The Writings of James Russell Lowell in Prose and Poetry, Volume V | Page 4

Society should expend its money to
convince the slave that he has a soul to be saved so far as he is obedient
to his master, but not to persuade the master that he has a soul to
undergo a very different process so far as he is unmerciful to his slave.
We Americans are very fond of this glue of compromise. Like so many
quack cements, it is advertised to make the mended parts of the vessel
stronger than those which have never been broken, but, like them, it
will not stand hot water,--and as the question of slavery is sure to
plunge all who approach it, even with the best intentions, into that fatal
element, the patched-up brotherhood, which but yesterday was
warranted to be better than new, falls once more into a heap of
incoherent fragments. The last trial of the virtues of the Patent
Redintegrator by the Special Committee of the Tract Society has ended
like all the rest, and as all attempts to buy peace at too dear a rate must
end. Peace is an excellent thing, but principle and pluck are better; and
the man who sacrifices them to gain it finds at last that he has crouched
under the Caudine yoke to purchase only a contemptuous toleration,
that leaves him at war with his own self-respect and the invincible
forces of his higher nature.
But the peace which Christ promised to his followers was not of this
world; the good gift he brought them was not peace, but a sword. It was
no sword of territorial conquest, but that flaming blade of conscience
and self-conviction which lightened between our first parents and their

lost Eden,--that sword of the Spirit that searcheth all things,--which
severs one by one the ties of passion, of interest, of self-pride, that bind
the soul to earth,--whose implacable edge may divide a man from
family, from friends, from whatever is nearest and dearest,--and which
hovers before him like the air-drawn dagger of Macbeth, beckoning
him, not to crime, but to the legitimate royalties of self-denial and
self-sacrifice, to the freedom which is won only by surrender of the will.
Christianity has never been concession, never peace; it is continual
aggression; one province of wrong conquered, its pioneers are already
in the heart of another. The mile-stones of its onward march down the
ages have not been monuments of material power, but the blackened
stakes of martyrs, trophies of individual fidelity to conviction. For it is
the only religion which is superior to all endowment, to all
authority,--which has a bishopric and a cathedral wherever a single
human soul has surrendered itself to God. That very spirit of doubt,
inquiry, and fanaticism for private judgment, with which Romanists
reproach Protestantism, is its stamp and token of authenticity,--the seal
of Christ, and not of the Fisherman.
We do not wonder at the division which has taken place in the Tract
Society, nor do we regret it. The ideal life of a Christian is possible to
very few, but we naturally look for a nearer approach to it in those who
associate together to disseminate the doctrines which they believe to be
its formative essentials, and there is nothing which the enemies of
religion seize on so gladly as any inconsistency between the conduct
and the professions of such persons. Though utterly indifferent to the
wrongs of the slave, the scoffer would not fail to remark upon the
hollowness of a Christianity which was horror-stricken at a dance or a
Sunday drive, while it was blandly silent about the separation of
families, the putting asunder whom God had joined, the selling
Christian girls for Christian harems, and the thousand horrors of a
system which can lessen the agonies it inflicts only by debasing the
minds and souls of the race on which it inflicts them. Is your
Christianity, then, he would say, a respecter of persons, and does it
condone the sin because the sinner can contribute to your coffers? Was
there ever a simony like this,--that does not sell, but withholds, the gift
of God for a price?

The world naturally holds the Society to a stricter accountability than it
would insist upon in ordinary cases. Were they only a club of
gentlemen associated for their own amusement, it would be very
natural and proper that they should exclude all questions which would
introduce controversy, and that, however individually interested in
certain reforms, they should not force them upon others who would
consider them a bore. But a society of professing Christians, united for
the express purpose of carrying both the theory and the practice of the
New Testament into every household in the land, has voluntarily
subjected itself to a graver responsibility, and renounced all title to fall
back upon any reserved