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EVERY-DAY LIFE 
 
 AND 
 
 EVERY-DAY MORALS 
 
 BY 
 
 ^ 
 
 GEORGE LEONARD CHANEY, 
 
 AUTHOR OF "ALOHA: TRAVELS IN THE SANDWICH ISLANDS}" 
 
 "F. GRANT AND CO., OR, PARTNERSHIPS;" 
 
 "TOM, A HOME STORY." 
 
 
 
 H^ 
 
 | dec i! wsy, 
 
 BOSTON: 
 
 ROBERTS BROTHERS. 
 
 1885. 
 

 Copyright, 1SS4, 
 By George Leonard Chaney. 
 
 Unifcrrsttn JDrrss : 
 John Wilson and Son, Cambridge. 
 
TO 
 
 THE CHURCH OF OUR FATHER, 
 
 AND ITS FRIENDS IN ATLANTA, GEORGIA, 
 IS AFFECTIONATELY DEDICATED. 
 
PREFACE, 
 
 HE papers which make up this vol- 
 ume were read last winter, on 
 Sunday evenings, in the Church 
 of Our Father in Atlanta, Georgia. 
 They had their origin in a local agitation 
 about some publicly exposed pictures, which 
 were considered by some excellent people to 
 be more injurious to the people's morals than 
 helpful to the people's taste. The considera- 
 tion of the relation of Art to Morals naturally 
 led to the equally important subject of the 
 influence of men's reading upon their moral 
 standard ; then the " Moral Uses of a Good 
 Trade" and "Business Morality" suggested 
 themselves. "The Stage," "The Press," and 
 " The Pulpit " followed as quickly as a flock 
 of birds settles where one has alighted. 
 
vi PREFACE. 
 
 In a word, these sermons — if they are 
 sermons (many will doubt it) — preached 
 themselves. I print them because I have 
 been asked to do so by some who heard them. 
 If the reader cannot approve their judgment, 
 let him, if he can, copy their kindness. If he 
 is led by reading this book to the wiser 
 thoughts his own mind may give him, our 
 purpose will be gained. Often it is only so 
 that the preacher reconciles himself to the 
 " foolishness of preaching." 
 
 GEORGE LEONARD CHANEY. 
 
 Atlanta, Georgia, 
 Nov. 3, 1884. 
 
CONTENTS. 
 
 Page 
 
 I. Art and Morals 3 
 
 II. . Juvenile Literature and Juvenile 
 
 Morals 23 
 
 III. Literature and Morals 55 
 
 IV. Industry and Morals 85 
 
 V. Business and Morals Ill 
 
 VI. The Stage and Morals 131 
 
 VII. The Press and Morals 161 
 
 VIII. The Pulpit and Morals 199 
 
ART AND MOEALS. 
 
EVEKY-DAY LIFE 
 
 AND 
 
 EVERY-DAY MORALS. 
 
 I. 
 
 ART AND MORALS. 
 
 And God saw everything that Re had made, and 
 behold, it was very good. — Gen. i. 31. 
 
 Blessed are the pure in heart, for they shall see 
 God. — Matt. v. 8. 
 
 HAT we see depends on what we 
 are. Take the Washington elm 
 at Cambridge. The patriot and 
 antiquarian love it for its his- 
 toric associations ; the artist admires its 
 beauty ; the naturalist sees in it a fine speci- 
 men of vegetation ; the traveller takes it for 
 his landmark ; the woodman thinks how 
 many cords of wood it would make ; the 
 butcher would like a section of its trunk for 
 his meat-block ; the bird views it as a safe or 
 unsafe place for her nest ; the cattle, on their 
 
ART AND MORALS. 
 
 way to Brighton, love to linger, in the hot 
 summer day, under its shadow ; the winds 
 make it their onran ; the moss clings to its 
 aged bark ; insects make their dying bed 
 and grave of resurrection in its sheltering 
 crevices ; the citizen points it out to the 
 visiting stranger, — he is proud of its memo- 
 ries. The poet sings his centennial ode under 
 the branches where the hero first drew his 
 sword in the defence of the liberties of his 
 country. Half way between the former 
 homes of Longfellow and Lowell, the one 
 could see its branches against the morning 
 sky, the other against the sunset ; they 
 answered its birds with son^s more sweet 
 than theirs ; they saw in the tree the prin- 
 ciples for which it stood in Nature and in 
 history. Meanwhile the busy crowd of un- 
 thinking men went by the tree daily, and did 
 not see it at all. 
 
 Thus the same object may be many differ- 
 ent things to many spectators. 
 
 The heart of man is like a mirror. Let 
 its surface be only a little out of level, or 
 its substance broken by cracks or flaws or 
 
ART AND MORALS. 
 
 scratches, and immediately its reflection will 
 be distorted or broken. A swelling convex 
 surface will make the most beautiful face 
 monstrous. Contrariwise, a retreating con- 
 cave surface will make the same face petty 
 and ridiculous. Every defect in the glass 
 shows in the image it gives back. A blotch on 
 it becomes a blotch on the face, which submits 
 itself to its false report. It is owing to such 
 defects as these in the medium through which 
 man looks upon the views and visions that 
 appear to him, that he gets such varied and 
 false ideas of the realities they represent. 
 Given a pure, smooth surface of polished 
 metal, and the reflection will be true ; but 
 given such hearts as most of us have, to hold 
 up to man and Nature or the heavenly sce- 
 nery, and it happens, of necessity, that all 
 these things suffer from our report of them. 
 We do not see them as they are, but as yve 
 are. 
 
 It is the full appreciation of this defect in 
 our apprehension and vision which makes us 
 willing to accept the testimony of experts, or 
 those more experienced than ourselves in one 
 
ART AND MORALS. 
 
 or another department of life. For truth of 
 art, we turn to the artist ; for truth of mor- 
 als, to the moralist ; for business truth, to the 
 honorable business man ; for law, to the law- 
 yer; medicine, to the doctor; education, to 
 the teacher ; and for spiritual truth, to the 
 spiritual seer. It is this which makes us 
 look gratefully to Jesus for the revelation of 
 the Father. In his heart, as in a clear mirror, 
 God's image may be seen. But even such 
 reports suffer often from our misunderstand- 
 ing ; so that we are brought at last to the 
 hard but really helpful extremity of having 
 to make our own hearts pure, clean, and sen- 
 sitive, if we would get a clear image or a 
 true knowledge of anything in its purity and 
 truth. 
 
 The promise to the pure in heart that they 
 shall see God, is the largest promise ever 
 made to man. The earlier faiths had said 
 that no man could see God and live ; and the 
 gospel had said : " No man hath seen God at 
 any time. The only begotten Son who is in 
 the bosom of the Father, he hath revealed 
 Him." But the same lips pronounce this 
 
ART AND MORALS. 
 
 benediction upon the pure in heart. As a 
 child, looking into the still deep of a well 
 and seeing his own face there, might sud- 
 denly behold bending over him his father's or 
 his mother's face, and know by that sign that 
 he was not alone, so the pure in heart, look- 
 ing into the depths of his own consciousness, 
 shall see God. 
 
 One example is worth pages of commen- 
 tary. Let us seek one that is not worn 
 threadbare. 
 
 Late in the seventeenth century there lived 
 near Amsterdam a Jewish youth, on whom 
 the title and the office of rabbi were early 
 bestowed. Born and bred a Jew, he could 
 not wholly or immediately throw off his in- 
 wrought habits of thought. Obedient to his 
 teachers, he travelled the customary round 
 of Scripture and commentary, Talmud and 
 Cabala, until the very suggestions of the 
 Bible itself, caught up by his expansive 
 mind, caused him to feel the immediate pres- 
 ence, in all places and in all things, of one 
 greater than the temple or its book. He 
 did not deny revelation, — the revelation 
 
8 ART AND MORALS. 
 
 of the Bible, — but he believed it so fully 
 that he acted upon it, and found the God 
 everywhere, whose report only was in the 
 Scriptures. 
 
 For this he was deemed heretical by the 
 Jewish church, and solemnly anathematized 
 and excommunicated. For this he was de- 
 clared atheist, — he who believed so much 
 in God that he disbelieved in the reality of 
 all else. No sect, Hebrew or Christian, had 
 a place for him of whom Auerbach says, at 
 the conclusion of his life : " No thinker, since 
 Spinoza, has lived so much in the eternal as 
 he did." 
 
 " The God-intoxicated man " he has been 
 called, because of the fulness and joy of his 
 faith and life in God. His mortal life, which 
 was cut off at only forty-four years, was a 
 Sabbath of the Lord ; and when you get 
 the secret of this intellectual and moral 
 vision of God, which Spinoza possessed, you 
 will find it in his mental candor and clean- 
 ness of heart. " Only the purified are pure ; " 
 and he was purified by the baptism of pov- 
 erty, disappointment, and loneliness, until, 
 
ART AND MORALS. 9 
 
 having suffered with patience the loss of all 
 things, he was rewarded by the communion 
 of the all in all. 
 
 As I see Baruch Spinoza, Benedictus or 
 blessed, as his Hebrew name signifies, earn- 
 ing his daily bread as a polisher of optical 
 glasses, I cannot shut my eyes to the perfect 
 symbolism of his homely trade. As Auer- 
 bach says, " The work is but unclean from 
 one point of view ; while engaged in it the 
 workman is covered with dirt and sand ; but 
 its aim is the highest degree of purity and 
 cleanliness." To make a lens without crack 
 or flaw was the daily work and ambition 
 of the devout artisan • and all the while his 
 own eye, single to truth, was flooding his 
 whole body with the light of the knowledge 
 of the glory of God. The pure in heart 
 saw God. And what is singular and in- 
 structive, — this man saw evil in all its de- 
 formity, and yet saw through it to the throne 
 of God. 
 
 " I forbear from evil, or strive to forbear 
 from it," he said, " because it is in direct 
 opposition to my special nature, and would 
 
10 ART AND MORALS. 
 
 divide me from the love and knowledge of 
 God, which is the highest good.' , 
 
 An acute critic has pointed out the radical 
 difference between the best morality of Greece 
 or Rome and that of Christianity, by showing 
 that the latter is touched by emotion and so 
 elevated to religion. "Thus," he says, " Cicero 
 comments : ' Hold off from sensuality, for if 
 you have given yourself up to it, you will find 
 yourself unable to think of anything else.' 
 But Christ says : l Blessed are the pure in 
 heart, for they shall see God.' " The one is a 
 prudential maxim ; the other is a quickening 
 benediction. Spinoza's rule seems to share 
 the prudence of the philosopher with the 
 fervor of religion. He would avoid evil 
 because it keeps him from the knowledge 
 and love of God, which is the highest good. 
 
 When one has caught the quickening im- 
 pulse of Christianity, and turned with pure 
 resolution unto God, then all other counsels 
 and direction have their value to him. He 
 sees, with Cicero, how wholly the thoughts 
 of the mind and the imaginations of the heart 
 are run away with, when a man gives him- 
 
ART AND MORALS. 11 
 
 self up to sensuality in any of its forms ; how 
 the haunting image pursues him wherever he 
 goes, blurring the page he reads, so that he 
 has to read it again and again before he can 
 know its sense, diverting his mind as he 
 travels from place to place, and blinding him 
 to the suggestive incidents by the way, or 
 defeating that preparedness which he might 
 have secured for the business before him. He 
 sees how little room there is in the crowded 
 inn of his money-making, world-pleasing 
 heart for the Son of God to be born ; and all 
 the reasons for purity, as well as the instinctive 
 love of it, come home with full force to him. 
 
 There is a wise proverb that they who go 
 to the Indies must carry the Indies with them. 
 It is a popular way of saying that only the 
 godlike can see God. 
 
 I have dwelt thus far upon the principle 
 that like sees like in everything it looks 
 upon, because of its especial application to 
 the questions sometimes raised between art 
 and morals. If every picture or statue suffers 
 a change in the passing of an eye, and be- 
 comes one thing to one man and the very 
 
12 ART AND MORALS. 
 
 opposite to another, how can any classifica- 
 tion of art take place, or any line be drawn 
 between the truly beautiful and the ugly, the 
 moral and the shameless ? What is one man's 
 " meat or drink " is another man's poison. 
 To the pure all things are pure, and to the 
 impure all things are impure. The moral of 
 ■which is that we should bend all our efforts 
 towards making men as their Maker has been 
 described, " of purer eyes than to behold 
 evil." 
 
 As to the natural relation of art to morals, 
 I never hear the matter discussed without 
 recalling the subject of one of our college 
 themes, namely : " Whether the sense of 
 beauty ever furthered the performance of a 
 single act of duty." The very form of the 
 question suggested a doubt; and when we 
 recall the lives of people distinguished for 
 artistic excellence, we certainly have to re- 
 member that they have not always been as 
 remarkable for purity. There is an element 
 of fiction in all art. It is " make-believe " 
 rather than " believe." The greatest actor 
 is he who can act as if he were somebody 
 
ART AND MORALS. 13 
 
 else — not himself. The greatest painter is 
 he who paints a bunch of grapes so that the 
 birds will peck at it, or a curtain so that one 
 will try to draw it away. The better the 
 cheat, the better the artist. Good novel- 
 writing is skilful lying. There is an element 
 of deception in most artistic work. 
 
 Moreover, there is a certain absorption in 
 art which, unless it is guarded against, makes 
 a man selfish. He cannot bear to be dis- 
 turbed. When the mood for work is on him 
 his dearest friend is an enemy to him, and his 
 wife and children aliens and strangers. For 
 whatever reason, artists certainly do not pre- 
 sent in their biographies very exemplary liv- 
 ing, and some of them so exhaust their powers 
 in acting that they have none left for doing. 
 Their lives make lively reading, — Benvenuto 
 Cellini's, for example ; and one is sure to 
 notice how often their works surpass their 
 virtues. Of course there are grand excep- 
 tions. But with them the question may 
 fairly be asked, whether their sense of beauty 
 ever furthers the performance of a single act 
 of duty. 
 
14 ART AND MORALS. 
 
 And yet we must not ask of art a virtue 
 which does not belong to it. 
 
 Enough if it refines and rejoices us with 
 its fine and versatile forms. Conduct is not 
 all of life, although it is all-important. In 
 that blissful recess, when the restraints of the 
 school discipline are taken off, and our tastes 
 and senses enjoy a free run out of doors, art 
 is the joyful master of our revels and sets 
 the red blood flowing in our arteries. We 
 should not ask her to be as orderly and quiet 
 as the school-room. She has a law and lib- 
 erty of her own. And although purity be- 
 longs alike to work and play, there is a 
 joyful abandon in the latter which will al- 
 ways seem like levity to the earnest moralist. 
 A modern writer on Culture and Anarchy 
 declares that Puritanism in England shut the 
 door and turned the key on man, and im- 
 prisoned him for two or three centuries, 
 away from grace and art and beauty. And 
 Christianity has been reproached from the 
 beginning because of its austerity and in- 
 difference to art. 
 
 It is true that the emphasis of Christianity, 
 
ART AND MORALS. 15 
 
 like its predecessor, Judaism, has been given 
 to morals and conduct. But it is not true 
 that it has antagonized art. Even in its 
 day of persecution, when it was driven to 
 make its abode with the dead in caves and 
 dens of the earth, it had its dear and sacred 
 symbolism. The catacombs of Rome are filled 
 with this native and unquenchable love of 
 the beauty that has a beautiful meaning in it. 
 The apolo'gist of Christian art and symbol- 
 ism, Tyrwhitt, declares that the fathers had 
 something more important to do in these early 
 days than to cultivate the fine arts. Nor had 
 they, as he shows, much reason to admire or 
 imitate the graces of that civilization which 
 maimed and crucified them. But the germ 
 of that sacred love of the beauty that has a 
 beautiful meaning was always in Christianity. 
 It filled the catacombs w T ith hopeful imagery, 
 more hopeful than the later theology was. For 
 among those images there is one of the Good 
 Shepherd, bearing upon his shoulder, not a 
 favored lamb, but a lost and despised kid. If 
 later Christian art has depicted with marvel- 
 lous power the horrors of the last judgment, 
 
16 ART AND MORALS. 
 
 it has also filled Christendom with the images 
 of hope and mercy. To-day the picture con- 
 fessed to be the most beautiful in the world 
 is the Sistine Madonna. In such art Christi- 
 anity defends herself from the imputation of 
 indifference or incompetence in the realm of 
 taste and beauty. 
 
 The beauty that has a beautiful meaning, — 
 that has an honored place in Christian nur- 
 ture. The art that tells a noble story so that 
 the hearer feels all its strength and power, — 
 that will always be found among the hand- 
 maids of religion and the friends of morals. 
 Yes, the sense of beauty is itself a moral aid. 
 For in spite of the frequently ill-regulated 
 lives of artists, I believe that the love of true 
 beauty is an ally of conscience, working for 
 and not against its claims. Nay, I should 
 put the aesthetic taste high among the sav- 
 ing powers ; in union with the active moral 
 powers of man, an inspiration and motive, 
 for it gives refinement to all our workings ; 
 it gives relief from drudgery to all our toil. 
 And here, before principles of right are fully 
 formed in us, it is often a safeguard from evil 
 
ART AND MORALS. 17 
 
 companionship and the grosser sins. In the 
 hazardous interim between boyhood and man- 
 hood we are more indebted to good taste than 
 good principles for our escape from bad com- 
 pany. The vulgar fellows either do or do not 
 suit us, according to our taste. It is more 
 that than abhorrence of their sins, I think, 
 which saves us from their intimacy. At 
 least, as I read the past, I find frequent 
 occasion to be thankful for influences which 
 quickened and pruned the sense of beauty 
 and the desire for it, in all its true forms. 
 I believe that in most people tastes grow 
 earlier than principles ; and as they are well 
 or ill formed, intimacies are made which, more 
 than anything else, determine the character 
 of our after-lives. 
 
 Guard well, therefore, your children's tastes. 
 Feed them early with the best scenery, the 
 best pictures, the best company, and the best 
 art, which is really nature. Let them study 
 nature, for there they will find ever the per- 
 fection of art, that is, of science at work, with 
 equal care for use and beauty. All the ways 
 of nature are artistic. The inspired poet of 
 
18 ART AND MORALS, 
 
 the creation, from whose song we took a por- 
 tion of our text, represents the Creator as 
 viewing the world after each stage of its 
 growth, and seeing that " it was good." It 
 pleased Him. It was well done. And ever 
 since that day, as the uncovered geologic 
 ages attest, and as all the fields are telling 
 in these latest creations, there has been the 
 same Almighty hand at work upon the earth, 
 blending use and beauty in every created 
 thing. Even in their decay the works of God 
 put on new beauty ; while in the freshness of 
 the living creation beauty so contends with 
 use that it is hard to pluck for eating what 
 nature has made so good for seeing. 
 
 Go where you will, by rail or carriage 
 through the country, or explore on foot the 
 deep woods, everywhere you are met by the 
 amazing tokens of an Almighty artist-hand 
 at work beyond all the requirements of mere 
 utility, seemingly for beauty's sake alone. At 
 least each useful shrub or tree and every ani- 
 mal is formed as admirably for looks as for 
 service ; and in every combination, as well as 
 in single creations, Nature presents always a 
 
ART AND MORALS. 19 
 
 harmony which gives the rule to taste. Thus 
 all her working is fine art; and the infinite 
 Father, who worketh hitherto, follows in His 
 own working the way He has given us the 
 instinctive desire and the inspired power to 
 pursue. When he, whose life and teachings 
 are our way to everlasting life, taught man to 
 strive to be perfect as the Father in heaven 
 is perfect, did he not mean that even as the 
 Almighty in His infinite variety of works did 
 each thing perfectly, so man in his sphere 
 should strive to do the things given him to 
 do, each perfectly in its way? Everything 
 well done is beautiful. 
 
 Thus will remain the real edifice of the 
 faithful workman. And even as we saw the 
 Jewish polisher of glass, Spinoza, the devout- 
 est philosopher of modern times, amidst the 
 dirt and clutter of his shop making a perfect 
 lens with which to see the work of God, and 
 all the while his own spiritual vision was 
 growing purer and purer with the perfect- 
 ing of his work, until at last he saw not the 
 work of God, but God Himself, the only re- 
 ality, the all in all ; so we, if we will live and 
 
20 ART AND MORALS. 
 
 love and labor, and do all things sincerely, 
 purely, and well, shall find ourselves growing 
 in the knowledge of that beauty which has a 
 beautiful meaning, and in the recognition of 
 which the true artist finds his acceptable 
 reward. 
 
II. 
 
 JUVENILE LITERATURE AND 
 JUVENILE MORALS. 
 
II. 
 
 JUVENILE LITEEATUEE AND JUVENILE 
 MOEALS. 
 
 And I went to the angel and said unto him, Give me the 
 little book. And he said unto me, Take it and eat 
 it up ; and it shall make thy belly bitter, but it shall 
 be in thy mouth sweet as honey. — Eev. x. 9. 
 
 F we do not know the book referred 
 to in this verse, we know others like 
 it. At least, we know of books that 
 have the same effect, — books that 
 please the tongue and ruin the digestion. 
 And very many of them are little books. A 
 grain of poison is often more deadly than a 
 pound. Little books for little folks, and their 
 effect upon the moral character of their sus- 
 ceptible reader, or juvenile literature and 
 juvenile morals, is the subject we would 
 consider. 
 
 But before we do anything else, let us 
 
24 JUVENILE LITERATURE AND MORALS. 
 
 define what we mean by literature. What 
 definitely is literature ? Not all possible 
 learning, surely. That would be too broad 
 a theme to handle at all. The name of 
 literature, as I would use it, applies only to 
 knowledge attractively put. Science, history, 
 biography, travel, even fiction and poetry, 
 are or are not a part of literature, accord- 
 ing as they are or are not attractively put. 
 There must be some special felicity of state- 
 ment to make a writing or address literary. 
 The book must he " sweet in the mouth." 
 It is not literature without this special grace. 
 Thus, when I read in my chemistry that 
 hydrogen and oxygen unite to form water, 
 that is science. But when I hear Tyndall, 
 as I once heard him in a lecture, put the 
 same truth in this ardent fashion, — hydrogen 
 and oxygen kiss each other, — then I recog- 
 nize the beginning of literature. And any- 
 body who is at all familiar with the writings of 
 Tyndall and Huxley and Proctor, and the best 
 of modern scientific lecturers, feels the charm 
 and poetry of their style as well as the value 
 and significance of their scientific truths. The 
 
JUVENILE LITERATURE AND MORALS. 25 
 
 same illustration of literature may be found 
 in every department of learning. The story 
 of the French Revolution, as told in the school 
 history, is not literature. But let Carlyle or 
 Dickens, in his " Tale of Two Cities/' speak 
 the word, and the dead past lives again like 
 a present reality. This is literature. The 
 multiplication-table is not literature. But 
 a Ten Times One is Ten," as Mr. Hale has 
 told it in his lively rendering of the great 
 principle of the geometrical progression of 
 goodness — this is vital literature. Science 
 is truth. Literature is truth and grace. 
 
 Dean Stanley is reported to have said that 
 he read Hawthorne's " Marble Faun " first to 
 follow the story ; then he read it again to en- 
 joy its exquisite English ; and then he read 
 it a third time because he wished to. In this 
 anecdote, whether exactly reported or not, 
 one sees the secret of literature. It is that 
 clothing or presentation of truth which gives 
 peculiar pleasure to the hearer of it. After 
 reading it, for one or another motive, you 
 turn to it and wish to read it again out of 
 your delight in its presentation. 
 
26 JUVENILE LITERATURE AND MORALS. 
 
 But we have pledged ourselves to speak 
 not of literature at large, but of that special 
 department of it, — books for children. Be- 
 lieving that the literary element in learning 
 is especially suited to promote pleasurable 
 emotion in its pursuit, and is therefore just 
 the element to be treasured and cultivated 
 in sound and vital education, we are bound 
 to study literature and use its best ways and 
 means in the nurture of the children. I do 
 not say that the world can be wholly emanci- 
 pated from drudgery, but some progress in 
 that direction can be made, and one of the 
 aids to this progress will be found in the liter- 
 ary treatment of many subjects that now get 
 before the children only in the driest and 
 most mechanical shape. 
 
 There is a law in optics, which says that 
 when you would see a very distant star, you 
 must look a little to one side of it. The star 
 is positively best seen by the eye that is not 
 looking directly at it. And the same princi- 
 ple holds good in education. The mind is 
 shy ; it shuns observation ; it will carry off 
 its food when it thinks nobody is looking. 
 
. JUVENILE LITERATURE AND MORALS. 27 
 
 The "truth embodied in a tale/' says Ten- 
 nyson, "will enter in at lowly doors." All 
 this accommodation of the truth to the whim 
 or natural constitution of the mind is a part 
 of the art of the educator of children; and he 
 has in this the example and sanction of the 
 spirit of truth itself, which teaches principles 
 by means of persons, and makes the actual 
 hint its pure ideal. 
 
 We shall certainly agree in this : the mind, 
 to be instructed, must be interested. One 
 might as well attempt to seal a letter with 
 cold wax, as fix a truth in a dull and inat- 
 tentive head. The latest and best instance of 
 a saving knowledge of this primary fact in 
 education, came to me in a Georgia city. I 
 was visiting a school with the superintendent, 
 and, as we came away from it, I could not 
 help expressing my satisfaction with the dis- 
 cipline, or, better than that, the entente cordiale 
 which evidently existed between the teacher 
 and her scholars. " And yet," said my com- 
 panion, " that very teacher came to me after 
 a few weeks' trial at the beginning of her 
 course, and said that she could not teach. 
 
28 JUVENILE LITERATURE AND MORALS. 
 
 She could not keep or even get the attention 
 of her scholars." This wise man did not re- 
 proach or discourage her. He agreed with 
 her that she must begin by exciting her 
 pupils' interest. But how ? " Go and teach 
 them the last jig you learned." " Oh ! I can 
 amuse them, if that is the thing." " The 
 thing is first to interest them. Take your 
 own way, but interest them." She began 
 with a jig, and when I was there she had 
 one of the best schools in Macon. That jig 
 was literature at work in education. I wish 
 there were more of it in our schools. 
 
 There is no lack of it, however, in our 
 libraries. It has been estimated that not 
 less that a thousand books a year for chil- 
 dren alone are published in the English 
 tongue. In this great sea of variously com- 
 pounded fact and fiction, the youth finds 
 abundance of leeway for his voyaging im- 
 agination. And he takes it too. I grudge 
 the live and greedy interest with which our 
 boys and girls turn from their studies and 
 leap into the fascinating pages of the story- 
 book. Such absorbing attention given to any 
 
JUVENILE LITER A TURE AND MORALS. 29 
 
 of the subjects we wish them to master would 
 make teaching a delight and learning a pas- 
 time. I shall never feel that we have mas- 
 tered the art of teaching until something of 
 the same eagerness and attention is secured 
 for the work of the school. If it ever comes, 
 it will come by the adoption of the literary 
 and persuasive, rather than the dogmatic and 
 authoritative method. 
 
 More and more, the best literature is find- 
 ing its way into our system of education. It is 
 used for continuous reading and study. Many 
 schools are provided with lending and consult- 
 ing libraries. And with the rapid multiplica- 
 tion of free libraries in centres of population, 
 a new agency, not inferior to the public school 
 system itself, and closely allied to it, is com- 
 ing into use. The librarians and teachers of 
 the country, co-operating for the sound and 
 vital development of the mind, will yet bring 
 it to pass. The library will quicken the school, 
 and the school will discipline the library. In- 
 stead of flying to the library from the school 
 as a refuge and consolation for its dull task- 
 work, the youth will go there to feast on what 
 
30 JUVENILE LITERATURE AND MORALS. 
 
 the school lias given him the taste for. Eager 
 to know more of what the school and the 
 home have only had time to teach him a 
 little, he runs to the library to gratify his 
 curiosity. He ought to find there a guide 
 and friend, who will show him where to look 
 for what he needs ; and such a guide ought 
 to receive the liveliest sympathy and closest 
 alliance of all parents and teachers. 
 
 It has been my privilege within the week 
 to visit with the librarian the most fre- 
 quented alcoves of the Young Men's Library 
 of this city. It is needless to say that these 
 contain the shelves of fiction. Nowhere else 
 has it been found necessary so frequently to 
 rebind or to supply duplicate copies. There 
 they stand, the people's favorite books, pay- 
 ing dearly for their popularity, if books take 
 any pleasure in keeping themselves whole 
 and neat. Nothing would be easier or com- 
 moner than to condemn the whole collection, 
 without hearing what its books had to say 
 for themselves or discriminating between one 
 book and another. But we have already said 
 too much on behalf of literature, that is, 
 
JUVENILE LITERATURE AND MORALS. 31 
 
 knowledge made attractive by its becoming 
 dress, to make such a sweeping judgment. 
 Some of the truest literature, perhaps the most 
 distinctive literature of our age, has been run 
 into the mould of fiction. The man would 
 show himself ignorant and ill-natured who re- 
 fused to see and allow this. It is very much 
 to the credit of those who make use of this 
 library that the best fiction is much read. 
 Even in the juvenile department the best is 
 never neglected. The old standards, especially 
 when they come out in new and modern dress, 
 hold their own, and the best of contempo- 
 raneous writings for children are heartily ap- 
 preciated. On the whole, the novel-reading 
 by these children is not so bad as we feared ; 
 not so bad as it might be. At least the better 
 writers are not ignored, although it is to be 
 feared the poorer ones are preferred. 
 
 But why are the poorer books preferred ? 
 This is the question we ought to be con- 
 sidering. To the man who believes that 
 child-nature is in itself corrupt, the answer 
 is ready. But he who called the little 
 children unto him and commended their 
 
32 JUVENILE LITERATURE AND MORALS. 
 
 innocence, will have us seek some other ex- 
 planation of the children's choice. In order 
 to get at this explanation, let us see what 
 that choice is. The juvenile books that are 
 pre-eminently the worse for wear in the 
 Young Men's Library are the stories written 
 by Oliver Optic, Horatio Alger, and Cap- 
 tain Mayne Eeid. We elders, reading these 
 books, find some things to deprecate in many 
 of them. But the boys like them, and like 
 them unreservedly. I have never heard an 
 adverse criticism from a boy upon any of 
 these stories. The name of either of these 
 authors upon a book is reason enough with 
 a boy for reading it. What is their charm ? 
 Let us seek for it and see if it cannot be 
 captured and combined with better matter. 
 Let us see if some of it cannot be imported 
 into school and church and home life, and 
 thus made a part of vital education. 
 
 It is easy to see where Mr. William T. 
 Adams (Oliver Optic) gets his hold upon the 
 youthful heart. If there is anything boys 
 love, it is vacation and motion. Mr. Adams's 
 heroes are always on the move and always on 
 
JUVENILE LITERATURE AND MORALS. 33 
 
 a vacation. One feels after reading his restless 
 books as if he must take the first opportunity 
 to run away. Take, for example, his Great 
 Western Series, in which the reader is whisked 
 from one end of the Union to another, now 
 on the Great Lakes and now in the Gulf of 
 Mexico, now on the Hudson and now on the 
 Mississippi, and everywhere on the track of 
 a hero who is always in imminent peril of his 
 life. If one should judge from these books, 
 yachting would seem to be the main business 
 in life ; existence one long outing. A little 
 lad on the Hudson being asked by his teacher 
 at school how to go from Albany to Chicago, 
 all the way by water, suddenly resolves to 
 make the trip in a yacht which his father has 
 given him. He runs off with the boat, is 
 discovered, brought back, and, notwithstand- 
 ing his youth and proved incapacity for 
 sailing, his astonishing father commends his 
 enterprise and advises him to put it through. 
 After this the reader is prepared to be sur- 
 prised at nothing, but he has miscalculated 
 the resources of his author. Other and more 
 startling adventures await him. Impending 
 
34 JUVENILE LITERATURE AND MORALS. 
 
 murder, rank conspiracy, and prevailing mys- 
 tery mingle with the elements to keep up 
 the excitement ; and in the end — if there 
 ever comes an end to these successive se- 
 rials — villany is thwarted and innocence 
 triumphant. 
 
 These books, as I said, are full of motion 
 and vacation, and hence charming to the 
 boys who read them. As I recall the genial, 
 quiet little author, his beaming face and bright 
 black eyes, his modest, unoffending manners 
 and address, I can with difficulty realize that 
 he wrote these tremendous stories. He was 
 a fellow-member with me of the school board 
 of Boston, and a very active and useful man 
 in that position. I remember his coming to 
 my desk one evening at a school committee 
 meeting and giving me his experience in 
 story-writing for boys. He began, he said, 
 by writing quiet, home stories for children ; 
 but the necessities of voluminous authorship, 
 and the discovery of the children's endless 
 capacity for motion, mystery, and adventure 
 had run away with him. I knew him also as 
 a faithful and conscientious Sunday-school 
 
JUVENILE LITERATURE AND MORALS. 35 
 
 superintendent of one of the oldest and best 
 of our churches, the First Parish Church in 
 Dorchester. I have no more doubt of the 
 good intention of his books than I have of 
 the improbability of their incidents, the in- 
 different quality of their literary workman- 
 ship, and the restless disposition they excite 
 in the children who read them. 
 
 Of Horatio Alger I can also speak from 
 personal recollection. I remember the day 
 when I was called upon to preach his ordina- 
 tion sermon in the town of Brewster, Massa- 
 chusetts. A little, fair, innocent-looking man, 
 with tender eyes and the complexion of a 
 girl, as far removed, one would say, from 
 knowledge or interest in the street boys of 
 New York as the young moon. His person- 
 ality then, like his slender frame, was only 
 faintly outlined. I suspected him of poetry, 
 and predicted for him a long and saintly 
 country pastorate like that of George Her- 
 bert, — a prediction which showed that I was 
 no prophet. It has all been the very reverse 
 of my anticipation. He left the ministry 
 before three years had passed, and took up 
 
36 JUVENILE LITERATURE AND MORALS. 
 
 juvenile literature. Nice readers complain of 
 his books that they are vulgar and vulgar- 
 izing. They say that their effect upon boys 
 is to make them pert and smart. But 
 here again there must be some merit in 
 books that attract so many boyish read- 
 ers. They are not read for their faults, but 
 for their merits. What are they ? It seems 
 to me that they are real and conspicuous. 
 These stories of the street Arabs of New 
 York, their fortunes and misfortunes, their 
 exposures, sufferings, and trials, their struggle 
 for life, and the survival and ultimate suc- 
 cess of the fittest and most enterprising 
 of them, have something in them which 
 appeals to the sense of reality in boys. The 
 characters may not be exemplary. They 
 are often far from that ; but they seem real. 
 If 3'ou hit them, you know that they would 
 hit back. They have fir more nature in 
 them than the better-behaved boys of better- 
 approved books. If they are rough, pert, 
 rowdy, and dare-devil, that is what such 
 bo}\s really are. The boy-reader knows this, 
 and he likes the truth of the picture whether 
 
JUVENILE LITERATURE AND MORALS. 37 
 
 he likes the picture or not. I think he is 
 quite right in this preference of reality to 
 make-believe. And although the company 
 offered in Mr. Alger's books is neither polite 
 nor refined, and therefore not the best com- 
 pany, it has the merit of being real. I can 
 see also how a limited acquaintance with the 
 rough and hard life of the city gamin may be 
 of advantage to a lad. It reveals to him the 
 common humanity of the lowest and the 
 highest. Indeed, it is not unusual to find 
 among these " lost and perishing classes," as 
 they are called, the tenderest feeling. When 
 Mr. McCabe, the remarkable English delinea- 
 tor of character, — a man who combined a 
 full theatrical company in himself, and actu- 
 ally played a long connected play alone, he 
 taking all the parts, — was in New York, 
 he fell into a discussion with a friend as to 
 the qualities of the rougher and ruder classes 
 of a great city. He declared that he could 
 touch their hearts quicker than those of the 
 higher classes; and to put his statement to 
 the proof, he donned the rags of a beggar, 
 and simulating with his perfect art the voice 
 
38 JUVENILE LITERATURE AND MORALS. 
 
 and air of a man in poverty and distress, he 
 went upon the street and appealed to rich 
 and poor. The gentlemen went by on the 
 other side. The newsboys and boot-blacks 
 took up a collection for him. 
 
 I tell the story only to show that tales of 
 street-boys are not of necessity demoralizing. 
 And it is due Mr. Alger and his youthful ad- 
 mirers to say that their popular books are 
 often relieved, in spite of their rude and 
 rough speech, by touches of real nobility. 
 At any rate, the characters generally have a 
 likeness to life in them, and that alone is no 
 mean merit, especially in a boy's eyes. He 
 can forgive anything more easily than un- 
 reality or insincerity ; and half the books 
 written for children with a moral or religious 
 purpose are as unreal as ghosts. Boys are 
 nature's detectives of unreality. If I knew 
 myself to be a humbug, I would beware 
 of boys. 
 
 I think this is one reason for the enthu- 
 siastic love of Captain Mayne Reid and his 
 books which most lads have. To be sure, 
 the out-of-door life in these books, their 
 
JUVENILE LITERATURE AND MORALS. 39 
 
 thrilling adventure, their hair-breadth escapes, 
 their agonized situations, out of which heroes 
 and heroines escape with miraculous agility, 
 would be enough to captivate the whole race 
 of boys ; but, with all this, there is a dash of 
 frank Irish feeling which redeems much of 
 the tragedy and melodrama. In his ear- 
 lier works for children, such as the " Boy 
 Hunters " and the u Young Voyagers," there 
 is a painstaking attempt to instruct as well as 
 delight the youthful reader. On every page 
 real information is given. It is natural his- 
 tory teaching by adventure. But the passion 
 for romance is in the warm Irish heart, and 
 before long his books run away from nature 
 in their love of man and ivoman. It cannot 
 be objected that "Ran away to Sea" is a 
 book calculated to encourage children to re- 
 peat that perilous experiment. Far greater 
 crimes than that could hardly be visited by 
 swifter or more awful punishment. Indeed, 
 the miseries and perils of that unhappy run- 
 away are quite enough to sicken the boldest 
 of youthful adventurers. Tortured by his 
 shipmates, persecuted by a brutal captain, 
 
40 JUVENILE LITERATURE AXD MORALS. 
 
 sold into slavery, rescued from that only to 
 fall into greater peril from a crocodile, saved 
 from this only to find himself in mid-ocean 
 dying of thirst, and then on a burning ship 
 with a cargo of living beings between decks 
 whom no power can save, again selected for 
 death to feed his starving companions upon 
 a raft, and last of all saved to write this book, 
 — all this on one short voyage from America 
 to Africa and back ! I know not what powers 
 of endurance and obduracy of sympathy chil- 
 dren's hearts may have, but I find myself 
 quite broken clown after such a recital. 
 
 For the last ten days I have been reading 
 children's books, and I can liken the result 
 to nothing but my imagination of the after- 
 effects of intoxication. Is it possible that 
 tender, shrinking youthful hearts, naturally 
 believing hearts, to whom fiction is, for the 
 time being, a reality, are being tortured alive 
 over these imaginary perils and hair-breadth 
 escapes, and the children still live ? 
 
 After reading " Osceola" and " The Fla^ of 
 Distress," by Mayne Reid, I feel like taking 
 back my praise of him. How can the same 
 
. JUVENILE LITERATURE AND MORALS. 41 
 
 hand write the " Boy Voyageurs " and snch 
 crude, mawkish, love and blood and thunder 
 stories as these ? The misery of it all lies 
 in the magic of an author's name when it is 
 once associated with a lively and entertaining 
 book. Forthwith the young reader takes 
 another and another, believing, hoping, and 
 surely expecting that all will be equally good. 
 Far from it. I think it may safely be taken 
 as a rule that only really great writers survive 
 a great reputation ; that is, only great writ- 
 ers do as good work after they become famous 
 as before. The second-rate writers, and they 
 are in the majority, seldom equal, in their 
 after efforts, the book that made their name. 
 Men presume so much, and usually, for their 
 generation, so safely upon their reputation, 
 that they make it do service in place of in- 
 creasing excellence. This accounts in part for 
 the growing inferiority of those who write too 
 long and too much for children. It accounts 
 for Oliver Optic's and Mayne Reid's degener- 
 ation. The latter's story of " Osceola," or 
 " The Flag of Distress," for example, is such 
 stuff as nightmares are made of. Love, 
 
42 JUVENILE LITERATURE AND MORALS. 
 
 slavery, alligators, Indians, pistols, shot-guns, 
 knives, fire, murder, scalps, tortures, snakes, a 
 mad squaw, cheating, stealing, war, duelling, 
 orang-outangs, gambling, shipwreck, sharks, 
 and if there be anything else known or im- 
 aginable that can harrow up the blood, let 
 that be thrown in, and you will have the ma- 
 terial for these stories. Let them be told in 
 true melodramatic style, with the subject 
 after the verb — "Had I" for "I had," and 
 " Whither goest thou ? " for " Where are you 
 going?" and " Ha ! perhaps it is too late," or 
 66 1 bethought me of a flowery vale," this in 
 a moment of extreme peril, and you have 
 "Osceola; or, The Seminole Chief." When 
 the plot can wait long enough for a moral 
 lesson to be instilled, it is given in this shape : 
 " In America, moral courage, though much be- 
 praised, does not find ready credence. A re- 
 fusal to meet a man who may challenge you 
 is not thus explained. It is called backing 
 out, showing the white feather ; and he who 
 does this need look no more upon his ladye 
 love ; she would flog him with her garters." 
 On the titlepage of a copy of " The Flag 
 
JUVENILE LITERATURE AND MORALS. 43 
 
 of Distress " in the library, I find written in 
 pencil this estimate of the book, — " A pretty 
 good tale, but rather bloody-minded." 
 
 These, then, are the books our boys are read- 
 ing- with such gusto and approval. And I have 
 said enough on their behalf to relieve me of 
 all just suspicion of prejudice against them. 
 Some of them have the great merit of reality 
 in the lives and characters they draw, notably 
 Mr. Alger's. Some have motion and vacation, 
 like Mr. Adams's, and boys love both. Some 
 have adventure, out-of-door life, and a dash of 
 danger in them, like Mayne Reid's, and there 
 is no fault in that. We do not wish our boys 
 to be life-long stay-at-homes, with no spirit of 
 enterprise or habits of endurance. Indeed, as 
 I have suggested, we should do well to steal 
 these elements of interest from the popular 
 story-tellers, — motion, outing, adventure, 
 reality, — and make them a part of our 
 school and home training ; or, if they are 
 already there, make more and better of 
 them than we have ever done before. 
 
 But in juvenile literature there is vastly 
 too much of these elements and these men, — 
 
44 JUVENILE LITERATURE-AND MORALS. 
 
 too many of their books. They run thin, and 
 run out or run into sensation, untruthfulness, 
 and an embarrassment of agony before they 
 get through. And thus the author who be- 
 gins by winning a genuine and deserved 
 popularity with youth, often ends by de- 
 serving to lose it wholly. The peril lies in 
 his retaining the child's favor after he has 
 ceased to merit it; the author's name cover- 
 ing and condoning the faults of which his 
 later writings are guilty. 
 
 Happily the developing mind, especially if 
 it is well trained and favored with good so- 
 ciety, outgrows its old favorites and leaves 
 them behind, for better company. Already. 
 in a better and simpler class of books, the 
 strain of these boyish tragedies finds the re- 
 lief of change. The home and school stories 
 of Louisa Alcott and Mrs. Diaz and Miss Eliza- 
 beth Clark, of Mrs. Molesworth and Juliana 
 Ewing, of Thomas Hughes and George Mac- 
 Donald, of Mrs. Whitney and Miss Yonge, and 
 the authors that fed our own boyhood with 
 pure adventure and wholesome recreation, — 
 Abbott, Defoe, Marryat, Mary Ilowitt, and Miss 
 
JUVENILE LITERATURE AND MORALS. 45 
 
 Edgeworth, — still live and gather delighted 
 readers to their pages. Genuine books of 
 travel, as interesting as novels, — Sir Samuel 
 Baker's, Livingstone's, Du Chaillu's, Stanley's, 
 Bayard Taylor's, Parkman's, Hayes's, Hall's, 
 and Kane's, have been written. Histories for 
 the young have been prepared by Dickens, 
 Mrs. Charles, Miss Yonge, Freeman, Green, 
 Hughes, Lanier, Coffin, Eggleston, and Hig- 
 ginson. And science itself, once the peculiar 
 property of age and learning, is coming down 
 to the youngest apprehension in books adapted 
 to the child. 
 
 The problem is, how to get these books, 
 and such as these, read by youth, in place of 
 the others, or in healthful proportion to the 
 others. I believe very much can be done in 
 this direction by parents and teachers. Not 
 always by direct advice or injunction, for 
 youth cannot be advised or driven into pro- 
 fitable reading. They must be led to it and 
 allowed to think they have been their own 
 leaders. A good book, bearing upon some 
 subject in which a child has expressed an in- 
 terest, skilfully dropped in his way, without 
 
46 JUVENILE LITERATURE AND MORALS. 
 
 any advice at all, will often accomplish the 
 purpose in view. Take the child where you 
 find him, and work up from that point, If he 
 is caught in the toils of Indian tradition, lead 
 him by degrees from Cooper to Parkman and 
 Catlin, and help him to know Indian character 
 and life as it is. If his heart goes voyaging, 
 go with him in such books as Darwin's " Voy- 
 age in the Beagle," or Mrs. Brassey's "Sun- 
 beam," or Dana's " Two Years Before the 
 Mast." If his imagination and fancy seek 
 indulgence, give him the best of fairy tales 
 and fables : Hans Andersen's and Grimm's, 
 the "Arabian Nights," "^Esop," and "Uncle 
 Remus." 
 
 With excellent books already written on 
 every subject that can interest a child's mind, 
 there should be no hindrance to the satisfac- 
 tion of that interest. Teachers and parents 
 have it for their vocation to discover what the 
 children really care to know, and beginning 
 with that, and proceeding from that, step by 
 step, I believe all the departments of knowl- 
 edge usually admitted into a general and lib- 
 eral curriculum of study, would in time be 
 
JUVENILE LITERATURE AND MORALS. 47 
 
 reached, and reached probably in the order 
 best adapted to the individual child's needs 
 and nature. It is not enough that we teach 
 the children to read ; we must teach them 
 what to read, and keep a supply of such 
 reading at hand. 
 
 In view of the hazards to which reading 
 youth are exposed in these days of enor- 
 mous and indiscriminate printing, it seems 
 sometimes a doubtful advantage to know 
 how to read. I know it is heresy to sug- 
 gest to a country resting its whole weight 
 upon the church and the school, that it 
 could stand for a moment without this latter 
 support. It could not. The school and the 
 church are the twin pillars of the republic. 
 But the school must teach something more 
 than reading, even as the church must teach 
 something more than doctrines. The one 
 must lead us to the best reading, and the 
 other to the best living. Failing this, both 
 fail, and the republic with them. 
 
 I have spoken thus far as if the only peril 
 to the reading child were to be found in his 
 injudicious use of such books as may be found 
 
48 JUVENILE LITERATURE AND MORALS. 
 
 in our leading libraries. But the great ma- 
 jority of children in cities not provided with 
 free libraries share neither the privileges nor 
 the perils of such places. In the absence of 
 a public library, they are obliged to depend 
 for their reading upon the scanty supplies of 
 their own homes and their neighbors'. Where, 
 then, shall they turn for their reading ? In 
 the answer to that question lies the secret of 
 no little of the wreck and misery which, in 
 spite of all the schools can do, — nay, it is 
 cruel to think, partly in consequence of what 
 the schools have done, — have come upon our 
 young people. Minds enfeebled, imaginations 
 fouled, bodies wrecked, powers defeated, lives 
 shortened and lost ! — I fear this must be a 
 part of the true report of our school and 
 church and home-keeping to-day. For the 
 youth who can read will read, and if we neg- 
 lect to give good reading, he will take what 
 he can get. And he can get easiest what is 
 cheapest. And what is cheapest is (or was 
 until this new era of the best in a cheap 
 form) the dime novel and the sensational 
 paper. Worse than that, — with an ingenuity 
 
JUVENILE LITERATURE AND MORALS. 49 
 
 and refinement of evil which suggest not 
 one but many personal devils, — there are 
 creatures in human form who actually make 
 and sell immoral books and papers, and can- 
 vass the whole country, making use, when 
 they can obtain them, of the school -lists of 
 our towns and cities, in order to circulate 
 their lying and ruinous teachings. Is it any 
 wonder that, for the moment, I wished our 
 children could not read, rather than have 
 them exposed to such a peril as that ? It is 
 not imaginary. It is not by any means sup- 
 pressed, although earnest and active men are 
 fighting it with skill and with local and tem- 
 porary success. But no outward laws or 
 guardianship can save our children. Their 
 defence must be in themselves ; in minds so 
 trained, in hearts so nurtured, in imaginations 
 so filled with sweet and uplifting images, in 
 tastes so pure and true, and principles so 
 fixed and just, that these temptations of evil 
 shall get behind them and slink out of sight. 
 And for this there must be not alone the 
 teaching and nurture of the school and the 
 church, but the free and generous supply, for 
 
50 JUVENILE LITERATURE AND MORALS. 
 
 all her citizens, of true, vigorous, bracing, and 
 elevating books. 
 
 What are we thinking of, when we open 
 schools and teach reading to eighty-three 
 thousand three hundred and one colored boys 
 and girls in the State of Georgia, and then leave 
 them to such reading as may come in their 
 way in the cheap daily and weekly papers or 
 periodicals, none of them too good, and some 
 of them too bad to be described ? We ought 
 to expect new crimes, and in increasing num- 
 bers, if we confer new powers without supply- 
 ing them with appropriate means for their 
 occupation and guidance. You cannot give 
 powers to a man and deny him scope for 
 their exercise or means for their use. Power 
 is its own temptation. There ought to be 
 free libraries and reading-rooms in all centres 
 of population for the graduates of our colored 
 schools. Better leave them in ignorance than 
 leave them able to read, and face to nice with 
 print that will only make them wise unto 
 damnation. I hope the time is coming, yea, 
 is already at hand, when all our youth will 
 have free access to the character-making 
 
JUVENILE LITERATURE AND MORALS. 51 
 
 books of English literature. In this work of 
 moral invigoration by means of good books, 
 especially in the nurture of the young, the 
 church has an immediate call to be up and 
 doing. With her sisters, the school and the 
 home, she will yet fulfil the prophetic prom- 
 ise : " And all thy children shall be taught of 
 the Lord, and great shall be the peace of thy 
 children." 
 
III. 
 
 LITERATURE AND MORALS. 
 
III. 
 
 LITEEATUEE AKD MOEALS. 
 
 Oh, that mine adversary had written a booh. — Job 
 xxxi. 35. 
 
 ffVEN then, in the most formidable 
 |. shape in which a charge could 
 come, Job meant that he would 
 meet it. He would bind it as a 
 crown upon his forehead, so sure was he of 
 his integrity. 
 
 I quote the passage only for its striking 
 recognition of the power of a book, — the 
 spell of literature. 
 
 If, as we have said, science is truth, and 
 literature is truth and grace, that is, knowl- 
 edge made attractive by the beauty of its 
 rendering; or if, to state the same thought 
 differently, literature is art wedded to learn- 
 ing ; and if art is the service of beauty, 
 
56 LITERATURE AND MORALS. 
 
 especially of the beauty which has a beautiful 
 meaning, then good literature may always 
 be distinguished by these two traits, — it is 
 truthful and it is beautiful. It is therefore 
 perfectly compatible with good morals and 
 even helpful to them, although not of neces- 
 sity aimed at a moral end. 
 
 It is enough for the purposes of art if the 
 book, the play, or the picture delights the 
 sense of beauty. On its art side, therefore, 
 literature only needs to gratify the instinct 
 for beauty. But on the other hand, it must 
 needs have truth, either of reality or proba- 
 bility, or it falls short of good literature. 
 Whatever meets both these requirements is 
 good literature. Whatever meets either alone 
 is art or science, according as it satisfies the 
 love of beauty or the love of truth. Litera- 
 ture is the daughter of science and art. 
 
 It may be objected to our definitions that 
 they are limited and arbitrary ; that what 
 I call art is really what is known as fine art, 
 and what I call literature is really belles- 
 lettres. I accept the criticism, but do not 
 count it an objection. At another time and 
 
LITERATURE AND MORALS. 57 
 
 in another connection, we may examine the 
 relation of industrial art to morals, and of 
 pure science to ethics. But nothing is really 
 lost, and much is gained, by taking the terms 
 literature and art in the narrower sense of 
 belles-lettres and fine art, which is, indeed, 
 their most popular and common sense. 
 
 But man is something more than an artist 
 and something more than a scientist. He is 
 also a moralist. He is this pre-eminently. 
 His nature touches its highest note in this. 
 He therefore has a right to ask, and, more 
 than that, he is in duty bound to ask, what 
 effect any particular work of art or litera- 
 ture may have upon character and life. Thus 
 he criticises art and literature from a moral 
 and practical stand-point ; and he has a right 
 to do so, if he will only bear in mind that 
 there is a real distinction in kind between 
 a moral judgment and a literary or artistic 
 judgment. He may justly object to certain 
 books, pictures, and statues as a moralist, 
 which as an artist or literary critic he would 
 be compelled to admire. 
 
 With this distinction clearly in mind, we 
 
58 LITERATURE AND MORALS. 
 
 are prepared to make our excursion into the 
 wide realm of literature. Happily one por- 
 tion of it we have already surveyed. Chil- 
 dren's books, with their moral equivalents, 
 have been already judged. The exact sci- 
 ences are also out of the question, consisting 
 as they do of truth exclusive of beauty. But 
 enough is left, in poetry, fiction, history, 
 travel, philosophy, and religion, to summon 
 all our powers of attention and discrimina- 
 tion. It is understood, however, that we are 
 going as moralists, not as artists, up and down 
 this World's Fair of literature, and also that 
 nobody expects to carry off from such a 
 massive spectacle anything more than a gen- 
 eral impression of the dizzy scene, with here 
 and there some well-defined book or name 
 associated with some moral principle which, 
 once fixed and illumined by an example, is 
 capable of very wide application. 
 
 Men fly to literature for diversion, enjoy- 
 ment, instruction happily put, unconscious 
 schooling, and education without compulsion. 
 It is live learning ; truth with the glow of 
 life in it. It does not, like the grocer, offer 
 
LITERATURE AND MORALS. 59 
 
 us dried fruits or meats in which everything 
 is preserved but their native flavor, or mere 
 flesh and bones, at their best, like the butcher. 
 It keeps nothing but live stock, which frisks 
 and goes through its paces with all the ease 
 and grace in life. Its creatures are well-bred 
 without losing their natural spirit, broken 
 in without being broken down, tamed but 
 not dulled, their culture the furtherance of 
 their nature, not its mortification and denial. 
 There is naturalness and simplicity in true 
 literature, not mere artifice and carpentry. 
 It refreshes, not wearies ; restores, not de- 
 pletes ; invigorates, not weakens. It does 
 not come, as the ancient sermon used to 
 come, with more heads than Cerberus, and a 
 reluctance to end as prolonged as the ser- 
 pent's. It knows how to rivet attention and 
 retain and reward it. It is master of a thou- 
 sand arts, but these all submit themselves to 
 one good rule, — namely, always to fit the 
 style of treatment to the subject-matter. To 
 model in clay, carve in wood and stone, 
 mould in iron, beat and chase in gold and 
 silver, — this is the safe secret of literary 
 
60 LITERATURE AND MORALS. 
 
 art. He who has the wit to use it is wel- 
 come to steal it. 
 
 If authors only wrote with a true literary 
 motive or out of a real literary faculty, 
 though the task of the critic would remain, 
 that of the censor would he diminished. So 
 long as so many people follow hook-making, 
 under the mistaken impression that there is 
 money in it, or exceptional honor or evidence 
 of superior wit, there will he a rush of blood 
 to that extremity, with all the perils accom- 
 panying it. " Of making many books there 
 is no end." If this was the woful complaint 
 of the author of Ecclesiastes, so long before 
 the invention of printing, what would that 
 intrepid pessimist say now ? The British 
 Museum has a million and a half of books, 
 and the National Library in Paris has over 
 two millions. It is estimated that twenty- 
 five thousand volumes are published every 
 year. An English critic is reported to have 
 said that more than three thousand years 
 would be needed for the merely mechanical 
 process of reading the books which cither are 
 or have been standard books of literature. 
 
LITERATURE AND MORALS. 61 
 
 Since our brief candle of seventy years will 
 not hold out till all are read, it becomes nec- 
 essary for us to select well and read wisely. 
 Every poor book we read is so much time 
 stolen from a good book. Such an exchange 
 is the worst kind of robbery. 
 
 Here on my table lie two books, — Taine's 
 " English Literature " and Hardy's " Far from 
 the Madding Crowd." The one is a full, 
 voluminous, independent, and able resume 
 and critique of English belles-lettres, from the 
 beginning until now. If I read it, I shall 
 get a knowledge of the origin of literature, 
 its sources in race, environment, and epoch, 
 — the finest instance extant of a full and 
 gradually developed organ of truth and 
 beauty, the body of English letters. I shall 
 get this in such a shape, told as it is by a 
 master among modern French writers^ that 
 the book itself will be excellent literature, 
 and its reading will be at once a source of 
 information and a lesson in style. It will 
 lead me, by the curiosity its comments excite, 
 to read a hundred standard books which I 
 might otherwise have known nothing of. It 
 
G2 LITERATURE AND MORALS. 
 
 will accustom me, by the freedom and inde- 
 pendence of its judgments, to dare to look at 
 the most famous writers with my own eyes, 
 and see their faults as well as their merits ; 
 it will put me on my guard even in regard 
 to the very book I am reading, and by its 
 example of bold exceptions taken to admired 
 standards, I shall learn to take exceptions to 
 Taine himself. I shall find entertainment, 
 education, discipline, pleasure, and profit all 
 combined, if I take up Taine's " English Lit- 
 erature." But the volume is bulky, and I 
 perchance am lazy. It is long, and will take 
 long to finish. Moreover, it is full of con- 
 nected meaning, and does not tell its story to 
 the reader who skips. On the other hand, 
 here is a little book in the handy size and 
 shape of the Leisure Hour Series, easy to 
 hold, easier still to understand, — not a talk 
 about novels, but a novel itself, and written, 
 besides, by a popular author. Which shall I 
 read ? I think I will just glance at the 
 novel ; see how it begins ; get the drift of it ; 
 crack the shell and pick out the meat ! It 
 will take but a few minutes. The title is so 
 
LITERATURE AND MORALS. 63 
 
 promising : " Far from the Madding Crowd.' ' 
 Visions of country sweetness and repose, se- 
 clusion from the world, emancipation from the 
 slavery of city customs and society, freedom 
 from all those excitements and alarms which 
 keep the nerves of the urban dweller al- 
 ways on the rack, float before the enchanted 
 mind. The opening chapter seems to meet 
 our expectations. It reveals a rural beauty 
 amidst unique and captivating circumstances. 
 We wonder what will become of her. We 
 read on to see. Other interesting people 
 come upon the scene. We grow curious 
 about them. Their lives get entangled with 
 the heroine's. The interest strengthens with 
 the spinning of the threefold cord. Before 
 we realize it we are caught in the meshes of 
 the story-spinner, and there is no peace till 
 the end is reached. Happy if there is any 
 peace then. In this case it assuredly is not 
 the peace we sought when we turned our 
 backs on the " madding crowd." Country 
 life, as it is depicted here, proves quite as 
 madding as the city. The rustic beauty cap- 
 tures in succession three hearts, giving her 
 
64 LITERATURE AND MORALS. 
 
 own to the one least worthy of it ; and hav- 
 ing outlived the murder of one, and the in- 
 sanity and imprisonment of another, she 
 meekly marries at last the very man she 
 began by refusing with scorn. Now there 
 may be truth enough in this picture of a 
 vain and foolish woman. No absurdity is un- 
 likely with such a character. But she cer- 
 tainly has not led us into the paths of peace, 
 as we had hoped to be led, when the title of 
 her story met our eyes. 
 
 I do not complain of any unlikelihood 
 in the story. On the contrary, the solitude 
 of the country is not seldom as madding as 
 the city's crowd, and there are tragedies of 
 the field as brutal and fearful as those of the 
 street. But when the tale is ended what 
 has been gained by the reader ? " Entertain- 
 ment for the time being," you may say ; and 
 that is true. It is also true that there is a 
 time in life for entertainment as for other 
 things; "a time to laugh and a time to 
 weep." But granted that laughing and weep- 
 ing have their equal right to be, it makes 
 some difference what we laugh or weep about. 
 
LITERATURE AND MORALS. 65 
 
 Here, if anywhere, is the place for the genial 
 and fair-minded moralist to come in and say: 
 " Have a care what you weep over and laugh 
 at!" Tears water, in the heart of him who 
 sheds them, the image of the thing he mourns. 
 What a man laughs over he will likely brood 
 over until his thoughts take the shape of his 
 pleased or startled imagination. I do not 
 wish my heart wrung with pity for a man 
 who is only getting the just rewards of his 
 folly or crimes, and who shows more sorrow 
 for his sufferings than for the wrongs which 
 brought them upon him. I feel personally 
 outraged when I am compelled to laugh at 
 something which I do not approve. Wit will 
 have its due. Laugh we must, and probably 
 shall, — all we who have a keen sense of 
 humor, — whenever that sense is skilfully 
 touched. It is as irresistible as tickling. 
 But we protest openly or inwardly whenever 
 this genial instinct in us is captured by a 
 gross or immoral act or allusion. To return 
 to Mr. Hardy's story, which we were in- 
 veigled into reading, it ought in fairness to 
 be said that the book is not bad, morally or 
 
 5 
 
66 LITERATURE AND MORALS. 
 
 artistically, but it is profitless. Its heroine 
 is n't worth knowing, and we grudge the 
 time spent in making her acquaintance and 
 following her fortunes and misfortunes. If 
 we are in search of entertainment for a lei- 
 sure hour, let us take it somewhere else than 
 "far from the madding crowd." The other 
 book, Taine's " English Literature," if too 
 critical for your mood or too heavy for your 
 leisure, would, if read at a suitable time, put 
 you on the track of really standard authors, 
 whom to know is to make progress. 
 
 In Mr. Taine's judgment, the whole body 
 of standard English literature labors under 
 the artistic disadvantage of being studiously 
 moral. I need not say that Mr. Taine is 
 French. The English, he says, excel as 
 moralists ; the French as artists. The rule 
 of English literature, as laid down by the 
 public taste, is : "• Be moral. All your novels 
 must be such as may be read by young girls." 
 And then follow five pages of satirical ad- 
 vice which starts as if it were supposed to 
 come from the British public, but soon falls 
 into the author's own pronounced opinion. 
 
LITERATURE AND MORALS. 67 
 
 The gist of his indictment of English litera- 
 ture is, that it misses the perfection of art 
 because it is so careful of the moral. One 
 would think from his sensitiveness to the 
 least touch of retributive justice in the stories 
 of the masters of English fiction, that Taine 
 had a spite against morality. But he has not. 
 He is only criticising what he considers its 
 misplacement. He frankly admits elsewhere 
 that the Northern, the German, and English 
 race were right in asserting that man must 
 seek greatness and permanence in liberty and 
 justice, not, as the Latin races have sought 
 it, in pleasure and power. This is admission 
 enough of the supremacy of morals. But in 
 art, literary and other, he maintains that the 
 moral must not be the controlling aim. Let 
 it be granted. And also let it be granted that 
 English authors are convicted of righteous- 
 ness, and miss sometimes the perfection of 
 art by their haste to anticipate the Judgment. 
 This comes in part from the limitations of the 
 author's time. His story must be told within 
 limits, and he cannot leave his characters in 
 mid-ocean. He must bring them to some port, 
 
68 LITERATURE AND MORALS. 
 
 and therefore he sometimes makes quicker 
 passages with his characters than Nature 
 ever allows. But in this rush for justice, he 
 offends as much against true morals as he 
 does against true art. Haste is not the way 
 of either. To one who believes in the moral 
 constitution of the universe, the ends and 
 methods of art and morals do not seem so far 
 apart. At bottom they are the same. Only 
 they must be approached from different sides. 
 There seems also to be some truth in the gen- 
 eral criticism of leading English novelists, that 
 their characters are abstract qualities baptized 
 with proper names and made to do service as 
 lay figures to set off one or another of the ten 
 commandments, rather than men and women 
 with more faults than the one they stand for, 
 and more virtues also than they get the credit 
 for. I think we must admit that we rather 
 expect Pecksniff to be a hypocrite and noth- 
 ing more, Squeers to be a fraud, Quilp a 
 brute, Weller a wag, Heep a knave, Pickwick a 
 dear old fool, and so on, to the end of Dickens's 
 long procession of heroes. But these people 
 are not so much characters as caricatures. 
 
LITERATURE AND MORALS. 69 
 
 Thackeray certainly does preach, as Taine 
 says of him, and his people are the illustration 
 of his sermons. But there is a world of na- 
 ture in them for all that. Pendennis and 
 Laura, Clive Newcome and Ethel, Philip and 
 the little sister, Esmond and Beatrix, — surely 
 these are all real people, and, with their great 
 company of associates in and out of " Yanity 
 Fair," might say to the world of men, "We 
 are of like passions as yourselves." 
 
 It will be a surprise to many to find the 
 earlier English novelists set down as inveter- 
 ate moralists, — men whose stories seem to 
 depict the very wantonness of immorality. 
 But they are all made to do duty as moral 
 philosophers, 'and hardly a noted English 
 writer from Chaucer to Tennyson , or from 
 Bichardson to Thackeray, escapes this inar- 
 tistic imputation. And yet, while pressing 
 this point against English writers as a defect 
 of art, he celebrates the results of their work 
 in words like these : " Frenchmen will say 
 that they only half like these official or- lay 
 preachers, — Defoe, Hogarth, Smollett, Rich- 
 ardson, Johnson, and the rest. I reply that 
 
70 LITERATURE AND MORALS. 
 
 moralists are useful, and that they have 
 changed a state of barbarism into a state of 
 civilization." 
 
 When I ask myself what Mr. Taine and his 
 French confreres would have in the way of 
 fine art in literature, I am obliged to infer 
 that he would favor some logical and long- 
 sustained role of revenge, such as is played 
 by the Count of Monte Christo ; or some 
 glorification of love, like George Sand's, or, 
 latest fruit from the upas-tree of French liter- 
 ature, — a pre-Raphaelite study in low-life 
 in Paris, such as Zola knows how to write. 
 Just to know what I was talking about, I 
 have taken the trouble to read one of these 
 realistic studies of Paris dirt. It may be 
 that such sketches of low life have their 
 value as a part of the testimony of the nine- 
 teenth century in regard to one phase of its 
 life. I do not dispute its truth, for I have 
 no means of testing it. God help us, if men 
 and women and children are indeed living 
 this life below the brutes. The people who 
 may safely read such testimony and know of 
 such characters arc, I fear, not those who are 
 
LITERATURE AND MORALS. 71 
 
 most likely to read these books. Bad com- 
 pany only improves those who are strong 
 enough and good enough to make it better; 
 and the people described in such stories are 
 bad company. I do not see why it should be 
 any safer or any less culpable to cultivate the 
 acquaintance of vulgar and degraded people 
 in books than in actual life. Such characters, 
 as they appear in the book, may be even more 
 demoralizing than their originals would be in 
 real life, for their portraits have none of their 
 repulsive odor, and may even win admiration 
 for the skill with which they are depicted. I 
 doubt if it is useful to know of the evil of 
 the world very much in advance or in excess 
 of our power and will to overcome it. The 
 young will learn it fast enough without the 
 aid of these books. And meantime the knowl- 
 edge of evil gained from books which inspire 
 horror of it, but lend no aid in combating or 
 avoiding it, does more harm than good. It 
 quickens feelings which it makes no attempt 
 to use in saving endeavors. The sight of 
 wrongs may stir us to abate them. The story 
 of them, told as exciting fiction, more often 
 
72 LITERATURE AND MORALS. 
 
 leaves us a prey to sentimental tears and 
 vain regrets. The poet and the novelist give 
 a soul to facts. The historians too, who take 
 their inspiration from letters rather than sta- 
 tistics, are quick writers. These translators 
 of the spirit of their age preserve a living 
 tradition, by means of which we recover 
 the past and know the present. Taine says 
 he would give " fifty volumes of charters and 
 a hundred volumes of state papers for the 
 memoirs of Cellini, the epistles of Saint Paul, 
 the table-talk of Luther, and the comedies 
 of Aristophanes." It is because in such un- 
 premeditated memorials as these, the age 
 enrolls itself and comes forth in due time, 
 winged and living, the very spirit of the 
 past. He also claims that it is chiefly by 
 the study of literature that one may con- 
 struct a moral history. For literature is 
 character-painting, and characters are the 
 factors of history. Creeds and constitutions 
 are far inferior to literature as witnesses of 
 man to man. 
 
 " The articles of a code or a 'catechism only 
 show us the spirit roughly and without deli- 
 
LITERATURE AND MORALS. 73 
 
 cacy." " If there are any writings in which 
 politics and dogma are full of life, it is in elo- 
 quent discourses of the pulpit and the tribune, 
 memoirs and unrestrained confessions." It 
 has long been my opinion that the truest 
 and best literature of every generation goes 
 into the fire. The family and friendly letters 
 that perish with the reading, or, if they linger 
 beyond the lives of their correspondents, 
 finally go to the mill as old paper, or to the 
 flames as a part of the spoils of spring clean- 
 ing, contain the truest and liveliest image, 
 and therefore the best literature, of the age 
 in which they were written. There are let- 
 ters now in the keeping of tender friends, 
 who cannot summon courage to destroy 
 them, nor yet to publish them, in which 
 the priceless materials for a veritable history 
 of the last quarter of a century in this 
 country are preserved. A few of these may 
 survive, and they will be the seed-corn of 
 the coming history. 
 
 But it is useless to speak of private cor- 
 respondence as literature. It is out of reach 
 and out of the question. " Tell us, if you 
 
7-4 LITERATURE AND MORALS. 
 
 can, by name/' one may say, " what books 
 are good literature and worth reading." An 
 impossible task, indeed, if the answer is to be 
 exhaustive or inclusive of all useful books. 
 Before attempting to answer it, it is impor- 
 tant to renew our early distinction between 
 the literary and the moral standard. The in- 
 discriminate use of that much-abused word, 
 " good," confuses many questions. " Good 
 for what?" one has to ask, when the de- 
 mand is made for good literature or good 
 reading. What is good for its moral influ- 
 ence may not be good as a piece of literary 
 work. And what is excellent as a work 
 of art may not be morally good. I think 
 common usage will justify our saying that 
 " good reading " means reading that will do 
 the reader good morally, while good litera- 
 ture, strictly speaking, means that which is 
 true to life and character and correct in 
 style, whether morally nutritious or not. 
 
 For good reading, then, I would go to 
 the standard English writers, reading but 
 sparingly the novelists before "Walter Scott, 
 but freely and repeatedly Scott and the 
 
LITERATURE AND MORALS. 75 
 
 greatest of his successors, — Jane Austen, 
 Dickens, Thackeray, George Eliot, and Haw- 
 thorne. I would adopt the same rule with 
 English poets, taking Shakspeare as the 
 dividing line, and making him among poets, 
 as Scott among novelists, the writer to be 
 read again and again. I would let Milton, 
 as prose writer, stand between the better 
 present and the poorer past of English es- 
 sayists, leading on to Addison, Macaulay, De 
 Quincey, Carlyle, and Emerson. I would read 
 Herodotus for history, if it were only to cor- 
 rect the impression that the father of history 
 must needs be dull. And then I would read 
 McMaster's recent history of our own country 
 since the war of the Revolution, to correct a 
 similar impression in regard to modern his- 
 tory. Prescott is not dull ; Motley assuredly 
 is not; Macaulay never wrote a stupid page ; 
 Carlyle is as exciting as a thunder-storm ; 
 Froude is as interesting as fiction, sometimes, 
 perhaps, for the same reason, for example, 
 where he makes Henry VIII., as Emerson 
 says, a good family man. History and biog- 
 raphy have been considering their ways in 
 
76 LITERATURE AND MORALS. 
 
 the latest dispensation of the spirit of truth, 
 and every great nation and every great man 
 has now its lively historian and biographer. 
 
 As for books of travel, they were never so 
 many or so good as now. Kane and Hayes 
 and Hall have made the Arctic regions famil- 
 iar as New England snow-storms ; Livingstone 
 and Speke and Baker and Stanley have so 
 opened Africa in their books, that he who 
 reads feels that he has been there. Wallace 
 in the East Indies makes science a fascinat- 
 ing outing. Italy and Greece attract the writ- 
 ers whose pens adorn whatever they touch: 
 Hillard, Hare, Taiue, Ho wells, and Mahaffy. 
 Wallace carries you to Russia; Yambery to 
 Turkistan ; Hare and Hay to Spain ; Hue to 
 Thibet and China ; McCleod and Chunder Dutt 
 to India ; and Pumpelly across two continents. 
 
 The embarrassment is not in the poverty of 
 books, but in their richness and variety. To 
 help the reader, good manuals have been pre- 
 pared, such as " The Reading of Books," by 
 Charles H. Thwing; " Good Reading," by Mr. 
 Perkins ; " What shall I Read? " by J. H. V. ; 
 " A Guide to English History," by Professor 
 
LITERATURE AND MORALS. 77 
 
 Allen, and a general manual of historical litera- 
 ture by Professor Charles K. Adams ; " Books 
 and Reading," by President Porter of Yale 
 College; No. 17 of the Harvard College Library 
 Bulletin, with a list of the most useful refer- 
 ence books ; " Poole's Periodical Index," and 
 other special indices for leading magazines. 
 The public libraries of the country have taken 
 the whole people into their hands, and nearly 
 all of them publish aids and guides to read- 
 ing, which, if they are heeded, must keep the 
 bookfaring man from error, in spite of him- 
 self and the publishers. Among these there 
 is nothing better than the monthly reference 
 lists issued by W. E. Foster, the librarian of 
 the Providence Public Library, and the bul- 
 letins of the Boston Public Library and the 
 library of Harvard University. With such 
 guides as these and others like them, we 
 may all know what to read, if we will take 
 the trouble to inquire at the right place. 
 
 I feel that the subject lies very near to the 
 moral and spiritual well-being of men. Next 
 to the people whose company we keep, we 
 are most influenced by the books we read. I 
 
78 LITERATURE AND MORALS. 
 
 am not sure but the books are the more in- 
 fluential of the two. Our friends and com- 
 panions are of necessity few and confined to 
 a narrow round ; but books take us into 
 every walk in life. They carry us around 
 the world and up into the starry spaces. 
 Through them we get access to every grade 
 of society. Palace and hut are alike open 
 to us. The queen reads us her diary, and 
 the cobbler his verses. We make a jour- 
 ney to the moon with Jules Verne, or navi- 
 gate twenty thousand leagues under the sea. 
 We live the life of Crusoe on a desert isl- 
 and, or in the crowded city with Dr. John- 
 son. We visit all lands without leaving our 
 own door; know all people without going to 
 know them ; share all emotions, all sensations, 
 all fortunes, through sympathy, when the ex- 
 perience would utterly consume us, and live 
 in all past time as vividly as in the present ; 
 and all this comes to us by way of literature. 
 If our admirations are our fate, and they seem 
 to shape our characters more than anything 
 else, then we are as much a part of all that 
 we have read as of all that we have seen. 
 
LITERATURE AND MORALS. 79 
 
 I doubt if we can exaggerate the effect of 
 sympathetic reading. Our models are in the 
 books more often than in the circle of real 
 folks that surround us. Thackeray's Colonel 
 Newcome has crystallized around him a pure 
 deposit of the best type of English manhood 
 in the present generation. There was a time 
 when every young girl's hero was the heir of 
 Redclyffe or John Halifax. The characters 
 in Miss Aguilar's "Home Influence " were as 
 real to my youth as the people with whom 
 I lived. If in the life to come we are per- 
 mitted to meet those whom we have known 
 on earth, we shall look for Jane Austen's men 
 and women rather than our old townsfolk. 
 Such reality and potency is there in the crea- 
 tions of genius ; and literature is the second 
 creation in which these characters live. 
 
 There is one book of which I have not 
 spoken at all ; not because it does not con- 
 tain poetry, history, biography, travel, con- 
 fessions, and teaching, — each the best and 
 most natural of its kind, — but because by 
 an unhappy misunderstanding its pages have 
 been sealed as dogma. One levelling plane 
 
80 LITERATURE AND MORALS. 
 
 of doctrinal purpose has passed over its 
 infinite variety and picturesque inequality, 
 until it has become as smooth as a globe and 
 as inartistic. And yet, in spite of this smooth- 
 ing down and killing out of its lively signifi- 
 cance, the men and women of the Bible do 
 start up, — real men and women, — and win 
 our love or reprobation, according to their 
 characters. We pity Abel and condemn Cain ; 
 w r e revere Abraham and tremble for his son ; 
 we are sorry for Esau and indignant with 
 Jacob ; we love Joseph and hate his brethren ; 
 we admire David and Jonathan and blame 
 Saul ; we wonder at Samson and exult in 
 his terrible revenge, albeit with pity for 
 his fate ; we marvel at Job ; we glory in 
 Elijah ; w r e feel the sublime faith of Isaiah, 
 and exult in the constancy of his fellow- 
 prophets ; we shudder over Daniel in his den 
 of lions, and catch the moral that lurks in 
 the fable of Jonah's voyaging with the fish. 
 Escaped from the Old and entered upon the 
 New Testament, we do not wholly lose the 
 charm of biography and correspondence with 
 their literary forms, notwithstanding the clasp 
 
LITERATURE AND MORALS. 81 
 
 of dogmatic theology which seeks to confine 
 it. Jesus and his friends, John the Baptist 
 and Paul, are too real to be spirited away 
 by any process of abstraction. And thus, in 
 spite of theory and decree to the contrary, 
 the genuine literary character of the Bible 
 asserts itself and brings all the attraction of 
 naive narration to bear upon the heart and 
 taste of mankind. It is this, far more than 
 supposed literal inspiration or unvarying re- 
 ligious significance, which maintains the Bible 
 as the educator alike of the imagination, the 
 mind, and the heart of humanity. It runs 
 the whole course of literature, — poetry, 
 fable, legend, biography, history, proverb, 
 fairy tale, or its early equivalent, parable, 
 that is, fiction, prophecy, dream, vision, 
 tragedy, travel, correspondence, philosophy, 
 apocalypse, — and its art is only equalled by 
 its truth, when rightly apprehended. The 
 most horrible and the most beautiful things 
 are told in its pages. It reveals man in all 
 his possibilities, from brute to angel. And. 
 the justification of this laying bare of what is 
 in man may be found in the demands of art 
 
 6 
 
82 LITERATURE AND MORALS. 
 
 as well as of morals. Here, at least, man is 
 suffered to speak out ; and the evil that ap- 
 pears is so accompanied or followed by an 
 avenging righteousness, that the revelation 
 of the man of sin is not attended by any 
 temptation to imitate him. 
 
 In this, as it seems to me, the moral and 
 the literary aim agree and show themselves 
 at one. The knowledge of evil which one 
 may learn in the Bible is mercifully accom- 
 panied by the knowledge of its sin and its 
 inevitable penalties. When this world-wide 
 book is known for what it is, — a compen- 
 dium of human nature deep as hell and high 
 as heaven, — its strenuous teachings will be 
 reached and grasped with a firmer hold and 
 more grateful faith than ever. For it will 
 be seen and known that it is the perfection 
 of literature, that is, truth and grace ; and 
 the beauty it adores and inspires will be the 
 beauty of the Sistine Madonna and the shep- 
 herd with the kid, — the beauty that has 
 a beautiful meaning. 
 
IV. 
 INDUSTRY AND MORALS. 
 
IV. 
 
 IKDUSTBY AND MORALS. 
 My Father worketh hitherto, and I ivork. — John v. 17. 
 
 iHEN a convict in the Massachusetts 
 State's Prison, who showed re- 
 markable skill in a certain handi- 
 craft, was asked if he could work 
 like that before he came there, he answered : 
 " No, or I should never have come here." 
 He felt, and justly, that the profitable employ- 
 ment of his time in skilful labor would have 
 kept him from the crime for which he had 
 been imprisoned. The statistics of crime 
 confirm this man's opinion ; for out of two 
 hundred and twenty inmates of the Massa- 
 chusetts State's Prison in one year, one hun- 
 dred and forty-seven had no trades, while 
 only twenty-two could neither read nor write. 
 If ignorance, therefore, is a source of crime. 
 
INDUSTRY AND MORALS. 
 
 it is plainly ignorance of handicraft, rather 
 than ignorance of reading and writing. If 
 education is to be the bulwark of our national 
 order, it must be an education of the peo- 
 ple in something more than the schools, as 
 commonly organized, now teach. Useful and 
 necessary as the literary training of the com- 
 mon schools may be, it can at best only post 
 the pickets along the front where our civili- 
 zation is encamped. The real defence must 
 be found further back in the earthworks 
 which the hands of the laborer have set up. 
 In fine, the peace and order of a country de- 
 pend upon the virtue and intelligence of its 
 working-men. In estimating the moral uses 
 of industrial art, therefore, we are met at the 
 outset by this concurrent testimony of the 
 convict and the prison statistics, that skilful 
 industry is a great safeguard against crime. 
 
 If time were not too precious to be spent 
 in proving what is self-evident, I might at- 
 tempt to show why this is so. I might dwell 
 on the saving grace of occupation, the bless- 
 ing of being so busy that vagrant thoughts 
 and roving inclinations have no holiday for 
 
INDUSTRY AND MORALS. 87 
 
 their profitless outing. The mischief which 
 is proverbially convenient for idle hands to 
 do is thus prevented ; and Satan, when he 
 comes calling at the door or whistling out- 
 side the window to lure us from our work, is 
 politely though summarily told that we are 
 not at home. I might enlarge at length upon 
 the excellent economy of having one's house 
 so full of good guests that it was never con- 
 venient to receive any of the other kind. * 
 But all this recommendation of useful occu- 
 pation would be just as much in place in a plea 
 for the professions as the trades, and I have 
 set out upon a search for some of the especial 
 benefits resulting to morality from the knowl- 
 edge and practice of the industrial arts. 
 
 First, I am going to claim that the hand is 
 itself a direct factor in the development of the 
 brain, and consequently that it has no small 
 part to play in securing the true and happy 
 operation of the mind. Dr. Brown-Sequard 
 is quoted by Dr. Edward H. Clarke as saying 
 that the left side of the brain, which co-oper- 
 ates with the right hand, is more fully devel- 
 oped than the right side of the brain, which 
 
88 INDUSTRY AND MORALS. 
 
 corresponds with the left hand. This, they 
 say, is due to the more frequent and diversified 
 use of the right hand. And it has been co- 
 gently argued, by men familiar with this fact, 
 that we shall never have level-headed people, 
 — people with really balanced brains, — until 
 we educate them to be ambidextrous, or 
 equally capable with both hands. However 
 this may be, the simple physiological fact, 
 if it is a fact, that the work of the hands 
 affects the structure of the brain is enough 
 to warrant the assertion that the knowing 
 faculty in us depends in part upon the use 
 we make of our hands. When the most 
 spiritual of the New Testament writers wished 
 to assure his hearers of the fulness of the 
 knowledge he had of the word of life, he 
 was not content with seeing and hearing, but 
 he declared that he spoke of what his hands 
 had handled. It is the sign-manual of real 
 knowledge. What we have handled, we know. 
 What but the instinctive trust we have in the 
 discriminating sense of touch makes us all so 
 eager to feel of what we see? "Hands off!" 
 reads the watchful placard at the grand expo- 
 
INDUSTRY AND MORALS. 89 
 
 sition, as if the exhibitor knew the tingling 
 curiosity which makes a man's fingers go, 
 with the certainty of iron to the magnet, 
 towards every object that interests and at- 
 tracts him. I remember, in the earlier exhi- 
 bitions of the Mechanics' Charitable x\ssociation 
 in Boston, it was customary to employ young 
 ladies with small whips, to switch the fingers 
 of too inquisitive visitors ; and my own hand 
 carries the shameful memory to this day of 
 the gentle castigation then bestowed upon it. 
 How often we have agonized to see thought- 
 less fingers working the ruin of the beauty 
 they were asked to admire, — rubbing the 
 bloom from grape or plum, feeling the rose 
 petal as if it were common velvet, and spoil- 
 ing the polish of precious woods or stone by 
 drawing their finger-tips across them. They 
 did not know what they were doing. Their 
 act was due to the mind's desire for knowl- 
 edge operating through those agile spies, the 
 human digits. And as the hand changes its 
 shape with what it holds, so the mind is half 
 conformed to the things it knows. Logically 
 and physiologically the dyer's mind, like his 
 
90 INDUSTRY AND MORALS. 
 
 hand, " is subdued to that it works in." If 
 the mind moves the hand, the hand in turn 
 removes the mind ; the reaction is as sure as 
 the action. There is such a thing, therefore, 
 as brain-building by hand. And it is to this 
 effect of the skilful handicrafts in develop- 
 ing the brain, and thus qualifying the action 
 of the mind, that I would first appeal in 
 celebrating the mental and moral uses of 
 industry. The rational element in all our 
 moral judgments and deliverances is cer- 
 tainly involved, in an intimate way, in the 
 occupations of our hands. When the subtile 
 connections between doino; and thinking: are 
 searched and known, it will doubtless appear 
 that habitual ways of viewing life and its 
 problems are due in no small degree to the 
 bias of one or another occupation. The 
 combination of physical and psychical rela- 
 tions between a man's calling and his call, 
 that is, between his trade and his conception 
 of life and its purposes for him, makes his 
 choice of a profession one of the elements in 
 his earthly fate. The tailor's proverbial mel- 
 ancholy will refer itself to his sedentary and 
 
INDUSTRY AND MORALS. 91 
 
 cross-legged avocation • the miller's shrewd- 
 ness to the simple fact that everything is 
 grist which comes to his mill ; the sailor's im- 
 providence to his daily life within a plank's 
 thickness of a watery grave ; the jeweller's 
 gravity to his exclusive commerce with hu- 
 man vanity ; and the undertaker's cheerful 
 suavity to his familiarity with death, and con- 
 sequent fearlessness of it. 
 
 And I would place next in my enumera- 
 tion of the moral economies of industry the 
 wholesome contentment which a man must 
 take in seeing and handling a piece of work 
 which he has done, and done well. All our 
 powers work best when we are contented. 
 I do not say satisfied. We can be contented 
 wherever we are in life's upward round of 
 being, but we shall never be satisfied till we 
 have reached our goal, — till we awake in 
 God's likeness. Contentment, fulness of joy 
 and cheer, according to our present capacity, 
 is attainable this and every day. And I say 
 that the sight and touch of some actual piece 
 of handiwork which he has done, and done 
 well, will go far to make a sensible man 
 
02 INDUSTRY AND MORALS. 
 
 contented and happy. Fortunate he who is 
 permitted to see the fruit of his labors. His 
 every-day walk is a triumphal procession. 
 The mason or carpenter going along the city 
 streets sees on either side the trophies of his 
 peaceful victories. Which is greater, the tri- 
 umph of a Csesar or Napoleon, greeted as he 
 returns to Rome or Paris with the acclamations 
 of an excitable and fickle crowd, or the modest 
 progress of the simple artisan, who, unnoticed 
 by the people, is nevertheless greeted by the 
 very stones as he passes by. cl This is he ! " 
 the carved and stable arches cry aloud ; "this 
 is he who made and fashioned us !" "He placed 
 us where we securely stand ! " the tall ware- 
 houses seem to say. " He paved and graded 
 us!" the very streets proclaim. "We are 
 his by creation !" carriage and dray and car 
 and omnibus agree. He sees the work of his 
 fingers in the clothes men wear. Every store 
 window pays tribute to his skill. The memo- 
 rials of his virtue arc in the walls themselves, 
 not in their temporary decorations. Beset 
 by these obvious and permanent celebrants 
 of his skill, what can hinder the joyful sense 
 
INDUSTRY AND MORALS. 93 
 
 of being useful and helpful in his day, with 
 which the common builder and maker is at- 
 tended? I could envy, if envy were not a 
 forbidden luxury, the solid comfort with 
 which a man who has put stone to stone, and 
 beam to beam, and built the strong house, 
 must look upon the finished work of his 
 hands, and behold that it is very good. 
 Something of the joy of the builder and 
 maker of this mighty frame, in which suns 
 and worlds are but granite blocks and the 
 impalpable air the permanent cement, must 
 attend this artificer and day-laborer. And 
 when at last he rests from his labors, his 
 works still follow him, carrying his name and 
 the fame of his thoroughness and skill from 
 generation to generation. 
 
 It may seem hardly worthy to be classed 
 among moral uses, but I cannot omit from 
 this list that general proficiency which the 
 mastery of a good trade promotes. Men 
 agree to call this general proficiency or apt- 
 ness for every practical emergency by the 
 name of " handiness." As if they knew what 
 it was which made a man really capable and 
 
94 INDUSTRY AND MORALS. 
 
 ready-minded, they call the possessor of these 
 traits a " handy man." The story of the " man 
 who kept himself in repair " is enough to illus- 
 trate the bearing of this gift or accomplish- 
 ment upon the moral issue of the clay. Let 
 him who has never known what it was to be 
 impatient with a creaking door, a slamming 
 blind, a scraping gate, a trunk that would n't 
 open, or, being open, would n't shut, a moody 
 lock and key, or any of the thousand and one 
 obstinacies that human workmanship is liable 
 to, say how much the ability to remedy these 
 faults conduces to good-temper and neigh- 
 borly kindness. Often the fate of nations 
 turns on the timely presence of the man 
 who can build a pontoon bridge or mend an 
 engine. 
 
 Again, we must not merge in any other 
 moral quality that manly independence with 
 which the possession of a good trade invests 
 its owner. The consciousness that he can 
 do something which the world wishes to have 
 done, that there is always a market for his 
 work, that he has not to go about begging 
 employment, but can be sure that it would 
 
INDUSTRY AND MORALS. 95 
 
 beg for him if he ceased to work ; this gives 
 a man the sense of mutual dependence be- 
 tween him and other men, which is what we 
 often mean by independence. "You need 
 me and I need you: it is an even thing," — 
 let a man feel and say that to society, and he 
 is no longer its slave or unworthy dependant. 
 He hangs his head at no man. He is sure 
 that if his health is spared he can always earn 
 an honest living. 
 
 There is one sure way out of all the injury 
 and injustice, if injury and injustice there be, 
 in the lot of the artisan. It is the way of 
 excellence in work. Let a man add skill to 
 strength, perfect finish to mere performance 
 of his task, and he becomes invaluable to his 
 employer. To lose him is to cripple the 
 business ; and how this independence through 
 the worth of his work dignifies a man ! He 
 owes his place and power to no indulgence, 
 favor, or patronage of the rich or the great, 
 but carries his office in himself. This aristoc- 
 racy of merit is a nobility which needs no 
 patent. And whatever excellence in working 
 can bring a man to it makes him so far a 
 
96 INDUSTRY AND MORALS. 
 
 moral hero. As David Swing lias said : " The 
 man who can lay a good country road de- 
 serves immortality." 
 
 Again, I find an especial aid to practical 
 morality, in the undivided responsibility which 
 attends the worker in wood, stone, or iron. He 
 knows that his product will always be what 
 he makes it. Given good material and good 
 tools, the worker must take the blame if his 
 handiwork is poor. No opposing will, no re- 
 bellious sinner, lurks in the wood or iron, to 
 undo all that the workman tries to do. There 
 is no natural depravity in things. If some- 
 thing akin to it comes out in chairs, tables, 
 walls, ceiling, or roof, it must have come from 
 the workman and his carelessness. This sense 
 of personal and entire responsibility for what 
 he does is a strong brace to manhood. The 
 minister can always blame his people or they 
 him, if the church drags. The doctor shelters 
 himself behind the patient's insubordination or 
 incurable malady. The schoolmaster protests 
 that he cannot be held responsible because 
 John or Mary will not learn. But the artisan 
 is justly praised or blamed for his works. He 
 
INDUSTRY AND MORALS. 97 
 
 is known by them. Buyers look for his name 
 on tool or case, and safely order his goods 
 without inspecting them. A reputation for 
 good and honest product is a living spring of 
 self-respect. What just rapture must that man 
 feel who knows that his name is a synonyme of 
 excellence wherever it is spoken. Machines 
 drop their common titles and are known by 
 his alone. " Ah ! you have a Corliss there," 
 men say. Or, "You use a Woods, I see." "Is 
 that a WJieeler & Wilson's ? " Is a Mackin- 
 tosh a man or the best of waterproof coats ? 
 Is a Stradivarius a violin or the name of an old 
 maker of violins ? In art the common desig- 
 nation of a really great picture is its artist's 
 name. It is a Rubens, a Raphael, a Correggio, 
 a Vandyke. As if men felt that the excel- 
 lence of the superior handling of gross matter, 
 as iron, wood, marble, or paint, was all in the 
 person who handles them, they agree to give 
 him all the praise. I say that this utter re- 
 sponsibility for his work is an incentive to 
 thoroughness and nicety of workmanship, and 
 in this incentive there is great moral worth. 
 The man who scamps his work is always, first 
 
98 INDUSTRY AND MORALS. 
 
 or last, a scamp himself. The man who can 
 shift the shame of his own failure upon the 
 intractability of others will always be in peril 
 of falling short of his full endeavor ; but 
 the artist or the artisan pricked to his finest 
 action by the assurance that his fate is not in 
 another, but in himself, has a powerful mo- 
 tive for effort and an undivided share in its 
 rewards. 
 
 Virtue, too, may find a natural ally in the 
 agricultural and mechanical arts, because they 
 bring men into intimate relations with Nature 
 and her products. Land, water, and the sea- 
 sons, the growing trees and herbs, wood, iron, 
 coal, how intently these all must be studied 
 and obeyed, if their productive capacities 
 would be known and utilized ! It is daily 
 sitting at the feet of the sun to be instructed 
 in his ways ; taking lessons of the earth in 
 the apportionment and sequence of the crops ; 
 patient searching of the stars to learn " what 
 of the night ; " tracking the coal to its beds, 
 and ore to its veins and pockets, — weighing, 
 measuring, adjusting, conquering Nature by 
 obeying her, — that make up the mechanic's 
 
INDUSTRY AND MORALS. 99 
 
 and the farmer's day. In all this co-labor with 
 the earth and skies there is a constant dis- 
 cipline in self-adaptation to the facts of the 
 universe, and an increasing acquaintance with 
 its forces and laws. If apprenticeship with a 
 man of good business habits is an education 
 in trade, what must be the influence of daily 
 life and work with a partner like Nature, who 
 never breaks her word, always keeps her 
 appointments, and generously rewards the la- 
 borer with all the profits of his toil and her 
 husbandry? Can any better schooling in char- 
 acter be found ? But this is not all. Inevitably 
 by the tracing of Nature's means and ways 
 of working, the mind of the thoughtful work- 
 man must be enlarged. It will grow not 
 alone, as indicated at the beginning, by the 
 physical reaction of the hand and the brain ; 
 but the recognition of thought in Nature, 
 and the application of thought to manu- 
 facture will furnish the best possible mental 
 discipline. Nature gives not only the pat- 
 terns of mechanical and decorative art, but 
 she works on the precise formulae which the 
 mathematician works out. In the butterfly's 
 
100 INDUSTRY AND MORALS. 
 
 wing the engineer discovers the tubular sup- 
 port which combines most perfectly lightness 
 and strength, and he copies it in his bridge. 
 The law of phyllotaxis, by which the leaves 
 grow on the plant, is the same which orders 
 the courses of the planets. The astronomer's 
 slate and the timely observation of the tele- 
 scope discover a new planet simultaneously. 
 No wonder the best brain of this generation 
 turns to natural science and the mechanic 
 arts. It finds there a discipline as well as 
 a theme congenial to its powers. The late 
 Wendell Phillips declared that the men of 
 most brains do not go to Congress as they 
 used to, but betake themselves to the fac- 
 tory and railroad. They build Lawrence 
 and Lowell and Atlanta and Birmingham, 
 instead of making orations in the senate. 
 They construct railroads to the Pacific coast, 
 or lay telegraph cables under the Atlantic, 
 instead of seeking a cabinet appointment. 
 And when one considers, only in the igno- 
 rant way in which our inexperience allows us 
 to consider it, the compass of mind and varied 
 gifts of calculation and management involved 
 
INDUSTRY AND MORALS. 101 
 
 in the successful conduct of a great mill, 
 manufactory, or railway, the tribute seems 
 hardly unjust. Of all the varied exhibitions 
 of the Centennial Exposition, none was more 
 impressive or indicative of mental force than 
 Machinery Hall. When the soft and brilliant 
 pageantry of the finer arts shall have faded 
 from our recollection, or melted, like a tinted 
 cloud, into the past, that majestic Corliss 
 engine will stand like a mountain peak un- 
 veiled, and the busy trades that prospered 
 by its power will haunt the memory like a 
 familiar song. I am speaking of these things 
 as the product and, in turn, the producer of 
 mind. They testify to thought and quicken 
 thought. 
 
 We need not depend upon any stated ex- 
 position which one man has seen and another 
 not ; but look at any section of this busy 
 and intercommercial country and see how it 
 bears witness to mind applied to mechanics. 
 Look at any great city. Take New York, 
 bound together and enmeshed by innumera- 
 ble rails and wires, like the great droning fly 
 she is, in the grip of that incarnate piece of 
 
102 INDUSTRY AND MORALS. 
 
 intellect, the mechanical spicier, with mind 
 in every claw, infinite capacity of spinning 
 and thinking along the line of his intermina- 
 ble rope. What a spectacle is this of all-em- 
 bracing mind at work, by the aid of physical 
 powers cunningly applied, to lift this strug- 
 gling and unwilling world to its profitable 
 place in the web that holds the stars. I offer 
 no apology for the homely comparison. The 
 spider is a divine institution. In Honolulu 
 he is treated as a friend, allowed an honored 
 corner in the room, encouraged to grow to 
 large dimensions, and permitted to indulge 
 his merciful appetite to its utmost capacity. 
 
 But greater uses still await us. The inti- 
 macy with Nature and her schooling of the 
 intellect may bring the thoughtful farmer or 
 mechanic a long way toward the discovery 
 and reverent recognition of the divine Ar- 
 tificer of the sun and stars. For if he finds 
 sun, moon, and stars made and ordered in 
 their courses according to laws that repeat 
 themselves in his own mind, must he not 
 infer a mind not wholly unlike his own as 
 their originator ? And since he knows that 
 
INDUSTRY AND MORALS. 103 
 
 no man has made them, what can he do but 
 reverently acknowledge God ? No mechanic 
 art is profoundly learned or well elaborated 
 unless it brings the artisan to this rational 
 and natural conclusion. 
 
 Thus the plea we started to make for the 
 mental and moral uses of industrial art, be- 
 ginning with its preventive and corrective 
 effect upon crime, and taking up successively 
 the reflex action of the hand upon the brain 
 itself, — the contentment, proficiency, rescue 
 from idleness, encouragement of independ- 
 ence and the sense of personal responsi- 
 bility ; wholesome and intimate contact with 
 Nature and its thought-provoking forces which 
 mechanical study secures, ■ — rises at last to 
 the recognition of the divine Originator of 
 this mindful universe. 
 
 But besides all this the artisan may derive 
 self-respect in his labor and humane impulse 
 from his work, from the consideration of its 
 effect upon the comfort and happiness of 
 other men, — the maintenance of social ties, 
 and the prevalence of human sympathies 
 among men. 
 
104 INDUSTRY AND MORALS. 
 
 What but the railroads connecting shore 
 with shore, and steamers making the ocean 
 a means of communication instead of a bar 
 to intercourse, have made possible the inter- 
 change of product for product: cloth for 
 bread, and spice for oil ? What but these 
 nervous wires across the lands, and that great 
 spinal cord under the sea, make it possible 
 for all the world to know simultaneously the 
 death of a prince and the grief of a queen ? 
 These are the achievements of labor. 
 
 Is it possible to exaggerate their influence 
 in promoting human interests, philanthropy, 
 community among nations, and finally con- 
 cord and peace ? When our late president 
 died, why was the whole world united in our 
 bereavement ? Because by means of the 
 telegraph all civilized countries knew and 
 felt it at the same time. The serious thought 
 of such results as these following their labors 
 would, if it were habitual among working- 
 men, lift their lives and labors into grateful 
 respect and reverence. 
 
 It does not become any man, least of all 
 him who professes to revere as the head of 
 
INDUSTRY AND MORALS. 105 
 
 his church the carpenter of Nazareth, to 
 ignore the religious value or forget the moral 
 uses of invention and handicraft. I do not 
 forget the day or the place in which I am 
 speaking. On the contrary, I have chosen 
 my subject because of its fitness to both. 
 The peril of the church is its tendency to 
 deem its association an end in itself. But 
 its mission is rather to interpret to man the 
 moral and spiritual meaning of his every-day 
 life. Industry is not honored as it should 
 be, in the church or out of it. Our churches 
 undervalue it. Society disparages it. Capital 
 tyrannizes over it. It is more often flattered 
 by demagogues than reasoned with by states- 
 men; and the bribery, cajolery, appeals to 
 passion and prejudice with which working- 
 men are too commonly addressed, are an ad- 
 mission of the poor esteem in which, as a class, 
 they have been held. It is one of the fore- 
 most duties of the church to attempt the 
 correction of all this, by the respect and hos- 
 pitality with which it addresses working-men. 
 I fear very few of our churches could bear the 
 inquisition of the apostle James, if he should 
 
106 INDUSTRY AND MORALS. 
 
 examine them touching their respect of per- 
 sons. The poorly dressed man must take the 
 back seat in our synagogues, while the gold 
 ring and goodly apparel command the broad 
 aisle. It is a shame and practical contradic- 
 tion and infidelity in the church, which bases 
 itself upon the dignity of human nature, that 
 we cater to wealth and social standing, and 
 give simple manhood our neglect. 
 
 Again, the church might do something 
 to elevate the artisan class by laboring to 
 modify the common-school system in such a 
 way that it will recognize handicraft as the 
 natural and probable vocation of nine tenths 
 of the youth of this country. Twelve mil- 
 lions of laborers in the United States stand 
 on one side, and four hundred thousand law- 
 yers, doctors, ministers, and school-teachers 
 on the other ; and the question is, which has 
 the larger claim upon a system of education 
 designed for the public welfare and supported 
 by taxation of the people at large ? The 
 church is not travelling beyond its becoming 
 domain, when its members devote themselves 
 to reforms like these. 
 
INDUSTRY AND MORALS, 107 
 
 But this is a subject of itself, and one upon 
 which we cannot enter here. Enough, as we 
 have already shown, that by the study and 
 presentation of the ways of Him who worketh 
 hitherto in the things that are made, and of 
 him who said, " And I work," we shall gain 
 a new apprehension of the glory and beauty 
 of the orderly universe in which we pass our 
 days ; and this high indorsement of the claims 
 of industry, and illustration of its grandeur, 
 will give energy to our work and reality to 
 our worship. 
 
BUSINESS AND MORALS. 
 
V. 
 
 BUSINESS AND MORALS. 
 
 Better is little with the fear of the Lord, than great 
 treasure and trouble therewith. — Prov. xv. 16. 
 
 f ET us speak first of what are called 
 " futures." Business men deal- 
 ing in cotton, corn, wheat, beef, 
 pork, bonds, and stock agree to 
 deliver the same on some future day, at a 
 given price. They are supposed to know 
 their business, and their calculations and en- 
 gagements are based on this knowledge. If 
 these transactions are genuine dealings in 
 real produce or its equivalent, nothing can 
 be said against them on the score of honesty. 
 If the contracting parties are ready to take 
 the risks it is their own affair; and yet, at 
 the peril of exposing my own lack of business 
 enterprise and capacity, I must say that it 
 
112 BUShXESS AND MORALS. 
 
 s 
 
 seems to me it would be better to en^ao:e 
 to furnish these supplies at the u going price " 
 at the time of delivery. This is what the 
 plain farming people of my acquaintance 
 a^ree to do. If you wish to emm^e your 
 winter apples or potatoes or wood of them, 
 they offer to deliver the things at a future 
 day and receive what is then the market 
 price. Sometimes the coal dealer, in return 
 for early orders, delivers his coal at a cheaper 
 rate than the market-price at the time of 
 delivery. But the " going price " is generally 
 the accepted rate. Thus neither the buyer 
 nor the seller is injured. If the one does not 
 make as much money by this method, the 
 other does not lose as much. A fair profit 
 is sure always, and there is no risk in such 
 transactions, unless the supply fails. This 
 fixing the price two, four, or six months be- 
 fore the sale or the actual exchange, exposes 
 one or the other of the contracting parties to 
 the risk of excessive loss. The merchant has 
 to hedge or double, to break the possible fall. 
 If he had nothing to consider but the chances 
 of nature, his problem would be comparatively 
 
BUSINESS AND MORALS. 113 
 
 safe ; for, taking the year through, seed-time 
 and harvest never fail. But when to the 
 variations of production are added the uncer- 
 tainties produced by monopoly, cornering, 
 combination, fluctuating cost of transporta- 
 tion, and all the ills that trade is heir to, the 
 use of prophecy in business transactions be- 
 comes more and more difficult. 
 
 It is not, however, for the purpose of giving 
 business men hints as to the best way of 
 managing their affairs, — a matter in which 
 I might more properly learn of them, — that I 
 am speaking now. There is an expressive 
 word which the business world frequently 
 applies to a class of operations which I wish 
 to separate from the real and lawful barter 
 we have been speaking of. When men w T ith 
 no goods of their own, and no money with 
 which to purchase them, undertake to buy 
 or sell corn or cotton or stock on some com- 
 ing day, never expecting really to do either, 
 but simply betting that the staple in question 
 will be worth this or that price on the given 
 day, then they leave the ranks of genuine 
 business men and become adventurers. They 
 
 8 
 
114 BUSINESS AND MORALS. 
 
 belong to the same class as those vagrant 
 people who pretend to be what they are not. 
 To affect a fortune which you have not is no 
 more respectable than to take a name or title 
 which does not belong to you. It is sailing 
 under false colors. It is gambling without 
 putting clown any money. I am not decry- 
 ing real transactions, or the exchanges of 
 real commodities, and stocks representing 
 invested capital are commodities as well as 
 wheat or corn ; but I am speaking of paper 
 promises to buy or sell, when the promiser 
 has neither the money to buy nor the goods 
 to sell, and no reasonable prospect of having 
 either at any future time. If all the trans- 
 actions of the stock exchange, for example, 
 were required to furnish their equivalents in 
 stock on any one day, it is doubtful if the 
 whole ocean could furnish water enough to 
 make the stock go round. So the same stock 
 does duty for a multitude of brokers' en- 
 tries and their speculating clients. Every 
 meeting of the stock exchange brings to- 
 gether an army of dealers who have noth- 
 ing to sell and nothing but doubtful bank 
 
BUSINESS AND MORALS. 115 
 
 accounts wherewith to buy. The assembling 
 of these gentlemen is more like a set-to of bulls 
 and bears, with which they have been fitly 
 compared. A level-headed, quick-eyed, and 
 stentorian chairman receives and announces 
 the bids made by the howling mob of frantic 
 dealers before him. " Ophir/' " Gould and 
 Curry," "Comstock," "Virginia Consolidated," 
 — all the variable mining stocks of California 
 went up and down like the waves of the sea, 
 in the stormy meeting of the Stock Exchange 
 of San Francisco which I once witnessed ; and 
 I can truly say that the feeding of the seals 
 in Woodward's Garden, which I saw on the 
 succeeding day, was a dignified and quiet 
 proceeding in comparison with this concourse 
 of men. They shouted, they roared, they 
 swung their hands in mid-air, they rushed, 
 they crowded, they glared at each other, and 
 screamed for recognition by the President of 
 the Board. Schoolboys on their play-ground 
 who should make such a row would be refused 
 another recess. And yet these were leading 
 business men, and this was the usual order of 
 business. I was told at the time that there 
 
116 BUSINESS AND MORALS. 
 
 was hardly a regular shop-keeper or dealer in 
 the city who did not dabble more or less in 
 mining stocks. The soundness, that is, of the 
 legitimate business of San Francisco depended 
 as much upon the price of stocks as upon the 
 value of the goods in trade. The spirit of 
 speculation had possessed all business, so that 
 all the earnings and investments of a well- 
 conducted firm were liable at any moment 
 to be swallowed up in the losses of some out- 
 side speculation. It was this which gave 
 such a feverish habit to California life, and 
 made its prosperity so changeable and uncer- 
 tain. What was typical of California twenty 
 years ago has now spread over the whole 
 country. New York has surpassed its West ern 
 rival in stock-gambling, and Chicago hardly 
 falls behind New York; and so the great cities, 
 pandering to the speculative spirit throughout 
 the country, offer themselves as its agents 
 and brokers, making themselves rich and 
 warm in the fleece of the lambs. 
 
 Like all other evils that infest human so- 
 ciety, this bottomless trading will go on until 
 its injuries to legitimate commerce and to 
 
BUSIKtSS AND MORALS. H7 
 
 innocent victims become unendurable. Then 
 society will rise and put the thing down. It 
 will be clearly seen that the buying and sell- 
 ing based on imaginary possessions is nothing 
 more nor less than betting; and betting is 
 nothing more nor less than gaming ; and 
 gaming is already unlawful and disgraceful. 
 When the law which prohibits gambling in 
 certain of its recognized forms sees clearly 
 that all betting is gambling, and punishes that 
 too, in all its forms, then our legal safeguard 
 against this curse will be complete. But, 
 pending that better day, it is our privilege 
 and duty to create a public sentiment on this 
 subject which may anticipate the law and 
 make it operative when it is made. 
 
 All honest business is either productive or 
 promotive. It either makes goods or facili- 
 tates their equitable exchange. Gaming does 
 neither. It makes nothing. It only secures 
 an unfair exchange, which is practical rob- 
 bery. Business says: "For value received 
 I promise to pay." Gaming compels a man 
 to pay without value received. Raffling, lot- 
 teries, betting pools, card-playing for money, 
 
118 BUSINESS AND MORALS. 
 
 stock-gambling, futures that have no inclorser 
 in the present, all these things are palpable 
 gaming, and the man who condemns the one 
 ought in consistency to condemn all. Church 
 fairs, where everything from a pincushion to 
 a piano is sold on shares, are just as unprin- 
 cipled as Monte Carlo or Baden-Baden. They 
 may not lead immediately to ruin and suicide, 
 but they may start the youth on a career 
 which will end there. How can a man re- 
 fuse to take a share in this fine saddle or that 
 rich counterpane when beauty comes to him 
 and pleads with him in the name of charity ? 
 It seems mean to refuse ; and yet I believe 
 any young man thus appealed to could better 
 afford to ask how much the article in ques- 
 tion is expected to 'bring when all the tickets 
 are taken, and then expend the entire sum 
 in purchasing the prize, than to go sinking 
 his money piecemeal into every raffle that 
 besets him, and running his chances of losing 
 it all, or, worse fate, of drawing something 
 for twenty-five cents which is worth as many 
 dollars. He knows he has no just right to the 
 thing. Chance has given him the advantage 
 
BUSINESS AND MORALS. 119 
 
 over a hundred others, each as generous, as 
 worthy, and as venturesome as himself. He 
 feels meanly in taking it, wishes to give it 
 again to the fair, to be raffled for yet again ; 
 or if he carries it home, carries with it an 
 uneasy consciousness that he has secured 
 something without paying for it and incurred 
 a debt which he can never repay. 
 
 I see that the Roman Catholic Church is dis- 
 cussing the expediency of forbidding raffling 
 at its fairs. I hope it will not end in dis- 
 cussion ; for no church has used this method 
 of increasing its finances more frequently or 
 profitably. I do not cast this imputation, 
 however, upon that church alone. I know 
 no sect that is sufficiently sinless in this mat- 
 ter to cast the first stone. All have sinned 
 and come short of the right standard. It is 
 not true that valuable articles cannot be dis- 
 posed of in any other way. These same ar- 
 ticles are sold every day in our stores without 
 resort to raffling. People who wish them 
 will buy them, and those who do not wish 
 them should not be tricked into their pur- 
 chase or chance possession. It is always 
 
120 BUSINESS AND MORALS. 
 
 costly to "buy what you do not want, how- 
 ever low the price ; and of all forms of 
 ■wealth, nothing is so burdensome as the ele- 
 phant one draws in a charitable lottery. Sales 
 of really marketable articles, for one or an- 
 other good cause, need not be objectionable. 
 People who cannot open their hearts wide 
 enough to extract a dollar for your object, 
 will often spend many times as much in gifts 
 and purchases at your fair, and enjoy doing 
 it. And, what is better, every donor of a 
 needle-book to the sale will feel a dispropor- 
 tionate interest in its object from that time 
 on. Her heart is with her treasure. Honest 
 barter is no disgrace to any man or cause. 
 But selling by chance, buying by lot, trad- 
 ing by teasing, profiting by cajolery, making 
 gains by persecuting your best friends, are 
 offences against friendship and good manners, 
 to say nothing of good morals, which make 
 a much larger demand upon your friend's 
 charity than the " unwilling dollar " he gives 
 to your importunity. Don't do it ! Discour- 
 age all such impositions. Only take part in 
 sales that refuse to admit rallies and lotteries, 
 
BUSINESS AND MORALS. 121 
 
 and see if you cannot keep at least one cor- 
 ner — the church corner — of this excitable 
 world free from the fever of gambling. 
 
 I know what an ugly word " gambling " is, 
 and how easy it is to confound with it some 
 really harmless proceeding. I have been try- 
 ing in vain for several days to get a definition 
 of gambling which should be neither longer 
 nor shorter than the thing itself. It is not 
 enough to call" it an appeal to chance, and 
 blame it on that single score. The appeal 
 to chance, other things being equal, is often 
 a very just way of deciding doubtful cases. 
 The resort to drawing lots is frequently re- 
 ported in the Old Testament and in the New ; 
 it is the way in which the apostles, after first 
 praying, proceeded to choose their twelfth 
 member. Among the Romans the same name 
 which means a lot meant also the response 
 of a divinity. For by lot their oracles were 
 often declared. There is nothing necessarily 
 wrong in an appeal to chance. But gambling 
 is an appeal to chance for a mean and selfish 
 end. It is an attempt to get the rewards 
 of work without working, and to do this at 
 
122 BUSINESS AXD MORALS. 
 
 the expense and injury of somebody else. 
 The gambler neither produces nor promotes 
 the fair exchange of products. His gains are 
 not the just reward of his skill, for such skill 
 has no appreciable value. As well might the 
 Jew Fagin and his rascally company of skilled 
 pickpockets claim that their plunder was the 
 fair wages of their audacity and address, as 
 the gambler reckon his winnings as honest 
 earnings. Fashion and custom throw a spe- 
 cious gilding over many an act which in 
 itself is really the dirtiest kind of dirt. Eng- 
 lish society, playing whist night after night 
 for small stakes, is a school for gambling. 
 American society following suit and adding 
 games of its own devising, is " another." The 
 cradle of unlawful commercial speculation, 
 with its wide-spread ruin, is the elegant draw- 
 ing-room in which gentlemen and ladies play 
 cards for money. The church and the home 
 must share between them no small part of the 
 responsibility of gambling at large. 
 
 They cultivate the taste for excitement, 
 which, more than greed, prompts men to game. 
 Of course the professional gambler is actuated 
 
BUSINESS AND MORALS. 123 
 
 by greed. He makes it his business, and adds 
 to skill at the game a thousand arts and de- 
 ceits, — deliberate, intentional, and ingenious 
 cheats, by which he succeeds in trapping his 
 unwary playmates. Few people are so skilful 
 in disguising their feelings that they can con- 
 ceal from a practised eye the general charac- 
 ter and value of their cards. A hundred signs 
 that you know not of betray you to your 
 gaming opponent. If your face were a mirror, 
 it could not reflect your hand more distinctly 
 than it already does to this plotting player 
 across the table. He meantime has schooled 
 his face to personate the Sphinx; and as 
 that awful monument rises above the desert 
 sands, hard, stony, inscrutable, so the gam- 
 bler's impenetrable face, motionless and piti- 
 less, stands above the desert sands that have 
 engulfed homes, temples, and caravans of men 
 and beasts. It is because there is such a be- 
 ing as a professional gambler, and because 
 he is, by his own confession and boast, an ac- 
 complished cheat and swindler, that we do 
 not like to apply the word to betting and 
 gaming people who are otherwise honest and 
 
124 BUSINESS AiXD MORALS. 
 
 respectable. They bet and play fairly, as they 
 will say. and do not refuse to take the con- 
 sequences. In the code of morals prevalent 
 among these gentlemen, I believe gambling 
 debts take precedence of all others. A man 
 who is not ashamed to fail and half pa}^ his 
 honest creditors, would feel scandalized if any- 
 body could accuse him of refusing to pay his 
 losses at cards or at the race-course. If the 
 truth were known, many a business failure 
 is due, in fact, to this misuse of the money 
 which is justly due legitimate creditors. 
 " Where has the missing money gone ? " men 
 ask. Go ask the kings and queens in the 
 playing cards. If they cannot tell you, then 
 the knave can. 
 
 It is the fascination of hazard, the excite- 
 ment of risk, as we were saying, more than 
 greed, which makes the amateur gambler of 
 good society. Money at stake adds just so 
 much to the zest of the game. It is the al- 
 coholic principle. Fermentation has begun 
 when betting begins. Intoxication is not far 
 off, or something worse ; for, while intem- 
 perance makes men drunk, gambling makes 
 
BUSINESS AND MORALS. 125 
 
 men crazy. We must nip it in the bud. Dis- 
 countenance and rebuke its first beginnings ! 
 Be jealous of the least appearance of gam- 
 bling ! I do not say that a man should never 
 play cards or backgammon because cards and 
 dice are often used for gambling purposes. 
 The most innocent, useful, and necessary 
 things may be made the occasion of betting. 
 But I do say, that not for a moment should 
 men allow themselves to put up the least sum 
 of money on the results of a game. Do as one 
 of my friends once did when one of his com- 
 panions in the game laid money on the table, 
 and said, " We may as well make some pro- 
 vision for the cigars/" My friend, who was 
 no unco' good man, and liked his game of 
 cards and his cigars too, instantly called the 
 waiter and ordered cigars for the company at 
 his own cost. " I never play for money," 
 was all the explanation he gave. It was 
 enough. They could not accuse him of mean- 
 ness. They saw that he was a man principled 
 against gaming, and they respected him for 
 it. The first step here, as elsewhere, is the 
 step that costs. Once let it be known, by a 
 
126 BUSINESS AND MORALS. 
 
 simple, decisive step, a quick, decided word, 
 that you never bet, and nobody will expect 
 you to bet. You will be delivered at once 
 from temptation and solicitation. 
 
 Those who have visited the gambling houses, 
 or, as they are properly called, " gambling 
 hells," of the large cities, say that the ma- 
 jority of their visitors are young men. This 
 warns us that we must interfere. It means 
 that the young, the wards of society, those 
 for whom society is specially responsible, are 
 made the victims of designing and tempting 
 gamesters. They are green, and can be easily 
 fooled. They are fond of excitement, and will 
 go where they can find it. The devil likes 
 young blood. We must thwart him. Better 
 occupation, brighter because cleaner amuse- 
 ments, other engagements, books, lectures, 
 concerts, drives, walks, work, games without 
 wagers, and athletic sports without betting, 
 — all good and lawful rivals of the gambling 
 dens, — must be put in the field. And, above 
 all, we must show the young that short cuts 
 are always the longest journeys, whether to 
 wealth, knowledge, pleasure, or salvation. It 
 
BUSINESS AND MORALS. 127 
 
 is like taking a serpentine path through some 
 city park in the fond belief that it will take 
 you across the lot more quickly than the 
 straight road along the edge. The chances 
 are that it will turn upon itself and bring you 
 just where you were at the beginning. When 
 men learn, as they commonly learn only too 
 late, that the best of knowledge and wealth, 
 and salvation too, is the " working it out," 
 they will not wish to shorten the process. It 
 merely defeats the divine method. But we 
 are all like little children, who wish they were 
 at their journey's end the minute they start, 
 and lose the charms of travel along the way 
 by fidgeting for the arrival. 
 
 Is not this mood symptomatic ? And does 
 it not lie at the root of the evils we are con- 
 fessing and deploring in the business world 
 to-day ? We want to get everywhere without 
 going. It cannot be done. Work alone makes 
 wealth, and the worker alone deserves it. 
 Practice only can make perfect, and practice 
 takes time and application. Only the puri- 
 fied are pure, and the longest and strongest 
 life is not long enough for our purification. 
 
128 BUSINESS AND MORALS. 
 
 Patience must have her full time, if she is 
 ever to have her perfect work. Rome was 
 not built in a clay, and shall man take less 
 time than a city for his fulfilment ? The 
 quickest to start is often the first to stop in 
 the race of life. Hasten slowly. Look be- 
 fore you leap. One false move may cost you 
 the game. 
 
VI. 
 
 THE STAGE AND MOKALS. 
 
VI. 
 
 THE STAGE AND MOEALS. 
 
 Children sitting in the market-place. — Luke vii. 32. 
 
 ^)HE first actor was Satan. He 
 played the part of the serpent 
 in the garden of Eden. Since 
 him there have been many, both 
 good and bad, but none more skilful. If 
 acting is making believe, or assuming a form 
 and character not one's own, then all deceit is 
 histrionic art, and " all the world 's a stage " 
 in very truth. The technical stage, however, 
 has the moral advantage over the world, of 
 being open and above board in its deceitful- 
 ness ; it tells its audience, to begin with, that 
 it is going to cheat them. And they come 
 to it for that purpose. Writers upon the 
 drama are at much pains to trace its begin- 
 ning to a remote antiquity, — the Hindoo 
 
132 THE STAGE AND MORALS. 
 
 plays running back for centuries before Christ. 
 But the beginning of acting is further back 
 than that. It is in human nature. Every 
 child playing store-keeper or nurse is an 
 actor. Imitation and imagination are the 
 sources of the drama, and they are in every- 
 body. Our surroundings may suggest the 
 part we choose to play. The nursery mimics 
 adult life. The child takes off the man. I 
 have seen by the roadside, in the neighbor- 
 hood of a large cemetery, an innocent child 
 playing at grave-making. The grave-diggers 
 in "Hamlet" were no more actors than the 
 child. An instinct so primitive, a habit 
 universal as this is, flowing out of imitation 
 and imagination, cannot be eradicated. The 
 stage in some form is as permanent as man's 
 nature. 
 
 It is very commonly believed that the 
 church is opposed to the stage, that religion 
 and the drama are at swords' points. And 
 so they may be in particular cases ; but that 
 there is any constitutional variance between 
 them is not borne out by the history of either 
 nor by the philosophy of either. 
 
THE STAGE AND MORALS. 133 
 
 The earliest plays are all religious, and in 
 every country the drama was at first a vehicle 
 of religion. Plays were enacted only on 
 occasions of religious festivity, and their sub- 
 jects were chosen from the Scriptures of the 
 people who presented them. The Hindoo 
 drama celebrated the adventures of Vishnu 
 in one or another of his incarnations. The 
 Greek stage was, first and last, profoundly 
 religious. All its action turned upon the 
 will and decrees of the gods. Our own later 
 drama, the English, began in the miracle- 
 plays of the twelfth century, which were en- 
 acted by monks, sometimes in the churches 
 themselves. When the trading companies 
 took the control of them, they were still 
 devoted to the illustration of the Scriptures 
 or of the lives of the saints. They were 
 played at the street corners, in little theatres 
 on wheels, built with two stories, the lower 
 occupied as a dressing-room, the upper as the 
 stage. The plays which followed the miracle- 
 plays were called " moralities." They were 
 allegories of the conflict between good and 
 evil. These are the beginning of the regular 
 
134 THE STAGE AND MORALS. 
 
 drama of a later elate. These were the prep- 
 aration for that greater miracle, — the dramatic 
 dispensation of the Elizabethan age. The 
 passage from the one to the other was made 
 by the introduction of interludes between 
 the Scriptural scenes. In these interludes 
 very real and very modern men and women 
 w r ere represented. Thus in time the volun- 
 tary eclipsed the "morality/' and the modern 
 drama arose, full-grown and armed, from the 
 cleft head of the church. 
 
 It is worth knowing that when the Roman 
 drama began to decay, its degradation was 
 shown and provided for by the substitution 
 of pantomime and dancing for language. 
 When the body hints the meaning which 
 the tongue is ashamed to speak, then the 
 stage is on its downward path. Opera bouffe 
 preludes the downfall of the opera gr<r,i<I. 
 The church will oppose the one while it may 
 encourage the other. Christianity was the 
 foe and destroyer of the corrupt and corrupt- 
 ing drama, as of the brutalizing gladiatorial 
 games ; but she destroyed only to fulfil, for at 
 a later elate, in the form of miracle-plays, she 
 
THE STAGE AND MORALS. 135 
 
 made the beginning of the modern stage. 
 Nay, more, the church has preserved in her 
 liturgies some of the elements of the drama, — 
 the sacred allegory and symbol ; the pageant, 
 the spectacle, the attitude and gesture, those 
 appeals to the senses, which make up so much 
 of the impressiveness and charm of the stage. 
 The mass is a miracle-play, with priests and 
 boys as actors and a hushed, auditory for its 
 audience. Or when, in some liturgical church 
 once or twice removed from Kome, you hear 
 the strains of far-off music, and, as it comes 
 nearer and clearer, the train of white-robed 
 priests and choristers file in, what is this but 
 the pageantry of the stage returning to the 
 church which sent it forth, and offering at 
 the altar the same sacrifice to sense and ar- 
 tistic taste which is offered in the theatre ? 
 If, therefore, any rebuke of the theatre is in 
 order, let it not come from a church which 
 owes very much of its fascination to the same 
 appeal to eye and ear which makes the stage 
 attractive. At least let such a church be sure 
 that its own forms and symbols express a re- 
 ality as real and an interest as commanding 
 
136 THE STAGE AND MORALS. 
 
 as that of the u pictured passions " of the 
 stage. That at least holds the mirror up to 
 man. The church, if it knows its calling, will 
 be content with nothing less than the reflec- 
 tion of the light of the knowledge of the glory 
 of God in its services ; and for this it will de- 
 pend less upon that which is seen and tem- 
 poral — the pageant and the show — than 
 upon that which is unseen and eternal, — 
 truth, life and love. 
 
 With this brief genealogy of the stage, let 
 us look at it as we know it in its standard 
 authors and in the modern theatre. What 
 is it, and how does it affect the moral char- 
 acter of its lovers and followers ? 
 
 Strange that its standard writers all belong 
 to an earlier age than ours, and one so far 
 inferior to the nineteenth century in science, 
 knowledge of the world, the economic arts, 
 and the means and luxuries of life. It is 
 mortifying to our intellectual pride to have 
 to seek the models of the classical drama in 
 ancient Greece two thousand years ago, and 
 of the English drama in the reign of Elizabeth 
 three centuries away. Nothing greater than 
 
THE STAGE AND MORALS. 137 
 
 Sophocles or Shakspeare has yet appeared. 
 Nothing approaching them seems probable. 
 We know too much to do much. The very 
 multiplicity of modern learning defeats crea- 
 tive work. Or men know too many things, 
 let us say, rather than too much. Our minds 
 are like rag-bags ; they run to patch-work. 
 
 Shakspeare's " little Latin and less Greek " 
 nourished his mind without depleting it. He 
 took life and books in the right proportion, 
 and the result was new books with more life 
 than quotations in them. 
 
 What the drama is, no one is so well able 
 to tell as he who was its acknowledged mas- 
 ter. " Players," he says in the work of 
 " Hamlet," " are the abstract and brief 
 chronicles of the time." The end of play- 
 ing, "both at the first, and now, was, and is, 
 to hold, as 't were, the mirror up to nature ; to 
 show virtue her own features, scorn her own 
 image, and the very age and body of the 
 time his form and pressure." What has been 
 claimed for literature in general, that it is 
 the retreat and hiding-place of the spirit of 
 each age, from which, as from a phonograph, 
 
138 THE STAGE AND MORALS. 
 
 the very voice and song of the past may be 
 heard again, is especially true of dramatic 
 literature. There the manners and morals 
 of the time step forth before the eyes of all 
 men. Take the unexpurgated plaj's of Shak- 
 speare, with all their vulgarities and obscen- 
 ity, and you will find there a true image of 
 the age in which he lived and wrote. The 
 Globe Theatre, where his plaj^s were first 
 acted, was the rudest of buildings on the 
 banks of the Thames, so poorly planned and 
 constructed that the people in the pit were 
 exposed to the rain when the weather was 
 bad, and the protected boxes were none too 
 nice. Sign-boards took the place of scenery, 
 the spectator having to supply the landscape 
 out of his own imagination. An extra top- 
 knot of feathers and a rose on either shoe 
 were the leading players' sufficient distinction. 
 The female parts were taken by boys; and no 
 lady attended the theatre without wearing a 
 mask. The rudeness of the audience and the 
 place accounts for much that a nicer taste and 
 finer auditory find disgusting in some of Shak- 
 speare's plays. The only feature we are now 
 
THE STAGE AND MORALS. 139 
 
 considering in them is their mirror-like truth- 
 fulness to human nature, according to the 
 " forms, modes, and shows " of the Elizabethan 
 age. 
 
 These " forms, modes, shows " the actor can 
 and does repeat, happy and great if he can 
 fill them with the suggestion of that " within 
 which passe th show." For that really is his 
 business, — to make the speech, walk, posture, 
 gesture, fashion, and habit of an age hint that 
 common humanity which underlies all the 
 ages. Hamlet, comparing the player's mock 
 tears for Hecuba with the dulness of his own 
 temper, asks : — 
 
 " What would he do, 
 Had he the motive and the cue for passion 
 That I have 1 He would drown the stage with tears, 
 And cleave the general ear with horrid speech, 
 Make mad the guilty and appal the free, 
 Confound the ignorant, and amaze, indeed, 
 The very faculties of eyes and ears." 
 
 But we humbly submit that the actor who 
 should thus forget himself would prove him- 
 self a poor actor. He would be the very 
 " robustious, periwig-pated," passion-tearing 
 monster which Hamlet's soul abhorred. He 
 
140 THE STAGE AND MORALS. 
 
 would miss the modesty of nature ; " for in 
 the very torrent, tempest, and, as I may say, 
 whirlwind of your passion, you must acquire 
 and beget a temperance that may give it 
 smoothness." The stage-manager cannot be 
 suffered to neglect his own rules, especially 
 when they are true rules. And it may be 
 easily proved that only he holds the mirror 
 up to nature who represents men and women 
 under some sort of self-restraint. Nobody in 
 real life acts precisely as he feels. We all 
 have our convenient masks and disguises. 
 The cloak of conventionality covers a multi- 
 tude of individual lines, angles, and tenden- 
 cies, and the stage which would depict man 
 must paint him with his mask on. Rarely, 
 very rarely, does man, or the actor who truly 
 represents him, break forth from his am- 
 bush and give his native passion utmost play. 
 Men, and the actors who best report them, 
 show themselves mightiest in what they re- 
 serve. They impress 3*011 as having that 
 " within which passe th show." Now and then 
 a great actor, in an exceptional moment, lets 
 all his passion out 5 as when Salvini, in his 
 
THE STAGE AND MORALS. 141 
 
 unequalled personation of Othello, — a person- 
 ation characterized in the main by marvellous 
 grace, dignity, and self-command, — suddenly 
 lets the tiger in him have full play, as he 
 leaps upon lago in momentary suspicion of 
 his falsehood, and almost wreaks the ven- 
 geance he threatens. But this is exceptional, 
 and only proves the strictness of the rule, 
 that really great actors impress you as keep- 
 ing back more than they express. It is this 
 which saves them from rant on the one hand 
 and tameness on the other. The language 
 of Shakspeare is itself so impassioned and 
 imaginative, not to say extravagant and un- 
 bridled, that only a strong rider can use it 
 without being run away with. I have heard 
 Booth rant in " Macbeth " until the tragedy 
 became pure comedy. What better, then, can 
 be expected of lesser actors ? The poet is 
 licensed to speak the language of hyperbole ; 
 but the actor who recites his verse assumes 
 the task of bodying forth the poet's vision. 
 It is his to make the creature of the poet's 
 imagination walk and live upon this solid 
 earth. His flesh and muscle balance the 
 
142 THE STAGE AND MORALS. 
 
 poet's nerve. He is not set to outdo his 
 author, but to weight his fancy with cor- 
 poreal fact. The playwright, if he is skilful, 
 has stretched the simple truth as far as it will 
 bear stretching. Something of excess in size 
 and freedom in grouping must be allowed 
 where stage effects are to be produced. But 
 all the more because the play is overdrawn 
 should the acting be restrained. To see Ris- 
 tori in " Medea," or Janauschek in the " Bride 
 of Messina," is to see how full to the brim 
 dramatic power may fill the poetic form with- 
 out spilling the least drop. When, in the 
 climax of her woe, the mother in Schiller's 
 gloomy tragedy calls on the gods to do as 
 they list, assured that nothing worse can 
 come, the cry of the woman is as strong and 
 deep as the roar of Niagara. Medea's visit- 
 ing of her children's murder upon their faith- 
 less father is like a stroke of lightning. Both 
 of these women, in the sleep-walking scene in 
 " Macbeth," show us what dreams may come 
 in conscience-haunted sleep without over- 
 stepping by a footfall the limits of nature. 
 But how does all this, it may be wondered, 
 
THE STAGE AND MORALS. 143 
 
 bear upon the question 'we proposed to con- 
 sider ? If one has nothing more to give than 
 a history of the drama and an analysis of its 
 theory and methods, he had better select some 
 other place and occasion than the church and 
 the day of worship, for the presentation of his' 
 views. I agree with the objection, and hasten 
 to justify our brief study of the drama con- 
 sidered historically and intrinsically because of 
 its real bearing upon the moral character and 
 competency of the theatre. The drama be- 
 longs to literature, and as such has its own 
 laws. In obeying these it is fulfilling its func- 
 tion as literature. If in addition to this it can 
 serve the ends of morality, that is so much 
 the better. If not, it is not deprived of its 
 excellence as art. We must keep our dis- 
 tinction in view here as in considering pic- 
 torial and literary art. Truth to his chosen 
 subject is all that art requires of the sculp- 
 tor, painter, poet, novelist, or dramatist. And 
 there is a moral element in the very truth of 
 art to its subject, which we may not overlook. 
 It is a part of perfect veracity, and therefore 
 admirable from a moral standpoint, however 
 
144 THE STAGE AND MORALS. 
 
 objectionable in itself the subject treated may 
 be. Take a popular instance. Few modern 
 plays have been seen by so many peo- 
 ple, and so thoroughly admired for the per- 
 fection of their presentation, as " Rip Van 
 Winkle." I need not recall the story or re- 
 state the plot. Everybody knows it, at first 
 or second hand, and almost everybody has 
 seen the leading character, as it has been 
 immortalized by the genius and study of its 
 famous representative. Whatever we may 
 think of the moral value of the play, — and 
 opinions will differ about that, some men 
 thinking that it carries the sympathies of the 
 audience with the careless drunkard rather 
 than with his hard-working wife, and others 
 feeling that the retribution of a lost life is 
 penalty enough for offences so genial, — not 
 attempting to settle these differences, let us 
 fix our eye for a moment on that incident 
 near the close of the play, which is made 
 so significant and telling by the actor ; 
 namely, the taking of a glass of wine which 
 his wife offers him, notwithstanding the mis- 
 ery and loss his intemperance has caused him. 
 
THE STAGE AND MORALS. 145 
 
 Undoubtedly the temperance advocate and the 
 moralist, pure and simple, would say that the 
 man should have refused the wine. It had 
 been his ruin, and he knew it ; the least he 
 could do was to let it alone. I have been 
 told that Mr. Jefferson tried the effect of 
 refusing this glass, at one time, and gave it 
 up, because it did not play w r ell or please his 
 audience in that shape. Now which of these 
 two ways is better ? The moralist, who looks 
 only at the immediate issue, will say : " Re- 
 fusing the cup is better." The temperance 
 moralist will not admit a doubt of it. But 
 I am sure the artist, the dramatist, with the 
 instinct of truthfulness to the character, would 
 say : " He must take the cup." There is 
 nothing converting in a twenty years' nap. 
 This man is what he was when he fell asleep. 
 He must act as he would have acted then. 
 And after watching the effect upon my own 
 mind, feeling as keenly and sorrowfully as 
 I could all the misery and wrong of this man's 
 intemperate ways, I am ready to say that I 
 think the artistic sense is the true sense in 
 
 this case, and that the moral lesson conveyed 
 
 10 
 
146 THE STAGE AND MORALS. 
 
 by this truth to character, this dramatic ve- 
 racity, is all the stronger, because the way of 
 the special reformer has not been taken. Let 
 us be fair to the stage in this matter. "We 
 may blame it for its choice of subjects if we 
 will, but never because, having chosen its 
 subject, it paints him to the life. It is nothing 
 less than lying to take a villain and either 
 soften him down or paint him over to suit 
 the nicer taste of a moral and critical audi- 
 ence. Still worse offence to put moral laws 
 and temperance lectures on his lips, when 
 the man he represents could never have com- 
 mended virtue in any other fashion than the 
 Spartan's drunken helot commended temper- 
 ance, namely, by showing the disgusting effect 
 of intemperance. 
 
 There are certain offences against the peace 
 and purity of domestic life and good society 
 which the world's best civilization has at last 
 succeeded in putting out of sight. No decent 
 people refer to them, even if they know of 
 them, and it is needless to say that nobody 
 who is notoriously guilty of them is cordially 
 admitted into the best society. Now I do 
 
THE STAGE AND MORALS. 147 
 
 not see why a custom so general and justi- 
 fiable in our social relations with one another 
 should not be extended to the domain of art, 
 and why we should not demand of the artist, 
 novelist, and dramatist that he keep to the 
 same wholesome rule in the selection of his 
 subjects and in his treatment of them. If 
 rogues, murderers, rakes, courtesans, and deb- 
 auchees are to figure in the legitimate drama, 
 then keep them in the background. We 
 know the dramatic necessity for a deep-dyed 
 villain. Every play must have him as a foil 
 to its hero or heroine. But there is a choice 
 among villains, and we prefer a clean one. 
 Let the dirty beasts in the human menagerie 
 of which the stage makes a show, appear in 
 solitary confinement. At least let that drama 
 which professes to hold the mirror up to vice 
 and virtue as they shape and show themselves 
 in human society to-day, be true to the de- 
 cent reservations of modern civilization, and 
 simply suggest without flaunting its grosser 
 sins. Unhappily for our age, the nation 
 which has succeeded best in giving dra- 
 matic literature its necessary brilliancy, speed, 
 
148 THE STAGE AND MORALS. 
 
 directness, passion, presence of mind, and in- 
 tensity is the one which either knows least of 
 moral distinctions or cares least for them in 
 connection with art. French plays and their 
 translation and imitation have won the lead, 
 and for our generation at least they seem 
 likely to keep it. The French have no word 
 in their language corresponding to our word 
 " home." It is sometimes said that they have 
 not the thing it describes. If their favorite 
 plays are a true picture of their manners and 
 morals, we might freely say that they do not 
 deserve to have. Such repeated and pro- 
 longed trifling with marital fidelity as these 
 plays exhibit must either be the result of the 
 thing they depict, or a fertile cause of it. 
 Oddly enough, while altogether too kind to 
 the offence, French society seems merciless 
 to the open offender. Not the sin, but the 
 stupidity of letting it be discovered, seems to 
 be the unpardonable thing. The only social 
 fault known in these circles is awkwardness. 
 Blunder is crime. In one of the plays of this 
 too much followed if not wholly approved 
 school, Camille, the heroine, extenuates her 
 
THE STAGE AND MORALS. 149 
 
 frivolous and abandoned life on the ground 
 that society has put her profession as actress 
 under its ban. She had once the opportu- 
 nity, and tried to use it, of entering good 
 society as a lady; but as soon as it was dis- 
 covered that she had been an actress society 
 turned its back upon her ; so she turned her 
 back upon society. Hence the wasting and 
 wasted life. 
 
 What I wish to note in the play is the in- 
 genuity with which the heroine is placed 
 in a strait betwixt two sins, and then raptur- 
 ously applauded because she refused one sin 
 and took another. She had one lover whose 
 love she honestly returned ; and she lied to 
 him and ran away with another man. Where- 
 fore ? Because she feared she should blast 
 her lover's fortunes, and offend and injure his 
 family if she married him. And this you are 
 compelled to see and admire in the heroine 
 of the play, if you are cajoled into going to 
 see it. I know not what Truth has done 
 to these playwrights and novelists of the ro- 
 mantic school in France, to make them so 
 indifferent to her claims. Victor Hugo plays 
 
150 THE STAGE AND MORALS. 
 
 us the same trick in " Les Miserables," when 
 he gets our sympathies all aroused for Jean 
 Valjean in his hard fight for virtue and free- 
 dom, and then puts him into an extremity 
 from which nothing can save him but a false- 
 hood. If the falsehood had been his own 
 it might have been less shocking, for he was 
 a fugitive from prison and at war with the 
 State, and war has its privileges. But to 
 make Sister Simplice, the saintly woman 
 whose whole life had been a struggle for 
 truth and honesty, — to make her, even when 
 on her knees in prayer, tell two lies in suc- 
 cession : first that Valjean was not in her 
 house at that time, and second, that he had 
 not been there on that day, when he was con- 
 cealed in the very room with her as she was 
 speaking, — to make this holy woman lie be- 
 tween one Ave and the next, as the only way 
 of saving her friend from arrest, and to make 
 her falsehood a sort of passport to heaven, — 
 a French passport, — this is the topmost reach 
 of the romantic school. In this dizzy eleva- 
 tion of romanticism, Camille and Sister Siin- 
 plice, the courtesan and the saint, go up in 
 
THE STAGE AND MORALS. 151 
 
 the same balloon. It is no fault of Victor 
 Hugo's or Dumas' if they do not reach the 
 empyrean together, and both for telling lies. 
 
 After getting flushed and headachy and 
 generally demoralized by such company, what 
 a moral tonic one finds in turning to the 
 " Heart of Mid-Lothian," and hearing Jeanie 
 Deans' brave though perilous truth-telling, 
 or in taking up Goethe's " Iphigenia," in 
 which the sweet, strong piety of Sophocles, 
 and his perfect art, seem for a brief space to 
 revisit the earth, — Iphigenia, who braved the 
 anger of a king for truth's sake, and saved all, 
 her own, her brother's, and her lover's lives, 
 when she seemed to have sacrificed all by 
 telling the truth. 
 
 If Christian France and England cannot do 
 better for us than in their society dramas of 
 the present day they have been doing, we 
 shall be drawn back to heathen Greece and 
 Rome. The stage seems all given over to 
 the rendering of man's brutality and woman's 
 frailty. If there is any one institution which 
 lies at the foundation of social well-being, it 
 is holy matrimony ; and the modern stage 
 
152 THE STAGE AND MORALS. 
 
 seems to take a peculiar satisfaction in doing 
 what it can to loosen its ties and jeopardize 
 its binding obligations. Why reputable peo- 
 ple, who would feel the presence of an aban- 
 doned woman in their society as a personal 
 outrage, should flock to do homage to a bril- 
 liant representation of such a character upon 
 the stage is a puzzle. But they do it, and 
 half the time their hearts are cajoled into 
 a sympathy and admiration even of the very 
 character which should arouse their reproba- 
 tion. A silly wife deserts a good husband for 
 a bad lover, is overtaken in her flight, swoons 
 away for fear her husband will hurt her lover. 
 — which he does temporarily in the process 
 of killing him, — and then the play ends with 
 a graceful dying scene on the part of the 
 heroine herself, the husband begging her for- 
 giveness. For what? That is the question, 
 she being the person at fault. 
 
 This briefly is the plot of a typical and 
 very popular French play, " Frou-Frou," and 
 the most gifted artists compete in rendering 
 its leading role. It makes one sigh for the 
 austere and awful tragedies of iEschylus and 
 
THE STAGE AND MORALS. 153 
 
 Sophocles. The crimes of GEdipus and Jocasta 
 were their fate. The crimes of these people 
 are their choice. 
 
 We must not allow ourselves to be cozened 
 by this " evil and adulterous" literature into 
 a false impression of the age in which we live. 
 I believe there were never so many or so 
 happy homes in the world as now ; never 
 so few offences against them, though too 
 many and too grievous still. Out of a really 
 large acquaintance, if my whole past life 
 is taken in review, I can truly say that 
 I know, or have known, very few husbands 
 and wives who wished they had married 
 otherwise. Their partners are like their own 
 selves. Time and acquaintance have shown 
 them that there is no perfection on either 
 side of the house ; but, for all that, they are 
 true, patient, hopeful, and attached each to 
 each, and they have the same respect for 
 their partners which they have for their own 
 souls. Without altogether approving of either, 
 they would not change with anybody else. 
 This is the world as it is, and the stage 
 maligns it when it paints it differently. 
 
154 THE STAGE AND MORALS. 
 
 I do not envy, — much as I enjoy good 
 acting, — I do not envy the haUtuSs of the 
 theatre, if they are compelled to see and hear, 
 with all the glamour of rich upholstery and 
 regardless dressmaking, this endless serio- 
 comico-ludicro-trasrico tale of love-making, at 
 the risk of one's life and the certain loss of 
 one's soul or character. I would not peril 
 the sensibility of my nerves and sympathies 
 in any such dram-shop of the heart or opium- 
 den of the conscience as the theatre thus 
 employed deserves to be considered. The 
 man or woman who exposes himself repeat- 
 edly to its blinding and deadening influences 
 becomes a kind of moral quicksilver, on which 
 you can make no imprint, and whose slippery 
 particles defy your attempt to compress or 
 pick them up. Or, if you prefer the figure, 
 he is like an old piano, drummed out of tune 
 and sensibility, and only capable thereafter 
 of making ridiculous the themes it once made 
 noble. 
 
 I wish there were time and this were the 
 occasion to take the world's greatest play, — 
 Shakspeare's " Hamlet/' — and let it tell us 
 
THE STAGE AND MORALS. 155 
 
 what the stage is capable of; just where its 
 powers and their limits are, — how it may teach 
 all virtues, without preaching one ; track the 
 human spirit in its highest flight and deepest 
 fear; glass alike the natural and that which 
 passes nature ; be true to life and yet be true 
 to art ; romantic and yet real ; a very extrava- 
 ganza in speech, and yet thought-freighted 
 from keel to deck, and ballasted beyond all 
 fear of overthrow from too much sail; no 
 moral purpose, yet full of moral impressive- 
 ness. To my thinking this play not only 
 holds the mirror up to the special character 
 and scenes it depicts, but it holds the mirror 
 up to every man who looks upon it and tries 
 to read or act it. Hamlet is every man's 
 touchstone. It tells his character by the 
 character he finds in it. 
 
 Mr. Furness has collected in one volume 
 the criticisms and interpretations of over a 
 hundred writers and actors, leading thinkers 
 of Europe and America; an<J I engage to 
 recognize each interpreter — at least if I 
 know his other writings — by the character 
 he puts upon Hamlet. To Booth he is 
 
156 THE STAGE AND MORALS. 
 
 always the melancholy Dane, all nerve and 
 feeling, irresolute because dreamy, scholarly, 
 and impractical. To Fechter he is a ruddy, 
 yellow-haired son of the North, witty, reso- 
 lute, capable, and quite likely, when over- 
 heated by exercise, to show himself " fat and 
 scant of breath." Thus the actors disagree, 
 each following his own temperament. To 
 Voltaire he is a barbarian ; to George Mac- 
 Donald a moral hero, only irresolute because 
 conscientious. " He must have ground more 
 relative " than his suspicion or the ghost's 
 revelation before his purpose of revenge can 
 take effect. And so we might go on tracking 
 the whole company by their interpretation 
 of this one great character and play. 
 
 And is not this an example of the mission 
 of the stage, — to show to man what is in his 
 own heart, by unpacking the heart of typi- 
 cal and representative characters ? In this 
 mission of self-discovery and mutual revela- 
 tion, it has a calling of the highest value 
 and importance. It is alike vain and foolish 
 to deny or to decry it. We have seen how 
 native to the heart the drama is, springing 
 
THE STAGE AND MORALS.. 157 
 
 up in the instinct of imitation and the noble 
 faculty of imagination. We have seen how- 
 it lay on the breast of religion and drank its 
 milk from her fountain ; we have followed it, 
 in its variable career, now the glory and now 
 the shame of its mother ; and we have seen 
 how capable it is, when at its best, of thrilling 
 lessons to the heart which enter but slowly 
 through the solemn doors of the reason and 
 the conscience. The church should court the 
 alliance of the stage, not repel or disown it ; 
 for we may depend that sooner or later the 
 character of the audience makes the color 
 of the stage. And we can only raise its 
 standard by giving our own hands in ready 
 applause of what is good in it, or the slow- 
 moving finger of scorn at what is base. 
 
VII. 
 
 THE PRESS AND MORALS. 
 
VII. 
 
 THE PEESS AND MOBALS. 
 Some new thing. — Acts xvii. 21. 
 
 i^^^^HE Athenians who, as Paul de- 
 i : lHlSl' bribed them, had leisure for noth- 
 JtelH [ ins; else "but either to tell or to 
 hear some new thing," correspond 
 to the newspaper subscribers of the present 
 day. They want the news. They love 
 novelty. Anything for a change. The Greek 
 lived on excitement. His mercurial tempera- 
 ment craved variety. Living in the very 
 focus of the world's civilization, in a country 
 whose natural bays and harbors invited the 
 commerce of all maritime people, familiar 
 by travel and warlike expedition with other 
 lands, rich in the traditions of conquest and ex- 
 ploration, the descendants of Herodotus and 
 Alexander came fairly by their curious, enter- 
 prising, quick-witted, gossiping character. 
 
 11 
 
1G2 THE PRESS AND MORALS. 
 
 This Grecian spirit, which has such interest 
 in the new, is nothing to be ashamed of. It 
 is the source of all progress, invention, dis- 
 covery. The charm of novelty is as legiti- 
 mate as that of antiquity. It is pre-eminently 
 a grace of youth. Only the aged or the pre- 
 maturely old live in the past. Youth lives in 
 the present and reaches out for that which is 
 to come. Historically one of the oldest nations 
 of Europe, Greece is always young. She has 
 the gifts and the faults of youth, its volatility 
 and its freshness. The Athenian's interest in 
 the new did not wean him from the old. His 
 standard authors, painters, and sculptors be- 
 longed to the past ; but their faces, like his 
 own, were towards the future. Paul on Mars 
 Hill had a more hopeful audience, with all 
 its idolatry, than he found in Jerusalem. If 
 Jerusalem was the most holy, Athens was the 
 most newsy city of antiquity. And it should 
 be remembered that it was Athens, not Jeru- 
 salem, which first became Christian. 
 
 When the angels sang the advent of Christ, 
 they called their message " Glad Tidings ; " 
 and no better title of the gospel has been 
 
THE PRESS AND MORALS. 163 
 
 found than " Good News." It might without 
 untruth or irreverence be claimed that the 
 first manuscript of the New Testament was 
 the first newspaper. It was the earliest sheet 
 on which was written the good news of God. 
 
 But, keeping within the limits of the subject 
 we have proposed, the newspaper proper, it 
 is said that the first newspaper published in 
 Europe was the " Gazetta " of Venice. It 
 was written and read aloud at various places 
 about the city, to inform the people about 
 the war with the Turks in 1 536. In England, 
 it was not until the reign of Elizabeth that 
 news-selling became possible and profitable. 
 Near the end of the sixteenth century the 
 newsdealers issued little pamphlets contain- 
 ing extraordinary intelligence. 
 
 " Wonderful and strange news out of Suffolk 
 and Essex, where it rained wheat the space of 
 six or seven miles." " Lamentable news out 
 of Monmouthshire, containing a wonderful 
 and fearful account of the great overflowing 
 of the waters of said county." You smile 
 over these items from the English press of 
 the year 1583 ; but I can match the credulity 
 
164 THE PRESS AND MORALS. 
 
 of those simple folk, who believed in a rainfall 
 of wheat, almost any day in our papers. Take 
 the story of that singular finding and losing 
 of a ten-dollar gold-piece by the same person 
 every year on the same day, with the start- 
 ling suggestion that there is something very 
 mysterious in this. Take the absurd report, 
 nevertheless true, from our mountain regions, 
 that certain farmers refuse to sell their sweet 
 milk for fear it w 7 ill dry up the cows. As to 
 the " fearful and wonderful " account of " the 
 great overflowing of the waters," what else 
 have we had in our papers for the last ten 
 weeks ? The press has always had a craving 
 for the mysterious and the tragical. When it 
 cannot find new instances, it republishes the 
 old, or invents a ghost story or an accident. 
 It is nothing if not startling. It lives on 
 murder if not hj it, and men's calamity is its 
 opportunity. The cyclone that sweeps a vil- 
 lage off the face of the earth, as a house-maid 
 might remove an ant-hill, fills the sails of the 
 daily paper and calls out an extra edition. It 
 revels in war, flourishes on bloodshed, thrives 
 on riot, grows fat on famine, healthy on 
 
THE PRESS AND MORALS. 165 
 
 pestilence, full with crime, merry with volup- 
 tuousness, sparkling with scandal, witty with 
 personality, confident with party triumph, 
 saucy with patronage, rich though making 
 many poor, or poor while making many rich. 
 The press is the residuary legatee of that ill 
 wind which blows nobody good. 
 
 In one of his contributions to the "Tatler " 
 (No. 18), Addison, himself a journalist, pays 
 this exquisitely humorous tribute to the sen- 
 sational newsmonger of his day. At the close 
 of a war he says : — 
 
 " Another gentleman I am much concerned for, 
 the ingenious fraternity of which I have the honor 
 to be an unworthy member ; I mean the news- 
 writers of Great Britain, whether postmen or 
 postboys, or by what name or title soever digni- 
 fied or distinguished. The case of these gentlemen 
 is, I think, more hard than that of the soldiers, 
 considering that they have taken more towns and 
 fought more battles. They have been upon par- 
 ties and skirmishes when our armies have lain 
 still ; and given the general assault to many a 
 place when the besiegers were quiet in their 
 trenches. They have made us masters of several 
 strong towns many weeks before our generals 
 
1GG THE PRESS AXD MORALS. 
 
 could do it, and completed victories when our 
 greatest captains have been glad to come off with 
 a drawn battle. Where Prince Eugene has slain 
 his thousands, Boyer (author of the ( Political 
 State ') has slain his ten thousands. This gentle- 
 man can indeed be never enough commended for 
 his courage and intrepidity during this whole war : 
 he has laid about him with an inexpressible fury ; 
 and, like the offended Marius of ancient Rome, 
 made such havoc among his countrymen as must 
 be the work of two or three ages to repair. . . . 
 
 " It is impossible for this ingenious sort of man 
 to submit after a peace ; every one remembers 
 what shifts they were driven to in the reign of 
 King Charles the Second, when they could not 
 furnish out a single paper of news without light- 
 ing up a comet in Germany or a fire in Moscow. 
 There scarce appeared a paper without a paragraph 
 on an earthquake." 
 
 Then Addison introduces Mr. Dyer, whose 
 favorite sensation was whales, having brought 
 three into the river Thames in five months ; 
 and the judicious and wary Ichabod Dawkes, 
 who " got himself a reputation from plagues 
 and famines ; by which in those days he de- 
 stroyed as great multitudes as he has lately 
 
THE PRESS AND MORALS. 167 
 
 done with his sword. In every dearth of 
 news, Grand Cairo was sure to be unpeopled." 
 
 The rise of the newspaper was the death 
 of literature. At least the two were coinci- 
 dent in time. Lecky, in his history of Eng- 
 land in the eighteenth century, says that it 
 was not prolific of the higher forms of litera- 
 ture, but the influence of the press was great 
 and growing, although periodical writing was 
 far less brilliant than in the preceding period. 
 Was not this due to the growing interest in 
 news for its own sake, rather than in the 
 literary form or sauce in which it might be 
 served ? 
 
 It had taken England a hundred years to 
 achieve a comparative freedom for her press. 
 Her government undertook to say how much 
 her people should know of the world's doings. 
 " Butler's Weekly News from Italy and Ger- 
 many," which was the representative London 
 newspaper of 1622, seems to have won and 
 deserved the derision which was poured upon 
 journalism by Ben Jonson in his "Staple of 
 News." He describes, with ridiculous com- 
 ments, the opening of an office for news, or 
 
168 THE PRESS AND MORALS. 
 
 the newspaper stand, — "a place of huge 
 commerce it will be/' where "staple news" 
 may be purchased. " No other will be cur- 
 rent." It seems to have been sold by persons 
 licensed by the government. A country wo- 
 man visiting the city is represented as coming 
 to the news-store and saying : " I 'd have, sir, 
 a groat's worth of any news, I care not what, 
 to carry down this Saturday to our vicar." 
 
 In 1641, the Star Chamber being abolished, 
 the press became more free and began to 
 influence public opinion. But in 16G2 the 
 government monopolized the press. Its free- 
 dom, such as it has had, dates from 1682, and 
 with its freedom began its increase ami its 
 power. The press cannot live in chains. Cage 
 it and you kill it. Like the pulpit, it only 
 flourishes when there is no let or hindrance 
 to the full expression of a man's real convic- 
 tions. In 1702 the first daily paper in Lon- 
 don, the " Daily Courant," appeared, printed 
 on one side of a half sheet of paper. Twenty 
 years later, there were three daily and five 
 weekly papers there, and ten which came out 
 three times a week. In the middle of that 
 
THE PRESS AND MORALS. 169 
 
 century every important town had a paper. 
 Two hundred half sheets a month were issued 
 in London, and as many elsewhere. They 
 were the " chief channels of amusement and 
 intelligence." " The people of Great Brit- 
 ain are governed by a power/' says Mr. 
 Danvers, as quoted by Lecky, " never heard 
 of as a supreme authority in any other age, — 
 the government of the press." 
 
 The passage from the puerile and slavish 
 press of the seventeenth century to the pow- 
 erful press of the eighteenth, the recognized 
 fourth estate of the country, was made by 
 such writers as Defoe, Swift, Steele, and 
 Addison. The " Tatler " and "Spectator" 
 mediated between an age of literature and 
 one of news. They are curiously compounded 
 of both. No such compound is likely to prove 
 successful again. To our minds, accustomed 
 to read the news of the day in telegraphic 
 sentences of ten words each, with no hint of 
 poetry or permission of ornament about them, 
 the graceful descriptions of the warlike doings 
 of the Duke of Marlborough or Prince Eugene, 
 which emanate from St. James' Coffee-House 
 
170 THE PRESS AND MORALS. 
 
 in the pages of the " Tatler," would be tor- 
 ture. Nor can I imagine a newspaper reader 
 of to-day lingering over his breakfast to read 
 the sometimes charming, often wearisome, 
 elegancies of writing which make up the 
 pages of these old literary journals. They 
 exactly suited the taste of their day, and 
 doubtless mitigated the political animosities 
 of the time with their mild diversions. Their 
 object was not political agitation, but social 
 reform. They aimed to " furnish entertain- 
 ment that pleased the imagination without 
 offending the sense of decency or the re- 
 ligious instincts." The " Spectator," which 
 succeeded the " Tatler," sought to establish 
 " a rational standard of conduct in morals, 
 manners, art, and literature." I think it was 
 Taine who said of Addison that he made 
 morality fashionable ; a sentence that re- 
 minds one of the shrewd comment of Dr. 
 Chapin, of New York. " In New York," said 
 he, " it is the fashion to go to church, and I 
 take advantage of it to try to do the people 
 a little good." So great was the popular- 
 ity of the " Spectator " in its day, that the 
 
THE PRESS AND MORALS. 171 
 
 morning meal in London was considered in- 
 complete without it. A servant, on being 
 asked by her master if breakfast was ready, 
 replied that the food was prepared, but the 
 " Spectator " had not arrived. 
 
 From Addison's day onward the newspaper 
 grew more and more newsy and political, and 
 less and less literary and moral. And to-day, 
 in spite of the boundless proportions which it 
 has put on, so that no subject is too high and 
 no enterprise too difficult for it to undertake, 
 the press at large is still distinguished by its 
 especial interest in politics and news, rather 
 than in literature and morals. The former are 
 its vocation, the latter its avocation. When it 
 means business, it deals in news and politics. 
 Books and homilies are the contributions of 
 its Easy Chair. They are the engagements 
 of its leisure hours. Parties, advertisements, 
 despatches, and telegrams are its stock in 
 trade. There is something in the necessary 
 rapidity with which most newspaper work is 
 done which precludes literary nicety. The 
 paragrapher must take the word which comes 
 first, whether it is the very best word for the 
 
172 THE PRESS AND MORALS. 
 
 place or not. He must take the shortest cut 
 to the thought he wishes to put, without 
 staying to dally like a meandering stream 
 with the willows and weeds of literature. 
 By the necessities of the case his vocabulary 
 becomes limited and popular, like that of the 
 masses whom he addresses, not exact or ele- 
 gant. Thus it happens, that those who only 
 read the business statistics and leading arti- 
 cles of the newspapers, lose their literary 
 taste and judgment. 
 
 Nor is exclusive newspaper reading, or 
 the reading of that which is most charac- 
 teristic in it, especially helpful to morals. 
 The motive of the paper modifies its matter ; 
 and when the controlling purpose is novelty 
 and party success, — as it is with most news- 
 papers, — then something is lost to morals as 
 well as literature. When I find my daily 
 paper in its propria persona, that is, in the 
 editorial column, frankly saying that i: a con- 
 viction standing in the way of the success of 
 its party does not amount to much," then I 
 see that I must seek elsewhere for the moral 
 tonic which I need. But you may say that 
 
THE PRESS AND MORALS. 173 
 
 this is not a fair representation of newspaper 
 morality ; you may summon me by mighty 
 names and high examples to acknowledge the 
 moral power of the press. I grant the possi- 
 bility of such power. I am speaking now of 
 its probability; the actual moral effect of the 
 average newspaper, which finds its especial 
 calling in collecting news and serving its 
 party. The temptation, on the one hand, as 
 Tattle says in Jonson's play, " to credit all, 
 and make more of it in the reporting," is far 
 too great for the professional news-gatherer ; 
 while, on the other hand, there are so many per- 
 suasions — bread-and-butter persuasions, place- 
 and-office persuasions, ease-and-good-fellowship 
 persuasions — to fidelity to party, right or 
 wrong, that it takes a really great editor 
 to withstand them. There have been such. 
 They are the glory of journalism, — men who 
 were capable of independent and honest con- 
 victions, and who dared to stand by them. 
 The press has had its martyrs and sufferers 
 for liberty and the right of private judgment, 
 as well as the church and the state. The. 
 history of journalism has many noble pages 
 
174 THE PRESS AND MORALS. 
 
 of tyranny braved and shamed by faithful 
 censorship of kings, parliaments, ministers, 
 and princes. 
 
 I find a moral invio-oration also in reading 
 the story of the origin and successes of such 
 papers as the London " Times " and the New- 
 York " Tribune," each at one time or an- 
 other, in its respective country, touching the 
 highest- water mark of circulation and influ- 
 ence. In both there has been from the be- 
 ginning a sturdy determination and capacity 
 for independence, which lay at the root of 
 their influence. When the manager of the 
 " Times," the second Walter, exposed the 
 delinquencies of Lord Melville, without fear 
 or favor, well knowing that his family would 
 lose the lucrative government printing in 
 consequence, and w r hen he virtuously refused 
 all reparation for his losses lest he should 
 compromise the perfect independence of his 
 paper, he showed of what stuff an editor may 
 be made, and laid the foundation for that su- 
 preme influence which his paper has wielded 
 in the later history of England. And when 
 Horace Greeley, in 1841, after a wholesome 
 
THE PRESS AND MORALS. 175 
 
 discipline of struggle and failure, and a half 
 success which seems like failure compared 
 with his later triumph, started the New York 
 " Tribune," he took ground which he never 
 deserted, and which made his paper a power 
 second to none in the eventful developments 
 of the present century of American life. In 
 his earlier paper, the " New-Yorker," seven 
 copartners withdrew from him in five and a 
 ialf years. " You don't humbug enough," 
 they complained. " You ought to make more 
 noise and vaunt your own merits. The world 
 will never believe you print a good paper 
 unless you tell them so." " Our course," says 
 the editor, " has not been changed by these 
 representations." And in introducing the 
 •first number of the " Tribune," he says : " We 
 hope to issue a fair sheet, unembittered by 
 the violence of party, untainted by the breath 
 of licentiousness." How well he succeeded is 
 attested by the great English commoner, John 
 Bright, who declared in the House of Com- 
 mons that there was no better paper in Lon- 
 don. " Here," said he, " is a newspaper 
 advocating great principles, and conducted 
 
176 THE PRESS AND MORALS. 
 
 in all respects with the greatest propriety, — 
 a newspaper in which I find not a syllable 
 that I might not put on my table and allow 
 my wife and daughter to read with satisfac- 
 tion." Originally that paper employed about 
 twenty persons. In 1871, when a review of 
 its fortunes was given to the public, it had 
 from four to five hundred engaged in each 
 issue. Its total cost the first week was five 
 hundred and twenty-five dollars. In 1871 it 
 was nearly twenty thousand dollars a week. 
 I find some of its old numbers most' instruc- 
 tive reading at the present time, and in other 
 circles than those first favored with its peru- 
 sal ; for example, the editor said years ago 
 that he asked " no free-trader to forego his 
 economic views in order to be of his party." 
 And he insisted that no protectionist should be 
 " bullied out of his convictions in deference to 
 the harmony of the party." Nor can I read, 
 without wishing to repeat, that wise warning 
 which he read to his old associates, when he 
 told them that " the attempt to base a great, 
 enduring party on hate and wrath, was as 
 though you should plant a colony on an ice- 
 
THE PRESS AND MORALS. 177 
 
 berg which had somehow drifted into a tropi- 
 cal ocean. " 
 
 If the testimony of a successful journalist 
 may be allowed to have weight in defining 
 the province of a newspaper, it may be found 
 in these words of Horace Greeley : " The idea 
 is to embody in a single sheet the information 
 daily required by all those who aim to keep 
 posted on all important occurrences ; so that 
 the lawyer, the merchant, the banker, the 
 forwarder, the economist, the author, the poli- 
 tician, may find here whatever he needs to 
 see, and be spared the trouble of looking else- 
 where." 
 
 In the two examples now given of successful 
 journalism, — the " Times " in England and 
 the " Tribune " in America, — there is the 
 evidence we were seeking, that it is both 
 possible and, in the end, profitable, for an 
 editor and a paper to have and to hold con- 
 victions of justice and right, which are dearer 
 to him than any party, and which he will 
 hold to and defend, through good report and 
 evil report, in sickness and health, in sor- 
 row and joy, till death doth reveal in the 
 
 12 
 
178 THE PRESS AND MORALS. 
 
 light of God's judgment their error or their 
 truth. 
 
 Profoundly studied, this will be seen also 
 to be the life and success of political parties. 
 If they ever thrive it is due to some power 
 or principle in them which the people feel to 
 be just. In the long run, no party carries 
 the votes which does not carry the heart and 
 conscience of the people. It is the weakness 
 of politics to-day that no commanding moral 
 issue is raised, or none whose moral bearing 
 can be readily seen and felt. If in this flat 
 interim of party warfare, in which " keeping 
 in" on the one side is pitted against " getting 
 in" on the other, some man or some paper 
 or some company of men would set up a 
 clean and clear piece of justice and rally the 
 people around that, there might yet be some- 
 thing worth working for and voting for in the 
 land. We would humbly suggest that such 
 a fair distribution of wealth and ordering of 
 society that every man in the country might 
 " sit under his own vine and fig-tree " would 
 make a good party standard. If we were 
 tempted to enter journalism, we would take 
 
THE PRESS AND MORALS. 179 
 
 that for our standard, and do what we could 
 to bring it about. 
 
 I sometimes please myself imagining this 
 new journal, the " Vine and the Fig-tree,'' 
 sheltering under its shade the small farmer, 
 the daily workman, the modest trader, the 
 toiling millions, and taking the best se- 
 curity against communism and anarchy, by 
 making every laborer a property-owner, 
 and so pledging him to order and respect 
 for "mine and thine." A roof of his own, 
 a home of his own, however humble, ought 
 to be within the reach of every hard-work- 
 ing man in America. If he is prospered, 
 a cow and an apple-tree, or their equiva- 
 lent, might be added. And I believe that 
 this simple platform, with the legislation, 
 agitation, sacrifices, and labor needed to 
 bring its prophecy to pass, would be the 
 making of the man or party that espoused 
 it, and the greatest possible blessing to 
 mankind. 
 
 At present, as it seems to me, the most ap- 
 propriate place in which any political party 
 could appear in its newspapers would be in 
 
180 THE PRESS AND MORALS. 
 
 the column of wants. " Wanted : A just prin- 
 ciple around which to rally, and some men of 
 convictions to lead us on." 
 
 We have seen something of the infancy 
 and growth of journalism in our brief review 
 of its history in England, where it has risen 
 from the " Daily Courant " of London, printed 
 on one side of a half sheet of paper in 1702, 
 to the London " Times " and its able contem- 
 poraries. Mr. S. C. Hall, in his " Recollections 
 of a Long Life," puts the number of news- 
 papers now published in the United Kingdom 
 as 1,986. In our own country the increase of 
 the journal in numbers and influence has been 
 far greater. In 1720, when James Franklin 
 began to print the " New England Courant," 
 there had been but three newspapers in this 
 country. His brother Benjamin says that 
 James was advised by his friends not to 
 start another paper, it being considered that 
 one newspaper was enough for America. To- 
 day, or at the time of the latest census, 
 there were 11,314 periodicals published in 
 this country. Of these 971 were daily pa- 
 pers, 8,G33 were weeklies, and 1,167 were 
 
THE PRESS AND MORALS. 181 
 
 monthlies. The circulation of the daily pa- 
 pers was 3,566,395, and that of the week- 
 lies was over twenty-eight millions. At the 
 time of the Ee volution', says McMaster, there 
 were forty-three newspapers in the country, 
 all of them in large towns, and rarely travel- 
 ling more than fifty miles from their editor's 
 door. They were not received by the post- 
 office as mail. The post-riders had to be re- 
 warded for carrying a dozen newspapers in 
 their portmanteaus (a custom of which I 
 have been recently reminded, by receiving 
 a summons to apply at the post-office for a 
 parcel too large to be delivered by the post- 
 man : it was a small package of newspapers). 
 These newspapers of Revolutionary times 
 were very modest affairs, never exceeding 
 four pages, and usually appearing thrice a 
 week. They had no editorial. Printer and 
 editor were one. Payment was received in 
 country produce. Scraps ; advertisements of 
 runaways ; news by the last packet from Lis- 
 bon or London ; " a note to the editor, post- 
 ing some enemy as a coward in abusive and 
 scurrilous language ; " rude woodcuts ; a 
 
182 THE PRESS AND MORALS. 
 
 poet's corner, with only less fame than that 
 of Westminster Abbey ; now and then a book 
 review ; and, best of all, occasionally a really 
 standard book reprinted in successive numbers, 
 — these made up the substance of the paper. 
 Lampoons, epigrams, anecdotes, and coarse 
 bon-mots furnished the spice for this pudding 
 literature. There was nothing in the papers 
 concerning really significant events happening 
 in their time at a distance from them ; for 
 there were no means of getting prompt ac- 
 counts of such transactions. Quotations from 
 private letters were the principal authorities 
 of that day. But when we consider that 
 letters sent out from Philadelphia spent live 
 weeks in going a distance now traversed in 
 a single afternoon, we see how stale the 
 news must have been on its arrival at its 
 destination. As the light from a remote 
 star which takes several years to reach our 
 eyes affords no evidence that the star is 
 still in existence, so news so tardy was no 
 assurance that its source was not destroyed. 
 In some country districts the post-rider was 
 an old man, who took his time and his ease 
 
THE PRESS AND MORALS. 183 
 
 in delivering the mail, knitting woollen socks 
 and mittens as his horse jogged along. This 
 was the mail service of a nation which now dis- 
 tributes more mail-matter in New York in one 
 day than it distributed throughout the coun- 
 try in a whole year one hundred years ago. 
 And this is the press which to-day has " her 
 ambassadors in every quarter of the world, 
 her couriers upon every road." 
 
 Not content with penetrating the heart of 
 the dark continent, and revealing Africa to 
 the world with greater clearness than she 
 knows herself, or piercing to either pole to 
 interview its silent icebergs and frozen seas, 
 the press of to-day undertakes the more diffi- 
 cult enterprise of exploring the mind and 
 heart of every leading man of the time, and 
 opening a northwest passage through the sel- 
 fishness, reserve, and heartless accumulations 
 of moneyed kings and capitalists. What it 
 does not know, it frankly says, is n't worth 
 knowing. But the same may be said of very 
 much that it does know. For one, I do not 
 care to know all that my daily papers can tell 
 me. It takes a strong mind to survive its 
 
184 THE PRESS AND MORALS. 
 
 acquisitions. Most men are the victims of 
 what they read or hear. I do not see how 
 any but the most able and disciplined minds 
 can safely know all the paper tells them. 
 Such multiplicity and incongruity is the 
 death of consecutive thinking. The mind 
 is like a hunted elephant under this daily 
 charge, and turns now to the man and now 
 to the dog that assails him, always beaten, 
 because always diverted before it reaches 
 its foe. 
 
 Skilful readers know how to skip ; and busy 
 people are compelled to set limits to their 
 reading. For all that, every man in America 
 must have his paper. He cannot live with- 
 out it. It is well. Only let him take it as 
 he takes his dinner, with choice and discre- 
 tion, not attempting to try everything that 
 is on the bill of fare, nor to eat all there is 
 of every course. There is such a thing as 
 temperance in newspaper-reading as well as 
 in eating and drinking;. I have to confess 
 that I sometimes meet people who are sadly 
 inebriated by their papers. They have lost 
 their heads, and parted with their divine right 
 
THE PRESS AND MORALS. 185 
 
 of free inquiry and independent judgment. 
 Their wisdom is not theirs, but their neigh- 
 bor's, and their wit is only the repetition of 
 his jokes. Among so many papers there is 
 room for choice. Unhappily, however, every- 
 body wants the local news, and it is not every 
 locality which can furnish him with good read- 
 ing. A good rule is to read the best of local 
 papers for its home news, and to rely upon 
 some standard metropolitan paper for the 
 world at large. The founder of the New 
 York " Tribune," after saying that no man 
 is even tolerably informed in our day who 
 does not regularly keep the run of events 
 and opinions through the daily perusal of at 
 least one good journal, adds : " What its 
 character should be must depend on his own 
 taste ; though if he should prefer a sheet 
 surcharged with calumny, scurrility, and ma- 
 lignity, — the mere instrument of faction 
 and the offspring of low ambition, — he will 
 give us leave to wonder rather than admire. 
 There are hundreds of newspapers printed 
 in this country (and the case is still worse in 
 England and elsewhere) which habitually vio- 
 
186 THE PRESS AND MORALS. 
 
 late all the decencies of life, and indulge in 
 language and temper which cannot be thrown 
 in the way of children without injury to their 
 manners, their morals, and their principles." 
 It is this consideration which makes us pause, 
 before we pay our whole measure of admira- 
 tion to the public press. Its enterprise amazes 
 us. The diligence, self-sacrifice, and hard 
 work, turning night into day ; the ability, 
 industry, and intelligence shown in its writ- 
 ing, collecting, and discriminating; the high 
 pressure under which its articles are pre- 
 pared, as well as printed ; the good nature 
 with which it meets the great army of bores, 
 idiots, and fools that beset its office ; the 
 public spirit it commonly displays, lending 
 its introduction and countenance to every 
 good cause — but who can enumerate the 
 uses and abuses of the press ? It is always 
 easier to show the latter than the former, 
 and often they who find most fault are those 
 who receive most service from the paper. 
 
 I do respect and hold in high esteem 
 the calling of journalism and the manner in 
 which it is often followed. But just because 
 
THE PRESS AND MORALS. 187 
 
 it is so far-reaching and so powerful, it ought 
 to be held to a high standard of behavior. 
 The model of the community must be its 
 superior. And I cannot accept as the func- 
 tion of the press or the secret of respectable 
 journalism, the realistic picturing of every- 
 day humanity, in all its vileness as well as 
 its virtue, in all its warning degradation as 
 well as its exemplariness. At least, if the 
 bad must enter, let not the press intro- 
 duce them with jocoseness and demoralizing 
 levity. Heaven knows that suicide, conjugal 
 infidelity, drunkenness, crime, murder, and 
 debauchery are no jokes to those who suffer 
 from them ; and who that feels his oneness 
 with society escapes such suffering ? I would 
 have the paper that performs its task of re- 
 porting new crimes, as well as better news, 
 do it with the same reserve and decency with 
 which its editor would speak of such things 
 in the presence of his wife and children. 
 That is where his paper is going, and he 
 ought to dress it for the best society it enters, 
 not the worst. The people who read and 
 support newspapers in this country are those 
 
188 THE PRESS AND MORALS. 
 
 who have had some advantages of education. 
 They are not the lowest of mankind, and they 
 have a right to have their better characters 
 and tastes respected in the paper that enters 
 their doors. I suppose every decent person 
 will admit that he would promptly show a 
 man the door who ventured to talk at his 
 table or in his parlor in the way in which 
 well-esteemed journals lying on his table 
 speak of current crimes and indecencies. 
 What is the difference between talking smut 
 and printing it ? I can see none that is not 
 in favor of the former ; for the printer has 
 time between the thought and the writing, 
 printing, and publishing to think better of it, 
 while the speaker is often betrayed into his 
 error almost unawares. Much is said and 
 something is clone to keep our children a way 
 from corrupting literature. We have already 
 considered together, in this course of lectures 
 on Life and Morals, the question of juvenile 
 reading and juvenile morals. But, barring 
 the illustrations, which do greatly aggravate 
 the offence of the text, I question if many 
 of the publications of the " Police Gazette " 
 
THE PRESS AND MORALS. 189 
 
 company surpass the shamelessness of repu- 
 table leading papers in this country. In 
 fact, many of those publications are made up 
 of newspaper reports of notorious tragedies 
 and court trials, with nothing added to them 
 but the illustrations. Do not think that I 
 am approving these publications. I am only 
 including in a common condemnation with 
 them the better-dressed corrupters of our 
 children's morals, which go unchallenged 
 from house to house. There are scandalous 
 books that have reached their hundredth 
 editions freely sold everywhere to-day. But, 
 bad as they are, they are no worse in open 
 or covert vulgarity and indecency than court 
 reports of the modern thorough-going news- 
 paper. Ben Jonson's estimate of the press 
 in 1622 is almost repeated in Bulwer Lytton's 
 modern play of " Money." One of its char- 
 acters says : — 
 
 " Aye, read the newspapers ! they '11 tell you 
 what the world is made of. Daily calendars of 
 roguery and woe. Here, advertisements from 
 quacks, money-lenders, cheap warehouses, and 
 spotted boys with two heads. So much for dupes 
 
190 THE PRESS AND MORALS. 
 
 and impostors. Turn to the other column : po- 
 lice reports, bankruptcies, swindling, forgery, and 
 a biographical sketch of the snub-nosed man 
 who murdered his own three little cherubs in 
 Pentonville. 
 
 " Do you fancy these things but exceptions to 
 the general virtue and health of the nation ? Turn 
 to the leading article, and your hair will stand on 
 end at the horrible wickedness or melancholy 
 idiotism of that half of the population who think 
 differently from yourself. 
 
 " In my day I have seen already eighteen crises, 
 six annihilations of agriculture and commerce, four 
 overthrows of the church, and three last, final, 
 awful, and irremediable destructions of the entire 
 constitution. And that 's a newspaper ! " 
 
 Making clue allowance for the extravagance 
 of the picture, is it not true to one side of 
 journalism, and a side very frequently turned 
 towards the public ? Who shall defend our 
 hearts and homes from the insidious demorali- 
 zation of prurient plays, novels, and news- 
 paper scandals ? The clime novels are not 
 the only offenders. Nickel newspapers are 
 often just as bad. An outrageously bad 
 paper gets tabooed ; but under cover of 
 
THE PRESS AND MORALS. 191 
 
 keeping its readers posted as to the news of 
 the day, it is getting ruinously common for 
 leading papers all over the country to chron- 
 icle, to the last syllable of their infamous de- 
 tails, cases of murder, violence, incest, and 
 debauchery. And as if the length and 
 breadth of the land, with its daily renewed 
 crimes, were not field enough for such damag- 
 ing enterprise, foreign countries are canvassed 
 for their scandals as they are for their rags, 
 and out of these two the sensational columns 
 of the papers are largely made up, — only 
 with this difference, that the rags are cleansed 
 before they are turned into paper, and the 
 scandals are not. " An evil and adulterous 
 generation seeketh after a sensation," for this, 
 I take it, is what was meant by a sign in the 
 ancient day. The press undertakes to give 
 them what they seek. We all read the papers 
 because we do not wish to be " behind the 
 times," as we say. But when the times be- 
 come perilously fast, it may prove an advan- 
 tage to keep behind them. 
 
 Lamar tine prophesied that " Journalism 
 would be the whole press before the end of 
 
192 THE PRESS AND MORALS. 
 
 this century. Thought will not have time to 
 ripen and accumulate into a book. The bock 
 will arrive too late. The only book possible 
 from this date is a newspaper." It has not 
 come to that as yet ; nor will it, unless the 
 press shall not only multiply its calling, but 
 magnify it. General knowledge has been 
 well defined as general ignorance ; and the 
 very omniscience of the press will make it too 
 shallow for deep sailing. After all, every 
 shop, though it be a variety store, has its 
 peculiar line of goods ; and the press, with 
 all its variety, still runs to news and politics. 
 People will go to it for these things. But 
 when they want real and independent studies 
 of great subjects, they will seek them as be-' 
 fore, in the best books and reviews ; and when 
 they feel the need of moral tonic and spiri- 
 tual quickening, they will go to church, the 
 reform convention, or to standard literature. 
 
 The newspaper is extempore printing, as 
 the stump is extempore speaking. Both are 
 mighty for the moment. The evil they do 
 " lives after them, the good is oft interred with 
 their bones.' ' The press was declared by 
 
THE PRESS AND MORALS. 193 
 
 one of its most successful editors, the elder 
 Bennett, to be the living jury of the nation. 
 But, like other juries, it is sometimes packed. 
 And I believe, whatever men may think to- 
 day of trial by jury, that they think still less 
 of trial by newspapers.' The editorial mind, 
 compelled to make itself up at short notice, 
 is as much too prompt with its verdict as the 
 ordinary jury is too slow. Moreover, there 
 is as much difference between papers as be- 
 tween jurors. Some of the former, as well as 
 the latter, have not been superior to a bribe. 
 Mr. Bennett, writing from Europe in 1847, 
 says that the "columns of the Paris press are 
 regularly sold in favor of any kind of specu- 
 lation, theatrical, financial, or political, the 
 price being regulated on the same principles 
 which rule the price of beef or mutton." 
 
 Leigh Hunt says that puffing and plenty 
 of tickets were the system of the day in Eng- 
 land, when he introduced a real criticism of 
 the stage into the " Daily News." So long 
 as a suspicion of these things hangs about the 
 press, whether in special cases it be just or 
 not, its judgments will be cautiously accepted. 
 
 13 
 
19-4 THE PRESS AND MORALS. 
 
 The only way of pure influence for it is to 
 stand in its own shoes and owe no man any- 
 thing but to love and serve him. " No paper 
 can very much help a cause which has to be 
 helped by it," said the second Franklin. His 
 own success and that of the editor of the Lon- 
 don " Times " lay in their uncompromising in- 
 dependence. Oh that men, editors, and leaders 
 of their fellows would dare, more of them, to 
 have convictions of truth and right, and stand 
 by them until they brought other men to their 
 side ! That way lies honor, usefulness, ser- 
 vice, and the best success for the press. In 
 that way already have the honorable triumphs 
 of the press been made. Let no man diminish 
 those honors or undervalue those triumphs. 
 In the working out of that freedom to which 
 the English-speaking race has attained, the 
 services of a brave and fearless press have 
 mightily contributed. It is not too much to 
 speak of it, as its historian has done, as the 
 fourth estate. Names famous in the per- 
 manent literature of the race are associated 
 with its service, — Milton, Defoe, Swift, Addi- 
 son, Steele, and Johnson, of an earlier gen- 
 
THE PRESS AND MORALS. 195 
 
 eration, and too many and too familiar names 
 of our own time to need mention. Its free- 
 dom has at once illustrated, accompanied, and 
 secured the freedom of the people. Wher- 
 ever independent papers flourish, there liberty 
 flourishes. Witness England and America, 
 in contrast with Russia and Turkey. Alive 
 to her great opportunity to shape the thought 
 and character of her innumerable readers, 
 conscious alike of her power and her respon- 
 sibility, proud and sensitive to every en- 
 croachment upon her independence, as eager 
 to tell what is true as what is new, prov- 
 ing all things and holding fast to that which 
 is good, the press may be second to no other 
 institution in its beneficence. It will redeem 
 the noble promise which, I well remember, 
 through all my boyhood's years, stood on the 
 titlepage of the paper that found its way into 
 my home. And if that modest sheet was not 
 so large, not so noisy, not so cosmopolitan, 
 not so full or so fulsome as the papers I after- 
 wards read in the larger cities, it never told 
 me anything I was ashamed to know, or low- 
 ered my opinion of the humanity to which 
 
190 THE PRESS AXD MORALS. 
 
 I belonged or the country which I loved to 
 call my own. This was its motto, worthy to 
 lead the ambition and endeavor of the press 
 of the whole land : — 
 
 " Here shall the Press the people's rights maintain, 
 Unawed by influence and unbribed by gain. 
 Here Patriot Truth her glorious precepts draw, 
 Pledged to Religion, Liberty, and Law." 
 
VIII. 
 
 ■ 
 
 THE PULPIT AND MORALS. 
 
vni. 
 
 THE PULPIT AND MORALS. 
 
 Despise not prophesyings. — 1 Thess. v. 20. 
 
 KE ACHING is improving conversa- 
 tion conducted by one. I dis- 
 covered this by attending at one 
 time what was advertised as a 
 conversation by Mr. A. Bronson Alcott. I 
 found that nobody spoke but Mr. Alcott, and 
 that he preached. From what has been told 
 us of Coleridge, I should call him also a 
 preacher. He did all the talking in every 
 company of which he formed a part. Carlyle 
 preached in the same way at times, though 
 at less length. The man who, under moral 
 or religious impression and fulness, monopo- 
 lizes the conversation, is a preacher. 
 
 If it be said that the man who can do this 
 must be an egotist and a bore, we answer, 
 
200 THE PULPIT AND MORALS. 
 
 that while the egotism or self-forgetfulness, 
 whichever it be, may be admitted, he need 
 not of necessity be a bore. If he can speak 
 more fully, wisely, and movingly than the 
 rest of the company, and really express their 
 thoughts better than they would be likely to 
 speak them, and acid to them good thoughts 
 and impulses of his own, he is a really edify- 
 ing person, and should be encouraged to 
 speak on. This view of preaching, although 
 not as high-sounding as more common presen- 
 tations of the preacher's office, carries several 
 consoling implications with it. It calls, for 
 example, for the conversational form and 
 tone in preaching, instead of the profes- 
 sionally oratorical or dramatic. It puts the 
 speaker upon the direct road to his purposed 
 end, whatever it may be. It rubs so much 
 of the oil of nature into the man's speaking, 
 that it has some of the pliancy and charm of 
 fireside conference. It makes the discourse 
 logical, continuous, and connected, — what 
 follows bearing some obvious relation to what 
 precedes, — and encourages the reasonable 
 and persuasive, rather than the dogmatic and 
 
THE PULPIT AND MORALS. 201 
 
 dictatorial tone. It recognizes and respects 
 the individuality of the hearer or silent part- 
 ner in the conversation, and appreciates his 
 real participation in the colloquy of mind 
 with mind and heart with heart. Moreover, 
 it puts a prompt quietus upon that vociferous 
 style of pulpit address, that halloaing to sin- 
 ners, which so painfully suggests the possi- 
 bility of the speaker himself being lost, or at 
 least not quite out of the woods. Dr. Lyman 
 Beecher came home one Sunday from church 
 in a very low state of mind, declaring that 
 his sermon had been a failure. " Why, 
 father,'' replied his little son Henry, " I 
 never heard you preach so loud in all my 
 life." "That is it!" said the doctor, "I 
 always halloa when I have n't anything to 
 say." 
 
 The Latin word sermo, from which is de- 
 rived our word sermon, comes from a root 
 which means " connected or bound together." 
 It was applied to various forms of speaking, 
 but chiefly of well-ordered discourse. Cicero 
 uses it to describe speaking " as opposed to 
 bawling or screaming," — that is, speaking 
 
202 THE PULPIT AND MORALS. 
 
 with the voice rarely raised above a moderate 
 pitch. And Horace is quoted as using this 
 word to describe his Epistles and Satires, — 
 compositions of a conversational rather than 
 a highly poetical character. 
 
 The foremost preacher of America, in his 
 lectures on preaching, pleads for conversa- 
 tional naturalness in pulpit speaking. " I 
 have often heard ministers in private conver- 
 sation, and said to myself, i Would to God 
 you would do so in the pulpit ! ' But the 
 moment they are in the pulpit they fall into 
 their scholastic, artificial style." He also de- 
 fines the province of preaching as well as it 
 can be defined. " It is the art," he says, " of 
 moving men from a lower to a higher life, — 
 the art of inspiring them toward a nobler 
 manhood." 
 
 Whenever, then, one man among many, 
 out of real love, interest, and religious ful- 
 ness, takes up the conversation and carries it 
 on, asking of the others only their silent atten- 
 tion, the responses of their concurrent think- 
 ing, and the free and suggestive comment of 
 their expressive faces, and thus encouraged 
 
THE PULPIT AND MORALS. 203 
 
 holds out to the end of a continuous, per- 
 suasive, well-ordered, and culminating dis- 
 course, there is preaching. Its end is moral 
 and spiritual uplifting. Its substance is truth, 
 given with conviction. Its vehicle is speech ; 
 its agent a speaker. In its ideal estate, its 
 subject-matter will be true, its agent will be 
 good, its vehicle convenient, and its effect 
 will be moral and spiritual elevation and 
 advance. 
 
 With such high matter and calling, it 
 would seem that there would be no room for 
 anything but eulogy of the moral influence 
 of the pulpit. And this would be the case 
 if the actual always reached the ideal. That 
 it does not, and has not always done so, is a 
 part of the common imperfection, in which 
 the pulpit and the preacher have to take 
 their share. 
 
 I propose to treat the subject of the Moral 
 Influence of the Pulpit practically and histori- 
 cally, not ideally ; to look at it as it is ; to 
 ask what it has done in past ages, and what 
 it is doing now ; and I shall, in each divis- 
 ion of the subject, inquire what is (1) the 
 
204 THE PULPIT AND MORALS. 
 
 substance, (2) the person, and (3) the effect 
 of the prophetic office. 
 
 That very word " prophetic " tells us where 
 to look for the beginning of preaching. The 
 prophet was the first preacher. The two 
 names stand for the same person. The limi- 
 tation of the prophetic idea to prediction is a 
 limitation in our understanding rather than 
 in the word. Predication is as much the 
 prophet's calling as prediction. To divine 
 the meaning of the past, and set it forth in 
 visible form and fresh colors, is as real 
 prophecy as to foretell the coming of Elias. 
 To elucidate experience is as great a service 
 as to formulate hope. In truth, the one is 
 not far different from the other. The lamp 
 that guides the patriot's feet in his bold 
 pioneering of futurity is the lamp of experi- 
 ence. To-morrow is only the other side of 
 yesterday, like the two faces of a coin. The 
 same metal and meaning, if not the same 
 impress, are in both. The preacher and the 
 prophet, the predicator and the predicter, are 
 one. 
 
 And what more glorious ancestry could the 
 
THE PULPIT AND MORALS. 205 
 
 preacher have than the ancient prophet ? He 
 was the reason of all progress. The keeping 
 qualities are with the priesthood ; but the 
 saving powers are the prophets. The hie- 
 rarchy conserves the existing order, good or 
 bad. It dreads nothing so much as change. 
 The prophet knows that there are times when 
 there is no way of saving but by losing. The 
 form must go in order to keep the substance. 
 The mould must break in order to release the 
 statue. Who that had his choice would not 
 rather be descended from Moses the prophet 
 than Aaron the priest ; from Samuel than 
 Eli ; from Elijah than Azariah ; from Isaiah 
 than Urijah ? And this is the noble ancestry 
 of the preacher. He is in the line of the 
 prophets. " The epochs of the world's moral 
 life," says a modern writer, " have been 
 epochs of popular preaching." And he jus- 
 tifies his statement by illustrious examples 
 from the times of the prophets until now. 
 Those Hebrew prophets, as he shows us, 
 " have ministered more to our worship than 
 any other class of men ; and if they con- 
 tributed nothing to ecclesiastical forms, to the 
 
206 THE PULPIT AND MORALS. 
 
 sanctity of the altar or the pomp of the 
 ritual, they gave that earnestness of con- 
 viction, hope, and love, without which altar- 
 form and ritual are worse than unsubstantial." 
 John the Baptist came preaching. Jesus 
 preached. The day of Pentecost was a day 
 of preaching. Paul was the prince of preach- 
 ers. The fathers, Tertullian the brazen, and 
 Chrysostom the golden-lipped, were trumpet 
 and bugle to a church falling asleep in cere- 
 monialism. Peter the Hermit was the prophet 
 of the Crusades. The preaching friars of Saint 
 Dominic, let loose upon an unthinking church, 
 and addressing every man in his own tongue, 
 awoke the reason they were set to quiet, and 
 recalled Pentecost. They prepared the way 
 for the Keformation. The bold and homely 
 prophecies of their successors anticipated 
 Luther, and prepared the way for Savonarola. 
 They spoke as men to men, and feared not 
 the faces of kings or priests. Oliver Maillard 
 being threatened by the courtiers of Louis 
 XII., because he opposed the edict of Tours, 
 replied : " As you please ; it is as convenient 
 for me to go to Paradise by water as by land." 
 
THE PULPIT AND MORALS. 207 
 
 Poncet, being rebuked by the Duke of Eper- 
 non because he made people laugh in his 
 sermons, replied boldly : " I would have you 
 know that I preach only the word of God, 
 and I have never in my life made as many 
 laugh as you have made cry." A preacher 
 before the council of Sienna, in the fifteenth 
 century, declares that the "bishops, in the 
 matter of luxury, outdo Epicurus. Over their 
 cups they discuss the authority of pope and 
 council." And he tells the story of Saint Bri- 
 gitta, who, in a trance in the church of Saint 
 Peter at Rome, saw the building suddenly 
 filled with mitred hogs. " These," replied 
 the Lord to her astonished inquiry, " are the 
 bishops and abbes of this generation." 
 
 Of such metal as this were the preachers 
 who led the way to Martin Luther. And in 
 him and his successors, Protestantism has 
 proved itself a prophetic church in contra- 
 distinction from the priestly and sacerdotal. 
 If it is true to its genius and traditions, it will 
 maintain this emphasis upon preaching as the 
 enlivening office of the church. It agrees 
 with Paul when he says : " I had rather speak 
 
208 THE PULPIT AND MORALS. 
 
 five words with my understanding, that by 
 my voice I might teach others also, than ten 
 thousand words in an unknown tongue." 
 
 Of the substance of very much of this 
 old-time preaching, we of to-day could not 
 honestly say much in praise. It does not 
 touch us much more nearly than would an 
 unknown tongue. For unknown thoughts, 
 unfamiliar and uncongenial modes of con- 
 ceiving and presenting truth, are even more 
 repellent than meaningless sounds. The 
 latter may be musical at least, and, by asso- 
 ciation with sacred scenes and places, acquire 
 a significance to the heart. But sermons of 
 which we know the meaning of every word, 
 and yet feel no sort of interest or faith in 
 anything they teach, are dull reading and 
 profitless hearing. They stupefy the mind ; 
 they do not edify. They are like water 
 slowly trickling over stone. You can trace 
 them by a sort of green or black ooze, — 
 the lowest form of vegetable life, — which 
 gathers in their pathway. I believe ser- 
 mons such as they do more harm than good. 
 They only stain the minds they have 
 
THE PULPIT AND MORALS. 209 
 
 neither the force to channel nor the depth 
 to flood. But in reading old-time sermons, 
 we must allow for the old times. The 
 early settlers in New England, as they 
 were marching in pursuit of the Indians, 
 stopped on their way to discuss foreordi- 
 nation. To them such topics were as excit- 
 ing and moving as they are passionless to 
 us. Moreover, we miss in our reading of the 
 discourses that come down to us out of the 
 scholastic, metaphysical, dogmatic, and ultra- 
 scriptural ages, the power of the preacher's 
 personality. It is like a spent rocket, this 
 ancient sermon we pick up ; and we wonder 
 how listening thousands could have gathered 
 round to hear Whitefield deliver it, or how the 
 agitated hearer of Jonathan Edwards could 
 have pulled his coat, to stay the torture of 
 his consuming rhetoric. Nevertheless such 
 was the power of these preachers in their day. 
 Their subject-matter, incredible or unimpres- 
 sive to us, was the moral tinder of their time, 
 and when the lively spark of their personal 
 influence fell upon it, the fire burned. Add to 
 these elements of power the high esteem and 
 
 14 
 
210 THE PULPIT AND A/ORALS. 
 
 authority in which the pulpit stood in times 
 past, — 'an esteem and authority not depend- 
 ent as now upon inherent truth and worth, 
 — and you will realize how influential it has 
 been in the preaching epochs of Christianity. 
 Preaching and prayer are the universal 
 offices of religion. They are possible in all 
 lands and in all places. They do not need 
 water, as in baptism ; or bread, as in the 
 Lord's supper ; or holy garments, as in the 
 mass ; or consecrated places, as in all forms 
 of temple-worship ; or a separate priesthood, 
 or a special altar, or animals of sacrifice. 
 They are the light-armed warriors of the 
 spirit, and go conquering where heavier 
 forces cannot travel. They pitch their taber- 
 nacle beside all roads, and sow their seed 
 beside all waters. They have been mighty 
 agencies in the past in kindling thought and 
 training minds, in moving hearts and shaping 
 characters, in inspiring reform and instruct- 
 ing consciences, in removing wrongs and es- 
 tablishing the right, in comforting sorrows 
 and ministering to resignation, in gently 
 breaking new discovery to ancient ignorance, 
 
THE PULPIT AND MORALS. 211 
 
 and mediating between the new and the 
 old ; and in leading a progressive human- 
 ity slowly and safely up the steps of its 
 moral and spiritual advance. 
 
 But here the man who has gone with us 
 agreeably in our retrospect of the preacher's 
 calling and influence, may stop and refuse to 
 go further. " To-day," he may say, " all is 
 changed." Stripped of his merely professional 
 authority, dependent upon the voluntary sup- 
 port of the people, rivalled by other powerful 
 and lively agencies of reform and education, 
 — the press, the public school and library, 
 the lyceum, and quite distanced by the stage 
 in popular favor, — the pulpit of to-day will 
 tell a different story from that of its past his- 
 tory. The modern pulpit, men will declare, 
 is the publishing house. People turn now to 
 literature, periodical and standard literature, 
 for their instruction and quickening ; and the 
 question is gravely mooted in thoughtful 
 circles to-clay, " Will the coming man go to 
 church?" 
 
 We have considered together in recent 
 preachings, or conversations on these subjects, 
 
212 THE PULPIT AND MORALS. 
 
 what the actual and possible benefits of the 
 press, the stage, and general literature are ; 
 and you may remember enough of the evi- 
 dence collected to moderate your faith in 
 their sufficiency as substitutes for a direct 
 moral agency, like the pulpit. The stage 
 may be a moral influence, but need not be 
 in order to fulfil its artistic calling. The 
 press also was found to have no call to 
 preach. As for books, common literature, 
 they are of all kinds, and are often made to 
 sell. If preaching and the pulpit may not 
 stand, then conscience will lose its spokes- 
 man, and morality the only agency which, 
 in being true to itself, must of necessity be 
 true to her. The pulpit believes. The stage 
 makes believe. The press makes others be- 
 lieve. The first alone is the vantage ground 
 of truth and righteousness. It has convic- 
 tions ; and woe to it if it conceals or hushes 
 them ! The whole force and power of the 
 preacher lies in his veracity and earnestness. 
 He believes, and therefore speaks. The stage 
 has just the contrary make-up. Its business 
 is to impose on its audience. Mrs. Mo watt, in 
 
THE PULPIT AND MORALS. 213 
 
 her autobiography, reports her fellow-actor in 
 a most pathetic play, as calling for an um- 
 brella when the audience were melted to tears. 
 They were smiling while the people wept. 
 Garrick said that the difference between the 
 actors and preachers of his day was that the 
 former uttered falsehood as if it were truth, 
 and the latter uttered truth as if it were 
 falsehood. I use the bon-mot only to justify 
 my definition of the actor out of his own 
 lips, — " The actor utters falsehood as if it 
 were truth." 
 
 But the preacher needs just the opposite 
 qualification for his work. He is nothing, if 
 not sincere. Goethe, in his introduction to 
 Faust, makes one man say to another : — ■ 
 
 " I 've often heard it said, the preacher 
 Might profit with an actor for a teacher." 
 
 To whom the other answers : — 
 
 " Yes, when that preacher is an actor, granted, 
 As often happens in these modern days." 
 
 If the preacher ever really assumes the 
 actor's part, he resigns his office and loses 
 his church, although he may for a season 
 
214 THE PULPIT AND MORALS. 
 
 double his audience. A preacher turned ac- 
 tor in the pulpit means a worshipper turned 
 spectator in the pew. " The hungry sheep 
 meanwhile look up and are not fed." 
 
 And what can the press do for them ? As 
 we just said, its business is to make others be- 
 lieve what it says. It may be true, it may be 
 false, but it is what the editor wishes the peo- 
 ple who read his paper to believe. He and 
 his party have certain measures to carry, cer- 
 tain men to elect to office, certain ends to at- 
 tain, good, bad, or indifferent, and he uses his 
 paper to serve those ends. In doing so, he 
 is not departing from any recognized stand- 
 ard of the newspaper press. But the preacher 
 who should thus use his pulpit or utilize his 
 position for any personal ends or party tri- 
 umphs, irrespective of their right or wrong, 
 would betray the trust imposed in him by 
 his people and degrade his high office. As 
 for literature in general, the very best of it, 
 when looked at as literature, acknowledges 
 no indebtedness to make men better. It 
 aims to instruct for the truth's sake, not for 
 the reader's ; to entertain for the joy of the 
 
THE PULPIT AND MORALS. 215 
 
 game, not for the moral invigoration of the 
 playmate ; and even when a book is writ- 
 ten with character-buildjng as its avowed 
 end, and an earnest purpose to lift man to 
 a higher manhood, it is nothing but a book 
 after all. It has no mobile face, no beaming 
 eyes, no persuasive tones, no voice, no speech, 
 no first person, no individual electric battery, 
 making the very air its vibratory track, and 
 setting the hearts of men a'clicking with re- 
 cording and responding beats. There is no 
 blood in a book. It is at best an apology for 
 the preacher's absence. Paul cannot come 
 at the present time, so he sends the Corin- 
 thians a letter, — an excellent substitute, such 
 letters as these, but nevertheless a substitute, 
 not Paul in person. Nothing can take the 
 place of the preacher; and, in fact, nothing 
 does take his place. 
 
 People who are in literature as a calling, 
 and so busy in it that they seldom get an 
 inside view of the church, are quite sure that 
 the world at large is as inattentive as they 
 are to the pulpit and the preacher. But the 
 fact, as the figures show, is all the other way. 
 
216 THE PULPIT AND MORALS. 
 
 The churches in this country and the church- 
 goers more than keep pace with its marvel- 
 lous growth in population. In 1800 there 
 were 3,030 evangelical societies in the United 
 States. In 1850 there were 43,072; in 1870 
 there were 70,148; and in 1880 there were 
 97,090, an increase of thirty- two fold in eighty 
 years. The number of communicants in these 
 churches has increased from 364,872 in 1800, 
 to 10,065,963 in 1880. Meantime the Roman 
 Catholics have increased (chiefly by immigra- 
 tion) from 100,000 in 1800, to 6,367,330 in 
 1880. Or take the money test : these same 
 evangelical churches raised $745,718 for for- 
 eign missions in the decade from 1810 to 1819. 
 Between 1870 and 1880 they raised for for- 
 eign missions $24,861,482 ; and for home 
 missions $31,272,154, as against $233,826 
 in 1820-29. Meantime, the value of the 
 church property of these churches has risen 
 from $71,275,909 in 1850 to $271,477,391 
 in 1870. Somebody must believe in preach- 
 ing besides the preachers, to make these 
 figures good. 
 
 The generosity, faith, and self-sacrifices 
 
THE PULPIT AND MORALS. 217 
 
 which such statistics prove, ought to be re- 
 warded by the very best of preaching. The 
 people, at least, have a right to expect that 
 the agency which they maintain at such an 
 immense cost, and with so much patience of 
 faith, shall do much to improve the characters 
 of men, and thus help to maintain a high 
 social state. This is its calling, as we agreed 
 at the beginning, to " inspire men toward a 
 nobler manhood." And I believe that this 
 calling is quite as earnestly and successfully 
 followed, on the whole, as any of the serious 
 occupations of life. If preachers fall below 
 the mark of their high calling, let it be re- 
 membered that their calling is enough higher 
 than others to give their attainment the lead, 
 whether they reach the perfection of their 
 vocation or not. A comparative failure in a 
 high attempt is better than success on a lower 
 plane. The traveller who reaches the Col de 
 Balm on his way to Mont Blanc, though he 
 rises no further, gets higher than the lake 
 tourist who only sails from Geneva to Vevay. 
 I make no apology for preaching or preachers. 
 They hold their own very well in this mediocre 
 
218 THE PULPIT AND MORALS. 
 
 world. Few who criticise them would do 
 better under like conditions, least of all the 
 litterateurs who think to write themselves up, 
 by writing the pulpit down. The truth is, the 
 world would give more for an honest shake 
 of the hand, awkwardly as it may be given, 
 than for the most graceful touch of the hat, 
 which the most finished gentleman can exe- 
 cute. And the earnest purpose to make men 
 better, the serious attempt to persuade them 
 to live more thoughtfully, the affectionate in- 
 terest which all real ministers have and show 
 in their people, are accepted of them and 
 valued by them, and made to cover a thou- 
 sand blemishes in their literary or oratorical 
 work. 
 
 If I allow myself to offer any criticism 
 upon the moral influence of the pulpit, it 
 will be for the sake of perfect candor, and 
 not from any lack of faith in the office or 
 respect for the men who so devotedly and 
 laboriously fill it. It is the one business 
 which has the moral and spiritual elevation 
 of men for its end. In other professions 
 this is incidental. To the preacher it is 
 
THE PULPIT AND MORALS. 219 
 
 primary and ultimate, the Alpha and Omega 
 of his endeavors. Other callings may achieve 
 greatness, though missing this ; missing this, 
 the preacher loses all. 
 
 Keeping this grand effect in view, — the 
 lifting of man from a lower to a higher life, — 
 it is fair to say that both the substance of 
 preaching and the person preaching should 
 be morally sound and true. The profession 
 which has manhood for its end must have 
 men for its agents. No mastery of the art 
 of speaking, or possession of outward graces, 
 or acquirement of a lucrative living, or act of 
 official indorsement, no laying on of hands 
 or laying in of goods, nothing short of or less 
 than personal character and first-hand right- 
 eousness, can be accepted in a preacher. You 
 have heard of the preacher who preached so 
 well that when he was in the pulpit men 
 wished he would never leave it ; and whose 
 daily life was so bad that, when he left the 
 pulpit, men wished he would never enter 
 it. Such instances are possible, although they 
 are not common. They show us one fatal 
 opening through which the moral influence 
 
220 THE PULPIT AND MORALS. 
 
 of the pulpit may be destroyed. I will not 
 say that the character of the preacher must 
 be above suspicion, — that may not be pos- 
 sible in a suspicious community, — but I do 
 say that it should be so high as to furnish no 
 just occasion for reproach, and so truly good 
 that in the end it will need no vindication 
 but time. 
 
 Mr. Spurgeon, in his lectures to his stu- 
 dents, quotes Bishop Eeynolds as saying : 
 " The star which led the w T ise men unto 
 Christ, the pillar of fire which led the 
 children unto Canaan, did not only shine, 
 but go before them." 
 
 And next to a consistent life, I would put 
 honest thought as a requirement of the 
 preacher. He has no right to preach, or be 
 understood to preach, what he does not be- 
 lieve. I am not blaming here the free and 
 poetical use of language, that verbal symbol- 
 ism which makes so much of the beauty of 
 literature and the charm of eloquence. Let 
 us have all you can afford to give us of this 
 speech of the heart and the imagination, only 
 let us have it in its proper form and place. 
 
THE PULPIT AND MORALS. 221 
 
 In homilies, consolations, confessions, prayers, 
 hymns, and aspirations, by all means, give us 
 words that bloom and thoughts that sing. 
 But there is one region, and that the very 
 region which the pulpit has very much fre- 
 quented in the past, in which this tropical 
 use of language is not only out of place 
 but out of truth. It is the realm of the in- 
 tellect and understanding. There, language 
 undertakes to be exact. Doctrine is not 
 poetry, and dogma is not song. It is in 
 vain, when you have ceased to believe your 
 creed, to set it to music. It becomes then, 
 in very reality, a mere song. No, there is 
 a place and room for exact thinking in re- 
 ligion, and there is a phraseology of much 
 nicety which befits such thoughts. When 
 men preach doctrine or dogma, they should 
 express themselves in its appropriate terms, 
 and then stand or fall by them. I cannot 
 think it anything less than mental dishon- 
 esty for men to accept, as true statements 
 of their religious opinions, articles and creeds 
 whose language has long ceased to represent 
 their convictions. The position taken by 
 
222 THE PULPIT AND MORALS. 
 
 so good a man and liberal an ecclesiastic as 
 the late Dean Stanley, that one could as- 
 sent to the thirty-nine articles, as a whole, 
 without believing in any one of them sepa- 
 rately, seems to me morally insane. And 
 what that American bishop meant, or who 
 he was, who wrote to Dean Stanley to stand 
 by the national establishment of the Church 
 of England to the u moral death" I cannot 
 imagine. And let me acid to the moral char- 
 acter and mental honesty, which are as gun 
 and carriage to the preacher's charge, one 
 word as to the truth and character of that 
 rendering of the Christian gospel which is 
 most popularly and, if I may coin a word, 
 rcvivallfj preached. I refer to the crude and 
 morally faulty renderings of the great mystery 
 everywhere manifested, by which suffering 
 innocence pleads with and for the wilfully 
 disobedient. The supreme instance, — the 
 Cross of Calvary, — in its atoning, sacrificial 
 aspect, is made the sole motive of repentance 
 and warrant of salvation by many preachers. 
 In doing so, they often, as it seems to me, 
 make shipwreck of morality. 
 
THE PULPIT AND MORALS. 223 
 
 You may have heard of the way in which 
 a wealthy layman once kept the ten com- 
 mandments. He had them engraved on tab- 
 lets, and presented them to his church. It 
 was shrewdly hinted at the time that a more 
 careful keeping of them in the conduct of 
 his life would be a grateful sacrifice to the 
 community. Men may say what they will of 
 this witty device for keeping the decalogue ; 
 it is quite as respectable, morally considered, 
 as the popular view of meeting the require- 
 ments of the moral law by the merits of Jesus 
 of Nazareth. I have listened to a preach- 
 ing of the substituted righteousness of Jesus 
 Christ, which has as clear and explicit a 
 statement of his sufficiency to replace by 
 his righteousness what is lacking in the sin- 
 ner, as it is possible to put into language. 
 The preacher, Mr. Moody, undertook to weigh 
 his audience with the ten requirements of the 
 decalogue, each commandment serving as a 
 separate weight. It was no difficult matter 
 to convict every person in the immense con- 
 gregation of having broken one or another 
 of these laws \ especially when the preacher 
 
224 THE PULPIT AND MORALS. 
 
 took the New Testament interpretion of mur- 
 der, lust, and filial unfaithfulness. If evil 
 thoughts and desires are culpable, as well as 
 evil deeds, — and this is Christian teaching, — 
 no man living can escape the condemnation 
 of broken law. 
 
 I have no word of objection or opposition 
 to the pungent, earnest, and truthful way in 
 which the revivalist put the requirements of 
 the ten commandments. He convicted us 
 all of sin. I am not sure but a retentive 
 memory and sensitive conscience, applying 
 Christ's rule of guiltiness in so much as de- 
 siring; a wrong thing, would have made us all 
 guilty of every sin forbidden in the decalogue. 
 But that would not be necessary in order to 
 bring us where the preacher aimed from the 
 first to bring us, — before the presence of God, 
 conscious of having broken His laws. The 
 father making an idol of his child, the woman 
 making amusement and fashion her first care, 
 the man so hating his neighbor that he wished 
 him dead, the thief, the covetous man, the 
 unlawful desirer, the Sabbath-breaker, — as 
 those familiar figures passed in review before 
 
THE PULPIT AND MORALS. 225 
 
 us, did we not recognize in their faults our 
 own, and confess that we had sinned and done 
 evil in God's sight ? The most effective por- 
 tion of the preaching, where the preacher 
 fell upon that man or woman who would 
 suffer his parents to want when he could re- 
 lieve them, or treat with disrespect the love 
 which had watched over his infancy and 
 guided and supported his youth, was as whole- 
 some a burst of moral energy as I have ever 
 listened to. If this were to be a report only 
 of another man's preaching in place of my 
 own, I would like to take up in detail the 
 teaching of this strong sermon on the deca- 
 logue, and give you the benefit of it. But I 
 should wish to stop before the closing and 
 really consummate paragraph. When the 
 preacher had weighed us all in the balance 
 and found every man wanting, not excepting 
 himself, he suddenly exclaimed : " And now 
 you will ask me, how shall I make up for my 
 light weight, — how shall I make the opposite 
 scale go up, when I step into God's scales ? 
 I will tell you. Jesus will step in with me, 
 and that will fetch up the weight. He, the 
 
 15 
 
226 THE PULPIT AND MORALS. 
 
 sinless one ; he who has never broken the 
 law ; he, my substitute, my king, my all, — 
 he will step in with me, and then the weight 
 will kick the beam." 
 
 In words of which these are the very copy 
 or exact equivalent, he preached the doctrine 
 of a substituted righteousness, — that doc- 
 trine whose statement seems to have such a 
 mysterious power over the spiritual imagi- 
 nation of the masses. How anything can 
 be conceived or stated more repugnant to a 
 healthy moral sense, I do not see. If my 
 salvation is to depend on my acceptance of 
 it, my whole nature must be changed from 
 what it now is, and my standard of right and 
 wrong entirely reversed. The substitution of 
 one man's innocence for another man's guilt, 
 or one man's righteousness for another's lack 
 of righteousness, is, in every way it may be 
 presented, unjust and immoral. We have 
 only to apply this principle of substitution 
 to any common relation of life to see its 
 unfairness. Let us keep to the figure of 
 the scales which, we are told, will finally 
 weigh us. 
 
THE PULPIT AND MORALS. 227 
 
 I have a little nephew only a few months 
 older than my son. In the summer-time 
 they come together, and there is a natural 
 rivalry between them as to which weighs the 
 more. What would you say to me, if, when I 
 took my boy to be weighed, I should secretly 
 put a five-pound weight into his pocket, to 
 bring up his weight ? Or how would it do 
 for me to stand on the platform with him, and 
 let my weight be added to his ? And yet 
 that is precisely what we are told Jesus does 
 for Mr. Moody and as many as he may con- 
 vert. Two men come up to be weighed, — 
 one a convert of the Tabernacle, the other 
 not ; both, we will suppose, are equally blame- 
 worthy before the moral law ; but the con- 
 vert will outweigh the other nevertheless. 
 " How ? " " By having Jesus step in with 
 him, and then how the weight will go up ! " 
 says this revivalist. 
 
 In such preaching as that I see no moral 
 benefit to the community. 
 
 Let the pulpit revise its doctrine. Let the 
 preacher honor himself and his calling by 
 being candid, true, moral both in life and 
 
228 THE PULPIT AND MORALS. 
 
 teaching ; let him magnify his work by doing 
 it, so that his acts, like those of the first 
 apostles, may survive his sermons, and we 
 will esteem them that labor among us highly, 
 " for their works' sake." 
 
 University Press : John Wilson & Son, Cambridge. 
 
Messrs. Roberts Brothers' Publications. 
 
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 very many, both old and young, of a more satisfying idea of what 
 Israel really was and did among the nations." 
 
 Sold everywhere by all booksellers. Mailed, post-paid, by the 
 publishers, 
 
 ROBERTS BROTHERS, Boston. 
 
Messrs. Roberts Brothers' Publications. 
 
 CHRISTIAN HISTORY 
 
 IN ITS THREE GREAT PERIODS. 
 
 By JOSEPH HENRY ALLEN, 
 
 Late Lecturer on Ecclesiastical History in Harvard University. 
 
 First Period. "EARLY CHRISTIANITY." - 
 
 Topics: i. The Messiah and the Christ; 2. Saint Paul; 
 3. Christian Thought of the Second Century; 4. The Mind 
 of Paganism; 5. The Arian Controversy; 6. Saint Augus- 
 tine; 7. Leo the Great; 8. Monasticism as a Moral Force; 
 
 9. Christianity in the East ; 10. Conversion of the Barba- 
 rians ; 11. The Holy Roman Empire; 12. The Christian 
 Schools. 
 
 Second Period. "THE MIDDLE AGE." — 
 Topics: i. The Ecclesiastical System; 2. Feudal Society; 
 3. The Work of Hildebrand ; 4. The Crusades ; 5. Chiv- 
 alry ; 6. The Religious Orders ; 7. Heretics ; 8. Scholastic 
 Theology; 9. Religious Art; 10. Dante; II. The Pagan 
 Revival. 
 
 Third Period. " MODERN PHASES." - Topics : 
 1. The Protestant Reformation ; 2. The Catholic Reaction ; 
 3. Calvinism ; 4. The Puritan Commonwealth ; 5. Port 
 Royal ; 6. Passage from Dogma to Philosophy; 7. English 
 Rationalism; 8. Infidelity in France ; 9. The German Critics; 
 
 10. Speculative Theology ; II. The Reign of Law. 
 
 Each volume contains a Chronological Outline of its Period, with a 
 full Table of Contents and Index, and may be ordered separately. 
 
 Volume I. ("Early Christianity") is, with a few additions, — the most 
 important being a descriptive List of Authorities, —the same that was 
 published in 1SS0, under the title, " Fragments of Christian History." 
 2 volumes. \6mo. Cloth. Price, 31.25 per volume. 
 
 Mr. Allen's writings, "Christian History in its Three Great Periods," 3 
 vols., $1.75; " Hebrew Men and Times from the Patriarchs to the Messiah,' 
 31.50; "Our Liberal Movement in Theology chiefly as shown in Recollec- 
 tions of the History of Unitarianism in New England," $1.25, may be had, 
 the five volumes, for 35 -5°- 
 
 Sold by all booksellers. Mailed, post-paid, on receipt of advertised price, by 
 the publislurs, Roberts Bkotheks, Boston. 
 

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