ÆäÀÌÁö À̹ÌÁö
PDF
ePub

their wills. If teachers, we shall think of men as good or bad linguists, mathematicians, metaphysicians. The minister of the Gospel, though he can say with Paul, "We are determined to know nothing save the cross," should be something else besides the minister. In order to the best discharge of his especial duties as a bringer of good tidings, as one who can speak a word in season to them that are weary, like his Lord, he must be a "Son of man," with quick pulses, with ready sympathies, with a heart full of tenderness, full of courage. Literature subserves this end, as it calls us away from what is individual to what is general, from what is professional to what touches the highest common interests of all. It takes us out of the routine of ordinary work and makes us recognize the existence of other spheres of thought and feeling. It keeps from stagnation the better portion of our nature, and gives a fulness and breadth to what otherwise would be contracted and narrow. Illustrations of these thoughts are found in every department. Dr. John Brown of Edinburgh, the author of "Spare Hours," is none the worse surgeon, from giving Baxter, and Howe, and Vaughan's poems, and such sterling literature a place in his time, alongside of the Carpenters, Dunglinsons and Velpeaus of the healing art. In our own land, the professional men of the widest influence are the men whom literature has liberalized. Men like Prof. H. B. Smith and Prof. Shedd have drunk deep draughts from every fountain. Men like Prof. Tayler Lewis (if there is his peer) have not contented themselves with what lay in the line of their own department. They have sought the growth and expansion that could be imparted by all that is noble and pure and spiritual in the profoundest and most human of the literature of the world. Rufus Choate would never have attained his power had he only turned the pages of Coke upon Littleton, and Chitty and Blackstone and Story. That splendor of diction, that wealth of illustration, that fascination of vital beauty, which clothed every argument and adorned every plea, sprang from the liberalizing efficacy of the life-blood of the master spirits of the world, which is treasured up in books. To their influence and mastery he surrendered himself. Daily, nightly, for

a little while, he sought their wise companionship, and reverently listened to their words of truth and power.

We need, further, the literature of which we are writing in order to harmonize us and make us feel our connection with our race. As the life of humanity is integral and continuous, we shall not understand the wants of the present, unless we feel the pulsations and power of the common life. As this generation is the outgrowth of all that preceded it, we must know the past to know the necessities of the present. It is not enough to come in contact with the living, we need to be brought face to face with the dead. The present is not wise enough; we need the cumulative wisdom of all time. To say that books are the cement of ages, is but saying a little of the truth. They contain the spirit of the generations in which they were written. The books of power that men do not let die, are the condensations of the best thought of their time and nation. When Cicero speaks it is not Marcus Tullius only. It is Rome of the first century before Christ. When Augustine speaks, it is not the bishop of Hippo only. The church of his time speaks through him, and he gives the best and fullest statement of their opinions; vague and undefined though they may have been until they had passed through the furnace of his genius, where they were freed from alloy and stamped with the impress of strength, of brilliancy and of beauty, by his master hand. The great writers of the times of Elizabeth, James, Charles and Cromwell, put in circulation the best thoughts of their days, in civil and religious liberty, on forms of government, on theology and on education, for all men's minds were exercised on those themes as never before nor since. The spirit of the nation, aroused to its highest pitch of enthusiasm by the pressure of its necessities, spoke through them as they told their countrymen and the world what could best subserve the interests of a people merging into a freedom which they were resolved to gain and perfect. When we go to them, we go to men who have thought most deeply, and expressed themselves most clearly and powerfully on these topics of undying interest which then arose before the world in their true and majestic proportions. They spoke for humanity, and not for themselves alone.

Would we gain wide views, we must seek the highest summits, and look through the optic glass of the best artists. We must sit at the feet of the great teachers, think their thoughts, feel their deep impulses, look out from their heights, both before and after, and see how far the one unbroken race, the genus man, has made advance in the line of true development.

As they who were the free instruments of God in giving us a Revelation, spoke as they were moved by the Holy Ghost, so they who have uttered the most of human wisdom spoke as they were moved by the spirit of humanity. There were many prophets, but their visions were not all recorded, the Divine hand gathering up only what the world needed, as inclusive of all the rest. So what was best uttered, what had most comprehensiveness, vigor, truth and beauty, what had the most vital worth and the finest, fullest verbal expression, the instinct of the race has handed down to us. If we do not know what the one human race has thought and felt in the days of its excited struggles, and in the halcyon hours of its repose, we shall neither enter into a full sympathy with its life, nor do our part in meeting its demands. Our ignorance will keep us in a par

tial isolation.

Literature not only harmonizes, it nourishes patriotism. It is impossible to surrender ourselves up to the power of those who write upon the deepest themes of our common humanity, in words of vigor and life, with the additional fascination of harmony of number or of rhythm, and not be kindled by their fires. All of the world's great oracles, no matter in what tongue they address their fellow-men, whether they at once have gained the general ear, or have had to wait until the coming generations for a listening audience, are full of ardor and affection for their native soil. Their hearts yearn toward their country and their countrymen. However wide their views and broad their utterances, their fulness and majesty are heightened when these interests awake the energies of their souls. However ardent their love for the liberty of all, their love for the liberty of their own land beams with a brighter, purer flame. If the Italian sings "Bella e liberta," it is liberty for Italy. If liberty, political, social and religious, is dear to Milton, it is for England and for Englishmen. When Wordsworth rouses

us most with a clarion blast, it is for England's victories. When Burns subdues us most, it is when his lines are fragrant with Scotland's own blossoms, and melodious with the sound of her own swift streams. Nationality is as essential an element in literature as individuality. The writer must not only speak for humanity with his own clear and peculiar utterances; he must speak for his own people and in his own mother tongue. He must be so penetrated with the flavor of the soil on which he grew, that the elimination of that flavor would be the destruction of the germ and fibre of all he writes. His style must have the raciness of his country's honest idioms. We know that this is so. Shakespeare could never have gained the sovereignty over the literature of the world, had not every page the vital throb of unmistakeable English life. It does the heart good to read his patriotic bursts, of which his historic plays are full.

We are moved by no writers as by those who "show the mettle of their own pastures." The spirit of their own people must speak if they would receive our homage. When patriotism fires them, patriotism will fire us, if we yield ourselves as we should to their generous ardor. Do we need historic proof of such a magnificent use of literature? The chosen spots in Germany where the patriotic impulses are most profoundly felt, are the universities, where they quaff the deepest draughts from the pure, perennial streams which may have sprung up in other lands, but they flow.on, like the four streams of Eden, to water the earth. The colleges of our own land have shown the most unsullied patriotism. Professors and students in our own land have shown what intellectual diet fed them, as they left behind the material and grosser element of their books, and carried their spiritual and imperishable essence into the field of battle. Our revolutionary patriots had this healthy nutriment. Witness the will of the father of the late Josiah Quincy: "I leave to my son Josiah, when he shall attain the age of fifteen, the works of Algernon Sidney, John Locke and Lord Bacon, Gordon's Tacitus, and Cato's Letters; and may the Spirit of Liberty abide upon him."

Another function of the literature we would magnify, is to vitalize. It is a very common remark that many public men,

as lawyers, editors, teachers and others, as they advance in years, show less and less of the healthy, pleasing vigor that gave to their earlier intellectual products much of their attractiveness. The sermons are dryer and duller, although they may be more compact with abstract thought. The lawyer's brief may be clear, but his speeches are cold and heavy. The teacher, who clothed the abstractions of language and logic with the dress of life, has subsided to the position of a dry imparter of dry systems and dead rules. The bones of paleontology have become very dry. There is no soul, now, under those ribs of death. The continuance in the old routine, with no visits to "fresh fields and pastures new," has had its slow and sure effect. All professional men must grow dull, abstract and skeletonlike, unless they are ever renewing their intellectual youth by a frequent and sympathetic recurrence to those great teachers of mankind whose thoughts are always young. Study of these authors, for the sake of criticism and analysis, will not do. There must be the genial, receptive surrender to their influences which marked the early perusal. Such an acquaintance will ever be detecting new beauties. The trained and affectionate eye will see hidden depths of meaning, where before it had only glanced upon the surface. Coming back again and again, like Antæus to the earth, they will renew their strength.

It is very strange that, among the very men whose professed object in life is the presentation of religious truth to men, so that old and young may be effected by it, there should be not only an indifference to, but a contemptuous disparagement of, the only means that can accomplish their object, that is truth presented to the intellect, the will, the sensibilities and the imagiination, in a living form. They avoid life as if it were death itself. They speak disparagingly of those who have it. But alas! they are in error. The race is always young, and full of vitality. To be moved aright, it must have its true cravings met. It demands the fundamental truths that are as old as the dawn of the race, but it must have them in vital, rounded and youthful forms. It asks for the same kind of air and water that Adam breathed and drank, but it must be running water and oxygenated air. Unless we go back to the Alpine men whom nature has appeared to furnish the beginnings of river-systems

« ÀÌÀü°è¼Ó »