6 guided. I, for one, however, am content to submit to the imputation of being a votary of expediency. And what is more, I do not see what right any one who is not so has to sit in Parliament, or to take any part in public affairs. Any one who may choose to acknowledge that the measures he opposes are expedient, or that those he recommends are inexpedient, ought manifestly to have no seat in a deliberative assembly, which is constituted for the express and sole purpose of considering what measures are conducive to the public good; — in other words, 'expedient.' I say, the 'public good,' because, of course, by expediency' we mean, not that which may benefit some individual, or some party or class of men, at the expense of the public, but what conduces to the good of the nation. Now this, it is evident, is the very object for which deliberative assemblies are constituted. And so far is this from being regarded, by our Church at least, as something at variance with religious duty, that we have a prayer specially appointed to be offered up during the sitting of the Houses of Parliament, that their consultations may be directed and pered for the safety, honor, and welfare of our sovereign and her dominions.' Now, if this be not the Now, if this be not the very definition of political expediency, let any one say what is." 6 pros I have no doubt, however, that this judgment of civilization rests in part on the difficulty and the rarity of the virtue which it praises. We prize the difficult and the rare because they are difficult and rare; and when you consider how easy and how tempting it is to fall in with and float with the stream on which so many swim; how easy is that broad road and how sweet that approved strain; how easy and how tempting it is to please an assenting congregation, or circle of readers, or local public; how easy and how tempting to compound for sins which an influential man "is not inclined to, by damning those he has no mind to;" how easy to please those we see, and forget those out of sight; what courage, what love of truth are demanded to dissent; how hard it is to rise to the vast and varied conception, and to the one idea, which grasps and adjusts all the ideas; how easy it is for the little man to become great, the shallow man to become profound; the coward out of danger to be brave; the free-state man to be an anti-slavery man, and to write tracts which his friends alone read; when you think that even the laughter of fools and children and madmen, little ministers, little editors, and little politicians, can inflict the mosquito bite, not deep, but stinging;-who wonders that the serener and the calmer judgment allots "to patient continuance in well doing," to resistance of the parts, to contention for the whole, to counsels of moderation and concession, "glory, honor, and immortality? too. What nothing earthly gives or can destroy, But this judgment of civilization is the judgment of religion You believe with the Bible, with Cicero, with the teachings of history, that God wills the national life. He wills civilization, therefore society, therefore law, therefore government, therefore nations. How do we know this? Always, from the birth of the historical time, civilized man led the national life. Therein always the nature God has given him has swelled to all its perfection, and has rendered the worthiest praise to the Giver of the gift. He who wills the end wills the indispensa ble means; he wills the means which his teachers, nature and experience, have ascertained to be indispensable. Then he wills these means, concession, compromise, love, forbearance, help, because his teachers, nature and experience, have revealed them to be indispensable. Then he wills our national life. Then he wills the spirit which made it and which keeps it. Do you dare to say, with President Davies, that you believe that Providence raised up that young man, Washington, for some great public service, with the spectator of that first inauguration, that you believe the Supreme Being looked down with complacency on that act, -with that Senate which thanked God that he had conducted to the tomb a fame whiter than it was brilliant; and yet dare to say that the spirit of Washington ought not to be your spirit, his counsels your guide, his Farewell Address your scripture of political religion? But what does he say? I need not repeat it, for you have it by heart; but what said a greater than he? "Render unto Cæsar the things which are Cæsar's." Render under Cæsar the things that are Cæsar's, and thus, to that extent, you “ render unto God the things which are God's." Be these words our answer and our defence. When they press us with the common-places of anti-slavery, be these words of wisdom our answer. Say to them, "Yes, I thank God I keep no slaves. I am sorry there is one on earth; I am sorry even that there is need of law, of subordination, of order, of government, of the discipline of the schools, of prisons, of the gallows; I wonder at such a system of things; piously I would reform it; but beneath that same system I am an American citizen; beneath that system, this country it is my post to keep; while I keep her there is hope for all men, for the evil man, for the intemperate man, for slaves, for free, for all; that hope your rash and hasty hand would prostrate; that hope my patience would advance. Have they done? Are they answered? There are other conditions and other laws of our nationality on which there needs to be said something if there were time. That it is not and that it cannot come to good, that it cannot achieve its destiny, that it cannot live even, unless it rests on the understanding of the State, you know. How gloriously this is anticipated by our own Constitution, you remember. How well said Washington who said all things as he did all things, well -"that in proportion as governments rest on public opinion, that opinion must be enlightened." There must then be intelligence at the foundation. But what intelligence? Not that which puffeth up, I fancy, not flippancy, not smartness, not sciolism, whose fruits, whose expression are vanity, restlessness, insubordination, hate, irreverence, unbelief, incapacity to combine ideas, and great capacity to overwork a single one. Not quite this. This is that little intelligence and little learning which are dangerous. These are the characteristics, I have read, which pave the way for the downfall of States; not those on which a long glory and a long strength have towered. These, more than the general of Macedon, gave the poison to Demosthenes in the Island Temple. These, not the triumvirate alone, closed the eloquent lips of Cicero. These, before the populous North had done it, spread beneath Gibraltar to the Lybian sands in the downward age. These, not Christianity, not Goth, not Lombard, nor Norman, rent that fair one Italy asunder, and turned the garden and the mistress of the earth into a school, into a hiding place, of assassins —of spies from Austria, of spies from France, with gold to buy and ears to catch and punish the dreams of liberty whis pered in sleep, and shamed the memories and hopes of Machiavel and Mazzini, and gave for that joy and that beauty, mourning and heaviness. This is not the intelligence our Constitution means, Washington meant, and our country needs. It is intelligence which, however it begins, ends with belief, with humility, with obedience, with veneration, with admiration, with truth; which recognizes and then learns and then teaches the duties of a comprehensive citizenship; which hopes for a future on earth and beyond earth, but turns habitually, reverently, thoughtfully to the old paths, the great men, the hallowed graves of the fathers; which binds in one bundle of love the kindred and mighty legend of revolution and liberty, the life of Christ in the Evangelists, and the Constitution in its plain text; which can read with Lord Chatham, Thucydides and the stories of master States of antiquity, yet holds with him that the papers of the Congress of 1776 were better ; whose patriotism grows warm at Marathon, but warmer at Monmouth, at Yorktown, at Bunker Hill, at Saratoga; which reforms by preserving, serves by standing and waiting, fears God and honors America. I had something to say more directly still on the ethics of nationality, on the duty of instructing the conscience; on the crimes of treason, and slander, and fraud, that are committed around us in its name; on the shallowness and stupidity of the doctrine that the mere mora! sentiments, trained by a mere moral discipline, may safely guide the complex civil life; of the teachers and studies which they need to fit them for so precious, difficult, and delicate a dominion; of the high place in the scale of duties, which, thus fitted, they assign to nationality; of the judgment which, thus fitted they would apply to one or two of the common-places and practices of the time. But I pass it all to say only that these ethics teach the true subordination, and the true reconciliation of apparently incompatible duties. These only are the casuists, or the safest casuists for us. Learn from them how to adjust this conflict between patriotism and philanthropy. To us, indeed, there seeins to be no such conflict, for we are philanthropists in proportion as we are unionists. Our philanthropy, we venture to say, is a just philanthropy. That is all. It loves all men, it helps all men, it respects all rights, keeps all compacts, recognizes all dangers, pities all suffering, ignores no fact, master and slave it enfolds alike. It happens thus that it contracts the sphere of our duty somewhat, and changes not the nature, but the time, the place, the mode of performing it. It does not make our love cold, but it makes it safe; it naturalizes it, it baptizes it into our life; it circumscribes it within our capacities and our necessities; it sets on it the great national public seal. If you say that thus our patriotism limits our philanthropy, I answer that ours is American philanthropy. Be this the virtue we boast, and this the name by which we know it. In this name, in this quality, find the standard and the utterance of the virtue itself. By this, not by broad phylacteries and chief seats, the keener hate, the gloomier fanaticism, the louder cry, judge, compare, subordinate. Do they think that nobody is a philanthropist but themselves? We, too, look up the long vista and gaze, rapt, at the dazzling ascent; we, too, see towers rising, crowned, imperial, and the tribes coming to bend in the opening of a latter day. But we see peace, order, reconciliation of rights along that brightening future. We trace all along that succession of reform, the presiding instrumentalities of national life. We see our morality working itself clearer and clearer; one historical and conventional right or wrong, after another, falling peacefully and still; we hear the chain breaking, but there is no blood on it, none of his whom it bound, none of his who put it on him; we hear the swelling chorus of the free, but master and slave unite in that chorus, and there is no discordant shriek above the harmony; we see and we hail the blending of our own glory with the eternal light of God, but we see, too, shapes of love and beauty ascending and descending there as in the old vision! Hold fast this hope; distrust the philanthropy, distrust the ethics which would, which must, turn it into shame. Do no evil that good may come. Perform your share, for you have a share, in the abolition of slavery; perform your share, for you have a share, in the noble and generous strife of the sections but perform it by keeping, by transmitting, a UNITED, Loving AND CHRISTIAN AMERICA. But why, at last, do I exhort, and why do I seem to fear, on such a day as this? Is it not the nation's birthday? Is it not this country of our love and hopes, which celebrates it? |