iv PREFACE AND INSCRIPTION. as to take delight in the softest adulation, and the grossest flattery. The cold and far off Heavens are fitly represented as his home, the fitful lightning as the flash of his eye, the hoarse thunder as his voice, and this earth, with its myriad of human hearts struggling for life and light, as his footstool. Not a frightful event takes place in the concerns of man which is not attributed to his revengeful "Providence": and there is not a wild passion in the human breast,-not jealousy, not envy, not pride, not ambition, not vengeance,—which has not been represented as a component part of his divine character. The priesthood of this baneful Religion are, for the most part, the relentless enemies of all innovation, and the swift defenders of all popular sin. Only entrench a system of iniquity, however great, behind the walls of the statute book,-throw before it the broad shield of popular opinion, and you may be sure that thenceforth, (unless those protections are withdrawn,) that priesthood will extend it the right hand of fellowship to the end of time. The highest standard of right which that order of men practically acknowledge is the popular will,-whose shifting vane they watch with the restless eye of the mariner, anxious to trim his sails to the uncertain wind. How different the Religion, the God, and the Priesthood in question are from the Religion, the God, and the Priesthood of the New Testament, there is no room here to inquire. Let each one,-lifting the thick film of prejudice, and drawing the deceptive veil of early association from his eye,judge for himself. For one, the writer is free to say, that if the Religion of this nation were the Religion of the New Testament, that book instead of being the blessing it now is to the human race, would be an unmitigated curse, and the Saviour it reveals, the greatest tyrant who ever lent the sanction of a charmed name to bigotry and crime. But let not this thought (that the popular Religion is one with that of the New Testament,) be expressed or intimated, even by way of hypothesis; for surely every person whose soul has not become petrified by the hardening elements of a false society, must know that a Religion whose protecting arms embrace every species of legalized iniquity in the world, is as different from the Religion of the New Testament as darkness from light, as Christ from Belial. But why lengthen this preface into an essay. It needs only to add that PREFACE AND INSCRIPTION. V the author of these desultory papers believes that Christianity contains the only system of ethics from which the human race has anything to hope, and that in proportion as its benign influences take possession of the human heart, crime will disappear from the face of the earth, and Bigotry and Superstition—those twin Goddesses of crime-will fold their black wings in the embrace of death. It may be too much to hope, that the following "articles"—(composed, as they were, amid the conflicting labors and wearing responsibilities of more than one employment)-will do anything to shake the faith of the people in their unrighteous God, nevertheless the writer entertains and indulges that hope, and was strengthened by it in preparing them for the public eye. If the writer has been fortunate enough to escape to any extent from the meshes of politics and sect, and to adopt a philosophy unlimited by sectional lines and unwarped by sectarian prejudices: if he has learned to consider the claims of Humanity as paramount to all others, and to repudiate and trample under foot whatever conflicts with those claims, however hallowed by age or consecrated by association: if he has been enabled to see with tolerable clearness the intrinsic evils of all political or religious corporation, and to protest with any power against cumbering the reforms of the day with a particle of its destructive machinery: if he has come to appreciate the sublime character and inconceivable power of unrestricted and unorganized speech as a reform instrumentality: if, in one word, his eyes have been opened to the infinite beauty and entire practicability of the distinctive principles of the New Testament: - he is mainly indebted for such wisdom to the brilliant pen, and heroic life of NATHANIEL PEABODY ROGERS, to whom, therefore, this little book is affectionately inscribed, as the most significant token the author can offer of his profound admiration and esteem. H. C. JR. LYNN, Jan'y 1st, 1846. |