The Arena. Volume 4, No. 20, July, 1891

Like a flash of keener light a sentence shot across the girl’s mind. “Nature knows no title-deed. The bounty of her mighty hands falls as the sunlight falls, copious, impartial; her seas carry all ships, her air is for all lips, her lands for all feet.”

“Poverty and suffering such as yours will not last.” There was something in the girl’s voice that roused the woman. She turned her dull eyes upon her face.

Lily took her hand in both hers as if by a caress she could impart her own faith.

“Look up, dear. When Nature is so good and generous, man must come to be better, surely. Come, go in the house again. Sim is there, he expects you, he told me to tell you he was sorry.” Lucretia’s face twitched a little at that, but her head was bent. “Come, you can’t live this way. There isn’t any other place to go to.”

No, that was the bitterest truth. Where on this wide earth with its forth-shooting fruits and grains, its fragrant lands and shining seas, could this dwarfed, bent, broken, middle-aged woman go? Nobody wanted her, nobody cared for her. But the wind kissed her drawn lips as readily as those of the girl, and the blooms of clover nodded to her as if to a queen.

Lily had said all she could. Her heart ached with unspeakable pity and a sort of terror.

“Don’t give up, Lucretia. This may be the worst hour of your life. Live and bear with it all for Christ’s sake—for your children’s sake. Sim told me to tell you he was to blame. If you will only see that you are both to blame and yet neither to blame, then you can rise above it. Try, dear!”

The wife pulled herself together, rose silently, and started toward the house. Her face was rigid but no longer sullen. Lily followed her slowly, wonderingly.

As she neared the kitchen door, she saw Sim still sitting at the table; his face was unusually grave and soft. She saw him start and shove back his chair,—saw Lucretia go to the stove and lift the tea-pot, and heard her say, as she took her seat beside the baby,—

“Want some more tea?”

She had become a wife and mother again, but in what spirit the puzzled girl could not say.

EDITORIAL NOTES

AN EPOCH-MARKING DRAMA

A movement destined, I think, to be in a degree epoch-marking in the dramatic annals of the American stage, was inaugurated by Mr. James A. Herne, on the fourth of May, in Boston, in the production of his remarkable realistic drama, “Margaret Fleming,” at Chickering Hall. The play is a bold innovation, so much so that no theatre in the city would produce it, although the various managers who examined it declared it to be as strong as and no less powerful than any American drama yet written. The character of the audience was as striking as the play was brave and original. It was, indeed, a strange sight to see such well-known and thoughtful men and women as Mr. William Dean Howells, Rev. Minot J. Savage, Rabbi Solomon Schindler, Rev. Edward A. Horton, Mrs. Louise Chandler Moulton, Hamlin Garland, and a score or more of persons almost as well known in literary, religious, and thoughtful circles, assembled on the first night of a dramatic production. Nor was the character of the audience less remarkable during the fortnight it was played. Men and women who are rarely seen at theatres attended two, three, and even four performances. The superb acting of Mr. and Mrs. Herne contributed much to the success of the play; curiosity also doubtless attracted many, yet beyond and above this was the deep appreciation of a thoughtful and intelligent constituency, who saw in this drama the marvellous possibilities of the stage for improvement as well as entertainment. They also saw real life depicted. The absence of empty lines and stilted phrases so common in conventional drama was refreshing and interesting to those who believe that the drama has a mission other than merely to amuse. “Margaret Fleming” is nothing if not artistic from the standpoint of the realist. Its fidelity to life as we find it—to existing conditions and types of society,—is wonderful. Its dramatic strength is none the less marked. But aside from and above all this, for me it has a far greater merit—utility. I have no sympathy with the flippant, effeminate, and senile cry, “Art for art’s sake”; that is the echo of a decaying civilization, the voice of Greece and Rome in their decline. It is the shibboleth of a people drunken with pleasure; of a popular conscience anæsthetized; the cry of sensualism and selfishness popular with shallow minds and bloodless hearts; the incarnation of that fatal effeminacy that springs from a union of wealth and superficial intellectuality; the voice of a human automaton without a soul. Victor Hugo has made no utterances more grandly true than when he pleads for the beautiful being made the servant of progress as voiced in the following sentiment:

“Be of some service. Do not be fastidious when so much depends upon being efficient and good. Art for art’s sake may be very fine, but art for progress is finer still. Ah! you must think? Then think of making man better. Courage! Let us consecrate ourselves. Let us devote ourselves to the good, to the true, to the just; it is well for us to do so. Some pure lovers of art, moved by a solicitude which is not without its dignity, discard the formula, ‘Art for Progress,’ the Beautiful Useful, fearing lest the useful should deform the beautiful. They tremble to see the drudge’s hand attached to the muse’s arm. According to them, the ideal may become perverted by too much contact with reality. They are solicitous for the sublime, if it descends as far as to humanity. They are in error. The useful, far from circumscribing the sublime, enlarges it. But critics protest: To undertake the cure of social evils; to amend the codes; to impeach law in the court of right to utter those hideous words, ‘penitentiary,’ ‘convict-keeper,’ ‘galley-slave,’ ‘girl of the town’; to inspect the police registers; to contract the business of dispensaries; to study the questions of wages and want of work; to taste the black bread of the poor; to seek labor for the working-woman; to confront fashionable idleness with ragged sloth; to throw down the partition of ignorance; to open schools; to teach little children how to read; to attack shame, infamy, error, vice, crime, want of conscience; to preach the multiplication of spelling-books; to improve the food of intellects and of hearts; to give meat and drink; to demand solutions for problems and shoes for naked feet,—these things they declare are not the business of the azure. Art is the azure. Yes, art is the azure; but the azure from above, whence falls the ray which swells the wheat, yellows the maize, rounds the apple, gilds the orange, sweetens the grape. Again I say, a further service is an added beauty. At all events, where is the diminution? To ripen the beet-root, to water the potato, to increase the yield of lucern, of clover, or of hay; to be a fellow-workman with the ploughman, the vinedresser, and the gardener,—this does not deprive the heavens of one star. Immensity does not despise utility,—and what does it lose by it? Does the vast vital fluid that we call magnetic or electric flash through the cloud-masses with less splendor because it consents to perform the office of pilot to a bark, and to keep constant to the north the little needle intrusted to it, the gigantic guide? Yet the critics insist that to compose social poetry, human poetry, popular poetry; to grumble against the evil and laud the good, to be the spokesman of public wrath, to insult despots, to make knaves despair, to emancipate man before he is of age, to push souls forward and darkness backward, to know that there are thieves and tyrants, to clean penal cells, to flush the sewer of public uncleanness,—is not the function of art! Why not? Homer was the geographer and historian of his time, Moses the legislator of his, Juvenal the judge of his, Dante the theologian of his, Shakespeare the moralist of his, Voltaire the philosopher of his. No region, in speculation or in fact, is shut to the mind. Here a horizon, there wings; freedom for all to soar. To sing the ideal, to love humanity, to believe in progress, to pray toward the infinite. To be the servant of God in the task of progress, and the apostle of God to the people,—such is the law which regulates growth. All power is duty. Should this power enter into repose in our age? Should duty shut its eyes? And is the moment come for art to disarm? Less than ever. Thanks to 1789, the human caravan has reached a high plateau; and, the horizon being vaster, art has more to do. This is all. To every widening of the horizon, an enlargement of conscience corresponds. We have not reached the goal. Concord condensed into felicity, civilization summed up in harmony,—that is yet far off. The theatre is a crucible of civilization. It is a place of human communion. All its phases need to be studied. It is in the theatre that the public soul is formed.”

The theatre may be made the most potent engine for progress and reform. We are living in the midst of the most splendid age which has dawned since humanity first fronted the morning, dimly conscious of its innate power and the possibilities that lay imbedded in its being; an era of life, growth, warfare. On the one hand are ancient thought and prejudice, on the other the inspiration of greater liberty and a nobler manhood. On the one hand selfishness, sensuality, vulgar ostentation, avarice, luxury, and moral effeminacy crying, “Art for art’s sake,” demanding amusements that will aid in dissipating any moral strength or deep thought that still lingers in the mind, and literature that shall enable one to kill time without the slightest suspicion of intellectual exertion; physical, mental, and moral ennui, with an assumed lofty contempt for utility. On the other hand we have the gathering forces of the dawn, demanding “art for progress,” declaring that beauty must be the handmaid of duty; that art must wait on justice, liberty, fraternity, nobility, morality, and intellectual honesty,—in a word the forces in league with light must compel the beautiful to make radiant the pathway of the future. In the union of art and utility lies the supreme excellence of “Margaret Fleming,” it deals with one of the most pressing problems of our present civilization; it is the most powerful plea for an equal standard of morals for men and women that I have ever heard. This thought, it is true, like the entire drama, is anything but conventional; it breathes the spirit of the coming day. The subtile bondage and servility of woman, a vestige of the barbarous past, still taints our civilization. Far more is demanded by society of her than of man, and when heretofore she has raised her voice against this inequity she has been silenced by unworthy imputations. It is the shame of our age that woman is not accorded a higher meed of justice. She has a right to demand that the man who marries her be every whit as pure and moral as herself, and until she makes this demand, and holds herself from the contamination of moral lepers, no substantial progress for higher morals and purer life will be made. Unless woman checks the increasing degradation of manhood, man will sooner or later drag her to his deplorable level. “Margaret Fleming” shows this truth and points to the woman of to-day her stern and inexorable duty.

Unless woman assumes an aggressive stand and ostracizes the libertine, refusing his society, his attention, and most of all the proffer of his leprous love, the moral outlook for society will soon be as gloomy as was Rome’s future when Epictetus was banished from her streets because he mercilessly assailed the moral degradation of his day.

THE PRESENT REVOLUTION IN THEOLOGICAL THOUGHT

The rapid spread of heresy throughout the churches is creating genuine dismay in many quarters. When such ripe scholars and representative thinkers as Rev. Heber Newton, Dr. C. A. Briggs, and Rev. Dr. Bridgman, representing three of the most powerful Protestant communions, freely preach doctrines at variance with conventional orthodox views, and express a grander hope and broader faith than that cherished by conservative theologians, it is by no means strange that the current of old-time thought should be stirred. If, however, these scholarly minds stood alone in their convictions, there would be no warrant for such widespread apprehension as is manifest. The serious character of the present theological revolution, however, lies in the fact that the pulpit and the people are honey-combed with the peculiar heresy which rejects the verbal inspiration of the Bible and the dogma of eternal damnation.[9 - The United Presbyterian in a recent issue says, “It appears that Dr. Briggs does not stand alone in the theological seminaries of the Presbyterian Church as a teacher of dangerous views of inspiration. Four of the professors of Lane Seminary have declared themselves as equally radical.” The Interior says, “The paper of Prof. Smith, of Lane, published in a pamphlet with that of Prof. Evans, goes much beyond anything that has appeared on the subject from Presbyterian authorship in this country.”At the meeting of the Alumni of the Union Theological Seminary, on the eighteenth of May, the newly elected professor of systematic theology, the brilliant Rev. Henry J. Van Dyke, D. D. (since deceased) made the following bold remark while defending Dr. Briggs: “If we cannot have orthodoxy and liberty, let orthodoxy go and let us have liberty. Liberty has always produced progress.”In his sermon on May the 24th, Rev. Thomas Dixon, one of the Baptist clergymen of New York City, said: The heresy trial is a record of barbarism, a relic of savagery. It belongs to the crudeness, and ignorance, and superstition of barbaric times. It smells of roasting flesh.On the same Sunday the Rev. Dr. Charles H. Parkhurst, of the Madison Square Presbyterian Church, of New York, quoted the ringing words given above by Dr. Van Dyke, with his cordial indorsement. He continued to thus severely arraign the Orthodox brethren in the Presbyterian Church:“This question of inerrancy is not new. Calvin, Luther, and many others did not believe in the Bible’s inerrancy. If this is not according to the confession of faith—I don’t know whether it is or not—we had better square the confession with the truth rather than the truth with the confession. Let those who would prove that there are no mistakes in the Bible produce a cud-chewing coney, and then we will consider the question of inerrancy.If the Church is to go on in the way that some are trying to persuade us it ought to go, the sooner it gives up the ghost the better, to save the medical expense.”] The general uneasiness occasioned by the present epidemic of heresy, and the bitter strictures which it has called forth, are perfectly natural, while it is equally true that the present liberal attitude of so many of the foremost thinkers in the various orthodox churches is the legitimate outcome of numerous agencies which have been silently working for generations.

At various era-marking periods in the annals of history, the multitudes have been thus disturbed. They have felt that the old-time beliefs of their fathers, the tradition of ages, the oracles, which from early infancy they have learned to revere and hold most sacred, were being demolished. This naturally aroused bitter antagonism in their souls. They believed they were carrying out God’s wishes when like Saul of Tarsus, they aided in slaying heretics. Thus when the great Nazarene taught a higher, sweeter, and nobler code of ethics than the ancient Jewish law-givers and teachers, he was persecuted and slain because the Jews believed he sought to overthrow their revered and sacred truths. In a like manner Paul and the early advocates of Christianity, when they proclaimed their religion in Gentile lands frequently aroused the bitterest antagonism. At a later date Galileo’s demonstrations and Sir Isaac Newton’s discovery occasioned precisely the game dismay, and called forth bitter and pronounced opposition, because it was felt that in one case the authority of the Bible was impeached, and in the other that God was to be taken out of the universe. When Luther and the Reformation broke the dead calm of centuries of growing corruption and externalization in the religious life of Europe, Christendom felt a thrill of dismay. New disturbing elements had entered the fields. The general uneasiness on the part of tens of thousands of people who believed they were sincere worshippers of God, was succeeded by an intense desire to crush out this dangerous heresy with fire and torture, if necessary. The terrible days, months, and years that followed the dawn of the Reformation, bear melancholy testimony to the innate ferocity of man’s nature, and the relentless character of religious warfare. Nevertheless, in spite of persecution, the new truth spread. A broader horizon opened to man’s view. That conflict marked the birth of one of the grandest epochs in humanity’s onward march. Thus has it ever been. To-day stones the prophet, to-morrow tearfully rears a monument and treasures his lofty utterances.

Yet with every transition period comes the old-time struggle, the apprehension and anguish of spirit, the night of doubt. It is, therefore, not surprising that the oppression of fear weighs on the minds of all those who believe that God has spoken His last word; that in the twilight of the past alone lies the hope of humanity.

On the other hand, the theological revolt now manifest is a legitimate result of multitudinous agencies, which have for generations been silently and subtly influencing the mind of man, among which may be mentioned the spread of popular education, and the growth of the newspaper. As long as people knew not how to read or were unable to procure any medium of information which brought them in rapport with the vast growing world of thought and action, they naturally turned to their priest or clergyman for intellectual as well as religious food, and from him as a rule received instruction with the docility and confidence exhibited by little children seeking for truth. With the appearance of schoolhouses in every hamlet, and the establishment of cheap and popular newspapers, however, came a change as marked as it was wonderful. People began to reason and think for themselves. They demanded credentials for the various dogmas and ideas discussed in every department of thought. It is true, that religion was approached much more reluctantly and reverently than other subjects, but the growth of knowledge, the opportunity to hear all sides of problems discussed, and the broader conception of life which a world knowledge gave, exerted a positive and ever-increasing influence on their minds in this department of thought. The great inventions of the past hundred years, which have bound together as one family almost the whole world, have also brought to light the great religions of other races and ages. Gradually it dawned on the public mind that almost every people had a clearly defined system of theology; containing much that was beautiful, elevating, and inspiring, more or less hidden among superstitious traditions natural to childhood and credulous ages. This led many to ask whether Jesus might not have had a larger thought in his mind than mankind had dreamed when he said, “Other sheep have I which are not of this fold”; and whether there might not be a wider significance than had been given to the idea, that God had in sundry times and in divers ways spoken to His children on earth. Another lever of progressive thought was the marvellous strides taken in physical science, which followed the Reformation. Discoveries in astronomy, in geology and biology have completely overthrown many time-honored and revered traditions and fables regarded for ages as divine truth. The critical spirit of the age, the inquiring condition of human thought, which instead of being discouraging is distinctly a mark of human growth, stands in bold antithesis to the dark ages, when speculation and progress were outlawed in many fields of research, and spirituality suffered an eclipse behind the pomp, form, and show of theology, when to a great degree mental stagnation prevailed. Yet this critical spirit has been one of the most potent factors in liberalizing thought. Another cause for the radical change of views among Bible scholars is found in the rich results of archæological research during the past generation. This with a critical, or scientific study of the Bible, the early church, and profane history, contemporaneous with the rise of Christianity, has led thousands of the most profound and sincere religious thinkers into broader fields, giving to them a loftier view of life, eternity and God than was possible under the old conceptions. What diligent research on the part of scholarship has effected among critical students, the recent revision of the Bible has accomplished among the people. The old-time reverence for the letter of the law, or what is commonly known as verbal inspiration, is disappearing as mist before the sunshine, owing, in this latter case, to the people becoming acquainted for the first time with the fact that there are passages in the Bible confessed by the most orthodox scholars to be spurious. They found in the revised scriptures passages in some instances containing many consecutive verses enclosed in brackets, as, for example, the story of the woman taken in sin in the Gospel of John from vii. 53 to viii. 11 inclusive. Consulting the foot-note they found that these passages were spurious or added by a later hand. I well remember the explanation made by a scholarly and devout professor in theology, while at the Kentucky University, regarding the passage referred to above. “The incident doubtless occurred much as it appears,” asserted the professor, “but while omitted from the earlier copies, was handed down by tradition, and at a later day incorporated into the text.” Such explanations in the very nature of things, however, were by no means calculated to satisfy the doubts which had been raised in the minds of those who had from infancy been taught to believe in the verbal inspiration of the Bible. Naturally the question arose in the minds of the thinking masses, if one passage is proved to be spurious, and the world possesses no original manuscripts, what guarantee that anything approaching the original teachings of Jesus is preserved. If the stream of inspiration is proved to be muddy in some places, is it not possible that what at first was pure as the melting snow on the mountain tops, after passing through the hands of various human authors and copyists, may have become as turbid with the cast of human thought as the mountain stream which, pure at the source, is heavy with mud at the base? It is impossible to estimate how much influence this discovery on the part of the people has exerted in behalf of a broader and more liberal interpretation of the Bible. Another factor which is usually overlooked, but which has had a marked effect on the thought which to-day is in open rebellion against the old standards, is found in the influence exerted by a galaxy of great and godly lives, which came on the stage of existence early in the present century, and whose thoughts have unconsciously broadened the minds, refined the sentiment, and ennobled the lives of every one who has read their works. In this country Longfellow, Bryant, Whittier, Lowell, Hawthorne, Emerson, Channing, Parker, Clarke, and other illuminated souls, gave all who came under the magic of their words a broader view of life, a truer conception of the universe, and a loftier inspiration than aught that had touched them before. It is doubtful if the great thinkers dreamed that on the current of their thoughts tens of thousands of earnest lives were to be carried into a larger hope, a more intelligent, humane appreciation of the mysteries of creation, and a grander idea of God. Thus we see in the present religious revolution nothing strange in the bitter opposition of conservative thought, nothing remarkable in the persistent and earnest attitude of those who stand for the higher criticism. It is the old feud; the past struggling with the future; departing night battling with the dawn. Of the issue none who have faith in the ultimate triumph of truth, wisdom, and progress can doubt.

THE CONFLICT BETWEEN ANCIENT AND MODERN THOUGHT IN THE PRESBYTERIAN CHURCH

The vote of the New York Presbytery on the twelfth of May, to present the case of Prof. Charles A. Briggs[10 - Dr. Philip Schaff, than whom there is no abler or more renowned biblical scholar in the New World, has in a recent paper in the New York Herald defended Dr. Briggs. That journal aptly says: In his paper, he defines in the most trenchant language, the apparent inconsistency of the New York Presbytery in practically avowing, eighteen months ago, the same principle for which Dr. Briggs, it declares, must now stand trial. He declares that the American Presbyterian Church has herself materially changed the Westminster Confession of a hundred years ago, and that this spirit of revision pervades the whole Christian world. Finally, he asserts that, as the theory of verbal inspiration of the Scriptures is not in the Westminster Confession of Faith, it cannot be demanded from any Presbyterian minister or professor, and warns churchmen that any attempt by the General Assembly to enforce an extra Scriptural and extra Confessional theory upon the Church will create a split worse than that of 1837. The Herald observes that:—“Dr. Schaff’s international fame as a church historian and theologian will compel the greatest respect from not alone the ministers of the Presbyterian church, but also from the clergy of all Christian churches.As early as 1845, he was tried for heresy in this country, and acquitted. In 1854, he represented the American German churches at the Ecclesiastical Diet at Frankfort, and received the degree of D. D. from the University at Berlin. In 1870, he accepted the chair of sacred literature in the Union Theological Seminary of this city. He is a member of the Leipsic Historical, the Netherland, and other historical and literary societies in this country and in Europe, and is one of the founders and honorary secretary of the American Branch of the Evangelical Alliance. In 1871, he was one of the Alliance delegates to the Emperor of Russia to plead for the religious liberty of his subjects in the Baltic Provinces.He was president of the American Bible Revision Committee, which was appointed in 1871 at the request of the English committee, and in 1875 was sent to England to arrange for the co-operation and publication of the Anglo-American edition. The same year he attended officially the conferences of the Old Catholics, Greeks and Protestants at Bonn, to promote Christian unity.Dr. Schaff was first president of the American Society of Church History, and is the author of a great number of historical and exegetical works, both in English and German, the latter having been translated into English.”] before the synod will probably prove one of the most momentous moves made in recent years in the theological world. It is a positive challenge thrown before Presbyterians who hold views popularly termed “Higher Criticism.” It is a declaration of war to the knife on the part of those who oppose the revision of the Westminster Confession, and who cherish ancient thought. Nor is the opposition led by Dr. Briggs disposed to yield what is believed to be the only truth consistent with an intelligent conception of a just, loving, and wise God. The immediate cause of this determined conflict is found in Professor Briggs’ recent address on the authority of the Holy Scriptures, delivered at his inaugural as Professor of Biblical Theology in the Union Theological Seminary of New York. In this notable address he maintained that there were three great fountains of divine authority, the Bible, the Church, and Reason, any one of which was capable of leading persons to God. He instanced the following cases: Cardinal Newman was led to God through the Church of Rome; Spurgeon, through the Bible, and the philosopher Martineau through Reason. He further asserted “that no one could get at the Bible unless he forced his way through human obstacles, which he tabulated as follows: (1) Superstitious reverence for the book itself. (2) The belief in the verbal inspiration of the Bible. (3) The authenticity of the Scriptures. Traditions from the dead church assign authors to all the books of the Bible, but higher criticism pronounces these traditions fallacies and follies. (4) The doctrine of the inerrancy of the Bible. Historical criticism again pronounces that there are errors in the Bible, but they are in circumstantials, not in essentials. (5) The miracles are in violation of the laws of nature, and keep men away from the Bible. (6) The failure of minute prophecy.” Dr. Briggs further expressed belief in the ultimate salvation of mankind, declaring that redemption was not limited to this world, but continued through the vast period of time preceding the resurrection.

On page 55 of his revised address, he observes:

The Biblical redemption is a redemption of our race and of universal nature. As the ancient Jews limited redemption to Israel and overlooked the nations, so the Church limited redemption to those who were baptized, and excluded the heathen and unbaptized. The Presbyterians have too often limited redemption by their doctrine of election; the Bible knows no such limitation. The Bible teaches election, but an election of love. Loving only the elect, is earthly, human teaching. Electing men to salvation by the touch of Divine love—that is heavenly doctrine. The salvation of the world can only mean the world as a whole, compared with which the unredeemed will be so few and insignificant and evidently beyond the reach of redemption by their own act of rejecting it and hardening themselves against it, and by descending into such depths of demoniacal depravity that they will vanish from sight.

In the appendix to his address, published about the middle of May, in speaking of inerrancy, Dr. Briggs further observes:—

It is agreed that there are a large number of errors in the best MSS. of the Bible; it is the theory of modern dogmaticians, that they were not in the original MSS. We can never have them, and it is idle to speculate as to their contents. When the Lower or Textual Criticism has done its best, and secured the best possible text, dogmaticians discredit the best text when they speculate as to what was in the original text. If the reactionary dogmaticians may speculate to remove errors from the text, the rationalistic critics may also speculate with regard to the original text in a way that would make havoc with scholastic theology. Even Mohammed was willing to accept the original text of the Law and the Gospel, which he claimed had been falsified by Jews and Christians.

I said, “It is not a pleasant task to point out errors in the Sacred Scriptures.” In “Biblical Study,” and “Whither?” I limited myself to two errors of citation. I have not taken a brief to prove the errancy of Scripture. Conservative men should hesitate before they force the critics in self-defence to make a catalogue of errors in the Bible. The errors are in the only texts we have, and every one is forced to recognize them.

It is well known that the great reformers, Calvin and Luther, recognized errors in the Scriptures, that Baxter and Rutherford of the second Reformation were not disturbed by them, and that the choicest spirits of modern times—such as Van Oosterzee, Tholuck, Neander, Stier, Lange, and Dorner—have not hesitated to point out numerous errors in Holy Scripture. This view is maintained by Sanday, Driver, Cheyne, Davidson, Bruce, Gore, Marcus Dods, Blaikie, and numerous others in Great Britain; by Fisher, Thayer, Smythe, Evans, H. B. Smith, W. R. Harper, and hosts of others in this country.”

One can easily see how dangerously heretical such bold declarations would sound to patriarchs of conservatism like Rev. Dr. Shedd, the well-known author of Dogmatic Theology, which embraces thirteen hundred pages, but in the index of which one looks in vain for “forgiveness of sin” or “pardon of sin.” A work which devotes eighty-six pages to hell and only four to heaven. Dr. Briggs, however, claims that theologians like Dr. Shedd, whose teachings have been chiefly on the damnation of men not competent to judge him, and gauged by our present civilization he is doubtless correct, but by the standard of the theologians who framed the Westminster Confession, I have less confidence in his accuracy. It must be remembered, however, that Professor Briggs has exhaustively studied the lives and teachings of the framers of the Confession, and he may have been able at times to catch them at their best, when in moments of spiritual exaltation they have uttered grand prophetic and divinely loving utterances which were foreign to their usual habits of thought or the religious conviction of the age in which they lived. And in that event he may be able to maintain his position when his case is called before the synod, even against the popular impression as to the real meaning of the Confession. Failing in this, the only alternative will be recantation or withdrawal from the Presbyterian Communion. From the stand already taken it is impossible to imagine the professor stultifying himself and teaching what he does not believe; while his withdrawal will unquestionably mean the greatest schism that Presbyterianism has yet suffered. I think it highly probable that the majority of his brother ministers to-day will condemn[11 - Since writing the above the Assembly at Detroit has voted against the confirmation of Dr. Briggs by 440 against 59; thus, from a numerical point of view, Dr. Briggs is in the minority. This is by no means surprising, and I regard it greatly to the credit of the Assembly that, while they hold to the severe doctrines popularly known as Calvinism, they repudiate all the great liberal scholars who refuse to believe and teach conceptions of God which were unquestioningly accepted in a former age, but which the enlightenment of the present century shrinks from with unutterable horror. Unless Dr. Briggs proves a dishonest man and recants he must leave Union Theological Seminary, if that institution remains in the Presbyterian fellowship.] the bold, brave man whom his communion in the near future will revere as a man who, prophet-like, saw beyond the sect to which he belonged; whose noble, loving, and holy nature drew him into intimate relationship with the Divine life, which is the essence of Love.

notes

1

Translated by G. H. A. Meyer and J. Henry Wiggin, from the manuscript of Camille Flammarion.

2

Thousands of the women toiling in the cities on starving wages, might be given in the Southern States pleasant employment in fruit culture, and other light agricultural labors.

3

A year after this was written, the following advanced sentiment was uttered by Rabbi Schindler: “Have the dead the right of imposing laws upon the living, of making contracts of which future generations ought to bear the burden?”

4

It is necessary to illustrate this by a few decisive facts which have not been made familiar to the majority of readers, as farmers’ interests have received very little consideration in the East. The financial policy of the general government ever controlled by capital against labor, has been the most gigantic imposition by financial jugglery that history has recorded, and has been effected chiefly by manipulation and contraction of the currency to make debts more oppressive, and during the war by depreciating the people’s money. After the war when $500,000,000 were needed to compensate the destruction of confederate money, a criminal contraction of $500,000,000 dealt a crushing blow to the South, and to the whole country. Let us look at it from the standpoint of the largest body of laborers, the farmers. A very intelligent Illinois farmer, Bert Stewart, presents the case as follows, and if his data are all correct, he has demonstrated a wholesale robbery: The national debt at the end of the war was about $2,800,000,000. What would it then have cost the farmers to pay this debt? He estimates that it could have been paid by 996,000,000 bushels of wheat; or 1,380,000,000 bushels of corn; or 10,000,000 bales of cotton. But financial legislation has increased the value of money (magnifying the debt), and decreased the value of the products of labor, so that practically, the debt has been increasing faster than it has been paid; and, after paying nearly $2,000,000,000 of the principal, and over $2,000,000,000 of interest, it will cost more to pay the remaining third of the debt than to have paid the whole at first. It would require to-day, instead of 1,380,000,000, over 4,000,000,000 bushels of corn to pay the remaining third. This being the case, it would seem that the payment of about four thousand millions during the last twenty-six years, leaving the debt substantially unpaid, was virtually a robbery of the commonwealth by corrupt or ignorant legislation. Mr. Stewart mentions also, that in one year the binding twine trust, by raising prices, drew $21,000,000 “from the farmers of the West to the sharpers of the East.” The reports of the State Board of Agriculture of Illinois show (what is a fair statement for the whole country) that during the last thirty years the corn crops of Illinois have for more than half the time brought less than the cost of their production; and taking the entire thirty years together, the losses so nearly balanced the profits that the average net profit of the thirty years has not exceeded seventeen cents an acre for each year, in the cultivation of over six millions of acres of corn. In the official report of Iowa also, it is stated “the general range of farm products have sold below cost of production, since 1885.” The official “Farm Statistics of Michigan,” just issued, tell the same sad story. It shows that the wheat crop of 1889 cost more than it sold for, the loss being $1,471,515. The entire loss on wheat, corn, and oats amounted to $9,226,510. Thus is agricultural labor crushed that millionnaires may grow. Hence it is that farmers are sinking under their burdens of mortgage indebtedness, paying seven per cent. or more, losing their farms, and often compelled to mortgage crops, tools, and stock. In the single year, 1887, 35,334 farm mortgages were recorded in Illinois, amounting to $37,040,770, and “nine million mortgaged homes” is the war-cry of the Farmers’ Alliance.

Thus the independent farmer is disappearing, and although there was scarcely a tenant farmer in Illinois in 1840, there are more than 110,000 tenant farmers now; and we have a vast increase of large farms. But while the farmer sinks into poverty, those who handle his products grow rich. The Chicago Stock Yard that was started with a million of capital has grown so prosperously that its stock now amounts to $23,000,000. The monetary interests control all things, and Mr. Stewart forcibly says: “The time has come, gentlemen, when the government must run the railroads, or the railroads will run the government. In Pennsylvania to-day two roads own the State, its legislature, its governor, its courts, its people, own them body and soul, and stole the money from the people to buy them with. You elect men to positions and pay them salaries, and then the railroads buy them and make you pay for bribing your own officers, in the freight rates they charge you. The net income of the railroads of the United States is three times that of the entire revenue of the government.”

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Parker Pillsbury mentions a Governor of Maine, who owns in Maine, Michigan, Wisconsin, Minnesota, Dakota, and Canada, 691,000 acres.

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As a single specimen of this, I would mention that those eminent politicians, John C. New, and Wm. H. English, of Indiana, under the laws engineered by cunning and accepted by ignorance, invested $200,000 in a national bank scheme when greenbacks had been knocked down to forty cents, and in thirteen years from 1864 to 1877 they made a clear profit of $2,133,000—more than ten for one of their investment. But this is very moderate in comparison with land speculation. The Elyton Land Company at Birmingham, Alabama, with a cash capital of $100,000, has declared in five years, ending in 1888, dividends amounting to $5,570,000, and is believed to own property still that will amount to $5,000,000, a return of more than a hundred dollars for every one invested—a clear profit absorbed of over ten millions—the gift of law to monopoly. Will this ever return to the commonwealth? The robbery of the commonwealth goes on in every direction. Shall we continue the present system under which, while the nation is losing its inheritance daily, one man in Chicago tied up the wheat crop of the United States, and one man also tied up or cornered pork, and both levied millions on the people?

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To save the nation we must reform and stop the production of 60,000 boy tramps and the half million of paupers and criminals which our horrible system has produced, which at the present rate of increase will, in fifty years, be a million and a quarter, and in a hundred years will probably exceed four millions. I see no measures but those I propose that will save us from this terrible condition. They will not be adopted in time to prevent civil war, but they must be adopted afterwards.

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Succession and income taxes are now beginning to be considered. Two very feeble propositions have been brought forward. The Massachusetts Legislative Committee, on probate, reported a bill well adapted to be worthless—to discourage benevolence and keep property in the family by imposing a tax of five per cent. on property left by will, except when going to relatives or connections. Congressman Hall, of Minnesota, introduced a bill in the last Congress for an income tax, a fourth of one per cent. on incomes between two and three thousand rising gradually to one per cent. on incomes over $10,000. This very small business is not what was demanded by “The Farmers’ Alliance and Industrial Union” in the Ocala convention, which demanded the abolition of national banks and “the passage of a graduated income tax law.” These demands were reiterated by the last legislature of Missouri, in a resolution calling upon Congress to act upon them, and pledging the legislature to enforce the farmers’ demand as far as in their power. North Carolina, too, has adopted the Alliance principles. The income tax will probably be a growing one—one per cent. will not be its maximum. The British income tax under Mr. Gladstone in 1885 was three and a third per cent. But this is mere child’s play, being about equivalent to a property tax of one seventh of one per cent. When seriously considered, the question will be between five, ten, twenty, and thirty per cent.

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