Sidor som bilder
PDF
ePub

there are many whom it accompanies all their lives, descending with them even to the mouth of the tomb. We think of our own consequence; our talents; our attainments. We think what a breach will be made when we die. We think of the mourners who will gather around us with broken hearts. We think of the solemn, sad procession that will go with us to the tomb:-forgetting how seldom it is that the hearts of any considerable proportion in a funeral procession are serious and solemn at all, or care anything about the dead. We look at our own affairs and press them forward, as if everything else should give way to them, and as if the world had no interests so great that they may not be required to yield to our convenience.

Now, how contrary all this is to truth and reality, it is hardly necessary to attempt to show. Few will care about it at all when we die; and the world at large will care nothing, and know nothing about it. A very little circle of friends will be affected-as a little circle of water is agitated when a drop of rain falls into the ocean. At the centre of that small circle of friends, there will be some deep emotion, and some tears of genuine grief will be shed; at a very little distance, the emotion will be fainter and feebler; at a point but a little more remote there will be none, and soon, very soon, all the agitation there was will have died away-as when the little drops of rain fall into the ocean

[blocks in formation]

A few friends will go and bury us; and then they will turn away to their own concerns, forgetful that we are sleeping in the grave. Affection will rear a stone, and plant a few flowers over our grave -but the hand that reared the stone or planted the flowers will soon become unable to cut the letters deeper as they become obliterated, or to cultivate the flowers-and in a brief period the little hillock will be smoothed down, and the stone will fall, and neither friend nor stranger will be concerned to ask which one of the forgotten millions of the earth was buried there. No "old Mortality" will go to cut again those effaced words which told our name, and the time of our birth and of our death. Every vestige that we ever lived upon the earth will have vanished away. All the little memorials of our remembrance-the lock of hair enchased in gold, or the portrait that hung in our dwellings, will cease to have the slightest value to any living being, nor will even momentary curiosity be excited to know who wore that hair, or whose countenance is delineated there.

[blocks in formation]

2. The other error is the opposite one-more rare but more virtuous, and more nearly bordering on truth-that of undervaluing our importance as individuals. In melancholy mood we look at the facts just adverted to. We think of the hundreds of millions that dwell on the earth, each one just as important in his own sphere as we are, and ask ourselves how many there are of these that we know, or care about; and then, by a natural transition, we ask pensively, how many of them know us, or care anything about us. We remember what countless hosts have lived, and played their parts, and are forgotten; and then we seize the glass of the astronomer and look out on other worlds and systems-when the imagination is lost in their immensity and their distance, and fancy them all peopled with as dense a population as our own, and come back with the impressive truth that all our earth compared with these worlds is literally less in proportion than a single grain of sand to all the sands which are spread along the shores of oceans, and with no mock modesty we ask, what are we? Of what importance are we amidst these multitudes; these worlds? What interests would suffer if we should be overlooked; who would weep if we should be forgotten forever? "What is man that Thou-the Maker of these worlds-art mindful of him?" Who, in these worlds, would know it if I should cease to be?

Looking out, then, on these opposite errors, it is of importance to understand our real place in the system of things where our Maker has placed us; the real work which is given us to do; the real bearing of what we do on the organization around us.

II. My second object, therefore, was to consider the place which the individual necessarily occupies in the social organization. Perhaps we shall find something, not inconsistent with the exercise of humility and modesty, which will inform our minds with a conviction of his importance.

We have an illustration of what I mean in the text, and in the other verses relating to the same subject, in the chapter from which the text is taken. The body is made up of many members or parts, each one of which in its place is necessary to the harmony and happiness of the whole, and no one of which can be spared without injury. "The eye cannot undertake to do the whole work allotted to the animal frame, and say to the hand, I have no need of thee; the head cannot undertake the entire functions, and say to the feet, I have no need of you." It may be indeed a question, which is the most valuable or useful, and which could be spared with the least disadvantage; but no member, however unimportant, is lost without our being made sensible, if we were never before, of its value. It is saying only what will occur to any one to remark, that the whole body is made up of all the individual members; that a nation is but the aggregate of individual citizens; that an army is made up of individual soldiers; that the "milky-way" in the heavens is made

up of individual stars; that the ocean is an accumulation of individual drops of water. Any one in itself may seem unimportant; and yet its value is to be estimated, not wholly or mainly by taking it out, and looking at it separately, and asking whether it would be missed by being withdrawn, but by the effect produced by all embraced as we judge of the beauty and value of the eye, not by taking it out of its socket and placing it in a casket of gold, but where God has placed it in combination with the other members of the body.

The real importance of the individual is to be estimated by the greatness of the results of all in combination, and the place to measure his value is when we are measuring those combined and aggregate results. To see the real worth of the soldier, all look not at one private in the army, and ask what difference in such a host it would make if he were killed or should run away; but we look at the results of such a victory as that at Waterloo-the effect on kingdoms, and on the course of the world perhaps for ages, and divide that result by the numbers engaged, and make that the point where we estimate his value. To see the importance of the individual laborer in the coral reefs, we do not select one of the countless millions of the little workers, and place him beneath the microscope, but we look at the land that begins to lift its head above the floods, or the groups of islands that form the habitations of men; and, standing there, we form our estimate of the value of the individual laborers that have long since ceased their toils, and that never seemed to be worthy of notice.

It has cost many experiments, and has been the fruit of long study, to know the true worth and place of the individual in the world. At one time, he has seemed to be so unimportant, and there seemed to be such evils from his being associated with others, that it has been held to be the height of virtue to sever all connection with the living, and to carry out the idea of individuality and isolation, to the utmost possible extent. Antony in Egypt, and Benedict in Italy, types of this class of men, and fathers of the great and disastrous experiment, believed that virtue consisted in cutting the cords which bound them to the living world, and in separating themselves from the race. They withdrew to caves and solitude, and made it a virtue not to look on the face of man, and to take no part in the good or the evil of the world; in its social virtue, toils, sufferings, joys. There was to be no family for them; no church; no clan; no tribe; no country; nothing which was to bind them to any of the living. The idea of individuality was to be carried out to the utmost possible extent, without anything of alliance or combination; and the single virtue to be cherished was to be that, which we now deem to be the excuse of the most severe and solitary punishment of felons-solitariness. The whole monastic system, so fruitful of mischief everywhere, grew out of that conception; and all its inexpressible vices and follies have been the result of ignorance

of the proper place of the individual in the organization where God placed him. Gloomy and ascetic spirits there are in all ages; misanthropic, and disappointed, and disturbed minds; the dissocial, and the proud, and the indolent, and the soured, to whom the cell of the monk is the appropriate home; and it shows some knowledge of human nature, and gives some popularity and power to a system of religion, to open caves in the desert for such minds as that of Antony, or to build monasteries like those on Sinai and Lebanon, for the soured and the disappointed;-or, which is the same thing, to establish a nunnery to which the disappointed, and the superstitious, of the gentler sex may retire, where they may close all communication with a hated world; and where, before physical death has done its work, the body and the soul may be entombed. All this is because the true place of the individual was not known.

An opposite but equally dangerous thing is to combine individuals in unnatural and unholy alliances; in secret associations for evil, or public confederations of iniquity. Here the power of the individual is required; but he is allied with others for purposes which nature never contemplated, and where the organization must sooner or later infringe on some law of society. Here too man, dissatisfied with his Maker's arrangements, is always making experiments as wide of the truth, and as disastrous in the end, as the scheme of the hermit, or the rules of the monastery. Now at New Harmony; now at Nauvoo; now at Niskequna and Lebanon; and now in the encampments of the Fourierites, the experiment is made over and over again, to see whether the individual cannot be disposed of in some better association than the Creator has designed, and whether some new organization may not be made up that shall be in morals what was sought in the laboratory of the alchymist-to find out some new combinations that should produce the elixir of life or the philosopher's stone.

God has grouped individuals in their natural relations as he thought best. He has left us free to form new combinations, if these natural groupings are not rudely sundered-but not otherwise; and he frowns on all combinations where they are not observed. If those natural groupings are not regarded; if the new disposing of the individual does not contemplate and recognize them, the new arrangement falls to pieces. The natural grouping of the parts of the human race, as God has arranged them, is into families; neighborhoods; tribes; nations. He might have peopled the world with independent individuals-bound together by no common sympathies, cheered by no common joys, impelled to effort by no common wants. All that is tender in parental and filial affection; all that is mild, bland, purifying in mutual love; all that is elevating in sympathetic sorrow and joy; all that is great and ennobling in the love of the species, might have been unknown. Isolated individuals, though surrounded by thousands, there might have been no cord to bind us to the living world, and we should

1

have wept alone, rejoiced alone, died alone. The sun might have shed his beams on us in our solitary rambles, and not a mortal have felt an interest in our bliss or woe. Each melancholy individual might have lived, as the hermit seeks to live, unbenefited by the existence of any other, and with no one to shed a tear on the bed of moss, when in despair he would lie down, and when he would die. But this is not the way in which God has made the world. He has made the race one great brotherhood; and each one has some interest in the wildest barbarian that seeks a shelter beneath the

rock, or that finds a home in a cave. This great common brotherhood he has broken up into communities of nations, tribes, clans, families each with its own set of sympathies, with peculiar interests, with peculiar sorrows and joys.

In these organizations the individual is never overlooked or forgotten. He is an essential part, and there is not a feeling or law of his nature which is not consulted or regarded. He can play his individual part in his place; act out his nature; develop his talents; and you can form any new combination for good in entire consistency with these laws. The individual is never lost sight of, and yet his power is greatly increased by the combination. The father is an individual, and yet it is never lost sight of that he is a father, and not a man occupying a place which any other man might occupy; the mother is an individual, and yet she is recognized as a mother, and not merely a woman whose place could be as well filled by another; the brother, the sister, the child, the neighbor, the patriarch, the patriot, is an individual, and fills his place as such, and yet no small part of the influence which he wields grows out of the place which he occupies.

See now, for one moment, what may be done in accordance with these laws, or what may grow out of these laws for the good of the whole.

It

There is, first, the widest play for individual genius and talent. The name of each one of the workmen of St. Peter's, as well as the name of Michael Angelo, might have been preserved; the labor of each stone-cutter, and carver, and gilder was needful; and the glory of the whole is the result of the combined skill of all. The fame of Newton is his own, and ever will be; but the world shares the glory and the benefit of the principle. The genius of Milton as an individual had ample play, and his fame is his own; though the happiness of millions has been promoted by the Paradise Lost. was a toiling individual that wrought all this. So all that there is in our literature, and arts, and sciences, is the result of the labor of individuals-individuals not exactly like the builders of the honey-comb, or the coral reefs, that are produced by unvarying and unconscious instinct; individuals not like the builders of the pyramids, or the soldiers in a disciplined army-positions which nature never contemplated, where there is little more of genius, or freedom, or independent thinking than there is in the labor of the bee or the

« FöregåendeFortsätt »