Is there, as reason, conscience, Scripture, say, LESSON LX. Duelling.-BEECHER. AND now let me ask you solemnly; will you persist in your attachment to these guilty men? Will you any longer, either deliberately or thoughtlessly, vote for them? Will you renounce allegiance to your Maker, and cast the bible behind your back? Will you confide in men void of the fear of God and destitute of moral principle? Will you intrust life to murderers-liberty to despots? Are you patriots, and will you constitute those legislators who despise you, and despise equal laws, and wage war with the eternal principles of justice? Are you christians, and by upholding duellists will you deluge the land with blood, and fill it with widows and with orphans? Will you aid in the prostration of justice-in the escape of criminals-in the extinction of liberty? Will you place in the chair of state-in the senate on the bench of justice, or in the assembly, men who, if able, would murder you for speaking truth? Shall your elections turn on expert shooting, and your deliberative bodies become an host of armed men? Will you destroy public morality by tolerating, yea, rewarding, the most infamous crimes? Will you teach your children that there is no guilt in murder? Will you instruct them to think lightly of duelling, and train them up to destroy or be destroyed in the bloody field? Will you bestow your suffrage, when you know that by withholding it you may arrest this deadly evilwhen this too is the only way in which it can be done, and when the present is perhaps the only period in which resistance can avail-when the remedy is so easy, so entirely in your power; and when God, if you do not punish these guilty men, will most inevitably punish you? If the widows and the orphans, which this wasting evil has created and is yearly multiplying, might all stand before you, could you witness their tears; listen to their details of anguish? Should they point to the murderers of their fathers, their husbands, and their children, and lift up their voice and implore your aid to arrest an evil which had made them desolate-could you disregard their ery? Before their eyes could you approach the poll and patronize by your vote the destroyers of their peace? Had you beheld a dying father, conveyed bleeding and agonizing to his distracted family: had you heard their piercing shrieks, and witnessed their frantic agonywould you reward the savage man who had plunged them in distress? Had the duellist destroyed your neighbour -had your own father been killed by the man who solicits your suffrage-had your son been brought to your door, pale in death, and weltering in blood, laid low by his hand-would you then think the crime a small one? Would you honour with your confidence, and elevate to power by your vote, the guilty monster? And what would you think of your neighbours, if, regardless of your agony, they should reward him? And yet, such scenes of unutterable anguish, are multiplied every year. Every year the duellist is cutting down the neighbour of somebody. Every year, and many times in the year, a father is brought dead or dying to his family, or a son laid breathless at the feet of his parents. And every year you are patronizing, by your votes, the men who commit these crimes, and looking with cold indifference upon, and even mocking the sorrows of your neighbour.-Be-I admonish you solemnly to beware, and especially such of you as have promising sons preparing for active life, lest, having no feeling for the sorrows of another, you be called to weep for your own sorrow; lest your sons fall by the hand of the very murderer you vote for, or by the hand of some one whom his example has trained to the work of blood. ware With such considerations before you, why, in the name of heaven, do you wish to vote for such men? What have they done for you-what can they do, that better men cannot as happily accomplish? And will you incur all this guilt and hazard all these consequences for nothing? Have you no religion-no conscience-no love to your country? No attachment to liberty-no humanity-no sympathy-no regard to your own welfare in this life; and no fear of consequences in the life to come?Oh, my countrymen, awake! Awake to crimes which are your disgrace-to miseries which know not a limitto judgments which will make you desolate. LESSON LXI. Moral Sublimity.-WAYLAND. PHILOSOPHERS have speculated much concerning a process of sensation, which has commonly been denominated the emotion of sublimity. Aware that, like any other simple feeling, it must be incapable of definition, they have seldom attempted to define it; but, content with remarking the occasions on which it is excited, have told us that it arises in general from the contemplation of whatever is vast in nature, splendid in intellect, or lofty in morals: or, to express the same idea somewhat varied, in the language of a critic of antiquity," That alone is truly sub lime, of which the conception is vast, the effect irresistible, and the remembrance scarcely, if ever, to be erased." But, although philosophers alone have written about this emotion, they are far from being the only men who have felt it. The untutored peasant, when he has seen the autumnal tempest collecting between the hills, and, as it advanced, enveloping in misty obscurity village and hamlet, forest and meadow, has tasted the sublime in all its reality; and, whilst the thunder has rolled and the lightning flashed around him, has exulted in the view of Nature moving forth in her majesty. The untaught sailor-boy, listlessly hearkening to the idle ripple of the moonlight wave, when on a sudden he has thought upon the unfathomable abyss beneath him, and the wide waste of waters around him, and the infinite expanse above him, has enjoyed to the full the emotion of sublimity, whilst his inmost soul has trembled at the vastness of its own conceptions. But why need I multiply illustrations from nature? Who does not recollect the emotion he has felt while surveying aught, in the material world, of terror or of vastness? And this sensation is not produced by grandeur in material objects alone. It is also excited on most of those occasions in which we see man tasking to the uttermost the energies of his intellectual or moral nature. Through the long lapse of centuries, who, without emotion, has read of Leonidas and his three hundred's throwing themselves as a barrier before the myriads of Xerxes, and contending unto death for the liberties of Greece? But we need not turn to classic story to find all that is great in human action; we find it in our own times, and in the history of our own country. Who is there of us that, even in the nursery, has not felt his spirit stir within him, when, with child-like wonder, he has listened to the story of Washington? And although the terms of the narrative were scarcely intelligible, yet the young soul kindled at the thought of one man's working out the delivery of a nation. And as our understanding, strengthened by age, was at last able to grasp the detail of this transaction, we saw that our infantile conceptions had fallen far short of its grandeur. Oh! if an American citizen ever exults in the contemplation of all that is sublime in human enterprise, it is when, bringing to mind the men who first conceived the idea of this nation's independence, he beholds them estimating the power of her oppressor, the resources of her citizens, deciding in their collected might that this nation should be free, and, through the long years of trial that ensued, never blenching from their purpose, but freely redeeming the pledge they had given, to consecrate to it "their lives, their fortunes, and their sacred honour." LESSON LXII. Address to the Survivors of the Battle of Bunker Hill.- VENERABLE men! you have come down to us, from a former generation. Heaven has bounteously lengthened out your lives, that you might behold this joyous day. You are now, where you stood, fifty years ago, this very hour, with your brothers, and your neighbours, shoulder to shoulder, in the strife for your country. Behold, how altered! The same heavens are indeed over your heads; the same ocean rolls at your feet; but all else, how changed! You hear now no roar of hostile cannon, you see no mixed volumes of smoke and flame rising from burning Charlestown. The ground strewed with the dead and the dying; the impetuous charge; the steady and successful repulse; the loud call to repeated assault; the summoning of all that is manly to repeated resistance; a thousand bosoms freely and fearlessly bared in an instant to whatever of terror there may be in war and death;all these you have witnessed, but you witness them no more. All is peace.. The heights of yonder metropolis, its towers and roofs, which you then saw filled with wives and children and countrymen in distress and terror, and looking with unutterable emotions for the issue of the combat, have presented you to-day with the sight of its whole happy. population, come out to welcome and greet you with an universal jubilee. Yonder proud ships, by a felicity of post |
