世界名著REFORMERS.docx

1、世界名著REFORMERS-Annual most popular English classics, hope for your study help, support baidu, hope baidu library collections more and more good. - _New England Reformers_ _A Lecture read before the Society in Amory Hall,_ _on Sunday, 3 March, 1844_ Whoever has had opportunity of acquaintance with soc

2、iety in NewEngland, during the last twenty-five years, with those middle andwith those leading sections that may constitute any justrepresentation of the character and aim of the community, will havebeen struck with the great activity of thought and experimenting.His attention must be commanded by t

3、he signs that the Church, orreligious party, is falling from the church nominal, and is appearingin temperance and non-resistance societies, in movements ofabolitionists and of socialists, and in very significant assemblies,called Sabbath and Bible Conventions, - composed of ultraists, ofseekers, of

4、 all the soul of the soldiery of dissent, and meeting tocall in question the authority of the Sabbath, of the priesthood, andof the church. In these movements, nothing was more remarkable thanthe discontent they begot in the movers. The spirit of protest andof detachment, drove the members of these

5、Conventions to beartestimony against the church, and immediately afterward, to declaretheir discontent with these Conventions, their independence of theircolleagues, and their impatience of the methods whereby they wereworking. They defied each other, like a congress of kings, each ofwhom had a real

6、m to rule, and a way of his own that made concertunprofitable. What a fertility of projects for the salvation of theworld! One apostle thought all men should go to farming; and another,that no man should buy or sell: that the use of money was thecardinal evil; another, that the mischief was in our d

7、iet, that weeat and drink damnation. These made unleavened bread, and were foesto the death to fermentation. It was in vain urged by the housewife,that God made yeast, as well as dough, and loves fermentation just asdearly as he loves vegetation; that fermentation develops thesaccharine element in t

8、he grain, and makes it more palatable and moredigestible. No; they wish the pure wheat, and will die but it shallnot ferment. Stop, dear nature, these incessant advances of thine;let us scotch these ever-rolling wheels! Others attacked the systemof agriculture, the use of animal manures in farming;

9、and the tyrannyof man over brute nature; these abuses polluted his food. The oxmust be taken from the plough, and the horse from the cart, thehundred acres of the farm must be spaded, and the man must walkwherever boats and locomotives will not carry him. Even the insectworld was to be defended, - t

10、hat had been too long neglected, and asociety for the protection of ground-worms, slugs, and mosquitos wasto be incorporated without delay. With these appeared the adepts ofhomoeopathy, of hydropathy, of mesmerism, of phrenology, and theirwonderful theories of the Christian miracles! Others assailed

11、particular vocations, as that of the lawyer, that of the merchant, ofthe manufacturer, of the clergyman, of the scholar. Others attackedthe institution of marriage, as the fountain of social evils. Othersdevoted themselves to the worrying of churches and meetings forpublic worship; and the fertile f

12、orms of antinomianism among theelder puritans, seemed to have their match in the plenty of the newharvest of reform. With this din of opinion and debate, there was akeener scrutiny of institutions and domestic life than any we hadknown, there was sincere protesting against existing evils, and therew

13、ere changes of employment dictated by conscience. No doubt, therewas plentiful vaporing, and cases of backsliding might occur. But ineach of these movements emerged a good result, a tendency to theadoption of simpler methods, and an assertion of the sufficiency ofthe private man. Thus it was directl

14、y in the spirit and genius ofthe age, what happened in one instance, when a church censured andthreatened to excommunicate one of its members, on account of thesomewhat hostile part to the church, which his conscience led him totake in the anti-slavery business; the threatened individualimmediately

15、excommunicated the church in a public and formal process.This has been several times repeated: it was excellent when it wasdone the first time, but, of course, loses all value when it iscopied. Every project in the history of reform, no matter howviolent and surprising, is good, when it is the dicta

16、te of a mansgenius and constitution, but very dull and suspicious when adoptedfrom another. It is right and beautiful in any man to say, I willtake this coat, or this book, or this measure of corn of yours, -in whom we see the act to be original, and to flow from the wholespirit and faith of him; fo

17、r then that taking will have a giving asfree and divine: but we are very easily disposed to resist the samegenerosity of speech, when we miss originality and truth to characterin it. There was in all the practical activities of New England, forthe last quarter of a century, a gradual withdrawal of t

18、enderconsciences from the social organizations. There is observablethroughout, the contest between mechanical and spiritual methods, butwith a steady tendency of the thoughtful and virtuous to a deeperbelief and reliance on spiritual facts. In politics, for example, itis easy to see the progress of

19、dissent. The country is full ofrebellion; the country is full of kings. Hands off! let there be nocontrol and no interference in the administration of the affairs ofthis kingdom of me. Hence the growth of the doctrine and of theparty of Free Trade, and the willingness to try that experiment, inthe f

20、ace of what appear incontestable facts. I confess, the motto ofthe Globe newspaper is so attractive to me, that I can seldom findmuch appetite to read what is below it in its columns, The world isgoverned too much. So the country is frequently affording solitaryexamples of resistance to the governme

21、nt, solitary nullifiers, whothrow themselves on their reserved rights; nay, who have reserved alltheir rights; who reply to the assessor, and to the clerk of court,that they do not know the State; and embarrass the courts of law, bynon-juring, and the commander-in-chief of the militia, bynon-resista

22、nce. The same disposition to scrutiny and dissentappeared in civil, festive, neighborly, and domestic society. Arestless, prying, conscientious criticism broke out in unexpectedquarters. Who gave me the money with which I bought my coat? Whyshould professional labor and that of the counting-house be

23、 paid sodisproportionately to the labor of the porter, and woodsawyer? Thiswhole business of Trade gives me to pause and think, as itconstitutes false relations between men; inasmuch as I am prone tocount myself relieved of any responsibility to behave well and noblyto that person whom I pay with mo

24、ney, whereas if I had not thatcommodity, I should be put on my good behavior in all companies, andman would be a benefactor to man, as being himself his onlycertificate that he had a right to those aids and services which eachasked of the other. Am I not too protected a person? is there not awide di

25、sparity between the lot of me and the lot of thee, my poorbrother, my poor sister? Am I not defrauded of my best culture inthe loss of those gymnastics which manual labor and the emergenciesof poverty constitute? I find nothing healthful or exalting in thesmooth conventions of society; I do not like

26、 the close air ofsaloons. I begin to suspect myself to be a prisoner, though treatedwith all this courtesy and luxury. I pay a destructive tax in myconformity. The same insatiable criticism may be traced in theefforts for the reform of Education. The popular education has beentaxed with a want of tr

27、uth and nature. It was complained that aneducation to things was not given. We are students of words: we areshut up in schools, and colleges, and recitation-rooms, for ten orfifteen years, and come out at last with a bag of wind, a memory ofwords, and do not know a thing. We cannot use our hands, or

28、 ourlegs, or our eyes, or our arms. We do not know an edible root in thewoods, we cannot tell our course by the stars, nor the hour of theday by the sun. It is well if we can swim and skate. We are afraidof a horse, of a cow, of a dog, of a snake, of a spider. The Romanrule was, to teach a boy nothi

29、ng that he could not learn standing.The old English rule was, All summer in the field, and all winter inthe study. And it seems as if a man should learn to plant, or tofish, or to hunt, that he might secure his subsistence at all events,and not be painful to his friends and fellow men. The lessons o

30、fscience should be experimental also. The sight of the planet througha telescope, is worth all the course on astronomy: the shock of theelectric spark in the elbow, out-values all the theories; the tasteof the nitrous oxide, the firing of an artificial volcano, are betterthan volumes of chemistry. O

31、ne of the traits of the new spirit, isthe inquisition it fixed on our scholastic devotion to the deadlanguages. The ancient languages, with great beauty of structure,contain wonderful remains of genius, which draw, and always willdraw, certain likeminded men, - Greek men, and Roman men, in allcountries, to their study; but by a wonderful drowsiness of usage,they had exacted the study of _all_ men. Once (say two centuriesago), Latin and Greek had a strict relation to all the science andc