I should add that, although this is the real account to be
given of the church-going of the farmers and villagers, yet
it is not known to them, only felt. Do you not suppose that
it is some benefit to a young villager who comes out of the
woods of New Hampshire to Boston and serves his
apprenticeship in a shop, and now opens his own store, to
hang up his name in bright gold letters a foot long? His
father could not write his name: it is only lately that he
could: the name is mean and unknown: now the sun shines on
it: all men, all women, fairest eyes read it. It is a fact
in the great city. Perhaps he shall be successful and make
it wider known: shall leave it greatly brightened to his
son. His son may be head of a party: governor of the state:
a poet: a powerful thinker: and send the knowledge of this
name over the habitable earth. By all these suggestions, he
is at least made responsible and thoughtful by his public
relation of a seen and aerated name.
Let him modestly accept those hints of a more beautiful life
which he meets with; how to do with few and easily gotten
things: but let him seize with enthusiasm the opportunity of
doing what he can, for the virtues are natural to each man
and the talents are little perfections.
Let him hope infinitely with a patience as large as the sky.
Nothing is so young and untaught as time.
How wise is his saying that we do not turn to the books of the
Bible--St. Paul and St. John--to start us on our task, as we do to
Marcus Aurelius, or the Lives of the philosophers, or to Plato, or
Plutarch, "because the Bible wears black clothes"! "It comes with a
certain official claim against which the mind revolts. The Bible has
its own nobilities--might well be charming if left simply on its
merits, as other books are, but this, 'You must,' 'It is your duty,'
in connection with it, repels. 'T is like the introduction of martial
law into Concord. If you should dot our farms with picket lines, and I
could not go or come across lots without a pass, I should resist, or
else emigrate. If Concord were as beautiful as Paradise, it would be
as detestable to me."
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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