Miscellanies

Preface

The Discourses, Reviews, and Sermons, composing the present volume, have, several of them, been already issued separately ; and of the opening article, the present is the third edition ; others of them appear now for the first time. It was thought, by some of the author's friends, that the book might find purchasers ; and the writer will have been recompensed, should it please " The Great Taskmaster" to give to the desultory pages aught of usefulness, in their influence on the minds of any of their readers. For the sake of its publisher, who is also the proprietor of the copyright, the author would hope for the volume sufficient currency to save him from loss in the venture he has made. W. R. W.

New York, Nov. 1, 1849.

C CITE NTS.

The Conservative Principle, 1

Appendix to the Conservative Principle, - 78

Ministerial Responsibility - - - gj

The Prayers op the Church needed for her rising Ministry, 111 The Church the Home and Hope of the Free, - - - - - - 129

The Strong Staff and the Beautiful Rod, - - - - . . - 148

The Jesuits as a Missionary Order, 159

The Life and Times of Baxter, - - 194

Publications of the American Tract Society, - 241

Increase of Faith necessary to the Success of Christian

The Church, a School for Heaven, - - 337

The Prayer of the Church against those delighting in War, 367 Appendix— The Cagots of France, ----------- 388

IN OUR LITERATURE.

AN ADDRESS DELIVERED BEFORE THE LITERARY SOCIETIES OF THE HAM- ILTON LITERARY AND THEOLOGICAL INSTITUTION, MADISON COUNTY, N. Y. ON TUESDAY EVENING, JUNE 13, 1843.

TO

THE REV. JOHN S. MAGINNIS, D.D.,

PROFESSOR OF BIBLICAL THEOLOGY IN THE

HAMILTON LITERARY AND THEOLOGICAL INSTITUTION,

IS, AS A SLIGHT MARK OF HIGH ESTEEM AND AFFECTION, INSCRIBED

BY HIS FRIEND.

W. R W.

PREFACE TO THE FIRST EDITION OF THE "CONSERVATIVE PRINCIPLE," &c.

Other engagements, which prevented the author from preparing this Address for the press, and for a time banished it entirely from his mind, must be, in part, his apology with the Societies who requested its publication, for its late appearance. Yet what of truth it may contain is not less true now than at the time of its delivery. Some additions made at the commencement of the Address, with regard to the proper definition of literature, and the permanent influence which may belong even to its more transitory productions, will, he trusts, not be found alien to the theme. But the chief cause of delay has been the writer's consciousness how far his treatment of the subject fell below the intrinsic importance of the topic. This consciousness, had he not bound himself to publish, would have prevented his appearance even at this late hour.

To prevent misconstruction he would add the remark, that a full review of our national literature in all its aspects, the more encouraging as well as the more gloomy, was no part of his design. It was his task to point out certain of the perils, and to indicate the sufficient and sole remedy.

NOTE TO THE SECOND EDITION.

This Address, originally delivered before the Adelphian and JEonian Societies of Hamilton Literary and Theological Institution, has, from its theme, found more acceptance than the author had at all anticipated. In preparing a second edition, he has subjected the whole to such hasty revision as his other engagements allowed, and made some other additions both to the text and notes.

New York, 1844.

NOTE TO THE THIRD EDITION.

The present edition has some slight revisions, and considerable additions have been made to some of the notes ; but these additions are, from want of leisure, less extensive than the writer had wished to make them.

New York, November, 1849.

THE CONSERVATIVE PRINCIPLE IN OUR LITERATURE.

Gentlemen : — In acceding to the request with which you have honored me, and which brings me at this time before you, I have supposed that you expected it of the speaker to present some theme relating to the commonwealth of literature ; that commonwealth in which every scholar and every Christian feels naturally so strong an interest. The studies in which you have here engaged, and which in the case of some of you are soon to terminate, have taught you the value of sound learning to yourselves and its power over others. That love of country, which in the bosoms of the young burns with a flame of more than ordinary purity and intensity, gives you an additional interest in the cause of letters ; for as you well know, the literature of the nation must exercise a powerful influence on the national destiny. Acting as it does not merely on the schools, but also on the homes of a land, it must from those fountains send out its waters of healing or of bitterness, of blessing or of strife, over the length and breadth of our goodly land. You know that it is not mere physical advantages that have gained or that can retain for our country its political privileges. You have seen how the physical condition of a people may remain unchanged, whilst the moral condition of a people is deteriorating rapidly and fatally. You remember that the same sun shone on the same Marathon, when it was the heritage and the battle-ground of freemen ; and when, in later and more disastrous days, it re-echoed to the footsteps of the Greek bondsman and his Ottoman oppressor. You look to literature, and other moral causes, then, as determining to some extent the future history of our land. You are aware that literature is not always of a healthy character, nor does it in all ages exercise a conservative influence. It is like the vegetation of our earth, of varied nature. Much of it is the waving harvest that fills our garners and piles our boards with plenty ; and, alas, much of it has been, like the rank ivy, hastening the decay it serves to hide, and crumbling into speedier ruin the edifice it seems to adorn and beautify. As lovers of your country, you must therefore feel an eager anxiety for the moral character of the literature that country is to cherish. And of your number most are looking forward to the work of the Christian ministry ; and, from the past history of the world, you have learned in what mode the progress of literature has acted upon that of the gospel, and been, in its turn, acted upon ; and to what an extent the pulpit and the press have sometimes been found in friendly alliance, and at others enlisted in fearful antagonism. How shall it be in your times ?

By the literature of a land, we mean, it is here perhaps the place to say, more than the mere issues from the press of a nation. The term is generally applied to describe all the knowledge, feelings, and opinions of a people as far as they are reduced to writing, or published abroad by the art of printing. But it may well be questioned whether the term does not in justice require a wider application. Language, as soon as it is made the subject of culture, seems to give birth to literature. And such culture may exist where the use of the press and even of the pen are as yet unknown. Savage tribes are found having their poetry ere they have acquired the art of writing. Such were the Tonga Islanders, as Mariner found them. The melody and rhythm of their dialect may have been partially developed, and their bards, their musicians, and their orators have become distinguished, ere the language has had its grammarians or its historians. The nation has thus, in some sort, its literature, ere its Cadmus has appeared to give it an alphabet. The old Gaelic poetry, on which Mucpherson founded his Ossianic forgeries, was a part of the nation's literature while yet unwritten. And if, as some scholars have supposed, the poems of Homer were, in the times of the author, preserved by memory and not by writing, it would be idle to deny, that, even in that unwritten state, and whilst guarded only in the recollection of travelling minstrels, they were a glor ous and influential literature to the Greek people, a ar^a ss aei to them, and to the civilization of Europe for all ensuing times. And even in nations having the use of letters, there is much

IN OUR LITERATURE. O

never written that yet, in strictness, must be regarded as forming part of the literature of the people. The unrecorded intercourse of a community, neither transcribed by the pen, nor multiplied by the press, may bear no inconsiderable part in the literary culture of that people, and form no trivial portion of their literary products. Of the eloquence of Curran and Sheridan much was never reported, or reported most imperfectly ; and yet in its effects upon the immediate hearers in courts of justice or houses of Parliament, deserved the name and honors of literature, alike from the literary culture it displayed on the part of the speaker, and from the literary taste it formed and cherished, on the part of the auditory. Some of the most distinguished among the living scholars of France were, whilst professors in her colleges, eminent for the eloquence of their unwritten lectures. Were not even such of those lectures of Guizot, Villemain, and Cousin as never reached the press, yet really and most effectively contributions to the literature of the land ? The departed Schleiermacher of Germany had the reputation of being among the profoundest thinkers and the most eloquent preachers of his time. His sermons, it is said, were never written ; nor were most of the pulpit discourses of a kindred spirit, Robert Hall, of England. Although many have been published, more must have perished. Yet were not those, which the living voice but published to a single congregation, truly a portion of German and British literature, as well as those which the press published to the entire nation, and preserved to succeeding times ? Thus the arguments of the bar, or the appeals of the pulpit, the floating proverbs, or the current legends of the nation, and the ballads, and even the jests, which no antiquary may as yet have secured aud written down, are expressions of the popular mind, which though cast only upon the ear, and stored only in the memory, instead of receiving the surer guardianship of the written page, may, with some show of reason, be claimed as forming no small and no uninfluential part of the popular literature. In this sense, the literature of a land embraces the whole literary intercourse of its people, whether that intercourse be oral or written. It is the exponent of the national intellect, and the utterance of the popular passions. The term thus viewed, comprises all the intellectual products of a nation, from the encyclopedia to the newspaper ; from the body of divinity to the primer or the nursery rhyme — the epic poem and the Sunday School hymn — the sermon and the epigram — the essay and the sonnet — the oration and the street hallad — the jest or the bye-word — all that represents, awakens, and colors the popular mind — all that interprets, by the use of words, the nation to themselves, or to other nations of the earth.

This literature not only displays the moral and intellectual advancement of the people at the time of its production, but it exercises, of necessity, a powerful influence in hastening or in checking that advancement. It is the Nilometer on whose graded scale we read not merely the height to which the rushing stream of the nation's intellect has risen, or the degree to which it has sunk, but also the character and extent of the harvests yet to be reaped in coming months along the whole course of those waters. Thus it registers not merely the inundations of the present time, but presages as well the plenty or sterility of the yet distant future. The authors of a nation's literary products are its teachers — in truth or in error ; and leave behind their imprint and their memorial in the virtues or vices of all those whom their labors may have reached. The errand of all language is to create sympathy ; to waft from one human bosom the feelings that stir it, that they may awaken a corresponding response in other hearts. We are therefore held responsible for our words because they affect the happiness and virtue of others. The word that drops from our lips takes its irrevocable flight, and leaves behind its indelible imprint. It is, in the stern language of the apostle, in the case of some, a flame "set on fire of hell ;" and consuming wherever it alights, it " setteth on fire the course of nature ;" as, in the happier case of others, that word is a message of salvation, " ministering grace unto the hearers." Reason and Scripture alike make it idle to deny the power of speech over social order and morality ; and literature is but speech under the influence of art and talent. And a written literature is but speech put into a more orderly and enduring form than it usually wears. We know that God and man hold each of us responsible for the utterance of the heart by the lips. Human tribunals punish the slanderer because his words affect the peace of society; and the Last Day exacts its reckoning for " every idle word," because that word, however lightly uttered, was the utterance of a soul, and went out to influence, for good or for evil, the souls of others.

And if the winged words, heedless and unpremeditated, of a man's lips are thus influential, and enter into the matter of his final account, it cannot be supposed that these words, when fixed by the art of writing, or scattered by the art of printing, either have less power over human society, or are in the eye of heaven clothed with less solemn responsibilities. A written literature embalms the perishable, arrests the progress of decay, and gives to our words a longer life and a wider scope of influence. Such words, so preserved and so diffused, are the results, too, of more than ordinary deliberation. If malicious, their malice is malice prepense. If foolish, their folly is studied, and obstinate, and shameless. The babbler sins in the ears of a few friends, and in the privacy of home. The frivolous or vicious writer sins, as on a wider theatre, and before the eyes of thousands, while the echoes of the press waft his words to distant lands and later times. And because much of this literature may be hasty and heedless, ludicrous in tone, and careless in style, soon to evaporate and disappear, like the froth on some hurried stream, we are not to suppose that it is therefore of no practical influence. The English stage, in the days of the last two Stuarts, was of a reckless character ; — the child of mere whim, the progeny of impulse and license. Many of its productions were alike regardless of all moral and literary rules — the light-hearted utterance of a depraved generation : full of merry falsehoods and jesting blasphemy, fantastic and barbarous in style, as well as irreligious in their spirit. Yet he must be a careless reader of history, who, because of its reckless, trivial, and profligate character, assigns to it but a limited influence. It did, in fact, greviously aggravate the national wickedness whence it sprung.

The trivial and the ephemeral as they float by, in glittering bubbles, to the dull waters of oblivion, may yet work irreparable and enduring mischief ere their brief career ends ; and the result may continue, vast and permanent, when the fleeting causes which operated have long gone by. Who now reads Eikon Basilike, the forgery of Bishop Gauden, ascribed to the beheaded Charles I.? Yet that counterfeited manual of devotion is thought by some to have done much in bringing back the house of Stuart to the English throne.*

* " Many have not scrupled to ascribe to that book the subsequent restoration of the royal family. Milton compares its effects to those which were wrought on the tumultuous Romans by Antony's reading to them the will

Who in this age knows the words of Lillibullero 1 * Yet the author of that street ballad, now forgotten, boasted of having rhymed, by his. song, the Stuarts out of their kingdom. Thus a forged prayer-book aided to restore a dynasty, as the ragged rhymes of a street song helped to overturn it. We err grievously, therefore, if we suppose that the frivolous is necessarily uninfluential, and that when the word passes, its effects also pass with it. According to Eastern belief, the plague that wastes a city may be communicated by the gift of a glove or a riband. The spark struck from the iron heel of the laborer may have disappeared ere the eye could mark its transient lustre, yet ere it expired have fired the train which explodes a magazine, lays a town in ruins, and spreads around a wide circuit alarm and lamentation, bereavement and death. Trifles may have no trivial influence. What is called the lighter literature of the age may be even thus evanescent, yet not inefficacious. By its wide and rapid circulation it may act more powerfully on society than do graver and abler treatises, and its authors, if unprincipled, may thus deserve but too well the title which the indignant Nicole gave to the comparatively decorous dramatists and romance writers of France, in his own time ; a title which his pupil Racine at first so warmly resented, that of "public poisoners."

Of literature, therefore, thus understood, thus wide in its range and various in its products, thus influential even where the most careless, and thus clothed with most solemn responsibilities because of its influence, it is our purpose now to_speak.

You perceive, gentlemen, that amongst ourselves, as a people, literature is subject to certain peculiar influences, perhaps nowhere else found in the same combination, or operating to the same extent as in our own land. We are a young nation, inhabiting, and called to subdue, a wide territory. Youth is the season of hope, enterprise, and energy — and it is so to a nation as well as an individual. Our

of Caesar. The Eikon passed through fifty editions in a twelvemonth." — Hume.

* " It may not be unworthy of notice, that a merry ballad, called Lillibullero, being at that time published, in derision of the papists and the Irish, it was greedily received by the people, and was sung by all ranks of men, even by the King's army, who were strongly seized with the national spirit. This incident both discovered, and served to increase the general discontent of the kingdom." — Hume.

literature is likely, therefore, to be ardent, original, and at times perhaps boastful. They are the excellences and the foibles of youth. We entered, as by right of inheritance, and in consequence of our community of language, upon the possession of the rich and ancient literature of Britain, at the very outset of our national career. As a people we enjoy, again, that freedom which has ever been the indulgent nurse of talent in all times and in all lands. The people are here the kings. And whilst some of our sovereigns are toiling in the field, others are speaking through the press. Our authors are all royal by political right, if not by the birthright of genius. Providence has blessed us with the wide diffusion of education, and the school travels, in many regions of our land, as it were, to every man's door. It is not here, if it may elsewhere be the case, that the neglected children of genius can complain that " chill penury repressed their noble rage." In addition to the advantages of the common school, our writers, publishers, and instructors, are sedulously preparing literature for the use of the masses. The popular lecturer is discussing themes of grave interest ; while the cheap periodical press is snowing over the whole face of our land its thick and incessant storm of knowledge. This knowledge, it is true, is not all of the most valuable kind. The wonders of steam are dragging the remoter portions of our union daily into closer contact, whilst a free emigration is bringing us the denizens of other lands, and the men of other tongues, until the whole world appears about to be made neighbors and kinsmen to America ; and the nation seems daily melting into a new and strange amalgam, in consequence of the addition of foreign materials from without, to the heterogeneous mass already found fusing within our own country.

All these causes are operating, and must operate long and steadily, upon the character of American literature. It becomes an important inquiry then, what moral shape this literature is assuming under these plastic influences. You ask, as change succeeds change, and as one omen of moral progress, or social revolution, follows close upon another : " Watchman, what of the night ?" And gazing into the deep darkness of the future, you would fain read what are the coming fortunes of our people and their literature. Allow me then to dwell upon some of the evils that endanger our rising literature, and threaten to suffuse the bloom of its 3 youth with their fatal virus. I would next bring- before you the remedy which as scholars, patriots, and Christians, we are bound to apply to these evils, and to which we must look as our preservative against the approaching danger.

Evils to be found besetting and perilling American literature, and the remedy of those evils, will afford our present theme. I may seem to dwell for a time, at least, upon the darker shades of a picture, that may, I fear, appear to some of ray respected hearers, overcharged in its gloom. I must also from the nature of the subject enter into some details, that will, I must expect, severely tax the patience of all who are listening. I can only cast myself upon your indulgence ; find an apology as to the length of some statements, and the denser shade cast by others, in the wide and varied nature of the subject, and its mingled difficulty, delicacy, and importance ; asking the aid of Him whose blessing can never fail those that trust in Him, the author of all knowledge, and the final arbiter who will bring into judgment all our employments, whether literary or practical, social or solitary.

We would then dwell for a time, on some of the dangers that threaten the rising literature of our land. If the foreground of the landscape be dark, we trust to show in the distance the sure and sufficient remedy of these dangers ; and though night be spread on the summits Of the nearer and lower mountains, we see glittering on the crest of the remoter and loftier heights beyond, the Star of Hope, that portends the coming day, and under the edge of the darkest cloud we seem to discern already the gleams of the approaching sun. Our country may suffer and struggle, but we trust it is not the purpose of Him who has so signally blest and so long defended us, that she should suffer long, or sink far, much less sink finally and for ever.

First then among the evil tendencies that beset our youthful literature, and are likely to thwart and mar its progress, we would name, the mechanical and utilitarian spirit of the times. We are as a nation eminently practical in our character. It is well that we should be so. But this trait in our national feelings and manners has its excesses and its consequent perils. Placed in a country where labor and integrity soon acquire wealth, the love of wealth has become a passion with multitudes. The lust of gain seems at times a national sin easily besetting all classes of society amongst us. Fierce speculations at certain intervals of years engross the hearts of the community, and a contagious frenzy sends men from all walks of life and all occupations into the field of traffic. Fortunes are rapidly made and as rapidly lost. The nation seems to be lifted up as on a rushing tide of hope and prosperity. It subsides as rapidly as it had risen ; and on every side are seen strewn the wrecks of fortune, credit, character, and principle. All this affects our literature. We are in the influential classes, a matter-of-fact and money-getting race. This tends, in the minds of many, to create a distaste for all truth that is not at once convertible into wealth, and its value to be calculated in current coin. In the clank and din of our never-tiring machinery, the voice of wisdom is often drowned, and the most momentous and stirring truths are little esteemed because they cannot be rated in the Price Current or sold on the Exchange. We are impatient to see the material results of every truth, and to have its profits told upon our fingers, or pressed into our palms. So, on the other hand, if any principle, plan, or expedient, be it true or be it false, will effect our purpose, produce a needful impression, and secure an end that we deem desirable, we are prone to think it allowable because it is effective. We idolize effect. And a philosophy of expediency thus springs up, which sacrifices everything to immediate effects and to mere material results — a philosophy which, in practice, if not in theory, is driving rapidly against some of the very bulwarks of moral principle that our fathers believed, and believed justly, to be grounded in the law, and built into the very throne of God.

Now we need not say that where this utilitarian and mechanical spirit acquires the ascendancy in our literature, it must operate dangerously on the state and the church. The prosperity which is built on gain, and the morality that is built on expediency, will save no nation. Wo to that nation in which Political Economy swallows up all its Theology ; and the law of self is the basis of all its wisdom. The declining glories of Tyre and Holland, each in her day mistress of the sea, and guardian of its treasures, may read us an admonitory lesson as to the fatal blight that such a spirit breathes over the freedom, the arts and the learning of a land.

We are, by the favoring Providence of God, placed under political institutions which more readily yield to and reflect the popular will, than the government and laws of other lands. The literature of our nation, more directly than that of earlier times, or of older countries, moulds the political action of the nation. Let but the spirit of expediency and of gain sway our political literature in the thousand journals of our country, and in the myriads of voters whom these journals educate and govern ; let the same spirit possess the great parties ever to be found in a free nation, and the aspiring leaders who are the champions and oracles of those parties, and what would soon be the result? A peddling policy, that, disregarding the national interest and honor, would truckle to power and favor, carry its principles to market, and convert statesmanship into a trade. The country would be visited by an impudent, voluble, and mercenary patriotism, that shrinking from no artifice, and blushing at no meanness, would systematize the various arts of popularity into a new science of selfishness. The legislation of the land and its intercourse with foreign nations would be engrossed by trading politicians ; huckstering their talents and influence to the party or the measure or the man, that should bid in the shape of emolument or office, the highest price for the commodities which they vend. The expert statesman would then be he who consulted most assiduously the weather-vane of popular favor, that he might ascertain to what point his conscience should be set. And should such time ever come over our beloved land, could our liberties endure when guarded only by hands so faithless, or our laws be either wise or just, when such men made and such men administered them ?

Let the same love of selfish gain pervade the pulpits of our land : let the messengers of the gospel learn to prophesy smooth things, and instead of the "word in season," let them substitute the word in fashion — let them retail doctrines that admit no personal application, truths that wound not the conscience and pierce not the heart, and morals enforced by no motives of love to God, but by mere considerations of gain or honor — let them compile unoffending truisms and dexterous sophisms, and put these in place of unpalatable truths — let them listen to the echoes of popular opinion evermore, that they may in them learn their lessons of duty ; and where soon is the gospel so administered, and where is the church, if left but to such instruction ? The far-sighted law of right, as God ordained and administers it, would be overthrown, that in its stead might be set up the law of interest, as short-sighted man expounds it ; and a creed by which the world is to be humored, flattered and adored, would be audaciously preached at the foot of a cross which ransomed that world only by renouncing and only by defying it. No — gain is not godliness.