause, force, or power. In the philosophy of the time in which the Apostle wrote, God as reason or intelligence was below and subsequent to God as pure essence or being. This notion the Apostle negatives, for according to him evn avrch/ h=n o` lo,goj. God then, as pure essence, possessed reason, or was, as we say, intelligent. His intelligence or reason is as primary as his essence, kai. o` lo,goj h-n pro.j to.n Qeo,n. If God, as pure essence, is intelligence, then God as pure essence, and God as intelligence, are absolutely identical, one and the same, kai. Qeo.j h-n- o` lo,goj. The Apostle in this first verse asserts, as we understand him, the co-existence, coeternity, and absolute identity of God viewed as Logos, reason, or intelligence, with God viewed as pure essence. “The same was in the beginning with God.” This is a reiteration common to the style of this writer; and is as much as to say, Do not therefore in your minds separate the reason of God from God himself. He is primarily, in his very essence, reason or intelligence, and therefore let him be such in your conception of him. “All things were made by him; and without him was not anything made that was made.” This refers to nature, or the sensible, material universe, and asserts first, the identity of God as power, cause, or Creator, with God as reason or intelligence; and, second, that nature herself is made by or after the principles of the divine reason. God as force, as Creator, especially of the material world, was at the time separated from God as pure essence, and sometimes even from God as intelligence. The Apostle in the first verse identifies reason taken absolutely with God as pure essence, and now in this third verse, identifies God as force or Creator of the world with God as pure essence and absolute reason. The Creator of the world then is God in the first degree, not in the second degree, as Philo [Ed. Philo (c. 15 B.C.-c. 50 A.D.) was a Greek-speaking Jewish philosopher in Alexandria. He was the most important representative of Hellenistic Judaism in the Diaspora.] and some others seemed to teach; nor in the third degree, as was subsequently taught by the Alexandrians, if not even then. But, if God be primarily, in his very essence,

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__________________________ both cause and intelligence, then it follows that he must create the world according to the laws, principles, or suggestions of absolute intelligence. Then the outward world is constructed according to rational laws, rests on a rational basis, and corresponds to the divine intelligence or reason. The phrase di. auvtou/, according to this construction, must not be taken in a causative sense, as cause efficient, nor as cause instrumental. According to the uniform tenor of the Bible, God is the direct and sole creator of the world. He delegates the work of creation to no subordinate agents, and uses no instruments but his own will. He willed and it was; commanded and it stood fast. When, therefore, we say God created all things by the Logos, we must mean that he created all things according to the ideas or suggestions of his own infinite and unerring reason. “In him was life.” The Apostle has considered the Logos in relation to God, or in itself; and in relation to nature, of which he declares it the type, model, and basis; he now proceeds to consider it in relation to humanity; and here he finds it is LIFE. “In him,” that is, in the Logos; but the Logos is God; therefore, in God is our life, harmonizing with Paul, who says “in him we live, and move, and have our being”[Acts 17:28]. “And the life was the light of men.” We live in God as absolute intelligence. Then our life is the life of intelligence, or is a living intelligence. Then it is light, kai. hv zwh. h=n to. fw/j, “the life was the light of men.”* All men share this life, all live in this intimate union with God as absolute intelligence. Then this life is not only Light, but must be to. fw/j to. a`lhqino,, “the true light which lighteth every man that cometh into the world.” We cannot proceed to comment on each separate portion of this remarkable proem. Our view of it will be easily gathered, when we say, the design of the Apostle in his Gospel, is to give us the history of the Logos in its special union with a particular individual. He introduces his history, therefore, by considering the Logos, 1. In itself or in its relation to God, the Absolute; 2. In its relation to nature; 3. In its relation to humanity in general; 4. In its relation to prophets and others who had borne witness to it; and 5. In its relation with Jesus, of whom he was specially to treat. This is a very natural, harmonious, and even artistic method of arriving at his subject. Under the first relation, he asserts the identity of the Logos with the absolute God; that is, considering the views he proposed to negative, he asserted that God is primarily and essentially reason or intelligence. Under the second relation he asserts that God, as absolute intelligence, is the author of the outward visible universe, and, therefore, must have created it after a rational type, or the principles of absolute intelligence. Under the third relation he asserts that God is our life; that is, God, as we have found him, primarily and essentially intelligence; therefore our life itself is intelligence, or light; and, therefore again, God is the true light enlightening all men, for all live the same life of intelligence. True, all do not perceive this light, but that does not prevent it from shining or from being light. Verse 5. Under the fourth relation he teaches us that the prophets, all of whom were until John the Baptist, the last prior to Jesus, and therefore standing as the résumé of them all, have indeed borne witness to this light, without giving us full and adequate conceptions of it. But now, as under the fifth relation he teaches, the divine reason itself has been manifested in the flesh, so clearly, so completely, that we may be said to have seen it in its absoluteness, as it exists in the bosom of the divine consciousness, full of grace and truth. Verse 14. This full manifestation is the subject of the history itself. Commentators have erred, as it seems to us, not in ascribing personality to the Logos, but in ascribing to it a separate personality from that of God; which is

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_________________________ an error of the same nature with that of considering a man’s reason a separate personality from that of the man himself. The design of the Apostle was, unquestionably to assert the identity of the personality of the Logos with that of God, to deny utterly the notion that it was a distinct hypostasis. They have also erred in considering the Logos to be the reason or wisdom of God personified. The first is the error of some Trinitarians, the last of some Unitarians. Both errors have resulted from confounding the Logos with Jesus viewed solely in his humanity. The Logos is not Jesus in his humanity, nor the personality of Jesus as a man; but God in his mysterious union with humanity. And this error grows out of another, contradicted in the 4th and 9th verses, that of supposing that the union of the Logos with humanity is only a special union with human nature in the person of one individual, whereas that special union is only a type of its union with human nature in general. Our readers will do well to consult on this subject, Mr. Andrews Norton’s Statement of Reasons (Boston, 1833), 229-50. A work which, as a whole, we are far from approving, but which throws considerable light on this particular passage of Scripture. We must say, however, that Mr. Norton does not seem to us to have caught the precise character of the Platonic and Neo-Platonic philosophies, which it is necessary to consult, in order to understand the probable design of the Evangelist. We think that he supposes these philosophies to ascribe creation to the Logos in a more absolute sense than they really do. They all virtually harmonize, notwithstanding some discrepancies, more apparent than real, in considering the Logos to be the creator of the world, only in the sense of furnishing its type, model, or plan, as the reason of the architect furnishes him the plan of the building which he proposes to construct, and which he follows in its construction. Their error consisted in sometimes, apparently at least, thinking and speaking of the Logos as if it were a distinct hypostasis from that of God taken as pure being. Mr. Norton is unquestionably right in supposing it to have been the design of the Apostle to correct this error, and to identify the Logos with God as pure essence. But the Apostle was more intent on identifying the Logos with God in its sense of intelligence than he was in its sense of creator of the world, a sense in which it is doubtful whether it was ever really understood. The chief point to be asserted was not that God was the direct and sole creator of the world, but that he was absolute intelligence, and therefore had created all things according to the principles of infinite and unerring reason. Mr. Norton would then, as it seems to us, have been truer to the thought of the Apostle, if he had translated the Logos, the “reason, or intelligence of God,” than he has been in translating it the “power of God.” Moreover, his translation mars the beauty and consistency of the proem itself, and disconnects it from the main subject of the history. That subject we have said was the special union of the Logos with an individual of our race. But the Apostle terms the Logos, in this union, light, and therefore necessarily regards it as a manifestation of the divine reason, rather than of the divine power. In that manifestation of the Divinity the prominent facts are not creative force, but “grace and truth.” Our translation is also as favorable to Mr. Norton’s views of Christian Theodicy as is his own. We cannot conclude this note without adding that if Dr. Adam Clarke, more conspicuous for his reading than for his sagacity or sound judgment, had understood himself, he never would have told us that the term Logos should have been left untranslated. His crude remarks reduced to some coherence and self-consis-

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great truth insisted on by Paul, when brought before the Areopagus at Athens, “In him we live and move and have our being” [Acts 17:28]. Our life and our light are in God, and it is only by this intimate union of the divine nature with the human that we live, that we know; whether we speak of life in relation to the body, or life in relation to the soul, which we call blessedness. The Savior is God then; but God in intimate union with humanity. To deny this intimate union, or to deny that God in this intimate union, as manifested in and through humanity, is God, is what we understand to be the denial of “the Lord that bought us” [2 Pet 2:1], that denial which is “antichrist,” the denial that “Jesus has come in the flesh” [1 John 4:2], and also of the proper Divinity of the Savior. Now, as the term Jesus, by almost universal usage, is the name appropriated to God, viewed in this intimate union with humanity, which we may distinguish though not separate from God, viewed as pure essence, and as pure cause or force, we confess we think it not well to speak of Jesus as a “Hebrew youth” or a “Galilean peasant.” These terms are not applicable to the character believed in and reverenced by the church. The faith of the church we hold to be both philosophical and scriptural. The Savior it believes in is a real Savior, is truly divine, and the only Savior we have or can have. It matters not indeed much by what name we call him, but it matters as little to change that name. Nay, the name itself, when hallowed by the devotency, resolve themselves into precisely the interpretation we have given. He himself tells us that one of the meanings of the word is reason, and he contends strenuously that it is “no subordinate being; no second to the Most High, but the Supreme Eternal Jehovah.” Granted; and what then does it mean, but that the Supreme, Eternal Jehovah, is absolute reason, that is, reason, in itself, or as we say in his essence intelligent, intelligence in itself? Commentators would do well to put their separate remarks together, now and then, and ascertain their real import. * “Many manuscripts, versions, and fathers,” says Dr. A. Clarke, “connect this with the preceding verse, thus; ‘All things were made by him, and without him was nothing made. What was made had life in it; but this life was the light of men.’” The good doctor’s comment on this is worth nothing. Admitting this to be the correct reading, it would bring us nearer to the Platonic conception, but would not militate against the interpretation we have given. The life of the universe is everywhere in principle the same, but rises to intelligence only in man. Hence, regarded in the outward world, Plato calls it ivdea,, but in the human mind it is ei=doj. This reading is probably due to the Platonizing fathers, and therefore not likely to be the genuine one. A little knowledge of Plato, or of the later Platonists, would have saved the Doctor from many of his extravagant and baseless interpretations. [Ed. Adam Clarke (c. 1762-1832) was a Methodist preacher and theologian who authored numerous theological and pious works, among which was an eight volume commentary on the entire Bible (1810-26) that combined critical and scientific with popular and devotional reflection.]

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tions of ages, consecrated by the prayers and tears, and loves and hopes of millions of our brethren, becomes more than a name; it becomes a NUMEN, and has a power over us, and moves us when no new name can touch us. The name of Jesus is consecrated in our hearts; around it cluster our holiest and tenderest associations, all that is worth living for, or dying for; and we own that we have not the nerve to see it becoming to us as that of Socrates, of Caesar, or of Cicero. We cannot then approve of the manner in which Mr. Parker has spoken of Jesus. We see clearly enough a sense in which all he says may be, and is true; but it is not the whole truth. The name Jesus does not stand in our hearts, for the Son of Mary, but for God in his intimate connection with man, for the MANIFESTATION of that LOVE ineffable and exhaustless, which creates, sustains, cherishes, redeems, forgives, saves, and blesses us; and we would not have it dimmed or tarnished by any earthy, or merely human association. It should be to us as to the Jews was the sacred name of Jehovah. It is time, however, that we bring this article to a conclusion. In it we need not say, we have attempted to discuss freely and somewhat thoroughly, a great and delicate subject. We hope we have discussed it reverently, modestly, not lightly nor presumptuously. We have spoken out our honest thought, as clearly and as distinctly as was in our power; and we present it to our readers as the solution of several theological difficulties, which have tormented us for years, and which we doubt not have troubled not a few others. We may not have seized the precise thought of the sacred writers; if we have not, our failure is owing, neither to our want of reverence for them, nor to our want of diligence and fidelity in the study of the records they have left us. But, however this may be, we have full confidence that the God of truth will suffer neither our own nor others’ errors to proceed so far as to thwart his benevolent purposes, or seriously to endanger the prosperity and stability of his empire. Truth is competent to sustain itself; and we have no fears that it will fall through, though we should fail to place ourselves underneath it as its support. We can therefore witness the free and bold discussion of all questions, see even youth and indiscretion rushing in where angels fear to look, without losing our equanimity, or fearing that the world must therefore be coming to its end. Of Mr. Parker’s Discourse we have spoken as we have felt. We have not found in it a whole scheme of Christian theodicy; we have not found in it the distinct recognition of certain views of Christian truth which we hold to be essential; but we complain not of this; for we do not ask everything from a single discourse. There must always

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be important truths which the preacher must leave for other discourses, and we have lived too long to infer that those portions of truth, not crowded into a particular discourse, are necessarily denied or misconceived by the preacher. For ourselves we are grateful to Mr. Parker for his Discourse; he has not told us all truth; but he has told us some not unimportant truths. He has spoken out in the tones of a brave man on a great subject, as few men among us have dared to speak. By his earnestness and eloquence, he has drawn the attention of the community to that subject; and by separating it, though somewhat rudely, from the prestige which has heretofore overawed us, from the associations which have prevented the mass from seeing it in itself, he has prepared the way for a freer and fuller discussion of it than it has heretofore received. We need not say that the free and fearless discussion of all questions of vital concernment to man, both for time and eternity, is no longer a debatable matter. Whatever may be our individual views and feelings in regard to the wisdom or tendency of such discussion, it is too late to hinder it. Great problems, questions of grave import, have come up, and are laboring in men’s minds. While a low and worldly, not to say corrupt, policy predominates in the political and business world, there is in our community a deep under-current of solemn, earnest thought. Men are beginning to think as if life and death hung on the issue. We see it in our friends’ faces, we hear it in the tones of their voices, we mark it in almost every movement of the age, in almost every publication sent forth from a teeming press. Great events are in preparation. What the issue will be God only knows; but we rest serene in the assurance that all things are under the control of a wise and good Providence, who will not suffer even a sparrow to fall to the ground without his notice and permission.26 We see all around us starting up the young prophets of humanity, glowing with unquenchable zeal, and burning with a lofty courage. God speed them. But they will permit one, who has lived long in a few years, whose experience has been varied and bitter enough to teach him wisdom, who has seldom followed the advice he gives, and therefore the better knows its value, to say to them to be careful that they mistake not innovation for progress, and to bear in mind that a departure from old beaten tracks is not necessarily to be on the road to truth. Let them be brave, be manly, free, and faithful to the intimate convictions of their own souls; but let them also remember that the world has existed many years, and not altogether in vain. 26

[Ed. A reference here to Matt 10:29.]

18. BANCROFT’S HISTORY 1 Boston Quarterly Review 4 (October, 1841): 512-18

Our official relations with the author of this History have heretofore rendered it indelicate for us to speak of the work in terms suitable to its merits. We were also too desirous of witnessing its unbounded success, to be found commending it, when all the world were clamoring against us. But as those relations have ceased to subsist, as the public clamor against us is subsiding, and as there is no danger, in this community at least, that Mr. Bancroft will be held responsible for our heresies, we are now free to speak as we think and feel. We would not write so foul a libel on our own judgment and taste, as to say that we do not fully coincide with the high and flattering opinions, which have been almost universally expressed of this History, both at home and abroad. It deservedly ranks, we will not say the first, but among the very first historical productions of the age, and of an age peculiarly rich in historical productions, so rich, and so original in its point of view, that it may almost be said to be the first age that has ever really written history. It is, with the exception of Mr. Prescott’s admirable work on Ferdinand and Isabella,2 the only really historical work this country has produced. Of all species of composition History is the highest and most difficult, requiring the highest order of genius, and the most various and varied qualifications and acquisitions. The historian must judge all, and therefore know all—philosophy, art, science, religion, politics, industry, and know them in detail as well as in their generality; or else he will give us a mere chronicle of events, as remote from true history as barren of instruction and interest. Mr. Bancroft possesses the requisite qualifications of an historian in an eminent degree. He combines in his work the splendor of Gibbon, the erudition of 1 [Ed. Brownson’s review of George Bancroft’s History of the Colonization of the United States, Abridged edition, 2 vols. (Boston: Little and Brown, 1841).] 2 [Ed. William Hickling Prescott (1796-1859), History of the Reign of Ferdinand and Isabella, the Catholic, 3 vols. (Boston: American Stationers’ Co., 1838).] 612

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Heerlen, the philosophy of Guizot, the graceful and winning narrative of Thierry, the life and movement of Thiers, and a warmth of feeling, a poetry of description, and a picturesqueness of expression peculiarly his own.3 The portions of his work, aside from his descriptions of natural scenery and sketches of individual characters, which strike us as most felicitous in execution, are those in which he gives a general view of the march of ideas and events in the old world, connects them with, and shows their bearing on American history. In these he shows that he has studied general history, not less successfully than he has the history of his own country. In this, he has pursued the true method. No man can, properly speaking, write the history of any one epoch, or of any one country, without having studied profoundly the history of the world, ascertained the general march of mankind, and the position occupied in the general development of the race by the particular epoch, or the particular country of which he proposes to write. We regard it as a high merit in Mr. Bancroft’s History that it is written under the profound conviction that humanity, in its progress through the ages, is developing and realizing a grand providential idea, plan, or purpose. Each age, each nation has its especial mission assigned it in advance, in the grand scheme of divine providence, a scheme which embraces all its ideas and events, from the most comprehensive to the most minute. This country has its idea, and its mission. Its idea is liberty, not of the king, the hierarch, the noble, the merchant-prince, but of man, under both his spiritual and his material relations. Its mission is the practical realization of liberty in this broad sense for the human race. Hence with us all events are significant or insignificant according to their bearing on liberty. Following out this idea, Mr. Bancroft groups all the details of our history around the idea of liberty, at greater or less distances, according to their relative influence in advancing or 3 [Ed. Edward Gibbon (1737-94), an Enlightenment historian of the late Roman empire, was renowned for his Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire (7 vols., 1776-88). Arnold Hermann Ludwig Heerlen (1760-1842), a German historian and author of, among other works, A Sketch of the Political History of Ancient Greece, trans. George Bancroft (Oxford: D. Da. Talboys, 1834). François Pierre Guillaume Guizot (1787-1874) was a French historian whose Histoire générale de la civilisation en Europe, depuis la chute de l’Empire romain jusqu’a la révolution Français (Paris: Pichon and Didier, 1828) was widely read in the United States throughout the nineteenth century. Augustin Thierry (1795-1856) was a French romantic historian, known particularly for his Histoire de la conquête de l’Angleterre par les Normands, 3 vols. (Paris: Didot, 1825). Louis-Adolphe Thiers (1797-1877) was distinguished for his Histoire de la révolution française, 10 vols. (Paris, 1823-27).]

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retarding its progress. In this way he renders our history really instructive, and reproduces it in its epic character. In this way he secures that unity and order in his narrative, which would otherwise be wanting, in an account of the establishment and growth of a large number of scattered and independent colonies. Mr. Bancroft not only writes his history under the influence of the true American idea, but he takes that idea in a large and generous sense. The freedom, he loves and pursues with the unwearied assiduity of a true lover, is freedom of mind, and freedom of the people. He says with Descartes, cogito, ergo sum, I am sovereign of my thought; no man can touch it, and whosoever would restrain it, or infringe its free and honest utterance is no true man. The freedom of the people is the natural result of freedom of thought. For if every man have that within him, which no man may control, if in fact every man is within the sphere of his own being a sovereign, then the freedom of all, which is nothing but the sovereignty of each, must be recognized. Thus far, we can speak; in terms of unqualified praise of Mr. Bancroft’s History. But we either see or seem to see a view implied in his conception of the freedom of the people, which we hold to be unsound, and even dangerous. He does not seem to us to keep always distinct in his mind the wide difference there is in reality, between the freedom of the people as the body politic, as a commonwealth, and the freedom of the people as individuals. He therefore welcomes always whatever tends to enlarge the power of the people in their collective capacity, as an event auspicious to liberty. But, on this point, he has rather followed out the abstract idea of democracy, as the student conceives it in his closet, than the idea of democracy as it is conceived and limited by the wise and practical statesman. No friend of liberty, in Mr. Bancroft’s or in any worthy sense of the term, can be a democrat, except when democracy is defined to be a form of government, which secures to each and every member of the community the free and full enjoyment of all his natural rights. A pure democracy, which is nothing but the unlimited freedom of the people as the commonwealth to do whatsoever it pleases, can never secure this end. It is an absolute government, as much so as an absolute monarchy, and in our judgment not a whit better, if even so good. In an absolute democracy, such as Mr. Bancroft seems to us to contemplate, where the people are absolutely sovereign, with none but moral limitations to their power, the stronger interest will always command a majority of votes, govern the government, and therefore through the government have always the means of strengthening and perpetuating itself. The government will always be made the instru-

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ment for protecting special interests, and it is by protecting special interests that government encroaches on the rights of the citizen; because the favor it bestows on one part is always taken from the other parts. We need not tell Mr. Bancroft, for no man knows better than he that the great evil of all governments consists in granting special favors, in protecting, as it is called, particular interests. But what remedy has he in his democracy for this evil? He has nothing on which to rely, but the wisdom and justice of the sovereign. Need we tell him that he who lies at the mercy of his sovereign, who has nothing but the wisdom and justice of his sovereign on which to rely for the protection of his rights, is, in theory and in fact, no free man, but a slave? Mr. Bancroft may hope to remedy the evil by new elections, by trusting to the “sober second thought of the people.” But this “sober second thought” does not come till the next morning, and the Constitution had been ruined in the debauch of the preceding evening. Your sober second thoughts come too late, for they come not till the mischief is consummated. Then as for new elections, in a pure democracy, they can amount to nothing. The stronger interest always predominates in the election, and packs the legislature with men pledged to its especial protection. We should much admire to see a legislature in Massachusetts not returned by the banking, and corporation interests, or interests which banks and corporations represent. What we want is a limited democracy; that is to say, a limit to the power of the people as the state, so that the government can never get any more power than all the interests of the community fully represented, and each therefore neutralizing the other, will mutually consent that it shall exercise. Or in other words, we want some limitation to the sovereign power, so that it not only will not, but cannot, act on any matters but those of general concernment. We therefore agree with the old Federal party in demanding a limit to the democracy, but we dissent from that party in its wish to limit it by the aristocracy. We would limit it not in favor of kings, nobles, gentlemen, or simplemen; but in favor of the citizen—not against liberty, but in favor of it. We are far from saying that Mr. Bancroft does not contemplate the liberty of the citizen, as well as of the state; but he seems to us to think that the freedom of the citizen is necessarily secured by establishing the absolute freedom of the people as the commonwealth. On this point, we think, he has fallen into the mistake into which most of our politicians fall. Indeed in this he adopts the popular creed of the country, a creed from which liberty has more to fear than from all other causes combined—a creed which no man can combat without being denounced as a political heretic and which affords so

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many facilities to the political demagogue, that no man, desirous of power or place will venture to question it. Courtiers are always the same, whether the sovereign be a gilded doll in a palace, or an unwashed mob in the streets. They always study to extend the sovereign’s power, both that they may flatter him, and furnish him with the means of conferring the larger favors on them. The evil with us is becoming great and alarming, and unless some check be put to it, or some guard against its natural consequences provided, Mr. Bancroft himself may live to record in an appendix to his History, the mournful tale of the failure of our Republic to realize the hopes of its friends. We have another fault to find with this History, growing out of Mr. Bancroft’s excessive democracy. His sympathy with the people; or his devout worship of abstract democracy, leads him sometimes to cast too far into the shade the failings of those who contributed to its establishment. His account of our Puritan fathers would hardly give a reader of American History a true conception of them. His picture has the lights but not the shades of truth. In a desire to bring the Quakers into the democratic brotherhood, he has misconceived some of their real characteristics. His chapter on the Quakers is one of the most splendid chapters in English composition, but it does not give us genuine Quakerism. The inner light of the Quaker is not identical with reason, as a faculty of human nature, but with reason as the WORD of God; that is, it is the reason of God, and not the reason of man. But faults of this kind are, after all, faults which “lean to virtue’s side,”4 and spring from the sunniness of Mr. Bancroft’s heart, which spreads a rich and golden hue over whatever he contemplates. This same sympathy with the people, and desire to defend the democracy, has led him in his account of Salem witchcraft, as it is called, to maintain, at considerable length, but not successfully as it seems to us, that the prosecutions which took place were gotten up by the aristocracy, and generally discountenanced by the people. But the people at that time were firm believers in witches, and also firm believers in the fact that they were commanded by God not to suffer a witch to live. Their own earnest faith would have led them to prosecute the suspected, without any undue influence on the part of the aristocracy. Moreover the multitude are always clamorous for such prosecutions. We have even ourselves personally known them restrained from prosecuting, or at least lynching some two or three individuals for witchcraft, only through the influence of some of the 4 [Ed. Oliver Goldsmith, The Deserted Village, a Poem (London: W. Griffen, 1770), Line 161.]

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more enlightened and influential members of the community. The belief in witches still subsists to a great extent in the country. The writer of this was brought up to believe in them as devoutly as in his Maker; and we have seen more than one door over which the horseshoe was nailed to prevent their ingress. We think the prosecutions in the Salem tragedy should be ascribed to the ignorance and fanaticism of the multitude, more than to the sinister designs of Stoughton and Cotton Mather,5 and their abrupt terminus, we conjecture, was mainly owing to the fact that they were about to strike some whom the multitude honored. We confess that for ourselves we have no more faith in the maxim that “the people can do no wrong,” than we have in its elder brother, “the king can do no wrong.” Both are fictions, and neither is a harmless fiction. Men taken individually we confide in, and honor, and love; for as individuals, there are few that are utterly worthless. But taken collectively, we distrust them. The more attenuated responsibility is by the numbers there are to share it, the weaker it becomes. Unite men in a corporation and they will applaud themselves for doing in their corporate capacity, what they would shrink from with horror as individuals. Enlarge your corporation till it become a state, and you have increased the evil, not diminished it. The multitude are never the first to discover, to welcome, or to support, even the principles which make for their own salvation. Every reformer knows by sad experience that his most obstinate enemies are those for whose especial welfare he is ready to lay down his life. Jefferson had to defend his doctrines of equality against hand-cartmen, hod-men, and wood-sawers; and the same may be said of Mr. Bancroft himself. We would rather undertake to make converts to our own views concerning the means of elevating the laboring classes, in Beacon street, than in Broad street. The multitude applauded the condemnation of Socrates, they shouted “crucify him, crucify him,” when Jesus was brought before Pilate, and they were foremost to imbrue their hands in the blood of Saint Bartholomew’s Night.6 The people are always saved by the few whom they at first persecute, and 5 [Ed. William Stoughton (1631-1701) was lieutenant governor and chief justice of Massachusetts during the Salem witch trials. He believed the testimonies of those who accused the witches and ordered the sentence of public hanging. Cotton Mather (1663-1728) was a Puritan pastor in Boston (1685-1728) who became involved in the witchcraft controversy at Salem, Massachusetts, in 1692, mostly by defending the court verdicts against those accused of witchcraft.] 6 [Ed. A reference to French government’s massacre of Huguenots in Paris and other French cities on the night of St. Bartholomew’s day in August of 1572.]

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afterwards deify. This always has been, and always must be the case. We say it not, in the spirit of railing against the people, but because it is true; and to show the folly of attempting to deify the people as a collective body. Our own devotion to the rights and interests of the people, we have no occasion to proclaim; our whole life speaks, or may speak for us. But if we found the people so wise, so virtuous, so intelligent, we should see nothing for us to do by way of reform. And then how happens it that this wise, intelligent, virtuous people, whose voice is the voice of God, submits for so many ages to such universal misrule and oppression? But we are taking perhaps greater liberties than become us. We have indicated two tendencies in Mr. Bancroft’s general principles which we regret, because they are tendencies which in a community like ours are dangerous. The man here who seeks to extend democracy, except in favor of the citizen, and who puffs up the people with the notion that they can do no wrong, or who does nothing but praise them, is consciously, or unconsciously, paving the way for an order of things which will prove the destruction of all true liberty. We honor Mr. Bancroft’s democratic zeal, we honor his love of the people, and we doubt not his moral power to suffer martyrdom in the cause of freedom; but at the same time we feel that he is laboring for an absolute democracy, without check or balance, except the virtue and intelligence of the people. Against such a government we have ever warred; and we took occasion in the very first number of this journal to utter our loud and indignant protest. We are as much opposed to monarchy, and to aristocracy, as Mr. Bancroft is, and we are also opposed to all unlimited governments. But after all, these tendencies are but slightly observable in Mr. Bancroft’s History, and are perhaps implied, unconsciously to himself. We ourselves might not have noticed them, had we not found them always manifesting themselves in all his political speeches and addresses. But with the faults we have found with it, we still pronounce his history a marvelous production, and for its general accuracy and fidelity worthy of the highest confidence. We know no historical work in our language that can rank above it. It is worthy of its author and of his country. The abridgment of the History now before us, though it offers no substitute for the larger work, is still a very full and interesting History of the colonization of the United States, admirably adapted to the use of schools, and to the younger members of the community. We are glad to perceive that in abridging his work, the author has not so diluted the thoughts as to render it valueless. He seems not

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to have acted on the Peter Parley theory of adapting the thought and expression to the capacity of the child, and therefore preventing the child’s capacity from ever enlarging.7 The child should always be required to read that which tasks the mind, and demands an effort to be understood. The Peter Parley theory has produced a series of children’s books, which our grand juries should take the earliest opportunity of presenting as a nuisance. As a father we call upon them to do it. Mr. Bancroft is no Peter Parley. He gives us a book which our children will profit by reading, and which cannot be read without generating habits of thought and reflection. In the name of the fathers of the country we thank him. We are grateful always to the man who furnishes us a book, suitable to be put into the hands of our children. He confers a public blessing, and the warm, fresh hearts of the young will bless him; and we much mistake Mr. Bancroft, if he would not delight in the sunny smile and gushing love of youth, still more than in the approbation and applause of the old. We conclude by saying that we wait impatiently for the forthcoming History of the Revolution, a History to which the three volumes we have had are but an introduction. In these we see liberty clearing away the forests and erecting her dwellings; we are now to see her on the battle field. The world looks on. Let the bugles sound the charge.

7 [Ed. Samuel Goodrich wrote the popular Peter Parley’s Juvenile Tales (1836), combining morality and natural history, for young children.]

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Index of Biblical References Gen. 1:1.........................................155 1:3.............................................155 2:17...........................................582 Exod. 4:24...................................593 15:3.........................................592

Isa. 28:5.......................................270 51:1........................................359 56:10.......................................321 58:4........................................343 Jer. 10:23.....................................152 31:33-34.................................344

Num. 16:13-16............................593 Mic. 6:6-8....................................175 Deut. 15:11..................................409 Josh. 9:21.....................................314 Judg. 18:13, 24............................594 1 Sam. 8:1-10, 18.........................228 2 Sam. 11-12................................594 1 Kgs. 4:25...................................322 19:18.......................................548 2 Kgs. 18:31..................................192 Job 3:16.........................................63 18:34........................................93 32:8........................................163 38:11......................................584 Ps. 42:1........................................490 102............................................536 110:4......................................345 Prov. 15:18...................................549 19:3................................219, 313 21:27......................................549 23:26......................................177 28:29......................................549

Matt. 5:3..............................106, 217 5:8..........................................260 5:38, 43..........................105, 573 6:24........................................312 8:20.........................................452 10:6.........................................596 10:29-30..........................288, 611 10:37......................................596 11:29......................................128 17:20.......................................461 19:24..............................211, 362 20:23......................................382 21:21.......................................461 23:8........................................106 23:27-33............................362-63 23:32....................................90-91 26:11.......................................409 28:20......................................128 Luke 2:14.....................................105 2:25-35...................................107 3:5..........................................452 9:58........................................452 12:57........................................601 16:13.......................................312 16:25......................................452 17:6.........................................461 18:24-25.................................453 21:2.........................................581

John 1:1-3............................130, 588 1:1-14...............................606-09 1:9......................12, 159, 163, 283 Eccles. 1:2......................................93 1:46........................................168 3:1..........................................589 621

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The Early Works of Orestes A. Brownson: Volume V 4:22........................................260 4:35.........................................333 6:53, 58..................................582 7:17........................................260 8:44........................................553 8:58................................537, 588 10:37........................118, 590, 601 12:31......................................553 14:1-7....................................163 14:12......................................462 14:30......................................553 16:11......................................553 16:15......................................130 17:3........................................260 18:36......................................103

Acts 2:3................................162, 165 2:8..........................165, 284, 594 4:12.........................................581 4:19........................................573 5:34.......................................122 10:35......................................592 11:26......................................590 17:28................140, 148, 607, 609 20:34......................................356 23:3.........................................89 28:30.....................................356 Rom. 6:23....................................582 7:21.........................................461 10:6-8......................................128 14:17......................................170 14:22.........................................84

Gal. 1:11-12...................................121 1:16..................................................331 2:11-14....................................594 3:17........................................588 Phil. 2:12-13................................289 4:13........................................464 1 Tim. 2:8....................................343 2 Tim. 3:16..................................594 Heb. 5-7......................................345 7:1-8 .................................12, 343 7:11........................................217 8:11........................................263 13:8........................................129 James 1:25...................................217 1:27........................................341 5:1-11....................................362 1 Pet. 3:15......................................67 2 Pet. 1:21...................................594 2:1.........................................609 1 John 2:1-2.................................343 4:2.........................................609 Rev. 13:8..............................537, 588

1 Cor. 1:27...........................349, 413 2:9...........................................63 2:14........................................185 7:14............................................80 12:4-11...................................166 12:7..................................12, 283 15:22......................................605 15:33......................................510 15:49......................................605 2 Cor. 3:6.............................111, 137 6:14-15.....................................80 12:7-9......................................594

index of names and subjects A abolitionists, 27, 41, 308, 364-65, 487 Abraham, 587-88, 592 Academic Lectures on the Jewish Scriptures and Antiquities (Palfrey), 592n activism, social and political, 4 Adam, 174, 227, 605 Adams, John, 248, 486 Adams, John Quincy, 31, 486 addiction, and will power, 460-61 Address to the People of the United States (Tyler), 44, 556 n. Aeneid (Vergil), 466n, 535n affections, value of, 110 Age of Reason (Paine), 154, 316n agrarianism, 99-100, 193, 451-52 Brownson’s, 195 and infidelity, 574 and “Laboring Classes,” 31, 193 Aids to Reflection (Coleridge), 111 n. 27 Alexander the Great, 447 Alexander, James Waddel, 251n, 266 n. 16 Alcott, Amos Bronson, 2, 3-4, 13, 182n Alexandrians, 277-78, 282, 296-97, 606-07 as Eclectics, 102n, 276n, 297 almsgiving, and reform, 108 America. See United States American Revolution, 22, 200-01, 209 Brownson’s interpretation of, 225-26 meaning of, 235-50, 570-79 “American Scholar, The” (Emerson), 17 Ames, Fisher, 472n Anabasis (Xenophon), 292 Andover Seminary, 584-85 Anthony, Marc, 206 Antiquary, The (Scott), 574 anxious seat, 52, 53, 61, 87 apostles, as reformers, 314 Aquinas, Thomas, 584

Arianism, 129 aristocracy, 302, 416, 428, 616 Aristotle, 156, 161, 166 Arkwright, Richard, 292 Arminianism, and free agency, 172 art, 152 Art of Poetry, The (Goldsmith), 478 n. 4 asceticism, and Puritanism, 533-34 atheism, 6, 62-63, 70-71, 410 impossibility of, 286 and “Laboring Classes,” 31 and love, 61-63, 98 and pantheism, 540 and Spinoza, 143 and Transcendentalism, 256, 270 and Unitarianism, 532 See also infidelity; skepticism Atonement, doctrine of, 174-76, 334 Augsburg Confession, 597 Augustine, 176, 584 authority, and religion, 70-73

B Bacon, Francis, 161, 187, 198 Bancroft, George, 31-32, 332n, 357n History of the United States, 44-45, 357, 591n, 612-19 bankers, and the clergy, 354 Bank of England, 233 Bank of the United States, 249, 369, 492, 493, 557 controversies over, 305 banks, 369-70, 502-03 and consolidationists, 488 freed from government, 324 and Whigs, 238, 241-44 Baptists, and priesthood, 346-47, 353 Baring, Alexander, 578n Barlow, Joel, 198 Bay Psalm Book, 223 beauty, as transcendental, 133, 536-37 Beecher, Lyman, 584 Belsham, Thomas, 585 benevolence, and love of accumulation, 512

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Bentham, Jeremy, 379, 545 Benton, Thomas Hart, 494, 569 Berkeley, George, 258 Bible, 15, 166-67, 585, 596-600 authority of, 55, 126-27, 585, 588, 595-99 and belief, 116 as revolting book, 184 criticism of, 593 as evidence, 54-57 and faith, 593 and Holy Spirit, 594 infallibility of, 594-95, 597-98 and Jesus Christ, 130 and literature, 198, 204-05 and miracles, 59 and The People’s Own Book, 223 and priests, 320 and property, 376 and reason, 67, 73 as record of human race, 120 and sacerdotal caste, 56 and wants of the soul, 184-85 and Transcendentalism, 9-12, and truth, 117 value of, 161 See also Gospels; inner light; inspiration; interpretation; New Testament; Old Testament; revelation biblical criticism, 593 “On Biennial Elections” (Ames), 472n bigotry, 65 biography, meaning of, 49 Blackstone, William, 378, 380-84, 399 Commentaries on the Laws of England, 379n. 30, 381n. 36, 399n. 54 Blackwood’s Magazine, 303, 415 body, and mind, 450 body-work, 425 Bonaventure, 584 Booz, E. G., 20 Bossuet, Jacques Bénigne, 207 Boston Quarterly Review, 2, 39, 574 aims of, 182-96 cessation of, 181 bourgeoisie, 25 Brisbane, Albert, 391, 512 Brown University, 17, 21 Brownson, Daniel, 392n. 40

Brownson, John, 392n. 41 Brownson, Oran, 392n. 40 Brownson, Orestes Augustus and Alexandrians, 102n and Bancroft, 612 beliefs of, 334 conversions of, 63, 334 family of, 392 father of, 85 and government, future policy of, 479-504 “Laboring Classes,” 298-327 and Lamennais, 217 and Lowell Offering, 505-08 as moral monster, 393 and Parker, 13-17 poverty of, 356, 397 as proletary, 359 and Quakers, 36 and slavery, 487-88, as religious teacher, 340 as Transcendentalist, 538 and the Whigs, 470 and women workers, 505-08 and Workingmen’s party, 181-82 youth of, 69, 70 Brownson, Relief Metcalf, 392n. 40 Buchanan, James, 494, 569 Bunyan, John, 39, 223 Burke, Edmund, 205, 218n burgher class, and Whigs, 231-33 business, 25, 233, 486-88, 499 Byron, George Gordon, Lord, 292, 447, 574

C Caesar, Julius, 187, 206, 447, 610 Calhoun, John C., 1, 44, 483n, 569 and concurring majorities, 525 and paper money, 494 and public lands, 489 Calvin, John, 584 Calvinism, 9, 172, 534, 584 and Locke, 533 and Lord’s Supper, 347 and priesthood, 346-47 capital, 325, 364, 430, 446, 576 capitalists, 18, 210-12, 366n. 23, 487, 542

Index of Names and Subjects Carlyle, Thomas, 298-303 Chartism, 298 Diamond Necklace, 239n French Revolution, The, 300 and Princetonians, 268 and Transcendentalism, 255 “Carlyle’s French Revolution” (W. H. Channing), 300 Catholicism, 102, 136, 320, 584 and the Bible, 591 and Methodists, 352-53 and priesthood, 346 and the state, 351 and clerical support, 350 Catiline, Lucius Sergius, 206 causality, 73-78, 142-43, 153 causes, necessary, 280-81 celibacy, of clergy, 319 certainty, 257, 262, 599 change, 74-75, 424 Channing, William Ellery, 5, 13, 31112 “Lectures on Elevation of Laboring Portion of the Community,” 32 and “Laboring Classes,” 32, 311-12 Channing, William Henry, 300 charity, and social reform, 222 Charles I Stuart (King of England), 230-31 Charles V, 230 Charles Elwood (Brownson), 2, 5-8, 46-180 and laboring classes, 23-24 Chartism (Carlyle), 298 chartism, 301-05, 573 chastity, and religion, 151 Chaucer, Geoffrey, 198 Chelsea Marine Hospital, 19, 32 children, 384-85, 388, 435, 619 Christ. See Jesus Christ Christian Examiner, 6 Christian Fathers, as Transcendentalists, 537 Christianity, 2-3, 6, 8, 14, 21 and American Revolution, 572 and Bible, 587-88, 593-601 Brownson’s defense of, 334 before Christ, 587-88, 590-91 of Christ, 28-30, 334, 587 resuscitation of, 321-24

625 of the church, 28-30, 321, 323-24, 334 conceptions of, 581-85 defined, 582, 587 and democracy, 23, 36, 100-01, 335 and doctrines, 581, 585-86 and equality, 377 evidentiary approach to, 11, 259-60 new explanation of, 179 failures of, 102-03 and freedom, 23, 216-17 and human rights, 106 as ideal, 111, 136 and infidelity, 5 and inspiration, 162 internal evidences of, 259-60 and intuition, 590 and Jews, 122-23 and elevation of laboring class, 335 as life, 111 and life after death, 103 and the lowest orders, 456 and miracles, 261-65 and morality, 229-30 and common opinions, 183-84 as outward, visible institution, 340 and Parker, 580-611 as permanent, 580-611 and philosophy, 2, 114 as poor man’s religion, 100, 106-07 practical, and Bancroft, 519-20 as protest against priesthood, 319 and probability, 262-63, 581 and progress, 583 and reason, 178 and reform, 2, 337 and other religions, 592 and sacrifice, 175 and social change, 312-13 social character of, 5, 30 and wants of the soul, 178 and the state, 529 and system of compensations, 443 theology of, 581, 583 as transient, 580-611 truth of, 580, 588 as universal religion, 263 and great wealth, 455 and worship, forms of, 581 See also Jesus Christ; religion;

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theology “Christianity and Reform” (Brownson), 335-37 Christians, and clerical support, 354 Chubb, Thomas, 545 church, 36, 170-71, 335 and belief in savior, 609-10 Brownson’s opposition to, 320, 33840 and Emerson, 532 and equality, 377 and government, 516 infallibility of, 118 and inner light, 163 and inspiration, 163-64 as interpreter of Bible, 118 and literature, 207 outward, visible, 320, 340 and other-worldliness, 103-04 and Quakers, 357 and reason, 297 and reform, 336 See also Christianity; Jesus Christ; state; Trinity Church of England, and priests, 346 Cicero, Marcus Tullius, 55, 165, 610 civilization, 197, 226-27, 229-30, 318 Clarke, Adam, 608-09 class warfare, and “Laboring Classes,” 31, 37 clergy, 180, 321, 350-51, 355 as conservative, 351, 417-18 and Emerson, 532 and employers, 307 and reform, 101, 217, 336 and religious liberty, 119 and theological seminary, 349 See also ministry; priests; priestcraft; priesthood Cobbett, William, 34, 399 Code de Napoleon, 434 Coleridge, Samuel Taylor, 13, 111 n. 27, 268 colleges, and wealth, 412, 414-15 Collins, Anthony, 545 Colton, Calvin, 31 Columbiad (Barlow), 198 Combe, George, 110n Commentaries on American Law (Kent), 377n

Commentaries on the Laws of England (Blackstone), 379n. 30, 381n. 36, 399n. 54 Commentary on the Epistle to the Hebrews (Stuart), 253-54 common grace, doctrine of, 164, 184, 283 common sense, 185, 282-83 Common Sense (Paine), 481n Communist Manifesto (Marx), 27 community system, and individuality, 513-14 “Compensation” (Emerson), 478 n. 5 Condillac, Étienne Bonnot de, 258, 537 Congregationalists, and clerical support, 353 Corn Laws, 398 Corwin, Thomas, 494 n. 18 conscience, 28, 227, 573 consciousness, 257 conservatism, 162, 338, 397, 403-04 Brownson’s, 3 and clergy, 354 mobs of, 395 and privileges, 395 and reform, 337-38 and system of compensations, 43839 consolidationists, 486, 488-89, 490 Constant, Benjamin, 2, 5, 13, 584 n. 5 Constitution, United States, 484-85, 497, 525, 568 and concurring majorities, 525-26, 556 and laborers, 577 and Providence, 568 and reform, 41 and will of majority, 525-26, 556-58 constitutionalists, 484-86, 489 “Conversations with a Radical” (Brownson), 402-69 conversion, religious, 7, 28, 64n, 87 Brownson’s notion of, 7, 63 and the heart, 110 Convert, The, and “Laboring Classes,” 34, 42 cosmogony, Mosaic, 149-50 Corneille, Pierre, 207

Index of Names and Subjects corporations, 354, 502, 617 councils, and interpretation of Bible, 597 Cousin, Victor, 1 n. 2, 2, 9, 47, 272 and Alexandrians, 102n and Brownson, 1, 5 and causality, 272, 274-75 and Christianity, 296 and God, 279 philosophy of, 12-13, 272-97 and Princetonians, 268-69 and reason, reflective and spontaneous, 12-13, 273-74 and Transcendentalism, 255-56, 268, 272-97 covenant, new, 344-45 creation, 147-50, 278 as necessary, 147, 275, 281-82, 291 credit system, and the banks, 499-501 creeds, and true religion, 171 criminal code, reform of, 503 Cromwell, Oliver, 230, 401 cross, significance of, 176, 418 crusades, 207 currency, and governmental policy, 493-98

D Dante, Alighieri, 207 Danton, George Jacques, 293, 299, 447 David, the prophet, 166, 284, 588 death, 68, 378-81, 401, 582 debt, imprisonment for, 366n. 23, 503 Declaration of Independence, 577 deism, 14, 154, 532, 586 Deity. See God De la religion considerée dans sa source, ses formes, et ses developpements (Constant), 13 De L’esclavage moderne (Lamennais), 211n, 366n. 25 De l’Espirit des lois (Montesquieu), 381n. 37, 391nn. 51, 52 democracy, 21-22, 484, 501, 519 and Bancroft’s History, 45, 614-15, 618 Brownson’s view of, 337 and Christianity, 36, 335, 377

627 as the end of government, 519-20 and individual rights, 519 and literature, 17, 198-99, 202-03 and majority rule, 520-22 meaning of, 370, 487, 575 in middle and western states, 487 and slavery, 487 and Whig party, 21 See also Christianity; Democratic party; government; politics; state; state rights “Democracy of Christianity” (Brownson), 42 democrat, as term of disdain, 575 Democratic party, 22, 192, 474-75, 484 and abolition of hereditary property, 374 as anti-monopoly party, 371 and Brownson, 1, 190, 329, 331 and election of 1840, 21-23, 471, 473, failures of, 495 and “Laboring Classes,” 25 policy of, 244-50 See also democracy; government; politics; state; state rights; Whig party depravity, 451, 458 Descartes, René, 161, 269, 537, 614 Deserted Village, The (Goldsmith), 616n design, argument from, 75-76 despotism, 152, 228, 316-17 devil, as father of lies, 553 De l’humanité (Leroux), 45 De Wette, Wilhelm Martin Leberecht, 256 Dial, 3-4, 34 diet, and dispositions, 447-48 digestion, 447-50 Discourse on the Transient and Permanent, A (Parker), 2, 13-17, 580-611 distillers, and the clergy, 354 divine light. See inner light “Divine and Supernatural Light” (Edwards), 12 “Divinity School Address” (Emerson), 10 divorce, 514

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doctrine, Christian, 15, 171-72, 552 of creation, 147-50 as evanescent, 15, 585 and miracles, 59-60 Dod, Albert Baldwin, 251n, 266 n. 16 dogmas, of the church, 170-77 Don Juan (Byron), 292 Dorr, Thomas, 21 doubt, 50, 68, 113-14 drunkenness, 365, 460, 365, 467 Dublin, Thomas, 39 Duns Scotus, John, 584 “Duty of the Democracy, The” (Brownson), 43 n. 130 Dwight, Timothy, 584-85

E East India Company, 233 eclecticism, 47, 195, 537, 540 and Alexandrians, 102n, 276n, 297 economics, 2, 7-8, 25-26, 27 n. 78 economy, as a system, 358-59 Edinburgh Review, 303 education, 37, 385, 414-15, 521-22 and reform, 28, 369, 371, 411, 50304 and workingmen, 303-04 Edwards, Jonathan, 9, 537, 584, 592 “Divine and Supernatural Light,” 12, 284 and inner light, 591 efficient grace, 184, 283 egoism, and Transcendentalism, 27072 Eleatic school, 275, 278 elections, political, 561-62, 564, 615 Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard (Gray), 427n Elements of Political Economy (Wayland), 27 n. 78 Elizabeth, Queen, and literature, 207 Emancipation in the West Indies (Thome and Kimball), 308n Emerson, Ralph Waldo, 1-4, 17, 39, 538-39 and Boston Quarterly, 182n Brownson’s criticisms of, 4, 530-43 as clergy, 542 “Compensation,” 478 n. 5

“Divinity School Address,” 539 Essays (1841), 17-19, 530-43 “Heroism,” 541-42 “History,” 542 idealism of, 538 labor, 542 and “Laboring Classes,” 34 “Over-Soul,” 538, 542 pantheism of, 538-40 and patriotism, 542 philosophy of, 530-31, 535, 538, 541 and Princetonians, 268 “Self-Reliance,” 541, 542 exclusive spiritualism of, 540 and the state, 542 “Thoughts on Art,” 463n and understanding, 13 and workingmen, 542 emigration, 303-04, 369 empiricism, 4, 11, 189, 258, 589 employer, as enemy of working class, 303-04 England, 199-200, 207-08, 302 enlightenment, universal, 159-60 entail, 374 equality, 216, 337, 345, 372, 482 and American Revolution, 234 and Democratic party, 245-46, 24849 as goal of government, 480 meaning of, 235n, 406-07 political, 210-11, 233-34 as alarming principle, 577 necessity of the times, 310 of opportunity, 192-93 social, and literature, 212 error, as harmless, 247 erudition, and Christianity, 263 Essai sur l’indifférence (Lamennais), 215 Essay Concerning Human Understanding (Locke), 168 n. 53 Essay on Man (Pope), 132n, 138n Essays (Emerson), 17-19, 530-43 eternity, 75 Ethics, The (Spinoza), 150n ethics. See morality Eucharist. See Lord’s Supper Evidences of the Genuineness of the Gospels (Norton), 254

Index of Names and Subjects evil, 312, 451 “Excursion, The” (Wordsworth), 292 “Existing Commerical Embarrassments” (Lothrop), 439 n. 14

F Fable of the Bees, The (Mandeville), 545 n. 4 factory girl, 38-41, 307-08, 505-08 “Factory Girls,” 307n. 10, 506n factory owners, and the clergy, 354 factory system, 194, 506 factory workers, 408 faith, 59, 139, 155, 461-62 and Carlyle, 298 of childhood, 68-69 Fall, the, 72, 174, 334, 517 family, and inheritance, 391-92 fanaticism, religious, 65 farmers, and political equality, 234, 240-41 fatalism, and Transcendentalism, 270, 287-97 Federal party, 491 federalists, 485-86 feelings, 86, 110 Fenelon, François de Salignac de la Mothe, 158, 207, 591-92 feudalism, 22, 232 Fichte, Johann Gottlieb, 9, 256, 268 finite, as correlative of infinite, 135, 153 Finney, Charles Grandison, 66n Fourier, François-Marie-Charles, 193, 512, 513 Fourth Eclogue (Vergil), 590 Fox, George, 357, 537, 586 France, literature of, 207-08 Franklin, Benjamin, 214, 292 freedom, 22, 358, 571, 573-74 American birth of, 225 and Bancroft’s History, 45, 614 and Boston Quarterly, 182-83, 574 and Byron, 574 and Christianity, 572-73 and civilization, 318 of clergy, 350 as human destiny, 394-95 as goal of government, 480

629 and laborers, 364-65, 571 and Lamennais, 215-16 and mission of America, 213-14, 471 and nobility, 571 and political parties, 330 and Robert Owen, 513 political, and Transcendentalism, 257 and priesthood, 316-17 and popular sovereignty, 45, 560, 567 of thought, 247, 358 See also liberty free trade, 37, 305, 369-70 French, the, and Americans, 397 French Revolution, 187, 208, 231, 302-03 French Revolution, The (Carlyle), 300 Frothingham, Nathaniel Langdon, 586 n. 9 Frothingham, Octavius Brooks, 5 Fuller, Margaret, 3, 34, 182n Fulton, Robert, 292

G Gannett, Ezra Stiles, 13 Germany, 208, 268 Gibbon, Edward, 612-13 gifted, the, and duty to society, 469 Glorious Revolution, 22, 230-33, 544, 545 gnosticism, 9-10, 296-97 God, 158, 173-74, 288, 583 and causality, 73-78, 142-43, 540, 606-07 as clock-maker, 128-29 as comprehensible, 286 existence of, 77-78, 140-47 as finite, 173-74 as free, 146, 280-81, 290 as the Holy, 165 intuition of, 590 and multiplicity, 277-78, 539 as blind necessity, 278-79 as omnipotence of, 148 personality of, 146 and Poe, Edgar Allen, 7 and the poor, 364 as principle, 538 as reason, 607 in space and time, 536

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as spirit, 136-40 as thought, 286 as Trinity, 539 as truth, 549 unity of, 277-78 See also Infinite, the; Jesus Christ; Kingdom of God; person; Trinity Godwin, William, 148n Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von, 191, 253, 268, 299, 447 Goldsmith, Oliver, 478 n. 4, 616n good, the, as transcendental, 134, 536-37 Goodrich, Samuel, 619n Gordon, George. See Byron, George Gordon, Lord government, 30-31, 202, 369-70, 481-84 and abolition of hereditary property, 374 as constitutional, 523-24 and the individual, 518, 527 and special interests, 614-15 and elevation of laboring class, 32427 as means of moral and social good, 479, 481, 518 and nature of man, 517 office of, 478 and reform of society, 515-29, 542 and the rich, 239-40 and United States Bank, 249 See also democracy; Democratic party; politics; state; state rights; Whig party Gracchi, Gaius, 206 Gracchi, Tiberius, 206 grace, doctrine of, 184, 283 Graham, Sylvester, 447, 449 Gray, Thomas, 427n Greek Fathers, 590 Greeks, 166, 205-06 Greeley, Horace, 31 Greene, Nathaniel, 223 n. 9 Gregory VII, Pope, 230 Gregory the Great, 584 Grundy, Felix, 494 Guizot, François Pierre Guillaume, 613 Guyon, Madam, 158n

H Hamilton, Alexander, 159, 188, 23738, 491 Harrington, Michael, 37 Harrison, William Henry, 42, 395, 470-72, 520, 526n and politics of 1840, 19-20, 308 as unqualified for office, 564 and Webster, 578 Hartford Convention, 485 Hartley, David, 545 heart, 85, 110 Hecker, George, 43 Hecker, Isaac, 43 Hecker, John, 43 Heerlen, Arnold Hermann Ludwig, 613 Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich, 9, 256, 266, 279 and being, 273, 291 and Princetonians, 268 Hengstenberg, Ernst Wilhelm, 266 n. 15 Henry IV (Shakespeare), 477n heredity, against democracy, 374 “Heroism” (Emerson), 541-42 Herschel, William Frederick, 292 higher classes, 336, 362, 365, 407 Hindoo, 592 historian, the, qualifications of, 612 historical criticism, and miracles, 167 “History” (Emerson), 542 history, 187-88, 295, 612 and a priori reasoning, 293 Cousin’s doctrine of, 287-88 and laws of intelligence, 290-91, 293 History of the Colonization of the United States (Bancroft), 44-45, 357n, 591n, 612-19 History of the Reign of Ferdinand and Isabella (Prescott), 612 n. 2 Hodge, Charles, 251n, 266 n. 15 Holbach, Paul-Henri Thiry, Baron d’, 70, 532 holiness, of human nature, 517 Holt, Michael F., 20-21 holy, idea of, 158 Holy Ghost. See Holy Spirit Holy Spirit, 129-30, 158, 599

Index of Names and Subjects and Brownson, 334 and Cousin, 289 and priesthood, 348-49 Homer, 55, 163, 205 Hopkins, Samuel, 584 Horace (Quintus Horatius Flaccus), 55 House of Commons, 302 Hugins, Walter, 25 humanity, 226-27, 299, 465 human nature, 61, 273, 461, 511 and divinity, manifestation of, 149 as naturally religious, 151, 315 and society, 228-29, 511 See also freedom; human race; liberty; nature Hume, David, 142n, 258 Hutchison, William R., 9 hypocrisy, and clergy, 347-48

I idea, 134, 189 ideal, the, and Cousin, 285 idealism, philosophical, 4, 9, 189, 538, 589 of Berkeley, 258 and Boston Quarterly, 195 of Brownson, 1-2 See also empiricism; philosophy identity, and religious faith, 252 Iliad (Homer), 205 imagination, 46, 462-63 immigration, 408 immortality, 7, 91-94, 162, 334 impiety, and Transcendentalism, 256 Incarnation, and Transcendentalism, 9 individual, the, 166, 468 individualism, and nouveau riches, 360 individuality, 227, 464, 515-16, 523 and the barbarians, 229-30 and selfishness, 511 indolence, and inheritance, 389 induction, 187 inequality, 210-11, 301, 451 artificial, 235n causes of, 314-15 and human capacities, 445, 482 and religious principles, 451 as will of God, 99

631 infallibility, 118, 351, 596-98 infidelity, 51-53, 70, 112, 534 and agrarianism, 574 and Norton, 265 and reform, 216-17 See also atheism; skepticism Infinite, the, 134-35, 153, 173 See also God inheritance, of property, 30-31, 371401, 434-36 injustice, social, 94-97 inner light, 163, 591, 607 and Logos, 606-07 and Quakers, 45, 616 necessary for revelation, 15 and objective reason, 12-13 and word of God, 595, 598-600 See also, Jonathan Edwards; François Fenelon; Quakers innovation, 411, 580, 611 inspiration, 161, 189, 283, 599 correspondence of interior and biblical, 599 of the Bible, 160-61, 585, 592-96, 599-600 special, 163-70 and Brownson, 5, 334 definition of, 154-62 plenary, 15, 592, 594, 596 institutions, influences of, 513 insufficiency, sense of, 151-52 intelligence, inequalities of, 192 interpretation, of the Bible, 166-67, 585, 596-97 intuition, 130, 259, 261-62, 264-65 of the divine in miracles, 167 of God, 11, 60-61,132, 259, 263-65 and Transcendentalism, 12, 189, 297, 537 See also intelligence; knowledge; reason; sensation; understanding Irish, the, 408 Ivanhoe (Scott), 575 n

J Jackson, Andrew, 19, 369, 473, 486, 493-94 and Senate, 567 and usurpations of legislature, 560

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Jefferson, Thomas, 188, 473, 486, 617 and American Revolution, 214 error, as harmless, 247n and property, 379-81, 383 Jeremiah, 29, 216, 320 Jesus Christ, 106, 339, 451, 604-05, 617 authority of, 126, 128, 585, 600-10 and American Revolution, 572 Brownson’s views of, 15-16, 334 character of, 585, 600-10 and church, 339, 601 death of, 175 divinity of, 602-03 and equality, 451 and hypostatic union, 603n, 605n and inheritance, 382 and inspiration, 162-63 knowledge of, 101-02 leveling doctrines of, 452 and Logos, 590 as Lord, 605 as mediator, 319-20, 343, 601, 60405, 608 mission of, 115, 170, 340 name of, 16, 609-10 Parker’s view of, 600-10 and the people, 216 person of, 585, 600-10 and the poor, 409 against the priesthood, 319-20 as reformer, 314, 337 and revelation, 261 and the rich, 454 and Ripley, 262 as risen, 129-30 and salvation, 602, 604, 609 and social reformer, 105-06 as spirit, 111 and Transcendentalism, 11-2 and wealth, 211 See also Christianity; God; Kingdom of God; person; Trinity “Jesus Christ, the Same Yesterday, Today, and Forever” (Ripley), 14 Jews, 122, 166, 586, 592. See also Judaism John the Baptist, 607 Josephson, Hannah, 38-39 Judaism, 136, 204, 344, 346. See also

Jews jurists, and right to property, 375-76 justice, 227, 394, 441-42 as eternal and immutable, 145, 227 and poverty, 108-09, 365-66 as transcendental, 536-37 See also democracy justification, doctrine of, 175, 334

K Kant, Immanuel, 9, 256, 268, 274-75, 292 Kent, James, 376, 380-82 Commentaries on American Law, 377n, 378n, Kimball, Joseph Horace, 308n King, William Rufus Devane, 494 kingdom of God, 104-05, 322, 341, 587 kingdom of heaven, and the rich, 452, 454 King Lear (Shakespeare), 389n kings, and society, 228 Kneeland, Abner, 6 knowledge, 58, 60 Koran, 586

L labor, 98-99, 363, 391, 486 and capital, 364 and business, 100, 499 as means of elevation, 361 and Emerson, 542 See also capital; wages laboring class, 2, 18, 323, 306, 448-49 and American Revolution, 571 Brownson’s defense of, 181-82 and Emerson, 542 as dependents, 26, 430 elevation of, 322 in England, 301-02 and freedom, 571 as lambs, 428-29 and literature, 210-11 and destruction of priesthood, 320 and Whig policy, 240-42 See also capital; wages “Laboring Classes” (Brownson), 1, 2431, 298-327, 514n

Index of Names and Subjects and abolition of Christianity, 334-40 and Democratic party, 329-32 exaggerates working class conditions, 358-67 exaggerates separation of capital and labor, 367-401 as horrible doctrines, 396 objections to, 31-35, 328, 334, 340, 358, 367, 393-94 and abolition of priesthood, 340-58 as social Transcendentalism, 3 as untimely, 328-32 and women, 38-41 “Laboring Classes—Responsibility to Party” (Brownson), 35-38, 328-401 laity, intelligence of, 120 Lamennais, Félicité Robert de, 215-24 De L’esclavage moderne, 211n, 336n. 25 Essai sur l’indifférence, 215 excommunication of, 354 Livre du peuple, Le (The People’s Own Book), 23, 215-24 Paroles d’un croyant (The Words of a Believer), 216, 337, 361n. 18 land, 368-69, 370, 400-01, 571 as gift of God, 399 Land Redemption Society, 398-401 language, 215n. 2, 300, 549 Latest Form of Infidelity (Norton), 9, 254, 257 Latin Fathers, 590 law, 324, 365, 387 Lawrence, Abbot, 303, 307 n. 9, 368 lawyers, 94-95, 420 learned, the, and duty to society, 469 “Lectures on Elevation of Laboring Portion of the Community” (W. E. Channing), 32 Lectures on the Science of Human Life (Graham), 447 n.16 legislation, and social reform, 30-31 legislatures, and usurpations of power, 559 Leibniz, Gottfried Wilhelm von, 286n Leo X, 584 Leo, Heinrich, 266 n. 15 Leroux, Pierre, 1, 6n. 13, 45, 170n liberty, 229, 244-45, 488 as American idea and mission, 613-

633 14 and constitutional government, 524, 557, 568 See also freedom light. See inner light Lincoln, Levi, 238n literature, 2, 415, 543, 554 American, 197-214, 415 and Boston Quarterly, 195 and Brownson, views of, 17-19 See also art; philosophy; poetry Livre du peuple, Le (The People’s Own Book) (Lamennais), 23, 215-24 Locke, John, 39, 161, 533, 537-38 and empiricism, 258 Essay Concerning Human Understanding, 168 n. 53 philosophy of, 188-89, 533-34 and Princetonians, 9-10, 267 and property, 379 and sensualism, 95-96 and Transcendentalism, 255, 358-59 Locofoco, 31, 42-43 logic, and ideas, 189 Logos, 590, 602, 606-09 London Quarterly Review, 199, 303n, 415-16, 574 Long Parliament, 230 Lord’s Supper, 347 Lothrop, S. K., 439 n. 14 Louis XIV (King of France), 207 Louis XVI (King of France), 230 Louis Philippe (King of France), 231n love, 98, 227-28, 512-13, 536-37 and conversion, 81n, 85 as kingdom of God, 341 Lowell Offering, The, 39-41, 307-08, 505-08 lower classes, 336, 402 Lucianian law, 206 Lucullus, Lucius Licinius, 356 Luther, Martin, 102, 115, 187, 449, 573 lying, 546-47

M Macbeth (Shakespeare), 391n Madison, James, 379, 557 Mahometan, 586, 592

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majorities, 556-57, 559-60 concurring, 525-26, 556 Malebranche, Nicholas, 285, 537 man. See human nature Mandeville, Bernard, 545 market revolution, 21-22 marriage, 79-81, 346, 387-88, 514 and Robert Owen, 514 Marius, Gaius, 187, 206 martyrs, 352, 587 Massachusetts Board of Education, 223 masses, the, and the divine light, 15960 materialism, 298, 532, 534 Mather, Cotton, 617 merchants, 22, 354, 420, 571 merit, and class, 407-08 metaphysics, 186-99 Methodist Quarterly Review, and “Laboring Classes,” 33-34 Methodism, and clerical support, 352 Michael Angelo, 152 middle class, in England, 302-03 Midsummer Night’s Dream (Shakespeare), 536 n.5 military, American appeal of, 477 Milton, John, 39, 163, 198, 447 “To Mr. Cyriack Skinner,” 213n, 418n mind, as blank sheet, 259 ministry, hireling, 36 See also clergy; priest; priestcraft Minnesingers, 207 minorities, and government, 523 Mirabeau, Honoré-Gabriel, Comte de, 299, 379 miracles, 11-12, 57-61, 261-65, 46163 Brownson’s view of, 334, 463 meaning of, 167-70 presence of God in, 589-90 mobs, and conservatives, 395 Moliere, 207 monarchy, 214, 303 money. See currency monopolies, 248, 325-26, 502-03 Montaigne, Michel de, 543 Montesquieu, Charles de Secondat, Baron de, 381, 391

Moore, Thomas, 139 n. 39 morality, 71, 294, 515, 517 Morgan, Thomas, 545 Morgan, William, 398 Moses, 167, 409, 590, 592 and Christianity, 587-88 inspiration of, 166, 284, 593 Moslem. See Mahometan mother, and religion, 68-69 movement party, and clergy, 350 Muslim. See Mahometan Myerson, Joel, 3-4 mysticism, 4, 9-10, 87, 189, 195

N Napoleon, 299, 447, 465 National Republican party, 238n natural law, and property, 380, 382 Natural Theology (Paley), 77-78 nature, 73-78, 167-68, 224, 552, 606n See also human nature New England, theology of, 266 n. 14 New Industrial and Societal Order (Fourier), 193n New Testament, 127, 382, 586 New View of Society (R. Owen), 193n New York Review, 415-16 nihilism, and Hegel, 268 no-government, theory of, 483, 51516 nominalism, and Cousin, 285 North American Review, 415-16 Norton, Andrews, 1, 10-12, 261-65 Evidences of the Genuineness of the Gospels, 254 Latest Form of Infidelity, 9, 254, 257 Remarks on . . . “The Latest Form of Infidelity” Examined, 254 n. 5 Statement of Reasons, 254, 532-33, 608 Two Articles from the Princeton Review, 9-10, 251-97 nouveau riches, and Brownson, 359-60

O Oberlin, Jean Frédéric, 158n, 293 Oberlin Seminary, 584-85 Octavius, Gaius, 206

Index of Names and Subjects Odyssey (Homer), 205 office holders, 562-63, 565 Old Testament, and Jews, 586 ontology, 273-74, 276, 284 Oration before Democracy of Worcester (Brownson), 42-43, 225-50 ordination, doctrine of, 125 Origen, 591, 592 orphans, and inheritance, 387-88 Other America, The (Harrington), 37 Otis, Harrison Gray, 486 “Our Future Policy” (Brownson), 4344, 470-504 “Over-Soul” (Emerson), 538 Owen, Robert, 193, 337, 513

P Paine, Thomas, 31, 481n, 154-55, 218, 316 Paley, William, 77-78, 399 Palfrey, John Gorham, 592n “Palfrey on the Pentateuch” (Parker), 592n, 593 n. 17 pantheism, 18, 143-44, 150, 268 and Transcendentalism, 9, 256, 27071 paper money. See currency Parker, Theodore, 1, 2, 13-17, 580611 Parmenides, 276 Paroles d’un croyant (Lamennais), 216, 337, 361n. 18 party of fear, 251-52 party of hope, 251-52 parvenus, and Brownson, 359-60 Pascal, Blaise, 381 passions, 512-13, 515 patronage, executive, 556-69 Paul, the Apostle, 158, 160, 163, 284 and Christianity, 121-31, 587-88 Peabody, Elizabeth Palmer, 32 Peasants’ Revolt of 1381, 576 n pedagogues, and economics, 28, 31011 Pelagius, 176 penal code, and the poor, 365 Penn, William, 158, 357, 537, 586 people, the, 159, 560, 616-17 People’s Own Book, The (Lamennais),

635 23, 215-24 perfectionism, as unrealistic, 511-12 personality, defined, 279-80 person, understanding of, 146, 27980, 603, 607-08 Peter Parley’s Juvenile Tales (Goodrich), 619n Phidias, 152, 359 philanthropy, 105, 375 Philo, 606 philosophers, as workingmen, 420 philosophes, French, 258 philosophy, 47, 269, 546-47, 575-76, 591 of Emerson, 530-31 of Germany, 268-69 history of, and human nature, 115, 187, 189 Kantian, 545 Neo-Platonic, 608 Platonic, 608-09 and Transcendentalism, 267-68 See also Cousin; empiricism; idealism; Kant; Locke; Plato phrenology, 110n physicians, as workingmen, 420 Pilgrim’s Progress (Bunyan), 223 Plato, 55, 161, 165, 292, 546 and idea, 581, 609 and inspiration, 163, 166 and philosophy, 206 and reform, 193 and reminiscences, 87 plunder party, 522-23 Poe, Edgar Allen, 7 poetry, and enthusiasm, 156-58, 21213 politicians, 469, 477-78 political economy, 440 politics, 2, 19-23, 190-91, 542 and human nobility, 476 as a science, 543 See also democracy; Democratic party; government; state; state rights; Whig party polytheism, as form of religion, 136 pope, the, and interpretation of Bible, 597 Pope, Alexander, 132n, 138n Porter, David Rittenhouse, 494 n. 17

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poverty, 94-95, 99, 211, 390, 410 and inheritance, 389 injurious effects of, 397 as relative, 421 source of, 409 power, 558-60, 566, 571, 614-15 Praxiteles, 152 preaching, 124-25, 349-50, 356, 418, 551-52 presbyteries, and interpretation of Bible, 597 Presbyterians, 1, 9-10, 346-47, 353 Prescott, William Hickling, 612 n. 2 president, 556, 559, 565-66 Price, Richard, 537 priestcraft, 88-91, 152, 160-61 See also clergy; ministry; priests; priesthood priesthood, 56, 214, 314-16, 345 as a corporation, 28-30, 316, 344 destruction of, 318-19 See also clergy; ministry; priestcraft; priests Priestley, Joseph, 545, 585 priests, 94-95, 311, 318-19; 321 as civilizers, 318 and economics, 28, 310-11 as inspired, 156-57 meaning of term, 342-44 and the wealthy, 453-54 See also clergy; ministry; priestcraft; priesthood primogeniture, 374 Princetonians, 9-12 Princeton Review, 251-97 Princeton Seminary, 584-85 Principles of Moral and Political Philosophy, The (Paley), 399n. 55 privilege, destruction of, 325-26 probability, and Norton, 262-63 professors, 412, 415 progress, 210, 226-27, 294 and abolition of hereditary property, 371 aim of humanity, 450-51 and the priesthood, 315, 318 proletaries, 25, 302-03, 364, 373-74, 395 conditions of, 360 elevation of, 237

emancipation of, 240, 310, 480 and Brownson, 359 and Emerson, 542 and French Revolution, 231 property, 376-77, 379, 380-82, 434, 474 abolition of hereditary, 326-27, 371401, 444 and Blackstone, 378, 380-84, 399 cause of inequality, 444-45 and government, 369 insecurity of, 404 as sacred institution, 374 and Jefferson, 379-81, 383 and justice, 394 and Kent, 376-78, 380-82 and marriage, 387-88 and power, 37, 369, 571 right to, 37, 375-76, 378-81 and Robert Owen, 513 prophecy, and Lamennais, 216-17 prophets, 156-57, 164, 314, 590 proprietorship, 192-94, 371-74, 424, 480 Poquelin, Jean-Baptiste. See Moliere Protestantism, 102, 320 Providence, 288-90, 304, 442, 588 and the American mission, 213-14, 234-35, 237 and the American Revolution, 22, 570 and Bancroft’s History, 613 Brownson’s belief in, 470-71 and condition of laboring classes, 361-62 and confidence, 611 defined, 293 and Democratic party, 244 as scapegoat of social sins, 361-62 and inequality, 313 and literature, 209-10 and Quakers, 357 and the United States Constitution, 568 and wealth, 433 prudence, nature of, 478 Psalm Book. See Bay Psalm Book Psalms, and denunciations, 593 Psalms of David (Watts), 536 n. 6 psychology, and Cousin, 273-74, 276

Index of Names and Subjects public opinion, 52 public lands, 488-89 punishment, doctrine of endless, 173 Puritanism, 341, 533-34, 584, 616 Pyrrho, 258

Q Quakers, 45, 586, 591, 616 Brownson’s view of, 36, 357-58 Quarterly Review. See London Quarterly Review

R Racine, Jean-Baptiste, 207 radicalism, 404, 423-24 Raphael, 152 rationalism, 154, 253 Rawle, William, 528n real, the, and Cousin, 285 realism, and Cousin, 285 reason, 13, 144-45, 273-74, 285 apotheosized, 9 as authoritative, 144 and Coleridge, 13 and faith, 67 impersonal, 13, 144-45, 273-74 and the infinite, 272-74 insufficiency of, 215 n. 2 and intelligence, principle of, 144-45, 538 as interpreter of Bible and religion, 116, 118-19 and Robert Owen, 515 pure, 153 reflective, 12-13, 155-56, 283-84 and religion, 86, 183 as revelation, 157 as rule of faith and action, 9 spontaneous, 12-13, 155-56, 164, 283-84, 600 trust in, 153-54 universality of, 145 as voice of God, 157 See also intelligence; intuition; knowledge; understanding Redemption, 9-10 reflection, 259 Reflection on the Revolution in France (Burke), 205n, 218n

637 reform, 24, 395-96, 510, 529 of individual, 310, 459, 510 and inspiration, 162 moral, 465-66, 510, 529 as return to lost principles, 544 social, 94-97, 458-59, 465-66 “Reform Spirit of the Age, The” (Brownson), 42 Reformation (Protestant), 102, 187, 207 reformers, 412 Réfutation d’éclectisme, L (Leroux), 45 regeneration , 72-73, 176-77, 334 Reid, Thomas, 537n religion, 86, 136, 183, 151, 548 as cause of inequality, 314-15 experimental, 163, 185 fundamental elements of, 135 and Emerson, 532 and human nature, 132 and idealism, philosophical, 2 as innate, 513 and the invisible, 550 and Lamennais, 215-16 and oppression, 216 and the permanent, 252 and poetry, 68-69 and social reform, 96, 570 n, 335 as revealed, 6 reverence for, 269-70 and society, 451 and suppression of lower orders, 451 and truth, 548, 550 unity of, 591 See also Christianity; democracy; philosophy The Religion of Nature Delineated (Wollaston), 544 religious culture, and reform, 371 religious experience, and Evangelical Protestants, 591 religious freedom, and ecclesiastical tyranny, 119 religious instruction, 320 religious sentiment, 134-36, 151 Remarks on a Pamphlet Entitled “The Latest Form of Infidelity” Examined (Norton), 254 n. 5 republicanism, 442, 575 Republicans, as consolidationists, 486

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Resurrection, doctrine of, 128, 169-70 retribution, and Brownson, 334 revelation, divine, 53-57, 73, 130, 167-68 and inner light, 15 as spontaneous inspiration, 156, 586 and intuition, 11 and Norton, 260-61 reception of, 15, 582 and Transcendentalism, 9-10 See also Bible; Gospels; New Testament; Old Testament revivalism, and inquiry meeting, 6467 revolution, 162, 204, 215, 251 of laboring classes, 210-11 “Rich and Poor” (Brownson), 439-43 Richard II (King of England), 302 rich, the, 428-29, 454 Richter, Jean Paul, 299 right, and might, 71-72 rights, human, 218-23, 365, 405 of individual, 482, 518-19 of society, 482, 518 Rights of Man (Paine), 218 Ripley, George, 13, 262-65 Rome, 166, 206, 230 Rousseau, Jean-Jacques, 163, 165

S sacerdocy. See priesthood Sacred Songs (Moore), 139 n. 39 sacraments, and priests, 346 sacrifice, 78-82, 96, 175, 565 and religion, 82, 151, 175 St. Bartholomew’s Day, 617 Saint-Simonians, 2, 397n salvation, 103, 311 sanctification, 175, 553 Schelling, Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph, 9, 256, 278-79, 284 and doctrine of identity, 291 and Princetonians, 268 Schleiermacher, Friedrich, 256 Schlesinger, Arthur M., Jr., 20, 25 schools, industrial, 503 science, 148-49, 187 Scottish Common Sense, 537 Scott, Walter, Sir, 574-75

Scotus. See Duns Scotus, John Scripture. See Bible sectarianism, 65, 90 self-culture, and social reform, 28 self-denial, 513 self-interest, enlightened, 95-96 selfishness, and human nature, 511 seminaries, and wealth, 412, 414 Senate, Brownson’s views of, 567-69 Seneca, Lucius Annaeus, 356 sensualism, and history of philosophy, 189 sexism, 39 Sextus Empiricus, 258 Shakespeare, William, 39, 198, 447 Henry IV, 477n King Lear, 389n Macbeth, 391n Midsummer Night’s Dream, 536 n.5 Tempest, The, 584 n. 4 sin, source of inequalities, 451 skepticism, 87, 189, 268, 298 and Norton, 258, 265 and Transcendentalism, 265-66 universal, 289 See also atheism; infidelity Skidmore, Thomas, 30, 326n. 24 slaveholders, and the clergy, 354 slavery, 308, 318, 407, 484, 488 Brownson’s view of, 26-27, 487-88, of custom, 247 and democracy, 487 forms of, 576 in Greece and Rome, 229 and laboring classes, 306-07, 364-65 See also abolitionists; wages Smith, Reuben, 8, 51 Social Destiny of Man (Brisbane), 391n, 512n “Social Evils and Their Remedy” (Brownson), 509-29 socialism, Brownson’s, 7-8 socialists, as reformers, 314 social position, and inequalities, 192 social radicalism, and “Laboring Classes,” 31 social reform, 218-19, 507, 509-10, 528 and individual reform, 458, 465 social science, 439-40

Index of Names and Subjects social systems, 367, 468-69 society, 2, 439, 465-66, 481, 517 as cause of depravity, 458 as classless, 480 as stratified, 441 Society of Friends. See Quakers Socinianism, 129, 266 n. 14 Socrates, 163, 206, 413, 610, 617 and inspiration, 166 Song of Songs, 593 soul-work, 425-26 South, the, and state rights, 485 sovereignty, 45, 71-72, 289, 560 Sozzini, Fausto Paolo, 129n Sozzini, Lelio Francesco Maria, 129n Spenser, Edmund, 198 Spinoza, Baruch, 143n, 150, 256 spirit, understanding of, 137-39 Spirit of the Laws (Montesquieu), 381, 391 spiritualism, 19, 516-17, 534-35 spontaneity, and Transcendentalism, 189 Spurzheim, Johann Kaspar, 110n state, 341, 351, 385 and church, 35-36, 170, 340-41, 351 and concurring majorities, 526-27 and Quakers, 357 See also government; politics; state rights Statement of Reasons (Norton), 254, 532-33, 608 state rights, 245, 496, 561 and Democratic party, 245, 484-86, 491 statesmen, 94-95, 152, 420, 469 stockholders, and the clergy, 354 Stoughton, William, 617 Strauss, David Friedrich, 13, 256 Stuart, Moses, 253-54, 584 suffrage, 37, 246, 369-70, 503, 52122 supernaturalism, 154-62 Swedenborg, Emmanuel, 158n, 293n symbols, of faith, and reinterpretation, 186 sympathy, power of, 462-63 synergism, and Brownson, 177n synods, and interpretation of Bible, 597

639 Synod of Dort, 597 System of Compensations, 442-43 Système de la Nature, (Holbach), 70, 532

T tabacco, and will power, 460-61 tariffs, 240-41, 308, 485, 488 Tasso, Torquato, 207 taxation, 489, 522-23 Taylor, Nathaniel William, 584-85 teachers, of religion, 321 Tempest, The (Shakespeare), 584 n. 4 Thayer, Thomas B., 39 theism, and argument from nature, 78 theocracy, 227-28, 516 theodicy, 277, 610-11 theology, 13-14, 61, 75-77, 269 New England, 266 n. 14, 584-85 See also Christianity; philosophy; religion theory, 460, 535 Theory of Legislation (Bentham), 379n. 32 Theory of Universal Unity, The (Fourier), 193n theosophists, 195 Thierry, Augustin, 613 Thiers, Louis-Adolphe, 613 Thirty-Nine Articles, 597 Thomas, Abel C., 39 Thomas Aquinas. See Aquinas, Thomas Thomas, Charles Grandison, 31 Thompson, George, 395n. 43 Thompson, William, 399 “Thoughts on Art” (Emerson), 463n Tindal, Matthew, 545 Toland, John, 545 “To Mr. Cyriack Skinner” (Milton), 213n, 418n Tory party, 199, 233, 574 trade, and currency, 493, 496 trade unions, 365, 404 traditionalism, and Lamennais, 215 n. 2 Transcendentalism, 4-5, 9-13, 258-59, 261-62, 297 and Boston Quarterly, 182n, 195 of Brownson, 1-2, 4-5, 10-13

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and Cousin, 269, 272-97 and Emerson, 536 meaning of, 255-56, 297, 537 as new school, 255 and Norton, 9-10, 251-97 as philosophy, 189 and the state, 542 and New England theology, 584-85 and Wollaston, 546 See also Alcott; Brownson; Emerson; Norton; Ripley; Unitarianism Transcendentalist Club, 3-4 “Transient and Permanent” (Brownson), 13-17, 580-611 Transient and Permanent (Parker). See Discourse on the Transient and Permanent. Trinitarians, 173, 608 Trinity, 9, 277-78, 539 Brownson’s understanding of, 12930, 173-74, 334, 602-03 Troubadours, 207 truth, 59-60, 145, 165, 341, 544-55 and authority, 71-72, 116-17, 60001 and Brownson, 328 and religion, 550 above traditions, 131 as transcendental, 536-37 and worship, 550 Two Articles from the Princeton Review (Norton), 9-10, 251-97 Tyler, Bennet, 584-85 Tyler, John, 19-20, 42, 556, 558, 56164 “Address to the People of the United States,” 44 and Webster, 578n Tyler, Wat, 302, 576 tyranny, ecclesiastical, 119

U unbelief, 6, 47, 136 understanding, 13, 595-96 Unitarianism, 1, 173, 534, 585 and Emerson, 18, 532 heresy of, 604, 608 See also Transcendentalism United States, mission of, 213-14,

236, 471 United States Bank. See Bank of the United States Universalism, 173, 354 universe, as revelation of God, 148

V value, labor theory of, 375, 445 Van Buren, Martin, 25, 494-95, 560 and election of 1840, 19-20, 470-72, Vane, Henry, 413 vices, source of inequalities, 451 A View of the Constitution (Rawle), 528n visitations, pastoral, 347 Vergil, 55, 399, 466n, 535n, 590n Virgil. See Vergil virtue, 85-86, 435, 459, 467 vocations, to priesthood, 349 voluntary system, and clerical support, 350, 352-58

W wages, 98-99, 363, 431-32 as slave system, 26-27, 210-12, 30609, 354, 364, 576 Walker, Robert John, 569 war, of social classes, 31, 37, 304, 39496 Warren, Joseph, 214 Washington, George, 159, 214, 465, 486, 571 Watt, James, 292 Watts, Isaac, 536 n. 6 Wayland, Francis, 7-8, 27, 33 wealth, 100, 211, 354, 390, 421 accumulation of, 360-61, 390, 420 advantages of, 406 and agriculture, 367-68 and Brownson, 394 and natural capacities, 433 distribution of, 452 inequalities of, 99, 192 intentions of, 455 and poor laborers, 94, 304-05 and Providence, 362 uses of, 457-58 See also the rich Webster, Daniel, 31, 493, 497, 578

Index of Names and Subjects Weed, Thurlow, 31 Westminster Confession, 597 Whig party, 19-21, 233, 544, 553, 565 and Brownson, 1, 21-22 and election of 1840, 325n, 470-471, 474, 489, 492, 495 English, mission of, 236 and “Laboring Classes,” 31, 34, 39697 policy of, 237-44 See also democracy; Democratic party; government; politics; state; state rights Whig Revolution. See Glorious Revolution Whitman, Bernard, 335 Whittier, John Greenleaf, 395n. 43 widows, and inheritance, 387-88 will, the, 450, 460-61, 463-65, 46869 William and Mary, 544 Williams, Roger, 214 Wilson, William Dexter, 6-8 witchcraft, and Bancroft’s History, 45, 616-17 Wolf, Friedrich August, ,n. Wollaston, William, 544-46 women, 38-41, 62, 81-82, 387, 50508 Woolston, Thomas, 545 Words of a Believer (Lamennais), 216, 337, 361n. 18 Wordsworth, William, 292, 447, 575 work, and literature, 203 working class. See laboring class workingmen. See laboring class Workingmen’s party, 181-82 worship, 65, 151, 341-42, 548-50 Wright, Frances, 337 Wright, Silas, 569

X Xenophanes, 276 Xenophon, 292

Z Zeno, 276

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