Thou could'st not endure Remember the Poor! With sickness of heart; Ere life shall depart. Remember the Poor! Remember the Poor! Its cheeks wet with weeping, On its mother's breast; Her husband to rest! Remember the Poor! The Lord will repay; And sweet thoughts shall cheer him, In his dying day! "And if you will not hear our prayer, all that I can say, is, God grant that you may never know what it is to have a cold hearth-stone and an empty table.' God grant that your children may never cry for bread, and there be none to help them!"-Rev. T. M. Clark. THE AGENTS OF CIVILIZATION. A SERIES OF LECTURES.-LECTURE SIXTH. THE PROPHET. THERE were other truths, living, conscious, energetic, before the Prophet; but the Prophet was the first living, conscious, energetic, preacher of the truth. He was endowed with no acuter perception than many earnest and honest men who preceded him; but he was the sincerest, the most upright, the most perspicacious when social incongruities began to be observable. When the Priest, aided by the Artist, had extended his triumphant dominion over the credulous minds of an ignorant people, the despotism would be borne, for a time, with unquestioning patience and loyalty; because physical force must always yield to intellectual or moral force; and if at any period it gains a momentary supremacy, still, it is to intellectual or moral force that it owes it. Against the machinations of the priesthood, therefore, its dupes remained without defence. No combat could be more unequal than that between the rude, untamed, disjointed strengths of the mass, and the subtle, refined, compacted energies of their priestly deceivers. And the combat would ever have retained its monstrous inequality, but for the appearance of the Prophet. He brought to bear upon spiritual tyranny a power with which that tyranny had not previously contended, and which it, or any other tyranny, will never be able to overthrow. The priesthood dominated over the physical force of the people by means of intellectual force. And when their domination had lasted for ages, the moral force of the Prophet rose to be the unceasing foe of the intellectual force of the Priest. A physical force is unable to make any permanent head against intellectual force; so is intellectual force unable to offer any decided or lasting opposition to the triumph of moral force. And it is this assurance, unquenchably vital in the heart, that clothes with a miraculous vigour the emancipators of their species, and rewards them with a miraculous success. If they did not know, if they did not feel that conscience has a diviner inspiration and a diviner sustainment than intellect, verily, verily they would be disposed to escape from the sickness, the weariness, and the despair of their efforts, by dashing their burning brow against the cold sepulchre of human hopes. Notwithstanding that the first Prophet who appeared was the impersonation of moral force, as opposed to the corporate embodiment of intellectual force in the priesthood, yet the first Prophet must have been a Priest. It is impossible to conceive such a combination of advantages as the first Prophet required, without admitting the influence of sacerdotal education. Every ray of light being studiously kept from piercing the benighted mind of the community; all modes and degrees of instruction being exclusively reserved for those who were to minister at the altar, and who were to assist in keeping up an iniquitous delusion; no possibility of culture, apart from this, remained by which a young soul, however noble, could be nourished and prepared for a strenuous mission. A peasant may spring from the midst of his peasant brethren, to grasp the standard of patriotic freedom; but there is no instance of the peasant growing into the Prophet, without a tincture of more expansive conceptions than could have been gathered from the peasant's life. Even Jesus is not an exception to this. He had a peasant's birth and a peasant's position; but there is convincing evidence that he had an intimate and comprehensive acquaintance with all that the most learned of his country then knew, and especially with the minutest tenets of his country's various sects. Signal injustice has been done to this greatest of God's Prophets, by regarding him as so far placed above the need and the sphere of human science, as to trample it under foot. As if the Deity in any of the administrations of his Providence, would not choose the fittest instruments for the accomplishment of their results. And surely Jesus could not have been better suited for the proclaimer of a religious revolution, by being uncultured and uninformed, than by being what he really was-a Prophet bold and wise, with a Priest's erudition. Jesus entered on his career as a teacher, at a time of comparative civilization; how much more, then, in the rude ages of man's early history, must a far wider range of information have been demanded for the Prophet, than that which any popular source afforded! Priest, therefore, the first Prophet must have been, initiated from a child into sacerdotal ideas and habits; imbued with sacerdotal predilections; identified with the sacerdotal destiny;-slowly, most slowly would conscience utter its monitions to his soul. Lingering would be the process by which doubt found an entrance; more lingering still, the process by which doubt grew into certainty. Doubt would be suggested by two circumstances to the Prophet's mind. It would be suggested by the singular contrast between the pompous modes of worship of which he was a minister, and those simple and unadorned modes which his countrymen formerly observed, and of which tradition preserved the memory. It would be suggested also, by the no less singular contrast between the isoteric or secret doctrines which the priesthood taught to its disciples, and the exoteric or public doctrines which it inculcated upon the people. When his fancy wandered back to the period when the Hero was the only god, and the Patriarch and the Poet the only Priests, he could not help perceiving that then the manners of men were more unsophisticated-their energies more free and individual_ their passions less headlong and violent-their being less thwarted, and darkened, and misused, by sensuality and selfishness. To what, after deep and mournful consideration, could he fail attributing this, but in a great measure to the corrupting influences of the priestly system? For was it not manifest, that as the priesthood grew stronger, and their machinery more complicated, all social agencies were more completely placed under their control? What conclusion more inevitable, consequently, than that the way to improve the character of the people, would be to return to the purity and the simplicity of the ancient worship? The mind that had arrived at this conclusion, would be easily disposed to dwell with sorrow, and shame, and anger, on the startling wrong that willingly gave falsehoods to the vulgar, and retained truths, as the intellectual monopoly of a narrow corporation. This would seem even a more flagrant sin against mankind, than the successive construction of the outward glorious, in the observances of religion to fascinate the sense. With these two feelings, gradually growing deeper and intenser, the Prophet would at last pause before the question, whether he ought in some form to express his opinions, or to smother them for ever in his own bosom. With the dim notions of duty, which were all that he had the means of obtaining, and indisposed, both by his priestly education and priestly position, to speak out his sentiments, terrible would be the contest of opposing motives before a decision was evolved. And when at last sympathy, and conviction, and the good-which in a good nature never dies-gained the mastery, another question would succeed, bearing on the best means of communicating what had so long and so agonisingly heaved in the breast. The Prophet, yet timid, and fearing the power of the mighty corporation to which he was professionally attached, and not yet cherishing the slightest idea of detaching himself from it, would imagine that the safest and the surest way would be to make the younger members of the priesthood participants of his plans, and, above all, those who were linked to him by friendly relations. But this amical participation could only be of short continuance. Some indiscretion, or some treason on the part of those to whom the schemes of reform had been communicated, would rouse the more influential and the more conservative portion of the priesthood. And what would they do in consequence of this novelty of aggression on their hitherto unquestioned empire? They would not kill the Prophet; for they would not attribute sufficient importance to what he, an unsupported individual, could do against a universally revered corporation; or to what he, the representative of moral force, could do against them, the representatives of intellectual force. They would not ignominiously expel him from their body, for that would excite a doubt on their infallibility; touching which, no whisper of scepticism had yet been breathed. They would, therefore, admonish him to reflect; which means, that reflection on a hated subject is to cease; and they would admonish him to be silent; which means, that the loudest, most obstreperous praises, should be given to what the heart condemns. And reflect he would, and silent he would be for a time; but not exactly according to their views of reflection and of silence. And reflection and silence would bring before him a still more awful question than any of those to which he had already |