Here is Mr. Emerson's greatly changed present language: *

1. "A new Socrates, or Zeno, or Swedenborg, or Pascal, or a new crop of geniuses like those of the Elizabethan age, may be born in this age, and, with happy heart and a bias for theism, bring asceticism, duty, and magnanimity into vogue again."

2. "I confess our later generation appears ungirt, frivolous, compared with the religious of the last or Calvinistic age. There was in the last century a serious habitual reference to the spiritual world, running through diaries, letters, and conversation-yes, and into wills and legal instruments also, compared with which our liberation looks a little foppish and dapper."

Enthusiasm

3. "A sleep comes over the great functions of man. goes out. In its stead a low prudence seeks to hold society staunch; but its arms are too short-cordage and machinery never supply the peace of life."

4. "Luther would cut his hand off sooner than write these against the pope if he suspected that he was bringing on with all his might the pale negations of Boston Unitarianism."

5. "You say, 'Cut away; my tree is Ygdrasil-the tree of life.' He interrupts for the moment your peaceful trust in the Divine Providence. Let him know by your security that your conviction is clear and sufficient, and if he were Paul himself, you also are here, and with your Creator."

6. "Virtue is the adopting of the universal mind by the individual will. Character is the habit of this obedience, and religion is the accompanying emotion, the emotion of reverence which the presence of the universal mind ever excites in the individual."

7. ""Tis a sort of proverbial dying speech of scholars—at least it is attributed to many-that which Anthony Wood reports of Nathaniel Carpenter, an Oxford Fellow. It did repent him,' he said, 'that he had formerly so much courted the maid instead of the mistress (meaning philosophy and mathematics) 'to the neglect of divinity.' This, in the language of our time, would be ethics."

That does not sound like the roaring of the earlier half of the history of this crystalline liquid pillar with vapour around it.

Most emphatically at this hour, Concord, which once taught pantheism at the lips of Mr. Alcott, asserts theism. Channing said in 1841 of the School of Transcendentalists in this city, that very few of them were consciously pantheists; but that he had heard pantheism from Mr. Alcott, who, as the nation knows, now teaches theism. There has come upon Eastern Massachusetts such a change, that today, if I am to be serious in my solitude, if I am not to take the side of superficiality and coarseness, if I am to be abreast of the loftiest

*North American Review, May and June, 1878, essay on "The Sovereignty of Ethics."

thought in the tumult of our speculative age, I must believe in two things-that I shall go hence as a personality, and that on the other side of the grave I shall meet God as a personality.

Can I walk with Him in peace unless I love what He loves and hate what He hates? We desire certainty. My passion, I hope, is a love of reality. And I am beginning here and now, far off and with propositions that I hope are incontrovertible, a justification of my belief that without similarity of feeling with God, I can have no peace in His presence; and also of my conviction that without some screen to shut off from my conscience and the sight of God my record in the black past, I cannot be harmonized with that record. Slowly I wish to lead you on from point to point of absolute certainty, till we see whether Tennyson was right in his "Palace of Art," in representing culture as leading to despair. I shall assume from this point that we agree with the higher and not with the lower schools of discussion; and that we take as ours this loftier range of thought which asserts theism and has immortality as a hope. Assuming God and immortality, what can culture do to give us peace? This is a purely scientific question, and to the answer to it we shall listen in the future.

OUTGROWN RELIGIOUS DOUBTS AND PANICS; OR,

RECENT TRIUMPHS OF THEISM.

PRELUDE.-HOPES AND FEARS IN AMERICAN POLITICS.

BENJAMIN FRANKLIN, the tallow-chandler's son, who was born on the opposite side of yonder street, saturated our Revolutionary era with the doctrine that the poor man's all is as dear to him as the rich man's all to him; and the inference from this proposition was, that the poor man needed the vote as much as the rich, and perhaps more, because the vote was his chief means of securing himself from assault, which the rich man might easily repel by other means than suffrage. Sound ideas as to finance, the purity of elections, and the yet pestilent doctrine of State rights, have recently been honoured and hallowed in elections from Maine to California by a tornado of popular approval. Even reactionary critics are inclined to indorse Franklin's extreme doctrine as to suffrage, although Mr. Phillips tells us that Boston does not believe in democracy, and that New England is shy to this day of the positions of Franklin in this respect. An aroused and independent suffrage, has always wrought justice in the United States; a torpid, unexercised suffrage has been the paradise of political tricksters from the beginning of our national history. Our first century of political experience proves, not that our suffrage needs to be narrowed, except by the reading test, of which may Providence speed the adoption; but that the number of our elections, the extent of our political machinery, the power of political managers as a professional class, need to be restricted. The term system, the spoils system, are phrases that mean very nearly the same thing in our swiftly recurring elections, and they have brought into existence a class of professional political managers and merely party men, whose power is a menace to our crowded and hazardous future.

My topic is Hopes and Fears after the late Elections, but as I have many fears let me emphasize strongly my hopes.

We begin to see that the census of 1880 will be the final reply to the rebel heresies of the Southern States. Goldwin Smith has told us that if Canada had belonged to the American Union in 1860, we should have had no civil war, for the suffrage of the North would have decisively outweighed that of the South. But after the census of 1880, and the redistribution of places in Congress according to the new count, it is altogether probable that any Confederate statesman now there will be in a minority, and a Confederate statesman in a minority is a very different political creature from a Confederate statesman in the majority. Look at this map of the constitutional population of the country, and see how heavily the North is already weighted [referring to Walker's Statistical Atlas of the United States, open on the platform]. Examine this other map of the illiteracy of the country, and notice that the North is not heavily weighted with darkness

in contrast with the Gulf. Look at the shadows on the Chesapeake, on the Savannah, on the lower part of the Mississippi, and along the Gulf coast of Texas. Compare these with this zone of free schools and omnipresent newspapers, stretching from Philadelphia and the northern border of Maine straight away towards the sunset. When you add the constitutional population that has been accumulated since the census of 1870, to the fact of the superior illumination of the North, you may well see that Providence is in a conspiracy to give success to intelligence. There is a conspiracy for the success of Northern ideas in this Union, and the parties to that conspiracy are the free schools and the multiplication table, and the census, and the Constitution of the United States.

The interests of the Southern States themselves will not be adequately protected, I think, except under the stern prevalence of Northern principles. I am not now assailing the Southern population, but simply certain Confederate politicians, who have learned nothing, and who will be utterly unteachable except by the census.

Only the census will bring the South to its senses. Why, not long ago I was at Topeka, in Kansas, and saw freedmen flocking out of bondage. If American citizens were living in Germany, or France, or England, and were so treated that by thousands they should take flight to secure their property and their lives, the American flag would very soon have its honour vindicated abroad by the power of the American Executive; but American citizens under our flag along the Gulf are so treated that they fly to Kansas for safety in property and life. An American citizen, under the American flag, is safer to-day in Afghanistan than he is in the South, if he is a freedman, and undertakes to vote an unpopular political ticket.

In the facts of our present condition, there is much to justify the large unconfessed anxieties of those who are the most thoughtful as to the future of the nation; but I am here to emphasize for a moment the gladness of the hour. We are lifting our feet from the further side of the last deep morass on the river bank of our civil conflict. I sometimes think of the civil war as a stream of blood running through morasses. The beginning of the reedy marsh we reached in the year 1851, when we passed the Fugitive Slave Bill. We walked painfully across the oozy acres of the Kansas struggle, on the left bank of the river, and in 1861 our feet plunged into the bloody current. On Gettysburg we first felt the firm land under our feet on the opposite side, and at Richmond we took our feet out of the scarlet stream. And then came those morasses of hard times brooded over by their fogs of inflation, and communism, and socialism, and many of our heaviest walkers in politics seemed themselves to be sinking in the Serbonian bog. But, on the first day of the current year we felt firm land under our feet in the matter of resumption. And now, thank God! we begin to feel land that is a part of the clean bank we shall reach in the census of 1880. I see in that date the other side of the morass. For thirty years we have been passing through either the river or the treacherous, pestilential, oozy acres. From 1851 to 1881 is a stretch of thirty years, over which the bloody current of the civil war cast out either its own swirling eddies, or else the morasses produced at the edge of the stream. We are nearly through. Take courage, for the land of 1880 is in sight; and we have put down slavery, we have put down rebellion, we have put down inflation, we have put down hard times, we have put down demagogism enlisted on the side of inflation, and we have done all this under free popular suffrage.

Demagogism, however, will be alive after all the demagogues who are now alive are dead; Butlerism will not die with Butler, and the defenders of false systems in finance will not die with the Ohio idea. It was my fortune, in Gov. Foster's

own town in Ohio, not long since, to lecture on the question, "Dons Death End All?" and on leaving the ball in the middle of the afternoon, when the streets were alive with martial music and a great procession, a shrewd man turned to me, and said, "We wish you would speak this evening in the public square, and take for your subject this question, 'Does Death End All-with the Rag Baby?' We may well ask whether death ends all with demagogism in Massachusetts, for our manufacturing populations, which have been wheedled into the support of false theories, are growing very rapidly, and we need to be taught in the future the duty of benevolence towards this class, the duty of justice on the part of the dominant political party towards all working-men, the duty of large sympathy with the working class everywhere, if we are to contend against the clamour of demagogues who defend heresies of a socialistic and a communistic order.

But, now, if these things are the hopes, what are the fears? My native State has been ground under the wheels of what is called the "political machine." I am glad enough, personally, that the result has been what it is, and yet the result was reached at an immense cost. Here is Fisher Ames (pointing to his portrait on the wall), who feared that the power of the politicians would ruin the republic. What if we bring Benjamin, the tallow chandler's son, and Fisher Ames to this platform, and confront them by the senator from New York and by another Benjamin from Massachusetts. Here is the contrast of the earlier portion of our political history and of the later, the power of the manager of the political machine over against the power of the statesman, the power of the demagogue over against the power of a true friend of the people.

The certainty is, that in the election in New York the administration itself suffered not a little humiliation.

You remember that the present Executive at Washington came into office promising to carry through schemes of Civil Service Reform. You remember his famous order in which he directed that no government official should be taxed for campaign purposes. You remember how the present Governor-elect of New York was dismissed from the Custom House in disgrace. You remember how sternly the senator who nominated this man to be the next governor of New York opposed the Administration's ideas of Civil Service Reform. You remember how in a hundred ways that strenuous party man threw contempt upon the cause which ostensibly lay close to the heart of the present Administration. And yet, what has happened? Why, the great Secretary of the Treasury, than whom there has not been in history a statesman more worthy of honour for his financial victories, has been made to take a low place at the side of the triumphant chariot of the party man, the senator of New York. He has been obliged to take the platform side by side with Mr. Dutcher, the appraiser, and go about swallowing his own record on Civil Service Reform. There is a letter in existence of the Secretary of the Treasury, authorising the Appraiser Dutcher to leave his post of public duty and to call on the Government officials under him for contributions to maintain the campaign in New York State.

Mr. Evarts himself was regarded with secret pity in New York city as obliged to take a humiliating position, for he came there to defend the candidate who had been nominated in defiance of the wishes and pledges of the administration—that is, in defiance of the whole scheme of Civil Service Reform. I am not one of those who would counsel unnecessary revolt to young men in politics; I do not know that I should have voted, had I been in New York State, with that wing of the Republican party who endeavoured to defeat the nomination dictated by the senator from New York; but the certainty is, that the clamour which has been