STOPPING THE MARCH OF FREEDOM.

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earth shook to its centre; a howling and a lamentation went up to heaven; the living ate the dead, and then fed upon their own flesh, and then went mad; the wolves and the vultures held their carnival, while Rachel wept for her children, and would not be comforted. Nevertheless, the sickle

of the destroyer was again thrust among the clusters; the wine-press of war was trodden at Dresden, and Leipsic, and Waterloo, till the blood "came out of the wine-press, even to the horse-bridles."

CLI-STOPPING THE MARCH OF FREEDOM.

THEODORE PARKER.

You

It is not for men long to hinder the march of human freedom. I have no fear for that ultimately; none at all—simply for this reason that I believe in the infinite God. may make your statutes; an appeal always lies to the higher law, and decisions adverse to that get set aside in the ages. Your statutes cannot hold Him. You may gather all the dried grass and all the straw in both continents; you may braid it into ropes to bind down the sea; while it is calm, you may laugh, and say, "Lo, I have chained the ocean and howl down the law of Him who holds the universe as a rose-bud in his hand-its every ocean but a drop of dew. "How the waters suppress their agitation," you may say. But when the winds blow their trumpets, the sea rises in his strength, snaps asunder the bonds that had confined his mighty limbs, and the world is littered with the idle hay! Stop the human-race in its development and march to Freedom! As well might the boys of Boston, some lustrous night, mounting the steeples of the town, call on the stars to stop their course! Gently, but irresistibly, the Greater and the Lesser Bear move round the pole; Orion, in his mighty mail, comes up the sky; the Bull, the Heavenly Twins, the Crab, the Lion, the Maid, the Scales, and all that shining company, pursue their march all night, and the new day discovers the idle urchins in their lofty places, all tired, and sleepy, and ashamed.

CLII.-INVECTIVE IN THE "WILKINSON TRIAL."

S. S. PRENTISS.

GENTLEMEN, although my clients are free from the charge. of shedding blood, there is a murderer, and, strange to say, his name appears upon the indictment, not as a criminal, but a prosecutor. His garments are wet with the blood of those upon whose deaths you hold this solemn inquest. Yonder he sits, allaying for a moment the hunger of that fierce vulture, Conscience, by casting before it the food of pretended regret, and false, but apparent eagerness for justice. He hopes to appease the manes of his slaughtered victims- victims to his falsehood and treachery-by sacrificing upon their graves a hecatomb of innocent men. By base misrepresentations of the conduct of the defendants, he induced his imprudent friends to attempt a vindication of his pretended wrongs, by violence and bloodshed. His clansmen gathered at his call, and followed him for vengeance; but when the fight began, and the keen weapons clashed in the sharp conflict-where was the wordy warrior? Aye, "where was Roderick then ?" No "blast upon his bugle horn" encouraged his companions as they were laying down their lives in his quarrel; no gleam of his dagger indicated a desire to avenge his fall; with treacherous cowardice he left them to their fate, and all his vaunted courage ended in ignominious flight.

Sad and gloomy is the path that lies before him. You will in a few moments dash, untasted, from his lips, the sweet cup of revenge; to quaff whose intoxicating contents he has paid a price that would have purchased the goblet of the Egyptian queen. I behold gathering around him, thick and fast, dark and corroding cares. That face, which looks so ruddy, and even now is flushed with shame and conscious guilt, will from this day grow pale, until the craven blood shall refuse to visit the haggard cheek. In his broken and distorted sleep his dreams will be more fearful than those of the "false, perjured Clarence;" and around his waking pillow, in the deep hour of night, will flit the ghosts of Meeks and Rothwell, shrieking their curses in his shrinking ear.

Upon his head rests not only the blood shed in this unfortunate strife, but also the soul-killing crime of perjury; for, surely as he lives, did the words of craft and falsehood fall from his lips, ere they were hardly loosened from the holy

volume.

THE WORLD OF BEAUTY AROUND US.

203

But I dismiss him, and do consign him to the furies, trusting, in all charity, that the terrible punishment he must suffer from the scorpion-lash of a guilty conscience will be considered in his last account.

CLIII-THE WORLD OF BEAUTY AROUND US.

HORACE MANN.

BUT a higher and holier world than the world of Ideas, or the world of Beauty, lies around us; and we find ourselves endued with susceptibilities which affiliate us to all its purity and its perfectness. The laws of nature are sublime, but there is a moral sublimity before which the highest intelligences must kneel and adore. The laws by which the winds blow, and the tides of the ocean, like a vast clepsydra, measure, with inimitable exactness, the hours of ever-flowing time; the laws by which the planets roll, and the sun vivifies and paints; the laws which preside over the subtle combinations of chemistry, and the amazing velocities of electricity; the laws of germination and production in the vegetable and animal worlds;-all these, radiant with eternal beauty as they are, and exalted above all the objects of sense, still wane and pale before the Moral Glories that apparel the universe in their celestial light. The heart can put on charms which no beauty of known things, nor imagination of the unknown, can aspire to emulate. Virtue shines in native colors, purer and brighter than pearl, or diamond, or prism, can reflect. Arabian gardens in their bloom can exhale no such sweetness as charity diffuses. Beneficence is godlike, and he who does most good to his fellow-man is the Master of Masters, and has learned the Art of Arts. Enrich and embellish the universe as you will, it is only a fit temple for the heart that loves truth with a supreme love. Inanimate vastness excites wonder; knowledge kindles admiration, but love enraptures the soul. Scientific truth is marvellous, but moral truth is divine; and whoever breathes its air and walks by its light has found the lost paradise. For him a new heaven and a new earth have already been created. His home is the sanctuary of God, the Holy of Holies.

CLIV.-DANGER OF VAST FORTUNES.

HORACE MANN,

VAST fortunes are a misfortune to the State. They confer irresponsible power; and human nature, except in the rarest instances, has proved incapable of wielding irresponsible power, without abuse. The feudalism of Capital is not a

whit less formidable than the feudalism of Force. The millionaire is as dangerous to the welfare of the community, in our day, as was the baronial lord of the middle ages. Both supply the means of shelter and of raiment on the same conditions; both hold their retainers in service by the same tenure their necessity for bread; both use their superiority to keep themselves superior. The power of money is as imperial as the power of the sword; I may as well depend upon another for my head as for my bread. The day is sure to come, when men will look back upon the prerogatives of Capital, at the present time, with as severe and as just a condemnation as we now look back upon the predatory chieftains of the Dark Ages. Weighed in the balances of the sanctuary, or even in the clumsy scales of human justice. there is no equity in the allotments, which assign to one man but a dollar a day, with working, while another has an income of a dollar a minute, without working. Under the reign of Force, or under the reign of Money, there may be here and there a good man who uses his power for blessing and not for oppressing his race; but all their natural tendencies are exclusively bad. In England, we see the feudalism of Capital approaching its catastrophe. In Ireland, we see the catastrophe consummated. Unhappy Ireland! where the objects of human existence and the purposes of human government have all been reversed; where rulers, for centuries, have ruled for the aggrandizement of themselves, and not for the happiness of their subjects; where misgovernment has reigned so long, so supremely, and so atrociously, that, at the present time, the Three Estates" of the realm are Crime, Famine, and Death.

INFLUENCE OF GENEVA UPON THE PURITANS. 205

CLV.-INFLUENCE OF REPUBLICAN GENEVA UPON THE PURITANS.

RUFUS CHOATE,

IN the reign of Mary, from 1553 to 1558, a thousand learned Englishmen fled from the stake, at home, to the happier seats of Continental Protestantism. Of these, great numbers, I know not how many, came to Geneva. They awaited the death of the Queen; and then, sooner or later, but in the time of Elizabeth, went back to England. I ascribe to that five years in Geneva an influence that has changed the history of the world. I seem to myself to trace to it, as an influence on the English race, a new Theology, a new Politics, another tone of character, the opening of another era of time and of Liberty. I seem to myself to trace to it, a portion, at least, of the objects of the great civil war in England, the republican constitution framed in the cabin of the May Flower, the divinity of Jonathan Edwards, the battle of Bunker Hill, and the Independence of America. · In that brief season, English Puritanism was changed fundamentally and forever. Why should one think this so extraordinary? There are times when whole years pass over the head of a man, and work no change of mind at all. There are others, again, when in an hour, all things pass away, and all things become new. A verse of the Bible, a glorious line of some old poet, dead a thousand years before, the new-made grave of a child, a friend killed by a thunderbolt, as in the case of Luther, some single more than tolerable pang of “ despised love," some single more intolerable act of the "oppressor's wrong and proud man's contumely," the gleam of rarer beauty on the lake or in the sky, something lighter than the fall of a leaf, or a bird's song on the shore, draws tears from him in the twinkling of an eye. When, before or since, in the history of the world, was the human character subjected to an accumulation of agents, so fitted to create it all anew, as those which encompassed the English at Geneva?

I do not make much account in this of the material grandeur and beauty which burst on their astonished senses, as around the solitudes of Patmos. It is of the moral agents of change of which I would speak. Passing over the theology which they learned there, consider the politics they learned there.

Consider that the asylum into which they had been