Page images
PDF
EPUB

fixed my

were cast idly on the page for a few seconds, till gradually as a mist clears away, the following words became visible, and at once • We looked for peace, attention. but no good came; for a time of health and behold trouble.—I turned to the beginning of the chapter: it was the eighth of the prophet Jeremiah, and having read it to the end, I repeated aloud the verses which had become connected in my memory by their pertinency to the conversation, to which I had been so lately attending: namely, the 11th, 15th, 20th, and 22d.

They have healed the hurt of the daughter of my people slightly, saying Peace, Peace, when there is no Peace. We looked for Peace, but no good came: for a time of health, and behold, trouble! The harvest is past, the summer is ended: and we are not saved. Is there no balm in Gilead? Is there no physician? Why then is not the health of the daughter of my people recovered?

These impassioned remonstrances, these heart-probing interrogatories, of the lamenting Prophet, do indeed anticipate a full, and alas! a too faithful statement of the case, to the public consideration of which we have all of late been so often and so urgently invited, and

the inward thought of which our very countenances betray, as by a communion of alarm. In the bold painting of Scripture language, all faces gather blackness, the Many at the supposed magnitude of the national embarassment, the Wise at the more certain and far more alarming evil of its moral accompaniments. And they not only contain the state of the case, but suggest the most natural scheme and order of treating it. I avail myself, therefore, of the passage as a part of my text, with the less scruple because it will be found to supply of itself the requisite link of connection. The case itself, the plain fact admitted by men of all parties among us, is, as I have just observed, and as you will yourselves have felt at the first perusal of the words, described by anticipation in the intermediate verses; yet with such historic precision, so plain and so specifically as to render all comment needless, all application superfluous. Peace has come without the advantages expected from Peace, and on the contrary, with inany of the severest inconveniences usually attributable to War. • We looked for peace, but no good came time of health and behold trouble. harvest is past, the summer is ended, and we

for a

The

are not saved." The inference therefore contained in the preceding verse is unavoidable. Where war has produced no repentance, and the cessation of war has brought neither concord or tranquility, we may safely cry aloud with the Prophet: They have healed the hurt of the daughter of my people slightly, saying peace, peace, when there is no peace.' The whole remaining subject therefore may be comprized in the three questions implied in the last of the verses, recited to you; in three questions, and in the answers to the same. First, who are they who have hitherto prescribed for the case, and are still tampering with it? What are their qualifications? What has been their conduct? Second, What is the true seat and source of the complaint, the ultimate causes as well as the immediate occasions? And lastly, What are the appropriate medicines? Who and where are the true physicians?

[ocr errors]

And first then of those who have been ever loud and foremost in their pretensions to a knowledge both of the disease and the remedy. In a preceding part of the same chapter from which I extracted the line prefixed, the Prophet Isaiah enumerates the conditions of a nation's recovery from a state

of depression and peril, and among these one condition which he describes in words that may be without any forced or over-refined interpretation unfolded into an answer to the present question. A vile person,' he tells us, must no more be called liberal, nor the churl be said to be bountiful. For the vile person shall speak villainy, and his heart will work iniquity to practice hypocrisy and to utter error against the Lord; to make empty the soul of the needy, and he will cause the drink of the thirsty to fail. The instruments also of the churl are evil: he deviseth wicked devices to destroy the poor with lying words, even when the needy speaketh aright. BUT THE LIBERAL DEVISETH LIBERAL THINGS, AND BY LIBERAL THINGS SHALL HE STAND.' (Isaiah, xxxii. 5, 6, 7, 8.)

Such are the political empirics mischievous in proportion to their effrontery, and ignorant in proportion to their presumption, the detection and exposure of whose true characters the inspired statesman and patriot represents as indispensable to the re-establishment of the general welfare, while his own portrait of these impostors whom in a former chapter (ix. 15. 16.) he calls, the tail of

the Nation, and in the following verse, Demagogues that cause the people to err, affords to the intelligent believer of all ages and countries the means of detecting them, and of undeceiving all whose own malignant passions have not rendered them blind and deaf and brutish. For these noisy and calumnious zealots, whom (with an especial reference indeed to the factious leaders of the populace who under this name exercised a tumultuary despotism in Jerusalem, at once a sign and a cause of its approaching downfall) St. John beheld in the Apocalyptic vision as a compound of Locust and Scorpion, are not of one place or of one season. They are the perennials of history and though they may disappear for a time, they exist always in the egg and need only a distempered atmosphere and an accidental ferment to start up into life and activity.

It is worth our while therefore, or rather it is our duty, to examine with a more attentive eye this representative portrait drawn for us by an infallible master, and to distinguish its component parts, each by itself, so that we may combine without confusing them in our memory; till they blend at

« PreviousContinue »