slowly sailing continents of magnificent fleece mountainsAlps and Andes of vapor. They, too, have their broad shadOWS. One you see cast upon yonder hill, far to the east, while the base is radiant with the sun. Another cloud-shadow is moving with stately grandeur along the valley of the Housatonic, and if you rise to a little eminence you may see the brilliant landscape growing dull in its sudden obscuration on its forward line, and growing suddenly bright upon its rear trace. How majestically that shadow travels up those steep and precipitous mountain sides! how it sweeps down the gorge and valley! how it moves along the plain ! "But now the mountain shadow is creeping down into the meadow. It has crossed the road where your horse stands hitched to the paling of a deserted little house. You forget your errand. You select a dry, tufty knoll, and lying down you gaze up into the sky. O, those depths! Something within you reaches out and yearns; you have a vague sense of infinity— of vastness of the littleness of human life, and the sweetness and grandeur of divine life and of eternity. You people the vast ether. You stretch away through it and find that Celestial City beyond, and therein dwell O how many that are yours! Tears come unbidden. You begin to long for release. You pray. Was there ever a better closet? Under the shadow of the mountain, the heavens full of cloudy cohorts, of armies of horsemen and chariots, your soul loosened from the narrow judgments of human life, and touched with a full sense of inmortality and the liberty of a spiritual state. An hour goes past. How full has it been of feelings struggling to be thoughts, and of thoughts deliquescing into feeling. Twilight is coming, you have miles to ride home. Not a trout in your basket! Never mind, you have fished in the heavens, and taken great store of prey. Let them laugh at your empty basket. Take their raillery good-naturedly; you have certainly had good luck. "But we have not yet gone to the brook for which we started. That must be for another tramp. Perhaps one's experience of 'fancy tackle' and of fly-fishing might not be without some profit in moral analogies: perhaps a mountain stream and good luck in real trout may afford some easy side-thoughts not altogether unprofitable for a summer vacation. At any rate, it will make it plain that often the best part of trout fishing is not the fishing." And now the same poet's hand that drew the above—the same heart which appreciated the tender and beautiful in nature-wrought that which follows. And why not? If we examine closely we shall find that it is the true poet who thunders loudest if needs be against tyrants; we shall see that the gentlest are after all the strongest, the profoundest. Who is gentler than a mother? Whose love is stronger than hers? Who can suffer as she often does for a loved, mayhap ruined, child? The article from which we make extracts is one in which Mr. Beecher defends his right in the pulpit to speak of slavery. He had been attacked by the Journal of Commerce for carrying abolitionism into the church, and he thus replies: "It is vain to tell us that hundreds of thousands of slaves are church members; does that save women from the lust of their owners? does it save their children from being sold? does it save parents from separation? In the shameless processions every week made from the Atlantic to the Gulf, are to be found slaves ordained to preach the gospel, members of churches, baptized children, Sunday-school scholars carefully catechized, full of gospel texts, fat and plump for market. What is religion worth to a slave, except as a consolation from despair, when the hand that breaks to him the bread of communion on Sunday takes the price of his blood and bones on Monday; and bids him God speed on his pilgrimage from old Virginia tobacco fields to the cotton plantations of Alabama? "What is church fellowship, and church privilege, and church instruction worth, if the recipient is still as much a beast, just as little loved, just as ruthlessly desolated of his family, just as coolly sold, as if he were without God and without hope? What motive is there to the slave to strive for Christian graces, when, if they make him a real man, they are threshed out of him; or if they make him a more obedient and faithful man, raise his market price, and only make him a more merchantable disciple of Christ? It is the religious phase of slave-life that reveals the darkest features of that all-perverting system. "These things are not new; nor out of the reach of the Journal of Commerce; yet when upon this state of facts the christianity of the north, too long unsensitive, lifts up its voice, the Journal of Commerce assails it as if it were a monster ravening for its prey! Three million men, against natural law, against every fundamental principle of our state and national government, are, by law, thrown over the pale of the race and denied to be men. This is not fit for the pulpit to mention; it is allowed, nevertheless, to preach about China and India! Every year thousands of children are snatched from their parents' bosoms, and remorselessly sold every whither. The pulpit is not the place for mentioning such things, though it be allowed to snatch children from the Ganges, and to mourn over infanticide in Polynesia! Every year husbands and wives are torn asunder, christian or no christian; and the Journal of Commerce browbeats that pulpit that utters a word about such politics, when it should rather be busy in expostulating with cannibals in Malaya, or snatching devotees from under the wheels of Juggernaut! Every year thousands of women are lashed for obstinate virtue; and tens of thousands robbed of what they have never been taught to prize; and the Journal of Commerce stands poised to cast its javelin at that meddlesome pulpit that dares to speak of such boundless licentiousness, and send it to its more appropriate work of evangelizing the courtesans of Paris, or the loose virtue of Italy; and it assures us that multitudes of clergymen are thanking it for such a noble stand. Some of those clergymen we know. The platforms of our benevolent societies resound with their voices urging christianity to go abroad: stimulating the church not to leave a corner of the globe unsearched, nor an evil unredressed. But when the speech ended, they steal in behind the Journal of Commerce to give it thanks for its noble stand against the right of the pulpit to say a word about home heathen-about their horrible ignorance, bottomless licentiousness, and about the mercenary inhumanity which every week is selling their own christian brethren, baptized as much as they, often preachers of the gospel like themselves, eating from the same table of the Lord, praying to the same Savior, listening to snatches of that same bible (whose letters they have never been permitted to learn) out of which these reverend endorsers of the Journal of Commerce preach! "It requires distance, it seems, to make a topic right for the pulpit. Send it to Greenland, or to Nootka Sound, and you may then practice at the far-away target. And the reason of such discrimination seems to be, that preaching against foreign sins does not hurt the feelings nor disturb the quiet of your congregation; whereas, if the identical evils at home, which we deplore upon the Indus, or along the Burampootra, are preached about, the Journal says that it will risk the minister's place and bread and butter. * * * * "Our laws scarcely recognize a crime against man save murder and violence akin to it, that is not legal under slave laws. There is not a sensual vice which we are taught to abhor, which slavery doth not monstrously engender. There is not a sin which religion condemns, that is not garnered and sown, reaped and sown again, by American slavery. Among freemen the road of honor lies away from animal passion, from sensation, toward conscience, hope, love, and spiritual faith. But slavery sharply turns the wretch downward, and teaches and compels him to evolve the task of life from such motives as are common to him with the ox, the ass, and the dog. The slave's pleasures are our appetites. His motives are, almost of necessity, those from which religion most earnestly dehorts To our children labor is honorable, because it is God's us. |