The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 03, No. 19, May, 1859: A Magazine of Literature, Art, and PoliticsVarious
History
The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 03, No. 19, May, 1859: A Magazine of Literature, Art, and Politics
Various
American periodicals
4. The very poor, who are apt to be immoral.
----The cut nails of machine-divinity may be driven in, but they won't
clinch.
----The arguments which the greatest of our schoolmen could not refute
were two: the blood in men's veins, and the milk in women's breasts.
----Humility is the first of the virtues--for other people.
----Faith always implies the disbelief of a lesser fact in favor of
a greater. A little mind often sees the unbelief, without seeing the
belief, of a large one.
The Poor Relation had been fidgeting about and working her mouth while
all this was going on. She broke out in speech at this point.
I hate to hear folks talk so. I don't see that you are any better than a
heathen.
I wish I were half as good as many heathens have been,--I said.--Dying
for a principle seems to me a higher degree of virtue than scolding for
it; and, the history of heathen races is full of instances where men
have laid down their lives for the love of their kind, of their country,
of truth, nay, even for simple manhood's sake, or to show their
obedience or fidelity. What would not such beings have done for the
souls of men, for the Christian commonwealth, for the King of Kings,
if they had lived in days of larger light? Which seems to you nearest
heaven, Socrates drinking his hemlock, Regulus going back to the enemy's
camp, or that old New England divine sitting comfortably in his study
and chuckling over his conceit of certain poor women, who had been
burned to death in his own town, going "roaring out of one fire into
another"?
I don't believe he said any such thing,--replied the Poor Relation.
It is hard to believe,--said I,--but it is true for all that. In another
hundred years it will be as incredible that men talked as we sometimes
hear them now.
_Cor facit theologum._ The heart makes the theologian. Every race,
every civilization, either has a new revelation of its own or a new
interpretation of an old one. Democratic America has a different
humanity from feudal Europe, and so must have a new divinity. See, for
one moment, how intelligence reacts on our faiths. The Bible was a
divining-book to our ancestors, and is so still in the hands of some of
the vulgar. The Puritans went to the Old Testament for their laws; the
Mormons go to it for their patriarchal institution. Every generation
dissolves something new and precipitates something once held in solution
from that great storehouse of temporary and permanent truths.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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