BOOK ONE.

CHRISTIANITY THE BASIS OF SOCIAL LIFE.

CHAPTER I.

FIRST PRINCIPLES.

OF CHRISTIAN PHILANTHROPY, HERO-WORSHIP, AND THE ORIGIN
AND END OF LAW.

PROPOSING, in this book, to glance generally at a few of the characteristic social agencies of our time, it seems to us an orderly and perspicuous method to regard modern Christian philanthropy as a fitting representative of those agencies, and its consideration, for that reason, a meet introduction to their cursory survey. We shall not allege it to be a principal agency in our present and prospective social system. But we do think that, in its treatment, we are brought eye to eye with that problem on which the future of the free nations depends; and that an inquiry into its fundamental principles, and a survey of its development, lead us by a natural path to the full statement and comprehension of that problem. With this statement we purpose concluding the present division of our subject. We consider, then, in the outset, the essential and fundamental ideas of Christian Philanthropy.

We do not affirm that there is any thing positively new in

the idea of this philanthropy. It is as old as love. Its history began to be written in the first tear which fell from a human eye, over one whose only claim was pity, and whose only plea was sorrow. But we shall not be required to prove that there is such a thing in our day as "the philanthropic movement:" we may safely allege the fact that simple pity, love for the wretched as such, has become a more formal and recognizable power in our time than heretofore. Of this we speak.

That our conception of Christian Philanthropy may be clearly perceived, and that it may be known at once what we believe to be its true nature, and what we are willing to stand by as its defensible positions, we shall state, in four categories, what we deem its grand fundamental propositions.

I. In the system of human affairs, there is a distinct, traceable, and indispensable function, to be performed by compassion.

II. All men are, in a definable sense, equal. All human law is grounded on expediency; on what is temporal and not eternal. Revenge is foreign to the idea of law.

III. It is not a possible case that hatred be the highest and most reasonable feeling with which one human being can regard another. There can not, upon earth, exist, in the human form, any one whom it is not noble and holy to love.

IV. It is impossible, in this world, that the traces of the divine image be absolutely obliterated from the human soul. God has not revealed to man any period at which it is either incumbent on, or lawful for him, to abandon hope and effort that his brother may attain to that higher nature which is at once the restoration and elevation of humanity.

These categories are closely connected with each other, and

a more searching analysis might doubtless afford clearer lines of demarcation; but, for practical purposes, we think they will serve. The first is the general declaration with which philanthropy, as such, sets out. The second leads us to define its true relation to justice. The third is intimately associated with the second, and is the Christian rule of feeling, as expressed by our Saviour. The fourth indicates the rationale of every effort toward reclamation of the criminal or condemned.

At its first arising, Philanthropy was hailed with acclamation. Without hesitation, apparently without question, and almost with universal voice, men affirmed its light to be holy, and its influence, of necessity, benign. Be the cause, however, what it may, we now find matters altered. Philanthropy, it is true, has pervaded the nation, and more is done at the simple cry of compassion than was ever done before; but it has been assailed with vituperation and contempt, scarcely condescending to argue; while it furnishes every petty novelist and scribbler with subjects of caricature, and targets for small arrows that stick because they are viscous with venom, not because they are pointed with wit. The chief argumentative assailant of philanthropy is a man whose words must always deserve calm and thorough consideration, whose name alone is a battery-Mr. Carlyle. Caricaturists and small wits might be left to shift for themselves, after we had demonstrated, if that proved to be in our power, the value and reasonableness of philanthropy; but to leave them thus altogether, were to fall into the mistake of supposing that nothing can injure which has little force, or that men are not in the habit, every day, and scores of times every day, of holding apples so near to their eyes that they shut out the light of the sun. We consider, therefore, a few words (and

they shall be as few as we can possibly make them) not. wholly wasted on the subject of the ridicule to which philanthropy is in our day exposed: they may prove applicable to the sense of the ridiculous as exercised on every kind of religious or moral action or emotion.

We are by no means among those who utter a sweeping condemnation against all laughter in the serious provinces of human affairs: we consider the sense of the ridiculous ex tremely valuable in a man and a nation. In every department of art, of literature, and of life, it prunes a fantastic or grotesque exuberance, keeping down, to give it in one word, excessive idiosyncrasy. It is, by its nature, in close league with common sense; it is the mortal foe of bombast, sentimentality, softness, and every sort of pretense. We regard the strong sense of the ridiculous inherited by the English people as one of the healthiest characteristics. It may at present threaten to degenerate into universal titter; but, in its native strength and soundness, it preserves us in a fine mean between the French and the Germans; between the "gesticulating nation that has a heart, and wears it on its sleeve," and the nation that thinks walls, and holds the empire of the air.* We imagine there is much in our literature at present which might be bettered by a little smart satire: it is a tonic we can not well do without.

And we claim no exemption for philanthropy from the restraining or tempering power of a sound sense of the ridic

* "Gentlemen, think the wall:"-these were the words in which Fichte commenced his philosophic lectures in Jena. However idealistic, we can scarcely conceive a British audience not being touched with a feeling of drollery by the words: the Germans sat like stucco. Let it not be thought from this remark that I intend the faintest disespect for the majestic genius and noble character of Fichte.