The Continental Monthly, Vol. 6, No 4, August, 1864

We have all the elements within and around us necessary to constitute a great people. We started on our career with a long background of experience to guide and to warn us. We saw what Europe had done for civilization with her long roll of kings and priests, her despotic governments, and her unequal laws—the people in most cases ciphers, and in all cases ignorant and enslaved—with no room for expansion, and little or no hope of political or social betterment; every inch of liberty, in every direction, which they had gained, wrung from their oppressors piecemeal, in bloody throes of agony.

Our fathers had not the best materials out of which to build up a republic; neither, in all cases, were they themselves sufficiently ripe for the experiment. They had the old leaven of European prejudice largely intermingled in their minds and character. They could not help, it is true, their original make, nor the fashioning which their age, time, and circumstances had put upon them. All this has to be taken into the estimate of any philosophical judgment respecting their performances. But they had learned from the past to trust the present, and to span the future with rainbows of hope. They stood face to face with the people, and each looked into the others' eyes and read there the grounds and sureties of an immortal triumph. Instead, therefore, of resting the supreme power of government in the hands of a person, or a class, making the former a monarch, and creating the other an aristocracy, those grand magistrates and senators of human liberty who framed the Constitution of the new American Nation, made the nation its own sovereign, and clothed it with the authority and majesty of self-government.

A venture so daring, and of an audacity so Titanic and sublime, seemed at that time and long afterward to require the wisdom and omnipotence of gods to guide it over the breakers, and steer it into the calm waters of intelligent government. All the world, except the handful of thinkers and enthusiasts scattered here and there over Europe, was against it, mocked at its bravery and aspirations, and sincerely hoped and believed that some great and sudden calamity would dissolve it like a baleful enchantment. But the hope of the republic was in the people, and they justified the fathers and the institution.

Here, therefore, was opened in all the directions of human inquiry and action a new world of hope and promise. The people were no longer bound by old traditions, nor clogged by any formulas of state religions, nor hampered by the dicta of philosophical authority. Their minds were free to choose or to reject whatever propositions were presented to them from the wide region of speculation and belief. The Constitution was the only instrument which prescribed laws and principles for their unconditional acceptance and guidance; and this was a thing of their own choice, the charter and seal of their liberties, to which they rendered a cheerful and grateful obedience.

With this mighty security for a platform, they pursued their daily avocations in peace, trusting their own souls, and working out the problem of republican society, with a most healthy unconsciousness. Sincere and earnest, they troubled themselves with no social theories, no visions of Utopia, nor dreams of Paradise and El Dorados, leaving the spirit which animated them to build up the architecture of its own cultus, with an unexpressed but perfect faith in the final justice and satisfaction of results.

Religion, therefore, and politics—literature, learning, and art—trade, commerce, manufactures, agriculture—and the amenities of society and manners, were allowed to develop themselves in their own way, without reference to rule and preconcerted dogmas. Hence the peculiarities which mark the institutions of America—their utter freedom from cant and the shows and pageantry of state. Bank, titles, and caste were abolished; and the enormous gulfs which separate the European man from the European lordling were bridged over by Equality with the solid virtues of humanity.

What a stride was here taken over time and space, and the historic records of man, in the fossil formations of the Old World during the ante-American periods! It had come at last, this long-prophesied reign of Apollo and the Muses, of freedom and the rights of man. Afar off, on the summits of imaginative mountains, were beheld, through twilight vistas of night and chaos, the proud ruins of dead monarchies, and the cruel forms of extinct tyrannies and oppressions, crowned and mitred no more; whose mandates had once made the nations tremble, and before whose judgment seats Mercy pleaded in vain, and Justice muffled up her face and sat dumb and weeping in the dust. Over the wolds of their desolation hyenas prowled, snuffing the noisome air as for a living prey; ghouls and vampyres shrieked in hellish chorus, as they tore up forgotten graves; and all manner of hateful and obscure things crawled familiarly in and out of palaces and holy places, as if they were the ghosts of the former inhabitants; and, high above them all, in the bloody light of the setting sun, wheeled kites and choughs and solitary vultures; owls and dismal bats flitting, ever and anon, athwart the shadows of their grim processions.

No matter that this vision was in reality but the symbolism of imagination and poetry, that Europe was not dead, but alive with the struggling vitalities of good and evil, and all those contending forces out of which American freedom was born—the vision itself was not the less true, either as feeling or insight; for Europe was now literally cut adrift from America, and the hopes and aspirations of the young republic were entirely different from hers, and removed altogether from the plane of her orbit and action.

The liberalists and thinkers of the age expected great things from a people thus fortunately conditioned and circumstanced. For the first time in modern history a genuine democratic government was inaugurated and fairly put upon its trial. The horizon of thought was now to be pushed back far beyond the old frontiers into the very regions of the infinite; and a universal liberty was to prevail throughout the length and breadth of the land. No more dead formalities, nor slavish submissions, but new and fuller life, self-reliance, self-development, and the freest individuality. Gladly the people accepted the propositions and principles of their national existence. Not a doubt anywhere of the result; no faltering, no looking back; but brave hearts, everywhere, and bold fronts, and conquering souls. Before them, through the mists of the starry twilight, loomed the mountain peaks and shadowy seas of the unventured and unknown future; and thitherward they pressed with undaunted steps, and with a haughty and sublime defiance of obstructions and dangers; fearing God, doing their best, and leaving the issue in His hands.

We know now, after nearly a hundred years of trial, what that issue in the main is, and whitherward it still tends. During that little breathing time, which, compared with the life of other nations, is but a gasp in the record, what unspeakable triumphs have been accomplished! Nearly a whole continent has been reclaimed from the savage and the wild beasts, and the all-conquering American has paved the wilderness, east, west, north, and south, with high roads—dug canals into its hidden recesses, connected the great Gulf with the far-off West by a vast network of railways and telegraphs—planted cities and villages everywhere, and fashioned the routes of civilization; bound Cape Race to the Crescent City and the Atlantic to the Pacific, sending human thoughts, winged with lightning, across thousands of miles of plains and mountains and rivers, and making neighborly the most distant peoples and the most widely sundered States of the mighty Union. Let any man try to estimate the value of this immense contribution to human history and happiness; let him try to measure the vast extent of empire which it covers, and sum up the mighty expenditure of physical and intellectual labor which has conquered those savage wilds, and converted them into blooming cornfields and orchards; which has built these miraculous cities by the sea, and made their harbors populous with native ships and the marine of every nation under heaven; those busy inland cities, the hives of manufacturing industry and the marts of a commerce which extends over all the regions of civilization, from the rising to the setting sun; those innumerable towns of the great corn-growing districts; those pleasant hamlets and pastoral homes which fringe the forest, and girdle the mountains as with the arms of human affection and the passion of love; those mills on the far-off rivers, whose creaking machinery and revolving wheels are the prelude of a yet unborn, but rapidly approaching civility, and whose music, heard by the right ears, is of the divinest depth and diapason, and in full concord with the immeasurable orchestra of triumph and rejoicing which the nation celebrates in the perpetual marches of her starry progress.

No man can compass this vast dominion, and no intellect can plumb its soundings or prophesy of its upshot. Who could have foretold what has already happened on this continent, had he stood with the Pilgrim Fathers on Plymouth Rock, that memorable day of the landing? Looking back to that great epoch in American history, we have no dim regions of antiquity to traverse, no mythic periods as of Memnon and the Nile, but a mere modern landscape, so to speak, shut in by less than two centuries. And yet what unspeakable things are included in that brief period! If we have made such vast strides and so rapid a development in those few years of our national life, with the heterogeneous and unmalleable materials with which we had to deal, converting the filth of Europe into grass and flowers for the decoration of the republic, what may we not achieve hereafter, when this dreadful war is over, and the negro question is adjusted, and the sundered States are reunited, and the Western wilderness is clothed with the glory of a perfect cultivation, and the genius of the people, no longer trammelled by Southern despotism, shall have free room to wing its flight over the immeasurable future?

There will be no likeness, in any mirror of the past, to the American civilization that is to be. New manners, customs, thinkings, literature, art, and life, will mark our progress and attest the mission of the nation. We are fast outgrowing the ideas and influences of that brave company of Puritans out of whose loins our beginning proceeded; and already each man goes alone, insular, self-reliant, and self-sustained. We owe the Puritans a large debt, but it is altogether a pretty fiction to call them the founders of American civilization. They helped to lay in the foundation stones of that early society, and kept them together by cementing them with their love of religious truth and liberty, so far as they understood these primal elements of a state; and we are likewise their debtors for the integrity which they put into their laws and government. But it is too high a demand to claim for them that they were the founders of the republic, and the originators of those great ideas which are embodied in our institutions and literature.

They came to this country with no very enlarged notions, either of religion or freedom, although they were perfectly sincere in their professions of regard for both; and it was this very sincerity which gave solidity and permanence to their colonies. We suppose we may repeat what history has made notorious respecting them, that they were, both in belief and civil practice, very narrow and limited in their outlooks—by no means given to intellectual speculations—and with but little faith in the intellect itself—which, indeed, was proscribed as a sort of outlaw when it stood upon its own authority, outside the pale of their church. The religion which they established had its origin in the reign of Elizabeth, and was a sort of revived Lollardism, which last dated as far back as Wycliffe, long before the Reformation. They thought they could worship God in conventicles, and in the great open-air cathedrals of nature, with quite as much purity of motive and heavenly acceptance as in regularly consecrated churches, and that the right of praying and preaching was inalienable, and secured to all godly men by the charter and seal of Calvary.

They had no idea, however, of non-conformity which was not based upon an orthodox creed, upon their creed, as they subscribed it on Plymouth Rock. They fled from persecution themselves, and sought freedom for themselves in the barren regions of our dear and now hospitable New England; and they, in their simplicity and good faith before God, sought to organize a system of civil and religious polity which should incrust all future generations, and harden them into a fossil state of perpetual orthodoxy.

They were a stern, implacable race, these early fathers, in all that related to belief, and the discipline of moral conduct; and we owe many of the granite securities which lie at the bottom of our social life and government to this harsh and unyielding sternness. It held the framework of the colonies together until they were consolidated into the United States, and until the modern culture of the people relaxed it into a universal liberty of thought and worship.

The Puritans, however, had no notion of such a result to their teachings and labors; and would have looked with pious horror upon them if they could have beheld them in some Agrippa's mirror of the future.

The truth—unpalatable as it may be—is simply this about the Puritans: they were narrow-minded, bigoted, and furious at times with the spirit of persecution; sincerely so, it is true, and believing they did God service; but that does not alter the fact. They had no conception of the meaning of liberty—and especially of religious liberty as a development of Protestantism. Their idea of it was liberty for themselves—persecution to all who differed from them; and this, too, for Christ's sake, in order that the lost sheep might be brought back, if possible, to their bleak and comfortless folds. They could not help it; they meant no wrong by it, and the evil which they thus did was good in the making, and sprang from the bleeding heart of an infinite love.

We like them, nevertheless; and cannot choose but like them, thinking it generous and loving to invest them with as much poetry as we can command from the wardrobes of the imagination. But we can never forgive them—in critical moods—for their inhuman, although strictly logical persecution of Roger Williams, the founder of Rhode Island, who represented in his person all the liberal-thoughts-men, both in religion and speculation, then existing on this continent.

This man of capacious intellect and most humane heart was hunted by them out of the associated colonies, as if he had been some ferocious beast of prey, because he differed from them in his religious opinions; and this drove him to found a state in accordance with the most liberal interpretation of Christianity. He had more than once, by his influence with the Indians, saved them from a general massacre; but their theological hate of him was so intense that they would not allow him to pass through their territories on a necessary journey; and once, on his return from England, where he had been negotiating with ministers for their benefit, they capped the climax of their bigoted ingratitude by refusing him permission even to land on their soil, lest his holy feet should pollute it.

It is a little too much, therefore, to say that all our ideas of liberty and religion have sprung from this stout race of persecutors. They were pioneers for us, bu nothing more. Our progress has been the untying of their old cords of mental oppression, and the undoing of many things which they had set up. This was so much rubbish to be moved out of the path of the nation, and by no means aids to its advancement, except as provocatives. What we now are, we have become by our own culture and development, and by the inflowing of those great modern ideas which have affected all the world, and helped to build up its civilization into such stately proportions.

Puritanism, as it then existed in its exclusive power, is, to all intents and purposes, dead upon this continent. The form of it still lingers in our midst, it is true, and in the Protestant parts of Europe its ritual survives, and pious hearts, which would be pious in spite of it, still cling to its dead corpse as if it were alive, and kindle their sacred fires upon the altar of its wellnigh forsaken sanctuaries. We should count it no gain to us, however—the extinction of this old and venerable faith—if we had no high and certain assurance that a nobler and sublimer religion was reserved for our consolation and guidance. We cannot afford, in one sense, to give up even the semblances and shows of religion, and these will survive until the new dayspring from on high shall supersede the necessity of their existence. 'Take care,' said Goethe, in some such words as these, 'lest, in letting the dead forms of religion go, you sacrifice all reverence and worship, and thus lose religion itself!' There is great danger of this in the transition state of human thought and speculation which marks the present crisis of American history. We are not a religious people, and shall not present any development of that sort until the intellectual reaction which has set in among us against the old modes and organons of belief has exhausted the tests of its crucibles, and reduced the dross to a residuum of gold which shall form the basis of a new and sacred currency, acceptable to all men for the highest interchanges.

In the mean while we must work out the problem of this religion of the future in any and all ways which lie open to us—doubting nothing of the final issues. The wildest theories of Millerites, Spiritists, Naturalists, and Supernaturalists, are all genuine products of the time, and of the spirit of man struggling upward to this solution—blindly struggling, it is true, but gradually approaching the light of the far-off truth, as the twilight monsters of geology gradually approached the far-off birth of man, who came at last, and redeemed the savage progressive, the apparent wild unreason of the terrestrial creation.

It is more than probable that this great fratricidal war with which we are now struggling, will prove, in its results, of the very highest service to the nation, and make us all both better and wiser men than we were before. We have already gained by it many notable experiences, and it has put our wisdom, and our foolishness also, to the test. It has both humbled and exalted our pride. It has cut away from the national character all those inane excrescences of vanity and brag which judicious people everywhere, who were friendly to us, could not choose but lament to see us exercise at such large discretion. It has brought us face to face with realities the most terrible the world has ever beheld. It has measured our strength and our weakness, and has developed within us the mightiest intellectual and physical resources. All the wit and virtue which go to make up a great people have been proven in a hundred times and ways during the war, to exist in us. Courage, forethought, endurance, self-sacrifice, magnaminity, and a noble sense of honor, are a few of the virtues which we have cropped from the bloody harvest of the battle field.

It is true that wicked men are among us—for when did a company, godly or otherwise, engage in any work, and Satan did not also fling his wallet over his shoulder and set out with them for evil purposes of his own?—but after all, these are but a small minority, and their efforts to ruin the republic and bring defeat and dishonor upon the Federal arms, have not yet proved to be of a very formidable nature. These, the enemies of America, though her native-born sons, the people can afford to treat with the contempt which they merit. For the rest, this war will make us a nation, and bind us together with bonds as strong as those of the old European nationalities. It will make us great, and loving patriots also; and root out from among us a vast amount of sham and political fraud, to the great bettering of society.

We shall have reason in many ways to bless its coming and its consequences. It was indeed just as necessary to our future national life and happiness as the bursting out of a volcano is to the general safety of the earth. It will destroy slavery for ever, and thus relieve us from the great contention which has so long and so bitterly occupied the lives of our public men and the thoughts of the world. In reality, we have never yet given republicanism a fair trial upon this continent. With that dreadful curse and crime of slavery tearing at its heart and brain, how was it possible for equality and self-government to be anything else but a delusion and a mockery? This cleared out of our pathway, and we have enough virtue, intelligence, and wealth of physical resources in the land to realize the prophecy and the hope of all noble thinkers and believes on the planet, and place America first and foremost among the nations—the richest, the wisest, the best, and the bravest.

LONGING

The corruption of a noble disposition is invariably from some false charm of fancy or imagination which has over-mastered the mind with its powerful magic and carried away the will captive. It is some perverted apprehension or illusory power of the infinite which causes a man who has once fallen a prey to any strong passion to devote all his energies, thoughts, and feelings to one object, or to surrender himself, heart and soul, to the despotic tyranny of some favorite pursuit. For man's natural longing after the infinite, even when showing itself in his passions and feelings, cannot, where genuine, be satisfied with any earthly object or sensual gratification or external possession. When, however, this pursuit, keeping itself free from all delusions of sense, really directs its endeavor toward the infinite, and only to what is truly such, it can never rest or be stationary. Ever advancing, step by step, it ever rises higher and higher. This pure feeling of endless longing, with the dim memories of eternal love ever surging through the soul, are the heavenward—bearing wings which bear it ever on toward God. Longing is man's intuition of enternity!—Schlegel.

THE LESSON OF THE HOUR

IStrong in faith for the future,Drawing our hope from the past,Manfully standing to battle,However may blow the blast:Onward still pressing undaunted,Let the foe be strong as he may,Though the sky be dark as midnight,Remembering the dawn of day.IIStrong in the cause of freedom,Bold for the sake of right,Watchful and ready always,Alert by day and night:With a sword for the foe of freedom,From whatever side he come,The same for the open foemanAnd the traitorous friend at home.IIIStrong with the arm uplifted,And nerved with God's own might,In an age of glory livingIn a holy cause to fight:And whilom catching musicOf the future's minstrelsy,As those who strike for freedomBlows that can never die.IVStrong, though the world may threaten,Though thrones may totter down,And in many an Old World palace,Uneasy sits the crown:Not for the present onlyIs the war we wage to-day,But the sound shall echo everWhen we shall have passed away.VStrong—'tis an age of glory,And worth a thousand yearsOf petty, weak disputings,Of ambitious hopes and fears:And we, if we learn the lessonAll-glorious and sublime,Shall go down to future agesAs heroes for all time.VIStrong—not in human boasting,But with high and holy will,The means of a mighty WorkerHis purpose to fulfil:O patient warriors, watchers—A thousandfold your powerIf ye read with prayerful purposeThe Lesson of the Hour.

THE SCIENTIFIC UNIVERSAL LANGUAGE:

ITS CHARACTER AND RELATION TO OTHER LANGUAGES

ARTICLE ONE.

THE ORIGIN OF SPEECH

The Continental for May contained an article, written by Stephen Pearl Andrews, entitled: A Universal Language: its Possibility, Scientific Necessity, and Appropriate Characteristics. Although then treated hypothetically, or as something not impossible of achievement in the future, a Language constructed upon the method therein briefly and generally explained, is, in fact, substantially completed at the present time. It is one of the developments of a new and vast scientific discovery—comprising the Fundamental Principles of all Thought and Being, and the Law of Analogy—on which Mr. Andrews has bestowed the name of Universology. The public announcement of this discovery, together with a general statement of its character, has been recently made in the columns of a leading literary paper—The Home Journal.