264 HENRY WARD BEECHER uttermost of joy; it was the uttermost of sorrow-noon and midnight without a space between. The blow brought not a sharp pang. It was so terrible that at first it stunned sensibility. Citizens were like men awakened at midnight by an earthquake and bewildered to find everything that they were accustomed to trust wavering and falling. The very earth was no longer solid. The first feeling was the least. Men waited to get straight to feel. They wandered in the streets as if groping after some impending dread, or undeveloped sorrow, or someone to tell them what ailed them. They met each other as if each would ask the other, "Am I awake, or do I dream?" There was a piteous helplessness. Strong men bowed down and wept. Other and common griefs belonged to some one in chief; this belonged to all. It was each and every man's. Every virtuous household in the land felt as if its first-born were gone. Men were bereaved and walked for days as if a corpse lay unburied in their dwellings. There was nothing else to think of. They could speak of nothing but that; and yet of that they could speak only falteringly. All business was laid aside. Pleasure forgot to smile. The city for nearly a week ceased to roar. The great Leviathan lay down and was still. Even avarice stood still, and greed was strangely moved to generous sympathy and universal sorrow. to his name monuments, found charitable institutions, and write his name above their lintels; but no monument will ever equal the universal, spontaneous, and sublime sorrow that in a moment swept down lines and parties, and covered up animosities, and in an hour brought a divided people into unity of grief and indivisible fellowship of anguish. . Rear Even he who now sleeps has, by this event, been clothed with new influence. Dead, he speaks to men who now willingly hear what before they refused to listen to. Now his simple and weighty words will be gathered like those of Washington, and your children and your children's children shall be taught to ponder the simplicity and deep wisdom of utterances which in their time passed, in party heat, as idle worlds. Men will receive a new impulse of patriotism for his sake and will guard with zeal the whole country which he loved so well. I swear you, on the altar of his memory, to be more faithful to the country for which he has perished. They will, as they follow his hearse, swear a new hatred to that slavery against which he warred, and which, in vanquishing him, has made him a martyr and a conqueror. I swear you, by the memory of this martyr, to hate slavery with an unappeasable hatred. They will admire and imitate the firmness of this man, his inflexible conscience for the right, and yet his gentleness, as tender as a woman's, his moderation of spirit, which not all the heat of party could inflame, nor all the jars HENRY WARD BEECHER 265 and disturbances of his country shake out of place. I swear you to an emulation of his justice, his moderation and his mercy. You I can comfort; but how can I speak to that twilight million to whom his name was as the name of an angel of God? There will be wailing in places which no minister shall be able to reach. When, in hovel and in cot, in wood and in wilderness, in the field throughout the South, the dusky children, who looked upon him as that Moses whom God sent before them to lead them out of the land of bondage, learn that he has fallen, who shall comfort them? O thou Shepherd of Israel, that didst comfort thy people of old, to thy care we commit the helpless, the longwronged and grieved. And now the martyr is moving in triumphal march, mightier than when alive. The nation rises up at every stage of his coming. Cities and States are his pallbearers, and the cannon beats the hours with solemn progression. Dead, dead, dead, he yet speaketh. Is Washington dead? Is Hampden dead? Is David dead? Is any man that was ever fit to live dead? Disenthralled of flesh, and risen in the unobstructed sphere where passion never comes, he begins his illimitable work. His life now is grafted upon the infinite, and will be fruitful as no earthly life can be. Pass on, thou that hast overcome. Your sorrows, O people, are his peace. Your bells and bands and muffled drums sound triumphant in his ear. Wail and weep here; God made it echo joy and triumph there. Pass on. A CORRUPT PUBLIC SENTIMENT A corrupt public sentiment produces dishonesty. A public sentiment in which dishonesty is not disgraceful; in which bad men are respectable, are trusted, are honored, are exalted, is a curse to the young. The fever of speculation, the universal derangement of business, the growing laxness of morals are, to an alarming extent, introducing such a state of things. If the shocking stupidity of the public mind to atrocious dishonesties is not aroused; if good men do not bestir themselves to drag the young from this foul sorcery; if the relaxed bands of honesty are not tightened, and conscience tutored to a severer morality, our night is at hand-our midnight not far off. Woe to that guilty people who sit down upon broken laws, and wealth saved by injustice! Woe to a generation fed by the bread of fraud, whose children's inheritance shall be a perpetual memento of their father's unrighteousness; to whom dishonesty shall be made pleasant by association with the revered memories of father, brother and friend! But when a whole people, united by a common disregard of justice, conspire to defraud public creditors, and States vie with States in an 266 HENRY WARD BEECHER infamous repudiation of just debts, by open or sinister methods; and nations exert their sovereignty to protect and dignify the knavery of the commonwealth, then the confusion of domestic affairs has bred a fiend before whose flight honor fades away, and under whose feet the sanctity of truth and the religion of solemn compacts are stamped down and ground into the dirt. Need we ask the cause of growing dishonesty among the young, the increasing untrustworthiness of all agents, when States are seen clothed with the panoply of dishonesty, and nations put on fraud for their garments? Absconding agents, swindling schemes, and defalcations, occurring in such melancholy abundance, have at length ceased to be wonders, and rank with the common accidents of fire and flood. The budget of each week is incomplete without its mob and runaway cashier-its duel and defaulter, and as waves which roll to the shore are lost in those which follow on, so the villainies of each week obliterate the record of the last. Men of notorious immorality, whose dishonesty is flagrant, whose private habits would disgrace the ditch, are powerful and popular. I have seen a man stained with every sin, except those which required courage; into whose head I do not think a pure thought has entered for forty years; in whose heart an honorable feeling would droop from very loneliness; in evil, he was ripe and rotten; hoary and depraved in deed, in word, in his present life and in all his past; evil when by himself, and viler among men; corrupting to the young; to domestic fidelity, recreant; to common honor, a traitor; to honesty, an outlaw; to religion, a hypocrite-base in all that is worthy of man and accomplished in whatever is disgraceful, and yet this wretch could go where he would-enter good men's dwellings and purloin their votes. Men would curse him, yet obey him; hate him, and assist him; warn their sons against him, and lead them to the polls A public sentiment which produces ignominious knaves cannot breed honest men. We have not yet emerged from a period in which debts were insecure ; the debtor legally protected against the rights of the creditor; taxes laid, not by the requirements of justice, but for political effect, and lowered to a dishonest inefficiency, and when thus diminished, not collected; the citizens resisting their own officers; officers resigning at the bidding of the electors; the laws of property paralyzed; bankrupt laws built up, and staylaws unconstitutionally enacted, upon which the courts look with aversion, yet fear to deny them lest the wildness of popular opinion should roll back disdainfully upon the bench to despoil its dignity and prostrate its power. General suffering has made us tolerant of general dishonesty, and the gloom of our commercial disaster threatens to become the pall of our morals. EDWIN H. CHAPIN (1814-1880) A GREAT ADVOCATE OF GREAT THEMES A S a popular and eloquent preacher Chapin was unrivaled among the ministers of Unitarianism, and there were few who surpassed him among those of any denomination in our country. As a public lecturer he was equally popular, being accounted one of the ablest and most attractive of this class. He stood on a par with such famous speakers as Beecher, Phillips and Parker, and made his themes much the same-temperance, abolition, universal peace, and the like. In 1850 he was a member of the Peace Convention at Frankfurt-on-the-Main, and made there a highly effective address. In 1848 he took charge of a church in New York, which grew, by successive stages, from one of modest size to a great erection, capable of holding the immense congregations that flocked to hear him. He published several volumes of sermons and other works, and in 1872 became editor of the Christian Leader. CHRISTIANITY THE GREAT ELEMENT OF REFORM [From Chapin's numerous addresses we select some brief passages as illustrations of his style and eloquent handling of any subject touched by him. There is an element of picturesqueness in all he says, and his delivery was so effective as to give him great influence over the minds of his hearers.] The great element of reform is not born of human wisdom, it does not draw its life from human organizations. I find it only in Christianity. "Thy kingdom come!" There is a sublime and pregnant burden in this prayer. It is the aspiration of every soul that goes forth in the spirit of reform. For what is the significance of this prayer? It is a petition that all holy influences would penetrate and subdue and dwell in the heart of man, until he shall think, and speak, and do good from the very necessity of his being. So would the institutions of error and wrong crumble and pass away. So would sin die out from the earth; and the human soul, living in harmony with the divine will, this earth would become like Heaven. It is too late for the reformers to sneer at Christianity; it is foolishness for them to reject it. In it are enshrined our faith in human progress, our confidence in reform. It is indissolubly connected with all that is hopeful, spiritual, capable, in man. That men have misunderstood it and perverted it is true. But it is also true that the noblest efforts for human amelioration have come out of it; have been based upon it. Is it not so? Come, ye remembered ones, who sleep the sleep of the just; who took your conduct from the line of Christian philosophy; come from your tomb, and answer! Come, Howard, from the gloom of the prison and the taint of the lazar house, and show us what philanthropy can do when imbued with the spirit of Jesus. Come, Eliot, from the thick forest where the red man listens to the Word of Life. Come, Penn, from thy sweet counsel and weaponless victory, and show us what Christian zeal and Christian love can accomplish with the rudest barbarians or the fiercest hearts. Come, Raikes, from thy labors with the ignorant and the poor, and show us with what an eye this faith regards the lowest and least of our race; and how diligently it labors,-not for the body, not for the rank, but for the plastic soul that is to course the ages of immortality. And ye, who are a great number,―ye nameless ones who have done good in your narrow spheres, content to forego renown on earth and seeking your record in the Record on High, come and tell us how kindly a spirit, how lofty a purpose, or how strong a courage the religion ye profess can breathe into the poor, the humble, and the weak. Go forth, then, spirit of Christianity, to thy great work of reform! The past bears witness to thee in the blood of thy martyrs, and the ashes of thy saints and heroes; the present is hopeful because of thee; the future shall acknowledge thy omnipotence. THE TRIUMPHS OF LABOR Who can adequately describe the triumphs of labor, urged on by the potent spell of money? It has extorted the secrets of the universe and trained its forms into myriads of powers of use and beauty. From the bosom of the old creation it has developed anew the creation of industry and art. It has been its task and its glory to overcome obstacles. Mountains have been leveled and valleys have been exalted before it. It has broken the rocky soil into fertile glades; it has crowned the hill tops with verdure, and bound round the very feet of ocean ridges of golden corn. Up from the sunless and hoary deeps, up from the shapeless quarry, it drags its spotless marbles and rears its palaces of pomp. It steals the |