No More Learning

Quid sum miser tunc dicturus?
Quem patronum rogaturus?

There is a point where toleration sinks into sheer baseness and
poltroonery. The toleration of the worst leads us to look on what is
barely better as good enough, and to worship what is only moderately
good. Woe to that man, or that nation, to whom mediocrity has become an
ideal!

Has our experiment of self-government succeeded, if it barely manage to
_rub and go? _ Here, now, is a piece of barbarism which Christ and the
nineteenth century say shall cease, and which Messrs. Smith, Brown, and
others say shall _not_ cease. I would by no means deny the eminent
respectability of these gentlemen, but I confess, that, in such a
wrestling match, I cannot help having my fears for them.

_Discite justitiam, moniti, et non temnere divos_.

H. W. ]



No. VI

THE PIOUS EDITOR'S CREED


[At the special instance of Mr. Biglow, I preface the following satire
with an extract from a sermon preached during the past summer, from
Ezekiel xxxiv.
2: 'Son of man, prophesy against the shepherds of
Israel. ' Since the Sabbath on which this discourse was delivered, the
editor of the 'Jaalam Independent Blunderbuss' has unaccountably
absented himself from our house of worship.

'I know of no so responsible position as that of the public journalist.
The editor of our day bears the same relation to his time that the clerk
bore to the age before the invention of printing. Indeed, the position
which he holds is that which the clergyman should hold even now. But the
clergyman chooses to walk off to the extreme edge of the world, and to
throw such seed as he has clear over into that darkness which he calls
the Next Life. As if _next_ did not mean _nearest_, and as if any life
were nearer than that immediately present one which boils and eddies all
around him at the caucus, the ratification meeting, and the polls! Who
taught him to exhort men to prepare for eternity, as for some future era
of which the present forms no integral part? The furrow which Time is
even now turning runs through the Everlasting, and in that must he
plant, or nowhere. Yet he would fain believe and teach that we are
_going_ to have more of eternity than we have now. This _going_ of his
is like that of the auctioneer, on which _gone_ follows before we have
made up our minds to bid,--in which manner, not three months back, I
lost an excellent copy of Chappelow on Job. So it has come to pass that
the preacher, instead of being a living force, has faded into an
emblematic figure at christenings, weddings, and funerals. Or, if he
exercise any other function, it is as keeper and feeder of certain
theologic dogmas, which, when occasion offers, he unkennels with a
_staboy! _ "to bark and bite as 'tis their nature to," whence that
reproach of _odium theologicum_ has arisen.

'Meanwhile, see what a pulpit the editor mounts daily, sometimes with a
congregation of fifty thousand within reach of his voice, and never so
much as a nodder, even, among them! And from what a Bible can he choose
his text,--a Bible which needs no translation, and which no priestcraft
can shut and clasp from the laity,--the open volume of the world, upon
which, with a pen of sunshine or destroying fire, the inspired Present
is even now writing the annals of God!