But why, it might be asked, should the clergy be picked out for blame in the matter of upholding slavery, rather than any other class, as that of the merchants for example? The answer is plain. If the church professed to be no more than a society of private citizens meeting once a week, the clergyman would be simply the chairman of the gathering, and a mouthpiece of the majority. But the church sets up the claim to be of divine origin and the depository of truth. If this be so, it should always be in advance of public opinion. “It should not wait till the Washingtonians, by acting the part which, in virtue of the station it arrogates to itself, should have been its own, had driven it to sign the pledge and hold fellowship with the degraded and fallen. It should not wait until the Abolitionists, by working a change in the sentiment of the people, have convinced it that it is more politic to sympathize with the slave than with the slave-owner, before it ventures to lisp the alphabet of anti-slavery. The glorious privilege of leading the forlorn hope of truth, of facing the desperate waves of prejudice, of making itself vile in the eyes of men by choosing the humblest means of serving the despised cause of the master it professes to worship, all these belong to it in right of the position it assumes.” And he calls upon the clergy to produce certificates of martyrdom before he will accept the claims they set up for themselves. The whole discussion is characterized by sincerity and a scarcely veiled sarcasm, and is interesting not only as showing Lowell’s thought at the time on a burning subject, but also as disclosing a certain academic air as if he had written carefully and with restraint, perhaps thinking how it would sound to his father’s ear. There is hardly more than a faint suggestion of the wit and humor which marked his later political writing, and there is one passage which may be noted as distinctly literary in tone. “In many parts of Germany,” he writes, “there are legends of buried churches and convents, whose bells are often heard, and in which, now and then, some person by a lucky chance can hear the monks chanting the ritual of many centuries ago. It seems to us that the religion of our churches is of very much the same subterranean and traditionary kind. To one walking in the pure light of upper day, the sound of their service seems dim and far off, and, if he catches a word here and there, it is an obsolete language which does not appeal to the present heart and soul, but only to a vague reverence for what is ancient, a mysterious awe for what is past.”