As a political element, journalism has entirely changed the position of statesmen, and seems destined to subvert the secret machinery of diplomacy. These results grow out of the enlightenment and circulation of thought on national questions induced by their constant public discussion by the press; their tendency is to break up monopolies of information, to scatter the knowledge of facts, and openly recognize great human interests. By condensing the mists of popular feeling into clear and powerful streams, or shooting them into luminous crystals, the judgment, the sympathies, and the will of mankind are gradually modified. Hence, all who represent the people are acted upon as they never could have been when authority was less exposed to criticism, and the means of a mutual understanding and comparison of ideas among men less organized and effective. It has been justly observed that no danger can result from the most seductive ‘leader’ on a public question, while the same sheet contains a full report of all the facts relating to it. The pamphlet and gazette of Addison’s day, and earlier, are now combined in the newspaper. In great exigencies, however, the immediate promulgation of facts may be a serious national peril. An experienced American editor, and careful observer of the phenomena of the Rebellion, thus emphatically testifies to the possible evil of an enterprising press: ‘I believe most strongly now, that this Rebellion would have been subdued ere this, if, at the outbreak, the Government had suppressed every daily newspaper which contained a line or a word upon the war question, except to give the results of engagements. Our daily journals have kept the Confederates minutely and seasonably informed. The greater the vigilance and accuracy of these journals, the greater their value to the enemy.’ But a more significant result than this may be found in the test which the Rebellion has proved, not only to social and national, but to professional life, and especially the editorial. How completely has the prestige of newspapers as organs of opinion faded away before the facts of the hour! What poor prophets, reasoners, historical scholars, patriots, and men, have some of the conductors of the press proved! With what distrust is it now regarded; and how does public confidence refuse any nucleus but that of individual character. The press, therefore, as a popular organ, is unrivalled. It now illustrates every phase, both of reform and conservatism, every religious doctrine, scientific interest, and social tendency. Take up at random any popular newspaper of the day, and what a variety of subjects and scope of vision it covers, superficially indeed, but to the philosophic mind none the less significantly; the world is therein pictured in miniature—the world of to-day.

Probably the most universal charm of a newspaper is the gratification it affords to what phrenologists call the organ of eventuality. Curiosity is a trait of human nature which belongs to every order of mind, and actuates the infant as well as the sage. To its more common manifestations the newspaper appeals, and indeed originated in this natural craving for incident. In its most sympathetic degree, this feeling is the source of the profound interest which tragedy inspires, and its lower range is the occasion of that pleasure which gossip yields. It is a curious fact that the same propensity should be at once the cause of the noblest and the meanest exhibitions of character; yet the poetic impulse and reverent inquiry of the highest scientific intelligence—intent upon exploring the wonders of the universe—is but the exalted and ultimate development of this love of the new and desire to penetrate the unknown. The everlasting inquiry for news, which meets us in the street, at the hearthstone, and even beside the bier and in the church, constantly evinces this universal passion. How often does that commonplace question harshly salute the ear of the reflective; what a satire it is upon the glory of the past; how it baffles sentiment, chills enthusiasm, and checks earnestness! The avidity with which fresh intelligence, although of no personal concern, is seized, the eagerness with which it is circulated, and the rapidity with which it is forgotten, are more significant of the transitory conditions of human life than the data of the calendar or the ruins of Balbek. They prove that we live altogether in the immediate, that our dearest associations may be invaded by the most trivial occurrence, that the mental acquisitions of years do not invalidate a childish love of amusement, and that the mere impertinences of external life have a stronger hold upon our nature than the deepest mysteries of consciousness. ‘It seems,’ wrote Fisher Ames, ‘as if newspaper wares were made to suit a market as much as any other. The starers, and wonderers, and gapers engross a very large share of the attention of all the sons of the type. I pray the whole honourable craft to banish as many murders, and horrid accidents, and monstrous births, and prodigies from their gazettes, by degrees, as their readers will permit; and, by degrees, coax them back to contemplate life and manners, to consider events with some common sense, and to study Nature where she can be known.’ On the other hand, this curiosity about what does not concern us, is undoubtedly linked with the more generous sympathies, and is, in a degree, prompted by them; so that philanthropy, good fellowship, and the amenities of social life and benevolent enterprise, are more or less the result of the natural interest we feel in the affairs of nations and those of our neighbour. If the newspaper, therefore, considered merely as a vehicle of general information in regard to passing events, has a tendency to diffuse and render fragmentary our mental life; on the other hand, it keeps the attention fixed upon something besides self, it directs the gaze beyond a narrow circle, and brings home to the heart a sense of universal laws, natural affinities, and progressive interests. But curiosity is not altogether a disinterested passion; and it is amusing to see how newspapers act upon the idiosyncrasy or the interest of readers. The broker unfolds the damp sheet at the stock column; the merchant turns at once to the ship-news; the spinster first reads the marriages; the politician, legislative debates; and the author, literary criticisms; while lovers of the marvellous, like Abernethy’s patient, enjoy the murders. To how many human propensities does the newspaper thus casually minister! Old gentlemen are, indeed, excusable for losing their temper on a cold morning, when kept waiting for a look into the paper by some spelling reader; and, to a benign observer, the comfort of some poor frequenter of a coffee-house oracularly dispensing his gleanings from the journals, is pleasant to consider,—a cheap and harmless gratification, an inoffensive and solacing phase of self-importance. We can easily imagine the anxious expectancy with which the visitors at a gentleman’s country-seat in England, before the epoch of journals, awaited the news-letter from town,—destined to pass from house to house, through an isolated neighbourhood, and almost worn out in the process of thumbing.

Three traditions exist to account for the origin of newspapers. The first attributes their introduction to the custom prevalent at Venice, about the middle of the fifteenth century, of reading the written intelligence received from the seat of war, then waging by the Republic against Solyman the Second, in Dalmatia, at a fixed time and place, for the benefit of all who chose to hear. French annalists, on the other hand, trace the great invention to a gossiping medical practitioner of Paris, who used to cheer his patients with all the news he could gather, and, to save time, had it written out, at intervals, and distributed among them; while an English historian, quoted by Disraeli the elder, says, ‘they commenced at the epoch of the Spanish Armada; and that we are indebted to the wisdom of Elizabeth and the prudence of Burleigh for the first newspaper.’[33] The same authority conjectures that the word gazette is derived from gazzerótta, a magpie, but it is usually ascribed to gazet, a small coin,—the original price of a copy in Venice. One of the most startling relics of Pompeii is the poster advertising gladiators. The oldest newspaper in the world, according to L’Imprimière, is published at Pekin. It is printed on silk, and has appeared every week for a thousand years. Whatever the actual origin, however, it is natural to suppose that a gradual transition from oral to written, and thence to printed news, was the process by which the modern journal advanced towards its present completeness. It is remarkable that the retrograde movement essential to despotism in all interests, is obvious in the newspaper;—censorship driving free minds from written expression, as in the recent instance of Kossuth when advocating Hungarian progress.

A rigid and complete analytical history of the newspaper would perhaps afford the best illustration of the social and civic development of the civilized world. Commencing with a mere official announcement of national events, such as the ancient Romans daily promulgated in writing, we find the next precursor of the public journal in that systematic correspondence of the scholars of the middle ages, whereby erudite, philosophical, or æsthetic ideas were regularly interchanged and diffused. From this to the written circular, distributed among the English aristocracy, the transition was a natural result of economical and social necessity; and the historian of the subject in Great Britain finds in the popularity of the ballad a still further development of the same instinct and want expressing itself among the people. As their vital interest in civic questions enlarged, pamphlets began to be written and circulated on the current topics of the day; then a periodical sheet was issued containing foreign intelligence, among the earliest specimens whereof is, The Weekly Newes from Italy and Germanie, which first appeared in 1622. It is a characteristic fact that the first two special newspaper organs that were published in England were devoted to sporting[34] and medical intelligence. But it was reserved for the last century to expand these germinal experiments into what we now justly consider a great civilizing institution. When Burke[35] began to apply philosophy to politics, and Junius to set the example of memorable anonymous writing on public questions, and Wilkes to battle for the liberty of the press, new and powerful intellectual and moral elements were infused into journalism; to these, vast mechanical improvements gave new diffusion; discussion gave birth to systems, invention to new industrial interests, social culture to original phases and forms of popular literary taste and talent. In England, Hazlitt’s psychological criticisms, Jerrold’s local wit, Thackeray’s incisive satire, the descriptive talent of scores of travelling reporters, and the dramatic genius of such observers as Charles Dickens, blended their versatile attractions with the vivid chronicle of daily news and the elaborate treatise of political essayists; while in France, from Rousseau, Grimm, and Mirabeau, to Thiers and St. Beuve, the journal represented the sternest political and the most finished literary ability; from the old Journal Etranger, devoted to scandal, to Marat’s Ami du Peuple, the vicissitudes and the genius of France are enrolled in her journalism.

The French papers have the largest subscription, those of London the most complete establishments, and in America they are far more numerous than in other countries; over three thousand are now published, and their price is about one-seventh that of the English. The tone of the American press is usually less dignified and intellectual than that of France and England. It has also the peculiarity of being maintained, in a great degree, by advertisements; thus the commercial as well as the party element—both dangerous to the elevation of the press—enter largely into its character here. It has been said of penny-a-liners that they are to the newspaper corps what Cossacks are to a regular army; and the activity of journalism in Great Britain, and the detail of its enterprise, are signally evidenced by such a class of writers, as well by the fact that in 1826, when Canning sent British troops to Portugal, newspaper reporters went with the army—a custom which in the Crimean, East India, and recent American war, has given birth to such memorable correspondence. The shipping intelligence of United States journals is more minute, the philosophical eloquence of those of Paris more striking, and the details of court gossip and criminal jurisprudence more full in those of London,—characteristics which respectively mirror national traits and the existent state of society in each latitude. The shareholders of the London Times have occasionally divided a net profit of one hundred and twenty thousand pounds—the well-earned recompense for the complete arrangement and efficient exercise of this greatest of modern instruments. It is not surprising that the most renowned of writers have availed themselves of a medium so direct and universal. Chateaubriand wrote in the Journal des Débats against Polignac; Malte-Brun contributed geographical articles to the same print; Benjamin Constant’s views were unfolded in the Minerve Française; Lafitte’s opinions found expression in the Journal du Commerce. Lamartine’s ideal of a journal is one which has ‘assez de raison pour convenir aux hommes sérieux, assez de témerité pour plaire aux hommes légeres, assez d’excentricité pour plaire aux aventereux.’ With all the restrictions to which despotism in France has subjected the press, its history as a whole is as Protean as Paris life, and reflects the tendencies of national character. As early as 1650, there was a Gazette de Burlesque, soon after a Mercury Galant; the Journal des Débats is devoted to facts and its own dignity, the Siècle represents mercantile interests, La Presse is full of ideas, and has been well described as partaking of the nature of a torrent which ‘se grossit par la resistance.’[36] Napoleon depended on the Moniteur, and kept the press low because he feared its influence more than an army. The proprietors of the Constitutionel often pay a hundred and fifty francs for a single column. William Livingston wrote effectively, in 1752, in the Independent Reflector, of New York, against Episcopal encroachments. Freedom of the press, in America, was established by the trial of the printer Zenger. Kossuth was a journalist while at the head of a nation. Cavour began his public career in the same capacity, and Heine was the admirable correspondent of leading German journals for many years. Centralization vastly increases the influence of journalism in Paris, and its history there is a perfect index of the successive revolutions. From Benjamin Franklin to Walter Savage Landor, and from Junius to Jack Downing, these vehicles of ideas have enshrined memorable individualities as well as phases of general opinion. Jefferson, Hamilton, Rufus King, De Witt Clinton, and Everett—all our statesmen—have been newspaper writers.

Specimens of recorded thought from the earliest to the present time would aptly mark the history of civilization; the writings on stone, wax, bones, lead, palm-leaves, bark, linen, and parchment—inscribed by patient manual toil, denoting the era when knowledge was a mystery and its possessor a seer; illuminated chronicles and missals representing its cloistered years;—black-letter, the transition period when it began to expand, although still a luxury; and the newspaper, illustrating its modern diffusion and universality. The scribe’s vocation was at once superseded by the invention of printing, and the scholar’s monopoly broken up; hence the scarcity and value of books prior to the times of Faust and Caxton, can scarcely be appreciated by this generation. Wonderful indeed is the contrast to the American traveller, as he muses beside the Anapus at Syracuse, over the papyrus vegetating in its waters,—between the scrolls of antiquity engrossed on this material, and the twenty thousand closely-printed sheets thrown off in an hour by one of the mammoth daily presses of his native country. This rapidity of production, however, is almost as oblivious in its tendency as the limited copies produced by the pen and transmitted in manuscript. It may be said of exclusive newspaper writers and readers, with a few memorable exceptions, that their intellectual triumphs are ‘writ in water;’ and melancholy is that fate which condemns a man of real genius to the labours of a newspaper editor; fragmentary and fugitive, though incessant, are his labours,—usually destructive of style, and without permanent memorials; when of a political nature, they often enlist bitter feelings and promote a knowledge of the world calculated to indurate as well as expand the mind. A veteran French writer for the press describes the editor’s life as always ‘troublée et militante.’ An American poet,[37] whose divine art is a safeguard against the worst evils of journalism, in a recent history of his paper, thus speaks of the influence of the employment upon character:—

In regard to the influence of newspapers on style, it has been noted that since their cheap issue, colloquial simplicity has vanished. ‘A single number of a London morning paper,’ observes a writer in Blackwood ‘(which, in half a century, has expanded from the size of a dinner napkin to that of a breakfast tablecloth, from that to a carpet, and will soon be forced by the expansion of public business into something resembling the mainsail of a frigate), already is equal in printed matter to a very large octavo volume. Every old woman in the nation now reads daily a vast miscellany, in one volume royal octavo; thus the whole artificial dialect of books has come into play as the dialect of ordinary life. This is one form of the evil impressed upon style by journalism; a dire monotony of bookish idiom has stiffened all freedom of expression.’[38] As to its effect on the morale, when pursued exclusively as a material interest, one of the most acute and observant of modern French writers says:—‘Le journal, au lieu d’être un sacerdoce, est devenu un moyen pour les partis; de moyen, il s’est fait commerce; et comme tous les commerces, il est sans foi ni loi;’ and in allusion to the French, bitterly adds, ‘nous verrons les journaux, dirigés d’abord par des hommes d’honneur, tomber plus tard sous le gouvernement de plus médiocre, qui auront la patience et lâcheté de gomme elastique qui manquent aux beaux genies, ou à des epiciers qui auront de l’argent pour acheter des plumes.’ Macaulay, says a French critic, ‘a conservé dans l’histoire, les habitudes qu’ il avait gagnées dans les journaux.’ Journalism has proved an effective discipline for statesmen; the late prime minister of Sardinia first dealt with public questions in the columns of a political journal.

But whatever facility of expression and tact in the popular exposition of political science may be acquired by the statesman or annalist, in the practice of journalism, there is no doubt that the worst perversions of ‘English undefiled’ have originated in, and been confirmed by, newspapers. On this subject, an American writer, at once philosophical, erudite, and liberal, who has treated of the history and influence of the English language with remarkable insight and eloquence, emphatically testifies to the verbal corruptions and consequent moral degradation of the newspaper press. ‘The dialect of personal vituperation,’ says Marsh, ‘the rhetoric of malice in all its modifications, the Billingsgate of vulgar hate, the art of damning with faint praise, the sneer of contemptuous irony, have been sedulously cultivated; and, combined with a certain flippancy of expression and ready command of a tolerably extensive vocabulary, are enough to make the fortune of any sharp, shallow, and unprincipled journalist who is content with the fame and the pelf.’

The interest which belongs to newspapers, as arenas for discussion and records of fact, is greatly marred by the abuses of the press. No more humiliating exhibition of human passion can be imagined than printed scurrility; and no meaner or more contemptible influence of skulking treachery than anonymous libels. By what anomaly base spirits enact and endure insult in this form, which public opinion and the faintest self-respect compel them to resent when orally uttered, we have never been able to explain. It is, however, a satire on the alleged freedom we enjoy in this country, that any malicious poltroon, who has the means to purchase types, may defame the character, and thereby injure the prosperity, of any one towards whom he entertains a grudge, with comparative impunity. Indeed, if a man comes before the public in any shape, even in that of a benefactor, he is liable to gross personal attacks from the press; here the shafts of envy, of party hatred, of blackguardism and of detraction, find a covert whence they may be sped with deadly aim and little or no chance of punishment. To realize at once the moral grandeur and the degrading abuse of which the press is capable, one should read Milton’s discourse on the Liberty of Unlicensed Printing, and then a history of cases under the law of libel. The choice of weapons is allowed his enemy even by the inveterate duellist; but there is this essential dishonour in the attacks of the practised writer—that he adroitly uses an instrument which his antagonist often cannot wield. Thus the laws of honourable warfare are basely set aside; and cowardice often wins an ostensible triumph. The meanest threat we ever heard was that of a popular author towards a spirited and generous but uneducated farmer with whom he was in altercation, and who proposed a resort to arms:—‘I hold a pen that shall point the world’s finger of scorn at you!’ The cheapest abuse is that which can be poured out in newspapers; and besides the comparatively defenceless position of the assailed, if he have no skill in pencraft, it is the more contemptible because premeditated; the insulting word may be uttered in the heat of rage, but the slanderous paragraph goes through the process of writing and printing;—it is, therefore, the result of a deliberate act. The ‘scar of wrath’ left on the heart by the partisan combats of the press is seldom honourable, and the records of duels, persecutions, and street-fights, originating in libels, is one of the most degrading, to all concerned, of any in social history. Vituperation and invective, Billingsgate and the cant nicknames of newspaper controversy, belong to the most unredeemed species of blackguardism. No wounds rankle in the human bosom like those inflicted by the press; and no agent of redress should be used with such thorough observance of the golden rule. ‘The French,’ says Matthew Arnold, ‘talk of the “brutalité des journaux Anglais.” What strikes them comes from the necessary inherent tendencies of newspaper writing not being checked in England by any centre of intelligent and urbane spirit, but rather stimulated by coming in contact with a provincial spirit.’

From these various capabilities and liabilities of journalism we may infer what are the requisites of an editor. It is obvious that his intellectual equipment should be more versatile and complete than that demanded by any other profession. He is to interpret the events of the day, and must, of course, be versed in the history of the past; he is to speak a universal language, and the gifts of expression must be his chief endowment; he exercises a mighty influence, and, therefore, judgment, self-respect, a recognition of rights and duties, and a benevolent impulse are essential. The juste milieu between moral courage and respect for public sentiment should be his goal. It is a significant fact that, in this country, where there are more readers than in any other, and, at the same time, entire freedom of the press, journals have not attained to the intellectual standard of the best of foreign origin, nor has the profession of an editor reached the rank it has in Europe. With a few exceptions, the vocation has been adopted, as school-keeping used to be, as the most available resource. Cleverness has usually been the substitute for acquirement; loyalty to some dogma for philosophy, and glib phrases and cant terms for style. In some memorable cases, where the London system of a division of labour is resorted to, and the French practice of careful rhetoric and reasoning applied to current topics, the result has approximated to what a leading journal should be. Such names as Franklin, Russell, Thomas, Duane, Buckingham, Walsh, Gales, Noah, King, Hoffman, and the eminent contemporary editors of America, bear, it must be remembered, but a very small proportion to the sum total of newspapers published in this country; and it is the average ability and character of editors to which we refer. Yet familiarity alone blinds us to the ‘extraordinary talent’ exhibited in the journalism of our times. ‘I’ll be shot,’ says Christopher North to the shepherd, ‘if Junius, were he alive now, would set the world on the rave as he did some half century ago.’

The rarest and most needful moral quality in an editor is magnanimity. Of all vocations this is the one with which narrow motives and exclusive points of view are most incompatible. It is true that the office is self-imposed; but in its very nature is included a comprehensive tone of mind and feeling; the editor, therefore, who pronounces judgment upon a book, a work of art, a public man, or popular subject, according to his personal animosities or selfish interests, annuls his own claim to the position he occupies. If the pulpit, the medical chair, the justice’s bench, or the authority of elective office is exclusively used by an individual for direct personal ends, for the exclusive emolument of friends, or the gratification of private revenge, the perversion is resented at once and indignantly by public opinion; and the same violation of a general principle for a particular end is equally unjustifiable in the press. Yet how many journals serve but as channels for the prejudices, the likes and dislikes, the plans and whims of their editors; so that at last we recognize them, not as broad and reliable expositors of great questions and critical taste, but as mouthpieces for the spite, the flattery, and the ambition of a single vain mortal! For such evils Milton’s arguments, for patient toleration of all kinds of printed ideas, are the best remedy: ‘Punishing wits,’ he says, ‘enhances their authority; errors known, read, and collated, are of main service toward the speedy attainment of what is truest; and though all the winds of doctrine were let loose to play upon the earth, so truth be in the field, we do injuriously by licensing and prohibiting to misdoubt her strength.’ With all its defects, therefore, the emanations of a free press are the best expositors of the immediate in taste, opinion, and affairs; and copies of The Times, the Court Journal, and Bell’s Life in London, deposited under the corner-stone of a modern English edifice, are as authentic memorials of the country and people as they exist to-day, as the styles of Grecian architecture, or the characteristics of Italian painting, of epochs in the history of art, and far more detailed, minute, and elaborate. The complex state of society, the multitudinous aspect of life, the progress of science, and its influence on social economy, can indeed only be designated by such a versatile record. The miserable little gazzettas issued in the south of Europe, containing only the diluted news of the French journals; the spirited feuilletons of the cleverest authors of the day that appear in the latter, the enormous advertising sheets in this country, and the able rhetoric and argument of the daily press in Great Britain, are so many landmarks and gauges of the civic life, the mental recreations, the prosperity, and the political intelligence of these different countries. Although Fanny Kemble snubbed the press-gang, ironically so called,—perhaps in this age there is no office capable of a higher ideal standard and a more practical efficiency combined, as that of the public writer. Let us suppose such a man endowed with the greatest faculty of expression, learned in history and the arts, with philosophic insight and poetical sensibility, chivalric in tone, uniting the principles of conservatism and reform, devoted to humanity, generous, heroic, independent, and ‘clear in his great office;’ and thus furnished and inspired, waging the battle of honest opinion, a staunch advocate of truth, stripping the mask from fanaticism and dishonesty, and shedding pure intellectual light on the common mind;—no more noble function can be imagined. Seldom, however, is the ideal of an editor even approached; and hence the wisdom of an eclectic system and a division of labour; concentrating upon the same journal the humour of one, the statistical researches of another, the learning of a third, and the rhetoric of a fourth, until all the needful elements are brought into action for a common result.

In periods of war, emigration, or catastrophes of any kind, the newspaper becomes a chart of destiny to the heart, and is seized with overwhelming anxiety to learn the fate of the absent and the loved; and, in times of peace and comfort, it is the readiest pastime. What traveller does not remember with zest the intervals of leisure he has spent, under the trees of the Palais Royal, over a fresh gazette; or the eagerness with which, in an Italian café, he has devoured Galignani with his breakfast? It is difficult to imagine how the social reforms that distinguish the age could have been realized without the aid of newspapers; or by what other means popular sympathy could be kindled simultaneously on both sides of the globe. In view of such offices, we must regard the editor as a species of modern improvisatore, who gathers from clubs, theatres, legislative halls, private society, and the streets, the idea and the elemental spirit of the hour, the topic of the day, the moral influence born of passing events, and then concentrates and elaborates it to give forth its vital principles and absolute significance.

As a medium of controversy, the advantages of the newspaper are signal. In 1685, the discussion of popery in England was carried on by means of tracts issued from the presses of Oxford, Cambridge, and London; and some of the pamphlets of Defoe, Steele, and other popular writers, had a large sale; but the circulation of these vehicles of argument was limited compared to the daily journals of our day; and in order to reach the people, controversialist and agreeable essayists, from the times of ‘Sir Roger L’Estrange’ to that of ‘O. P. Q.,’ have wisely availed themselves of newspapers. That they now aid rather than form public opinion, however, is quite obvious. The implicit faith once bestowed upon editors has departed; and no class are more pertinacious in asserting the right of private judgment than habitual readers of journals; they derive from them materials of discussion rather than positive inferences. Yet there are two qualities that in Great Britain and America gain an editor permanent admirers—good sense and an individual style. The thunder, as Carlyle calls it, of Edward Sterling in the London Times, and the plain words of Cobbett, are instances. In fact, the same qualities insure consideration for a newspaper as for an individual; tone, manliness, grace or vigour, full and free knowledge, wit and fancy, and the sincerity or geniality of the editor’s character, are not less recognized in his paragraphs than in his behaviour. But as a general rule, as before suggested, in the United States, the press is the expositor, not the herald, of opinion; the newspapers simply mark the level of popular feeling; their criticism seldom transcends the existent taste, and their tone is rarely elevated above that of the majority. Between the radical and the conservative there appears no medium; and newspapers symbolize these two extremes. In our large cities there is always one newspaper which has a name for respectability, of which its editors are extremely jealous; it never startles, offends, or inspires, but pursues an even, unexceptionable course, is praised by old people who have taken it for years, and desire that it shall contain their obituary; its news, however, is usually stale, its opinions timid, and its spirit behind the age. To represent the opposite element, there is always a vigorous, speculative, and fresh-toned newspaper, which continually utters startling things, and suggests glorious impossibilities; it is the exponent of reform, a harbinger of better times, and appeals to hope and fancy, rather than to memory and reflection. Now the experienced reader will at once perceive that an editor, worthy the name, should be an eclectic, and combine in his own mind and work the expression of both these extremes of opinion and sentiment; but it is found, by experiment, that a hobby is the means of temporary success,—that a catholic temper is unappreciated, and that, in a republic, combativeness and self-esteem are the organs to be most profitably addressed.

There is a very large class whose reading is confined to newspapers, and they manifest the wisdom of Pope’s maxim about the danger of a little learning. Adopting the cant and slang phrases of the hour, and satisfied with the hasty conjectures and partial glimpses of truth that diurnal journals usually contain, they are at once superficial and dogmatic, full of fragmentary ideas and oracular commonplace. If such is the natural effect upon an undisciplined mind of exclusive newspaper reading, even the scholar, the thinker, and the man of refined taste is exposed to mental dissipation from the same cause. A celebrated French philosopher, recently deceased, remarkable for severe and efficient mental labour, told an American friend that he had not read a newspaper for four years. It is incalculable what productiveness of mind and freshness of conception is lost to the cultivated intellect by the habit of beginning the day with newspapers. The brain, refreshed by sleep, is prepared to act genially in the morning hours; and a statistical table, prepared by an able physiologist, shows that those authors who give this period to labour, most frequently attain longevity. Scott is a memorable example of the healthfulness and efficiency attending the practice. If, therefore, the student, the man of science, or the author dissipates his mental vigour, and the nervous energy induced by a night’s repose, in skimming over the countless topics of a newspaper, he is too much in relation with things in general to concentrate easily his thoughts: his mind has been diverted, and his sympathies too variously excited, to readily gather around a special theme. Those intent upon self-culture, or intellectual results, should, therefore, make this kind of reading a pastime, and resort to it in the intervals of more consecutive thought. There is no element of civilization that debauches the mind of our age more than the indiscriminate and exclusive perusal of newspapers. Only by consulting history, by disciplining the reasoning powers in the study of philosophy, and cherishing a true sense of the beautiful by communion with the poets,—in a word, only by habitual reference to standard literature, can we justly estimate the record of the hour. There must be great examples in the mind, great principles of judgment and taste, or the immediate appeal to these qualities is ignorantly answered; whereas, the thoughtful, intelligent comments of an educated reader of journals upon the questions they discuss, the precedents he brings in view, and the facts of the past to which he refers, place the immediate in relation with the universal, and enable us to seize upon essential truth. To depend for mental recreation upon newspapers is a desperate resource; not to consult them is to linger behind the age. De Tocqueville has shown that devotion to the immediate is characteristic of republics; and this tendency is manifest in the prevalence of newspapers in the United States. They, in a great measure, supersede the demand for a more permanent native literature; they foster a taste for ephemeral topics and modes of thought, and lamentably absorb, in casual efforts, gifts and graces of mind which, under a different order of things, would have attained not only a higher, but a lasting development. The comparative importance of newspapers among us, as materials of history, is evidenced by the fact that the constant reference to their files has induced the historical societies to propose an elaborate index to facilitate the labours of inquirers, which has been felicitously called a diving-bell for the sea of print. A list of the various journals now in existence would be found to include not only every political party and religious sect in the country, but every theory of life, every science, profession, and taste, from phrenology to dietetics, and from medicine, war, and odd-fellowship, to literature, catholicism, and sporting. Tribunals and punsters, not less than fashion and chess-players, have their printed organ. What was a subordinate element, has become an exclusive feature. ‘In those days,’ writes Lamb, ‘every morning-paper, as an essential retainer to its establishment, kept an author who was bound to furnish daily a quantum of witty paragraphs at sixpence a joke.’ Now Punch and Charivari monopolize the fun, and grave and gay are separately embodied. The cosmopolitan nature of the people would as obviously appear in the number of journals issued in foreign languages, each nation and tribe having its newspaper organ; and an analysis of the contents, even of one popular journal for a single year, would be found to touch the entire circle of human knowledge and vicissitude, without penetrating to a vital cause, or expanding to a comprehensive principle, yet affording a boundless horizon;—astronomical phenomena, causes célèbres, earthquakes, the advent of a great cantatrice, shipwrecks and revolutions, battles and bankruptcies, freshets and fires, émeutes and hailstorms, gold discoveries, anniversaries, executions, Arctic expeditions, World’s Fairs, the utterance of patriots, and the acts of usurpers; all the materials of history, the suggestions of philosophy, and the visions of poetry, in their chaotic, elemental, and actual state. It is evident that more excitement than truth, more food for curiosity than aid to reflection, more vague knowledge than actual wisdom, is thus promulgated and preserved. The harvest of the immediate is comparatively barren; and life only proves the truth of Dr. Johnson’s association of intellectual dignity with the past and future. The individual, to be true to himself, must take a firm stand against the encroachments of this restless, temporary, and absorbing life of the moment represented by the newspaper; he must cleave to Memory and Hope; he must look before and after, or his mind will be superficial in its activity, and fruitless in its growth.

There is no mechanical invention around which cluster such interesting associations as that of printing; the indirect agency of the press and of journalism is remarkable; and this is owing to the relation they bear to the world at large, and to personal improvement. The newspaper office has always been a nucleus for wits, politicians, and literati,—a nursery of local genius, and a school for knowledge of the world, and criticism. In Franklin’s autobiography, the natural effect of even a mechanical connection with the press is memorably unfolded; and scarcely a great name in modern history is unallied with some incident or activity connected with the daily press. Otis, Adams, Hancock, and Warren, used to meet at the office of the Boston Gazette, and write essays on colonial rights in its columns. Talleyrand and Louis Philippe frequented the sanctum of an editor in the same town, to read the Moniteur and discuss news. Chateaubriand first heard of the king’s flight from a stray newspaper picked up in a log hut in the backwoods of America; and it sent him back at once to the army of the Princes. Horne Tooke’s Diversions of Purley were written to beguile his imprisonment occasioned by a libel; and his trial resulted in making parliamentary reports legal. Hunt’s prison-life, for which he was indebted to his comments on the Prince-Regent in the Examiner, is the most charming episode in his memoirs; and some of the noblest flights of Erskine’s eloquence arose from the defence of those prosecuted for constructive treason based on the free expression of opinion in regard to public questions. Jefferson thought Freneau’s paper ‘prevented the Constitution from galloping into a monarchy;’ it was in the columns of a daily journal that Hamilton defended the proclamation of neutrality. It has been said that the most reliable history of the French Revolution, and wars of the Republic, could be gleaned from the pages of an American journal of the day, conducted by a man of political knowledge and military aptitude, who combined from various prejudiced foreign papers what he deemed an authentic narrative of each act in the drama; and it is certain that the best account of the massacre and the destruction of the tea—from which dates our Revolution—are to be found in the contemporary newspapers. Never was contemporary history so copiously and minutely written as in the newspaper annals of the war for the Union. In fact, the best history thereof has been compiled by an assiduous collator from current journalism. The history of censorship in Europe in modern times is the history of opinion, of freedom, and of society. We felt the despotism of the King of Naples in all its baseness, only when a writer of genius told us, with a sigh, that he had been driven to natural history as the only subject upon which he could expatiate in print without impediment. Thus we see how the fate of nations and the experience of individuals are associated with the press; and how its influence touches the whole circle of life,—evoking genius, kindling nations, informing fugitives, and alarming kings.

PREACHERS.

Thus writes a popular preacher of the conservative sect in theology: recognizing a spiritual fact and conviction which tempts us to analyze and define, as a subject of natural history, the function and fame of the preacher. The term by its derivation is the most generic word to indicate clerical vocation; ‘to say before,’ to proclaim, inculcate, preach; in other words, to be the herald and representative of truth, right, faith, and immortal hope,—such is the basis and logical claim of the preacher’s authority, under whatever form, creed, or character. They may be divided into the inspired, the ascetic, the jovial, the belligerent, the finical, the shrewd, and the ingenuous. The ‘oily man of God’ described by Pope, Scott’s Covenanter, and Friar Tuck, the disinterested Vicar of Fielding, Shakspeare’s good friars and ambitious cardinals, Mawworm, Mrs. Inchbald’s Dorimel, the gentle hero of the Sexton’s Daughter, Manzoni’s Prelate and Capuchin, and Mrs. Radcliffe’s Monks, are genuine and permanent types, only modified by circumstances. All that is subtle in artifice, all that is relentless in the love of power, all that is exalted in spiritual graces, all that is base in cunning, glorious in self-sacrifice, beautiful in compassion, and noble in allegiance, has been and is manifest in the priest. His great distinction is based upon the fact that ‘the church, rightly ministered, is the vestibule to an immortal life.’ He is at once the author of the worst tyranny and the grandest amenities of social life. The traveller on Alpine summits blesses the name of St. Bernard, and descends to Geneva to shudder at the bigoted ferocity of Calvin. The picture of the good pastor in the Deserted Village, and Ranke’s Lives of the Popes, give us the two extremes of the character. The spiritual heroism of Luther, the religious gloom of Cowper, and the cheerful devotion of Watts, are but varied expressions of one feeling, which, according to the frail conditions of humanity, has its healthy and its morbid phase, its authentic and its spurious exposition, and is no more to be confounded in its original essence with its imperfect development and representatives, than the pure light of heaven with the accidental mediums which colour and distort its rays.

The prestige of the clerical office is greatly diminished because many of its prerogatives are no longer exclusive. ‘When ecclesiasticism became so weak as to be unable to regulate international affairs, and was supplanted by diplomacy, in the castle the physician was more than a rival for the confessor, in the town the mayor was a greater man than the abbot.’[39] The clergy, at a former period, were the chief scholars; learning was not less their distinction than sanctity. In every intelligent community, this source of influence is now shared with men of letters; and even the once peculiar office of public instruction, is now filled by the lecturer, who takes an evening from the avocations of business or professional life, to claim intellectual sympathy or impart individual opinions. But the great agent in breaking up the monopoly of the pulpit has been the press. Written has in a great measure superseded oral thought. Half the world are readers, and the necessity of hearing no longer exists to those desirous of knowledge. The sermons of the old English divines abound with classical learning and comments on the times, such as are now sought in periodical literature. In Latimer, Andrews, and Donne, we find such hints of the prevailing manners as subsequently were revealed by The Spectator. The philosophy of antiquity and the morals of courts, the facts of distant climes, all that we now seek in popular books and the best journals, came to the minds of our ancestors through the discourses of preachers. American ministers, prior to and at the era of the Revolution, were the expositors of political as well as religious sentiments. Independent of the priestly rites, therefore, a clergyman, in past times, represented social transitions, and ministered to intellectual wants, for which we of this age have adequate provision otherwise; so that the most zealous advocate of reform, doctrine, or ethical philosophy, is no longer obliged to have recourse to the sacerdotal office, in order to reach the public mind. This apparent diminution of the privileges of the order, however, does not invalidate but rather simplifies its claims. In this as in so many other functions of the social economy, progress has the effect of reducing to its original elements the duties and the influence of the profession. Education, once their special responsibility, and popular enlightenment on the questions of the hour, being assumed by others, the preacher is free to concentrate his abilities on theology and the religious sentiment. Division of labour gives him a better opportunity to be ‘clear in his great office.’ It is reduced to its normal state. Except in isolated and newly-settled communities, there is not that incessant appeal to his benevolence and erudition: to heal the sick, reconcile litigants, argue civic questions, teach the elements of science, promote charities; in a word, to be the village orator and social oracle, are not the indispensable requisites of a clergyman’s duty which they were before the Newspaper and the Lyceum existed. He is, therefore, at liberty to imitate the apostles of Christianity and the fathers of the church, and bring all his power to awaken devotion and faith, and all his learning to the defence of sacred truth. That the time and capacity of the profession are diffused, and the sympathy of its members enlisted in behalf of other than these aims, is, indeed, true; but this is a voluntary and not an inevitable result, and only proves that the spirit of the age overlays instead of being penetrated and ruled by the priestly office.

‘Civilization,’ says Lamartine, ‘was of the sanctuary. Kings were only concerned with acts; ideas belonged to the priest.’ And, by a singular contradiction, with the general progress of society, the same class, as a whole, have proved the most antagonistic to innovation even in the form of genius, whose erratic manifestations are jealously regarded as inconsistent with professional decorum. Hence Byron, in one of his splenetic moods, exclaimed to Trelawney: ‘When did parsons patronize genius? If one of their black band dares to think for himself, he is drummed out or cast aside like Sterne and Swift.’ On the other hand, venerable physicians say that the clergy are the most efficient promoters of medical innovations; and that quackery owes its social prestige in no small degree to their countenance.

After the Reformation, this office, as such, lost its specialty; the right to exercise it was no longer peculiar; and in all societies and epochs, when a great activity of the religious sentiment, or an earnest discussion of questions of faith prevailed, men prayed, sermonized, commented on Scripture, and mingled all the duties of the clerical vocation with their own pursuits. Thus the English statesmen of Cromwell’s time were versed in divinity, exhorted, and published tracts in behalf of their creeds. Theology was a popular study; and the kingdom swarmed with lay-preachers. Sects, too, repudiated official leaders; and even among the Pilgrim Fathers of New England, ministers betrayed a jealousy of encroachments on the part of their unconsecrated brethren. Many Christians also recognized spiritual gifts as the exclusive credentials of a priesthood. Church, not less than State prerogatives were challenged by republican zeal; and the historical authority of the order being thus openly invaded, a new and more rational test was soon applied, and preachers, like kings, were made amenable to the tribunal of public opinion, and obliged to rest their claims on other than traditional or educational authority. ‘On conserva,’ says Rochambeau, writing of American society at the period of the Revolution, ‘au ministre du culte le première place dans les repas publics; il bénissoit le repas; mais ses prérogatives ne s’entendoient pas plus loin dans la société.[40] Cet exposé,’ he adds, evidently in view of priestly corruption in France, ‘doit amener naturellement des mœurs simples et pures.’[41] ‘They,’ says the historian of preachers at the time of the Revolutionary war, ‘dealt in no high-sounding phrases of liberty and equality; they went to the very foundations of society, showed what the rights of man were, and how those rights became modified when men gathered into communities. The profound thought and unanswerable arguments, found in these sermons, show that the clergy were not a whit behind the ablest statesmen of the day in their knowledge of the great science of human government. In reading them one gets at the true pulse of the people, and can trace the steady progress of the public sentiment. The rebellion in New England rested on the pulpit, received its strongest impulse, indeed its moral character, from it; the teachings of the pulpit of Lexington caused the first blow to be struck for American independence.’

The tendency of all the so-called liberal professions is to limit and pervert the development of character, by giving to knowledge a technical shape, and to thought a prescriptive action. Conformity to a specific method is unfavourable to original results, and organization often does injustice to its subjects. Only the strong men, the brave, and the highly endowed, rise above such restrictions. It is a kind of social necessity alone which reconciles the man of scientific genius to seek the passport of a medical diploma,—the logician to exert his mind exclusively before a legal tribunal, and the votary of religious truth to sign a creed and become responsible to a congregation. How constantly each breaks away from his respective sphere to expatiate in the broad kingdom of letters! Would Humboldt have written the Cosmos had his life been confined to a laboratory, or a round of medical practice? Would Burke have theorized in so comprehensive a range if chained to an attorney’s desk, or Sir Henry Vane’s martyrdom acquired a holier sanction from the mere title of priest?

At the first glance, so distinct are the phases of the office that it is difficult to realize its identity. The ideal of a village pastor like Oberlin, self-devoted, in a secluded district, to the most pure and benevolent enterprise,—the life of a Jesuit missionary in Canada or Peru, who seems to incarnate the fiery zeal of the church he represents,—the complacent bishop of the Establishment, listlessly going through a prescribed form, and his very person embodying worldly prosperity; and the inelegant but earnest Methodist swaying the multitude at a camp-meeting in the wilds of America,—consider the vast contrast of the pictures: the dark robe, lonely existence, and subtle eye of the Catholic; the simple, friendly, conscientious toil of the poor vicar; the scholarship and good dinners of the English bishop; the cathedral decked with the trophies of art, and fields lit up by watch-fires; the silence of the Quaker assembly, and the loud harangue and frantic moans of the ‘revival;’ the solemn refinement of the Episcopal, the intellectual zeal of the Unitarian, and the gorgeous rites of the Roman worship; and an uninformed spectator, to whom each was a novelty, would imagine that a totally diverse principle was at work. To the philosophic eye, the ceremonies, organization, costume, rites, and even creeds of Christian sects, are but the varied manifestations of a common instinct, more or less mingled with other human qualities, and influenced in its development by time and place. Traced back to its source, and separated from incidental association, we find a natural sentiment of religion which is represented in social economy by the preacher. Simple as was the original relation between the two, however, in the process of time it has become so complicated that it now requires no ordinary analytical power to divest the idea of the priest from history, and that of religion from the church, so as to perceive both as facts of human nature instead of parts of the machinery of civilized life. To do this, indeed, we look inward, and derive from consciousness the great idea of a religious sentiment; and then ask ourselves how far it is justly represented in the institutions of the church and the persons of her ministers. Let this process be tried by a man of high endowments, genuine aspirations, and noble sympathies, and what is the result? ‘Milton,’ says Dr. Johnson, in his life of that poet, ‘grew old without any visible worship,’ a phrase which, considering the superstition of the writer, and the exalted devotional sentiment of the subject, has, to our minds, a most pathetic significance. It tacitly admits that Milton worshipped his Maker; it brings him before us in a venerable aspect, at the time when he was blind, proscribed, and indigent; we recall his image at the organ, and seem to catch the symphonies of Paradise Lost and the Hymn on the Nativity; and yet we are told by the greatest votary of religious forms and profession among English literary men—one who was oppressed by the sense of religious truth, and a slave to church requirements, that, in his old age, the reverential bard had no ‘visible worship.’ It is an admission of great moment; it is a fact infinitely suggestive. Why did not Milton practically recognize any organized church, or publicly enact any prescribed form? Not altogether because he had tasted of persecution, and been driven, by the force of individual opinion, away from popular rites; but also, and to a far greater degree, because he had so fully experienced within himself the force and scope of the religious sentiment, and found in its prevalent representation, not an incitement, but a hindrance to its exercise.

In the patriarchal age, the head of a family was its priest; and, in all ages, the true and complete man feels a personal interest and responsibility, a direct and entire relation to his Creator, that will not suffer interference any more than genuine conjugal or parental ties. The so-called progress of society has rendered its functions more complex, and broken up this simple and natural identity between the offices of devotion and those of paternity. It has not only made the priestly office distinct and apart from domestic life, but shorn it of glory by the cumbrous details of a hierarchy and badges of exclusiveness; and lessened its sanctity by changing the grand and holy function of a spiritual medium and expositor into a professional business and special pleading. What are conventional preachers but the employés of a sect? And so regarded, how is it possible to rejoice ‘in the plain presence of their dignity?’ Called upon by a thoroughly earnest soul in its deep perplexity and agonizing bewilderment, what can they do but repeat the commonplaces of their office? How instantly are they reduced to the level of other men, when brought into contact with a human reality! The voice of true sympathy, though from ignorant lips, the grasp of honest affection, though from unconsecrated hands, yield more of the balm of consolation in such an hour, because they are real, human, and therefore nearer to God, than the technical representative of His truth. The essential mistake is, that instead of regarding the man as something divine in essence and relation, a perverse theology assigns that quality to the office. It is what is grafted upon, not what is essential to, humanity, that is thus made the nucleus of reverence and hope, whereas priesthood and manhood are identical. The authority of the former is derived from the latter; by virtue of being men we become priests—that is, servants—of the Most High; and not through any miraculous anointing, laying on of hands, courses of divinity, or rites of ordination. ‘How,’ says Carlyle, ‘did Christianity arise and spread abroad among men? Was it by institutions and establishments and well-arranged systems of mechanism? Not so. On the contrary, in all past and existing institutions for those ends, its divine spirit has invariably been found to languish and decay. It arose in the mystic deeps of man’s soul; and spread abroad by the “preaching of the word” by simple, altogether natural, and individual efforts; and flew like hallowed fire from heart to heart, till all were purified and illuminated by it.’ Accordingly, if merely professional representatives of the church, as such, hold a less influential position now than formerly, it is not because the instinct of worship has died out in the human heart, nor because men feel less than before the need of interpreters of the true, the holy, and the beautiful; it is not that the mysteries of life are less impressive, or its vicissitudes less constant, or its origin and end less enveloped in sacred obscurity; but it is because more legitimate priests have been found out of the church than in it; because that institution and its ministers fail to meet adequately the wants of the religious sentiment; and it has been discovered that the Invisible Spirit is more easily found by the lonely seashore than in the magnificent cathedral; that the mountain-top is an altar nearer to His throne than a chancel; and that the rustle of forest-leaves and the moaning of the sea less disturb the idea of His presence in the devout heart, than the monotonous chant of the choir, or the conventional words of the preacher. We have but to glance at the pictures of clerical life, so thickly scattered through the memoirs and novels of the day, to realize the necessity of an eclectic spirit in estimating the clerical character—whose highest manifestations and most patent abuses seem entirely irrespective of sect. A Scotch clergyman, writing, in 1763, of the society at Harrogate, ‘made up of half-pay officers and clergymen,’ thus describes the latter: ‘They are in general—I mean the lower order—divided into bucks and prigs; of which the first, though inconceivably ignorant, and sometimes indecent in their morals, yet I held them to be most tolerable, because they were unassuming, and had no other affectation but that of behaving themselves like gentlemen. The other division of them, the prigs, are truly not to be endured, for they are but half-learned, are ignorant of the world, narrow-minded, pedantic, and overbearing.’[42] Contrast with this estimate of a class Victor Hugo’s portrait of an individual in his Provincial Bishop—‘Monseigneur Bienvenu,’ so called, instinctively, by the people: ‘The formidable spectacle of created things developed a tenderness in him; he was always busy in finding for himself and inspiring others with the best way of sympathizing and solacing. The universe appeared to him like disease. He auscultated suffering everywhere. The whole world was to this good and rare priest a permanent subject of sadness seeking to be consoled.’

The absolute need of separating in our minds the idea of the clerical man as a natural development of humanity—a normal phase of character—from the historical idea of the same personage, is at once evinced by the immense distance between the lives, influence, and traits of the men who have conspicuously borne the office of public religious teachers and administrators in different sects, ages, and countries; as for instance, Ximenes, Wolsey, Richelieu, Whitfield, Channing, George Herbert, and Dr. Arnold; in position, habits, and relations to the world, how great the contrast! And yet each represented to society, in a professional way, the same principle; the former with all the pomp of hierarchal magnificence, and all the influence of executive power, and the latter by the force of patient usefulness, earnest simplicity, and individual moral energy. Between Puritan and Pope, what infinite grades; between Jewish rabbi and Scotch elder, how diverse is the traditional sanction; and how little would a novice imagine that the bare walls and plain costume of a Friends’ meeting had the least of a common origin with the gorgeous decorations of a minster! Thus do the passions, the tastes, and the very blood of races and individuals modify the expression of the same instinct; worship is as Protean in its forms as labour, diversion, hygiène, or any other human need and activity. Philosophy reconciles us to the apparent incongruity, and reveals beneath surplice, drab-coat, and silken robe, hearts that pulsate to an identical measure.

The best writers have recognized the clerical tone of manners as significant of the social condition of each period. Burnet thought more highly of his Pastoral Care than of his History; and Baxter’s Reformed Pastor is an indirect but keen testimony to the decadence of the clergy. Macaulay cites Fielding’s parson. Sir Roger’s chaplain in the Spectator, Cowper’s rebuke of the ‘cassocked huntsmen,’ the Stiggins of Dickens, and Honeyman of Thackeray, are but a popular reflex of that deep sense of the abuse of a profession which is the highest evidence of its normal estimation. And the types of the vocation seem permanent. Every era has its Whateley, its Lammenais, and its Spurgeon—or men in the church whose gifts, tone, and mission essentially correspond with these. When George Herbert abandoned court for clerical aspirations, a friend protested against his choice ‘as too mean an employment;’ and yet so truly did he illustrate the spiritual grandeur of his office that the chime which called to prayer from the humble belfry of Bemerton, was recognized by the country people as the ‘saint’s bell.’ It was his holiness, and not his attachment to the ritual year, that inspired his example while living, and embalmed his memory; lowly kindnesses were ‘music to him at midnight;’ charity was ‘his only perfume;’ to teach the ignorant, in his estimation, ‘the greatest alms;’ and a day well spent, ‘the bridal of the earth and sky;’ his humanity, spiritualized by Christian faith and practice, so essentially constituted him a priest that, ‘about Salisbury,’ writes his brother, ‘where he lived beneficed for many years, he was little less than sainted.’ He drew an ideal from his own soul, and for his own guidance, in the Country Parson.

To the reverent mind that dares to exercise freely the prerogative of thought, the constant blending of human infirmity with the method of worship is painfully evident: the instinct itself, the sentiment—highest in man—is thus ‘sicklied o’er with the pale cast of thought;’ what is beautiful and true in the ceremonial, or the emblem, arrays itself to his consciousness so as to intercept the holy beams that he would draw from the altar. Let him obey the waves of accident, and pause at shrines by the wayside; and according to circumstances will be the inspiration they yield. Thus turning from the gay Parisian thoroughfare, at noonday, he may pace the chaste aisles of the Madeleine, and feel his devotion stirred by the solemn quietude, the few kneeling figures—perhaps by the dark catafalque awaiting the dead in the centre of the spacious floor; and then what to him is the doctrine of transubstantiation? Religious architecture is speaking to his heart. The voices of the choristers at St. George’s Chapel, at Windsor, may touch his pious sensibility; but if his thoughts revert to the ruddy dean, his good dinners, and indulgent life, and the poor, toilsome vicars, which make the Establishment a reflection of the world’s diversity of condition—the pampered and the drudged; or, if he notes the prayer that the Queen may be preserved ‘in health and wealth,’ how sanctity ceases to invest the priest and the ritual, thus typical of human vanity and selfishness! ‘We know not,’ wrote Jerrold, ‘and we say it with grief, but with profound conviction of the necessity of every man giving fullest utterance to his thoughts—we know not, in this world of ours, in this social, out-of-door masquerade, a more dreary shortcoming, a greater disappointment to the business and bosoms of men, than the Established Church. Its essence is self-denial; its foundations are in humility and poverty; its practice is self-aggrandizement and money-getting.’ Nor is the reverse of the picture, the contrast between the high and low clergy, less inauspicious. ‘A Christian bishop,’ writes Sydney Smith, ‘proposes, in cold blood, to create a thousand livings of one hundred and thirty pounds each,—to call into existence a thousand of the most unhappy men on the face of the earth—the sons of the poor, without hope, without the assistance of private fortune, chained to the soil, ashamed to live with their inferiors, unfit for the society of the better classes, and dragging about the English curse of poverty, without the smallest hope that they can ever shake it off. Can any man of common sense say that all these outward circumstances of the ministers of religion have no bearing on religion itself?’ On the other hand, what divine significance to the pious soul, ‘as through a zodiac moves the ritual year,’—in the altar, the font, the choral service, the venerable liturgy, the holy emblems and hallowed forms whereby this Church is consecrated to the hearts of her devout children, and the reverence of sympathetic intelligence.

Buckle, drawing broad inference from extensive and acute research, unmodified by sympathetic observation, wrote an historical treatise, rich in knowledge and philosophy, to prove that Spain and Scotland owe whatever is hopeless and hampered in their intellectual development to the tyranny of priests and preachers. It was a special plea, but it serves to illustrate, with comprehensive emphasis, the antagonism between Ecclesiasticism and Christianity; for, viewed individually, as a social phenomenon, and not the mere exponent of an organization, the preacher or teacher of the right, advocate of the true, representative of faith, becomes a distinct and personal character, and is identified with humanity. It is when the man and the function coalesce, and the former transcends and spiritualizes the latter, that, in history and in life, all that is great and gracious in the vocation is memorably vindicated. Under this genuine aspect, Rousseau found his ideal of happiness in the life of a village curé, Chateaubriand renewed the heartfelt claims of religion in eloquently describing its primitive and legitimate benignities. Mediæval ecclesiasticism commenced its purifying though inadequate ordeal through the heroism of Savonarola at Florence and Sarpi at Venice. Current literature, indeed, continually and clearly states the problem; and illustrates the question with a frequency and a talent which indicate how largely it occupies the popular mind. To discriminate between the preacher’s conventional office and his spiritual endowment,—between Christianity as a sentiment and a dogma, between the religious and the temporal authority, between the church as an institution and a faith, is an emphatic mission of artist and author in our age. Witness the salient discussions of the ‘Roman question,’ the pleas and protests of Gallican and Ultramontane, the conservative zeal of the Puseyite and liberal encroachments of the progressive clergy, and the picturesque or psychological fictions which instruct and beguile modern readers.[43] Both literature and life in modern times, while they attest the official decadence of the clergy, as a political and theological organization, still more significantly vindicate their normal influence as a social power. ‘Not as in the old times,’ says a philosophical historian, in allusion to the clergy of America, ‘does the layman look upon them as the cormorants and curses of society; they are his faithful advisers, his honoured friends, under whose suggestion and supervision are instituted educational establishments, colleges, hospitals—whatever can be of benefit to men in this life, or secure to them happiness in the life to come.’[44]