a religion to be true, not merely because certain inspired or learned men said so; not because certain councils indorsed it; not because Popes or Luthers or Calvins or Swedenborgs sanctioned it; not because miracles were wrought or the sword enforced it but simply because it accords with the heights and the magnanimities of the human soul. But the State as well as the Church has been from time immemorial infested with old-fogyism. All political history is one compact, continuous record of its domination. As religious fogyism found its fit embodiment in the Heaven-sanctioned and irresponsible priest, so political fogyism had its incarnation in the irresponsible king. And, of course, where there is a king or an emperor, there must be a nobility, an aristocracy of birth. The dukes and earls are but lesser lights of monarchy. The essence of tyranny is unbelief in human naturedenial of the natural capacity of mankind to grow in intelligence and virtue, and the ability to govern themselves. Hence feudalism, vassalage, serfdom, slavery, and all the iron codes that crushed the poor, the ignorant, and the weak. Hence the infernal powers stealing the supernal robes of justice, and defrauding man of his birthright. Hence the denunciation of free thought and reform. Hence the dungeon, the rack, the stake, and all the iniquities and horrors of political joined with priestly despotism. The history of every old country on the globe furnishes examples without end of these crowned and mitred criminals-all alike desperate and hopeless unbelievers in man. But we need not go to foreign countries, or back into the past, for our illustrations. Our own country and times can supply us. I call that politician an old fogy who believes more in his party than in the principles which should inspire his party-who believes, not that his partyplatform should be as firm as Plymouth Rock, but that it may be built so that you can slip in or out plank after plank, as easily as you do it in your extension dining-tables, to suit the emergency, making it a platform of compromise when compromise means surrender of what is noble and right for what is deemed expedient for party ends. I call that partisan an old fogy who would effect his ends by bribery and other unworthy means rather than by fair and open appeal to honor and truth. I call old fogies that ruler, that judge, and that legislator, who look upon government and its machinery as less safe in the hands of faithful servants, chosen for their qualifications for office, than in those of cunning wire-pullers and selfish devourers of the loaves and fishes. I see the jagged rocks ahead on which our American ship of state may steer and strike. I see how lack of faith in ideas and principles, and in men of integrity, is suffering the good old morality of our fathers to become a thing to sneer at and trample in the dust; and how it is tolerating in public life a class of selfish schemers and gamblers who put their trust in the influence of money and official patronage before fair competition, honest work, and open dealing in the state. If the pen is mightier than the sword, the creed is getting to be that the purse is mightier than either. Common honesty, commonsense, common respect for the traditions of our glorious Revolution and our admirable Constitution, should brand forever such plotters against the principles we profess. Then there are the old fogies of society-a very ancient order-the people who worship established custom and usage, and obey without questioning prescribed forms of thought and of life. The manners, customs, morals, fashions, of the time in which they live, are but moulds in which they are cast, and insist on others being cast in. This category comprises often people of the most opposite political, social, and theological beliefs: as, for instance, in the time of Charles II., the Cavaliers and the Puritans; and the social forms represented by these two great conflicting extremes ran and hardened into corresponding extremes of social life. The stern and solemn Roundhead who protested against all free play of Nature, and denounced all amusement and hilarity, was an old fogy no less than the gay and licentious Cavalier who made his religion a sort of church-drill, and had no particular principle save loyalty to his unprincipled sovereign. And in our time and country we have the same varieties of this family-at war with each other, but all tacitly agreeing in unbelief in the great basis of humanity. I see these people all about me-in the streets, in shops, in parlors, in churches, in political meetings. Sometimes I fancy I know them by certain outward signs-by the expression of their faces, by their voices, by their gait, and their dress. Old fogies are not, of course, always old. Some of the most virulent sort are, alas ! young men and young women, petrified at a very early stage of their existence into these peripatetic fossils. You can't always detect them at first sight or hearing, for they cover their hard emptiness with plausible manners. But the old O. F.'s are more easily recognizable. I used to fancy that I met occasionally a noteworthy member of the order in the streets of New York, and in the market where I bought my daily meat. I never knew his name or his number, but I strongly suspected him to belong to a branch of the O. F.'s whose united freemasonry extends over the globe. As I recall him now, he is an erect, smooth-shaven old gentleman, wearing his gray hair and whiskers brushed forward, the opposite direction to their natural turn. He looks in good preservation, and evidently lives well. He is as good as gold on 'Change and at the banks. He has a self-complacency which is superb. I have no doubt he stands as well with his conscience and in his church-piety as he does on Wall Street. He is so erect in his self-estimation, as well as in his vertebral column, that, as he stands there choosing the best tenderloin-steak to be had, he rises occasionally on the toes of his shining boots with a springy motion highly delightful to see in a gentleman of sixty. He monopolizes the butcher's stand; is in no hurry to let others take their turn; never looks around, ex cept to reply over his shoulder to some acquaintance's remark about the weather. He feels his oats, and rears and cavorts mentally. He is not a devotee to the fashions of Fifth Avenue. He can afford to scorn those. And he likes a good table so well that he will choose his own roasting-piece. He wears a tall, shiny hat and a tall shirt-collar. He carries a cane, silver-headed or gold-headed, with which he raps dictatorially on the piece of meat he wishes a cut from, and walks superbly out, like a very Dombey of the imperishable firm of Dombey & Son. Surely, I say, he carries O. F. on his garments as plainly as if written with indelible ink. In fancy I can follow him to his brown-stone domicile, when business is over, and hear his cut-anddried remarks upon persons and things. He takes the most conservative paper. He attends the wealthiest church. He talks with the infallibility of a machine. His ideas go round and round in a daily treadmill. His brain is a wheel, and his heart a miller's hopper. He keeps himself high and dry above any inundation from undue emotion or thought. And, as for laughter, why should such irreproachable facial muscles ever be distorted in such an unnecessary lapse of dignity? He might have been an apologist for slavery ten years ago. He is an apologist now for many customs which were just the thing when he was young. When he was young! As I look at him, I wonder if he ever was young. His opinions were formed-oh, so long ago!-when his mind was in as fluid and receptive a state as consisted with his character. He holds them still. He has not changed. He believes in his church. He believes in Wall Street. He believes in stereotyped morality and social standing. He believes in the current and average commonplaces of the average society. Above all, he believes in himself. What sympathies for youthful ardor, what consideration for youthful indiscretion, can we expect from such a fossil? Can we imagine him taking any but cold, sidelong glances over his daily paper at the sports and prattle of children? or looking with any toleration upon the frailties of the poor, misguided wretches who were born and bred in degradation and ignorance? Think of it-in this open-windowed century, all ablaze with the light of ideas and principles-a young man -perchance sometimes a young woman (though, let us hope, such specimens are rare)—who never had anything of the soul of youth in them—at best only a faint shimmer of a chilly spring morning soon hidden in hard, gray clouds; whose belief in mankind and in womankind and in children goes only as far as their clothes or their social position or name; who hardly believe even in love except as a sort of weak, ephemeral sentiment; whose souls kindle with no generous enthusiasm at noble and heroic deeds; who never feel a tear dim their eyes at any record of suffering, or, if they do, credit it to themselves with self-complacency, taking stock in a sentiment as if it were a solid conscientious deed, but bearing about as much proportioned value to the latter as depreciated bank-bills or Bland silver bear to gold; who are incapable of any aspiration beyond the round of fashion and custom, and accept their environment as the all-in-all of life. This I say is a dreary spectacle. Were young society made up of such, it would be little better than a great mill or factory. And, instead of life's inner music and songs, we should be bored to death with an endless reiteration of humdrum tunes ground from social hand-organs. We all hope, I am sure, that such types are rare. In the older and aristocratic phases of society they must have been more frequent. If they are found in American life, they cannot accord with our institutions and habits of thought. It is only as it is made up of persons who believe that the great central elements of human nature are working for good, and who endeavor to make their lives accord with an ideal standard, that society becomes possible in any large sense. The central Christian idea, which is that of universal human brotherhood, sums it all up in the kingdom of heaven, or ideal society on earth. And the same idea, only in far less power, has been the sap and essence of all society deserving the name society since men and women existed in communities. And in proportion as the opposite or devil's creed has prevailednamely, that human nature is essentially corrupt and weak-society has become disorganized and lost natural cohesion; and the result has been anarchy, class-antagonism, and every hideous form that self Did he ever read the stories of Dickens, or "Les Misérables" of Victor Hugo, or any of the modern gospels of humanity, whose light and warmth, radiat-ishness and aggressive brute force can assume. ing through this nineteenth century, are better than half the sermons from Christian pulpits? If he has, these benign showers have slipped over him like drops of water on the back of a duck. Yet he lives in the droppings of the sanctuary. Once a week, at least, he takes a Sunday-bath in his pew. But it would be hard to detect any wet spot-any sign of inward baptism. Was there ever an ancient Scribe or Pharisee who more justly merited the name we have given him? But we can bear with an old O. F. much better than with a young one-who is, I think, about the dreariest specimen of humanity one can meet with in a community calling itself educated and cultivated. But the modern nickname which has been the text of this essay applies rather to those who clog and impede the divine currents than to the active foes of society. The genuine O. F. is a negative rather than a positive force. He obstructs the free circulation of the fair humanities. He lies with a dead weight upon the healthy action and growth of the social body. He produces social indigestion and worry and blues and nightmare. He brings a chill into a company of warm, earnest, and hopeful souls. He acts like confined carbonic-acid gas in ill-ventilated rooms-is unprofitable, stale, mephitic, deadening; takes the elasticity out of you; is a non-conductor, an east wind, a drug. You may mistake him for a lump of sweet and soluble sugar in your cup, and he turns out to be a lump of marble; or, if he melts at all in the wine or tea of life, it is only into dregs and questionable deposit at the bottom of the glass. In all generous and enthusiastic conversation he is a wet blanket. You can't kindle him short of petroleum or nitro-glycerine; but, if you should kindle with the flame of any unprecedented thought or feeling, he pulls out a patent formulated fire-extinguisher, and tries to put you out. We wrong the conservatives in classing him with them. Genuine conservatism conserves what is worth preserving; but all that he preserves is like mud and slime and refuse at the bottom of the stream. that only on one day in the week, and for a few hours, he remembers that he is bound to differ from you. There is comfort, then, that this credo of despair is for the most part essentially hollow and superficial. It is extraordinary how even double-dyed conservatism will complacently quote Burns's "A man's a man for a' that " an aphorism of true philosophic depth condensed into a flash of poetry gleaming out of the world's darkness, and bringing us face to face with all that is good and great in the masses of humanity. The great antidotes to this unbelief in man are found in lofty commerce with the True, the Beautiful, and the Good, in philosophy, in poetry, in conscience, Yet, after all, we should not, perhaps, consider old-fogyism too seriously. It may be more unreal and hollow than we think. Man's belief in man is, perhaps, more deep-seated and universal than it ap-in fraternal relations with our kind. Sound thought, pears from looking upon the surface of things. Were it not so, society would not cohere as it does. Over our heads and under our feet throbs and courses a great current, more than electric, more than magnetic, uniting all men in marvelously subtile relations. good sense, the fine ideal pictures painted in the air before us by imagination and hope, and, above all, a habit formed on trust in the real, underlying elements of character-these are the preserving forces that keep our feet from stumbling on the dark mountains, and plunging into pitfalls and craters; and it is these that keep open the blessed light of the heavens, so that belief in human nature shall be one with the enjoyment of the light and the air and with all that furnishes us with symbols of the Divine nature. "One touch of Nature makes the whole world kin;" or, as a friend of mine quaintly, though less elegantly, expresses it," Folks are very folksy." Were mankind governed altogether by the creeds they were born into, the world would have a sorry time of it. The only way the world has ever gone for- And let our youths and maidens fortify their ward has been by breaking through or overtopping minds with the study of the great and good characits creeds. And this occurs more frequently than we ters of all time. History, read aright, is more a think. I don't refer to the brave come-outers and rad- garden of flowers and fruits than a wild of weeds icals, or to the clear-eyed philosophers whose views and briers. Not on man's helplessness, but on his would embrace the All (such deserve a chapter by strength and glory, must the faith of our day found themselves); but to those unconscious evaders of itself. If man is a worm, he can at least spin his cotheir professed creeds-the genuine men and women coon, and come out one day from the chrysalis a gloriof every day, whom these creeds do not confine so ous winged creature. If the devil is at the core of closely that they cannot sometimes go out, as it things, we can harness even him to our triumphal were, like double-lived somnambules, and meet cars, as Science yokes the telluric forces of steam their heretic neighbors as if no such prison-house and fire to our wagons, and bids the thunderbolts of existed as that from which they have gone out on Jove fly with our messages like carrier-doves. And an airing. And if your orthodox neighbor forgets all sin and evil shall be so much excessive and waste your heresy or infidelity on six days of the week, strength, destined in the providence of God to be and agrees with you in the daily relations of life bet-utilized for the intellectual and spiritual triumph of ter than he thinks he does, let us consider it a gain the race. BY CHAPTER XLVI. A FAMILY CELIA'S GATHERING. O all seemed settled, and there was nothing at So al ARBOR. But, dear aunt"-well-brought-up young people in those days did not venture on such a disrepectful endearment as "auntie"-I should like to have seen any one address Mrs. Pontifex as "auntie" -"you have no objection to Leonard, have you?" "No, no," she replied, critically. 'He is, I am told, though not yet a Professing Believer, not without hopes. A husband, my dear, is what a wife makes him. You would hardly believe, perhaps, the trouble which my husband, John Pontifex, has given me by the violence of his natural inclinations. All men, in the matter of eating and drinking, require all left for us but to rejoice and be glad together. All is well that ends well. Leonard and Celia were to be married; the captain and I were to go on together as of old; there was to be no more threatening of insurrections; life would resume the same calm which is so dull to look back upon, and yet so happy while it lasts. We celebrated the event of Celia's engagement immediately by a family gath-strong and constant discipline. That you will have ering that evening at Mr. Tyrrell's. It was also an entertainment in commemoration of the reconciliation of Aunt Jane with her niece, and, if on that account alone, the best tea-things were produced, and there was a lavish expenditure in the matter of muffins and tea-cakes. Nothing shows the march of civilization more than the decay in the consumption of muffins and tea-cakes. Nobody has tea at all now, except at five o'clock, because those who remember what a tea-party used to be cannot call handing tea round in trays having tea. Nobody sits down now to a table covered with cake in various forms; but it was in those days the commonest form of entertainment. I suppose everybody of the middle classes looked upon a tea-party as the chief instrument of social intercourse, and Mrs. Tyrrell was by no means singular in attaching a symbolic importance to her best tea-service. Nothing could have been finer than the manner of Aunt Jane. She kept Celia beside her. She offered no objection whatever when her husband, presuming on the unusually fine weather, ventured to ask for more sugar. She made no allusion to any Christian privileges, either by way of example or admonition, and, having found out that Miss Rutherford's father had been a distinguished writer and preacher of the same school as herself-that is, of the severest Calvinistic type-she received her with marked cordiality. Calvinism in that gentle lady, however, was so tempered with native kindness that it lost all its terrors. As for Mr. Tyrrell, the removal of the weight upon him almost restored him to his youth. He made jokes; he laughed; he was attentive to his wife; he was not only happy again, but he had recovered his old confidence and importance. In the evening we played, Celia and I, then we sang duets, then Celia sang by herself, but only one song, because everybody wanted a little confidential | talk with her in turn. First it was Aunt Jane. "Well, my dear," she said, with an inclination of the head in the direction of Leonard, "" as you to administer, with constant searchings into your own conscience. Mere worldliness I need hardly warn you against. You must not encourage your husband's tendency to over-estimate the value of earthly distinctions, though I am glad to learn from his aunt that he comes of a County Family. We who have been blessed by Providence with County connections would be blind to our privileges did we not remember that fact. You will never forget your own maternal connections. I refer rather to military distinction. And, above all, my dear, guard against inordinate affection. I need hardly warn you that, before marriage, any demonstration of—of— of what I suppose you call love, is highly improper. No girl who values herself, or calls herself a Christian gentlewoman, would allow her lover to kiss her on the lips. My first husband, it is true, once surprised me by kissing what he called my marble brow. I never allowed John Pontifex more than the tip of my fingers. After marriage you will find they are not so anxious for kissing. Remember that, my dear. "He is what the world calls handsome, I fear" -as if it were a blot upon his moral character"and he has been successful so far." Here she sighed, as if that was another moral blot. "But he is young. I could have wished you to remain, as I did, single to the age of thirty, or even forty; you then might have chosen a man some years your junor, and enjoyed the privileges which age and maturity add to marriage. That has been the case with John Pontifex." Then it was the captain. "Come to me, Cis, my pretty," the old man called her to sit beside him. "Come and tell me all about it. And so you have accepted my boy Leonard, have you? Happy man! I believe I am jealous of him. You must not forget the old house by the mill-dam." "No," said Cis., "I shall not forget the old house, or its owner.” "When is Leonard going to take you away? Don't let him hurry you, Celia. We shall be dull when you are gone." They protested to each other like a pair of lovhave made your choice, I suppose there is nothing ers, the old captain and the girl. I believe she loved more to say." the old man as well as any one, after Leonard. |