By LUELLA CLARK.
Hark, hark! What does the fir tree say?Standing still all night, all day—Never a moan from over his way.Green through all the winter’s gray—What does the steadfast fir tree say?Creak, creak! Listen! “Be firm, be true.The winter’s frost and the summer’s dewAre all in God’s time, and all for you.Only live your life, and your duty do,And be brave, and strong, and steadfast, and true.”
Hark, hark! What does the fir tree say?Standing still all night, all day—Never a moan from over his way.Green through all the winter’s gray—What does the steadfast fir tree say?Creak, creak! Listen! “Be firm, be true.The winter’s frost and the summer’s dewAre all in God’s time, and all for you.Only live your life, and your duty do,And be brave, and strong, and steadfast, and true.”
Hark, hark! What does the fir tree say?Standing still all night, all day—Never a moan from over his way.Green through all the winter’s gray—What does the steadfast fir tree say?
Hark, hark! What does the fir tree say?
Standing still all night, all day—
Never a moan from over his way.
Green through all the winter’s gray—
What does the steadfast fir tree say?
Creak, creak! Listen! “Be firm, be true.The winter’s frost and the summer’s dewAre all in God’s time, and all for you.Only live your life, and your duty do,And be brave, and strong, and steadfast, and true.”
Creak, creak! Listen! “Be firm, be true.
The winter’s frost and the summer’s dew
Are all in God’s time, and all for you.
Only live your life, and your duty do,
And be brave, and strong, and steadfast, and true.”
There is a pride which belongs to every rightly-constituted mind, though it is scarcely to be called pride, but rather a proper estimate of self. It is, properly speaking, the elevation of mind which arises when we feel that we have mastered some noble idea and made it our own. Man is proud of the idea only so far as he feels that it has become part of himself.—Von Humboldt.
By B. W. RICHARDSON, M.D.
It is the business of science to take up the pint and a half of ardent spirit which, split up through fifteen pints, gives all the zest and consequence to the thirteen and a half pints of colored water.
Taking this ardent spirit into one of her crucibles or laboratories, Science compares it with other products on the shelves there, and soon she finds its niche in which it fits truly. On the shelf where it fits she has ranged a number of other spirits. There is chloroform, ether, sweet spirit of nitre, and some other fluids, very useful remedies in the hands of the physician. These, she sees, are the children of the spirit, are made, in fact, from it. On the same shelf she has another set of spirits; there is wood spirit, there is potato spirit, there is a substance which looks like spermaceti; and these she sees are all members of the same family, not children, this time, of the ardent spirit, but brothers or sisters, each one constructed from the same elements, in the same relative proportions and on the same type. Passionless, having no predilection for any one object in the universe except the truth, she writes down the ardent spirit as having its proper place in a group of chemical substances which are distinctly apart from other substances she knows of, on which men and animals live, and which are called by the name of foods or sustainers of life. She says all the members of the spirit family are, unless judiciously and even skilfully used, inimical to life. They produce drowsiness, sleep, death. In the hands of the skilful they may be safe as medicines; in the hands of the unskilful they are unsafe, they are poisons. To this rule there is not one exception amongst them. There can be no demur, no doubt now on this particular point; it may be a blow to poetry of passion; it may make the ancient and modern bacchanalian look foolish to tell him that wine is a chemical substance mixed and diluted with water, and that beer and spirits are all in the same category; but such is the fact. In computing the influence of wine, men have no longer to discuss anything more than the influence of a definite chemical compound, one of a family of chemical compounds called the alcohols—the second of a family group, differing in origin from the first of the series, which is got from wood, in that it is got from grain, and is called ethylic, or common alcohol, pure spirit of wine. But now the world turns properly to ask another question. Admitted all that is said, why, after all, should the practice of mankind in the use of this spirit be bad? Man is not guided solely by reason; passion may lead him sometimes, perchance, in the true path. Tell us then, O Science! why this ardent spirit may not still be drunken; why may it not be a part of the life of man?
To this question the answer of Science is straight and to the point. In the universe of life, she says, man forms but a fractional part. All the sea is full of life; all the woods are full of life; all the air is full of life; on the surface of the earth man possesses, as companions or as enemies, herds and herds of living forms. Of that visible life he forms but a minute speck, and beyond that visible life there is the world invisible to common view, with its myriads of forms unseen, which the most penetrating microscope has not reached. Again, there are other forms of life; plants innumerable, from gigantic Wellingtonias to lichens and mosses, and beneath these myriads more so infinitely minute that the microscope fails to reach them. This is all life, life which goes through its set phases in due form; grows in health and strength and beauty, every part of it, from highest to lowest living grade, without a shade of the use of this strong spirit. What evidence can be more conclusive that alcohol is not included in the scheme of life?
And yet, if you want more evidence, it is yours. You try man by himself. Every child of woman born, if he be not perverted, lives without alcohol, grows up without it; spends—and thisis a vital point—spends the very happiest part of its life without it; gains its growing strength and vitality without it; feels no want for it. The course of its life is, at the most, on the average of the best lives, sixty years, of which the first fifteen, in other words, the first fourth, are the most dangerous; yet it goes through that fourth without the use of this agent. But if in the four stages of life it can go through the first and most critical stage without alcohol, why can not it traverse the remaining three? Is Nature so unwise in her doings, so capricious, so uncertain, that she withholds a giver of life from the helpless, and supplies it only to the helpful? Some men, forming whole nations, have never heard of it; some have heard of it and have abjured its use. In England and America, at this time, there are probably near upon six millions of persons who have abjured this agent. Do they fall or fail in value of life from the abjuration? The evidence, as we shall distinctly see by and by, is all the other way. There are, lastly, some who are forced to live without the use of this agent. Do they fall or die in consequence? There is not a single instance in illustration.
On all these points, Science, when she is questioned earnestly, and interpreted justly, is decisive and firm, and if you question her in yet another direction, she is not less certain. You ask her for a comparison of alcohol and of man, in respect to the structure of both, and her evidence is as the sun at noon in its clearness. She has taken the body of man to pieces; she has learned the composition of its every structure—skin, muscle, bone, viscera, brain, nervous cord, organs of sense! She knows of what these parts are formed, and she knows from whence the components came. She finds in the muscles fibrine; it came from the fibrine of flesh, or from the gluten or albumen of the plants on which the man had fed. She finds tendon and cartilage, and earthy matter of the skeleton; they were from the vegetable kingdom. She finds water in the body in such abundance that it makes up seven parts out of eight of the whole, and that she knows the source of readily enough. She finds iron, that she traces from the earth. She finds fat, and that she traces to sugar and starch. In short, she discovers, in whatever structure she searches, the origin of the structure. But as a natural presence, she finds no ardent spirit there in any part or fluid. Nothing made from spirit. Did she find either, she would say the body is diseased, and, it may be, was killed by that which is found.
Sometimes, in the bodies of men, she discovers the evidences of some conditions that are not natural. She compares these bodies with the bodies of other men, or with the bodies of inferior animals, as sheep and oxen, and finds that the unnatural appearances are peculiar to persons who have taken alcohol, and are indications of new structural changes which are not proper, and which she calls disease.
Thus, by two tests, Science tries the comparison between alcohol and man. She finds in the body no structure made from alcohol; she finds in the healthy body no alcohol; she finds in those who have taken alcohol changes of the structure, and those are changes of disease. By all these proofs she declares alcohol to be entirely alien to the structure of man. It does not build up the body; it undermines and destroys the building.
One step more. If you question Science on the comparison which exists between foods and alcohol, she gives you facts on every hand. She shows you a natural and all-sufficient and standard food—she calls it milk. She takes it to pieces; she says it is made up of caseine, for the construction of muscular and other active tissues; of sugar and fat, for supplying fuel to the body for the animal warmth; of salts for the earthy, and of water for the liquid parts. This is a perfect standard. Holds it any comparison with alcohol? Not a jot. The comparison is the same with all other natural foods.
Man, going forth to find food for his wants, discovers it in various substances, but only naturally, in precisely such substances, and in the same proportions of such substances as exist in the standard food on which he first fed. Alcohol, alien to the body of man, is alike alien to the natural food of man.
Some of you will perhaps ask: Is every use of food comprised in the building up of the body? Is not some food used as the fuel of the engine is used, not to produce material, but to generate heat and motion, to burn and to be burned? The answer is as your question suggests. Some food is burned in the body, and by that means the animal fire—thecalor vitalis, or vital heat, of the ancients—is kept alive. Then, say you: May not alcohol burn? We take starch, we take sugar into the body, as foods, but there are no structure of starch and sugar, only some products derived from them which show that they have been burned. May not alcohol in like manner be burned and carried away in new form of construction of matter?
What says Science to this inquiry? Her answer is simple. To burn and produce no heat is improbable, if not impossible; and if probable or even possible, is unproductive of service for the purpose of sustaining the animal powers. Test, then, the animal body under the action of alcohol, and see your findings. Your findings shall prove that, under the most favorable conditions, the mean effect of the alcohol will be to reduce the animal temperature through the mass of the body. There will be a glow of warmth on the surface of the body. Truly! but that is cooling of the body. It is from an extra sheet of warm blood brought from the heart into weakened vessels of the surface, to give up its heat and leave the whole body chilled, with the products of combustion lessened, the nervous tone lowered, the muscular power reduced, the quickened heart jaded, the excited brain infirm, and the mind depressed and enfeebled. Alcohol, alien to the structure of man and to the food of man, is alike alien to living strength of man, and to the fires which maintain his life.
By COLEMAN E. BISHOP.
The place of Lorenzo Dow in the American pulpit is peculiar. He might be called “The Great Disowned.” He passed his life a wandering, outcast preacher; did a great work alone, generally unacknowledged by any religious body; opposed by the societies and maligned by many of the clergy, whom he powerfully aided; and in death his name and work would have sunk into undeserved oblivion, but for his own writings in which, with prophetic instinct, he preserved the record of his own sacrifices and successes, and the scant recognition accorded them. He also recorded with impartial fidelity his own “fantastic tricks” and erratic independence, which furnish the only excuse for the treatment he received. He called himself a Methodist, and refused to work inside church lines. A zealous, even bigoted sectarian; he preached in open defiance of all denominational polity. He was a clerical bushwhacker.
The time in which Dow flourished was a remarkable one politically, commercially and religiously. It was the formative age of the Constitution and of the American Republic. It saw the creation of American commerce and the opening up of the continent to settlement. And it has been well called “the heroic age of American Methodism.”
As the sense of dependence on the mother country, and of subjection to royal authority wore off, the people began to grow rapidly in mental and moral stature. The population which had timidly hugged the Atlantic coast, as if afraid to lose sight of the British navy, now turned its eyes inland, its thoughts over the whole world. The pioneer spirit awoke. The “Northwest Territory” was organized for settlement; Louisiana and Florida were purchased and the great Mississippibasin was opened up. Indian nations were subdued and “city lots were staked for sale above old Indian graves.” A second war was fought with Great Britain, to drive her from our path of advance on land or sea. Settlers in a thousand directions ramified the wilderness with the nerves and arteries of civilization. The growth of men’s ideas was to correspond with expansion of territory—for “the spirit grows with its allotted spaces.” It became evident, even in the first generation of the Republic, that a new people had been raised up—almost as Roderick Dhu’s men sprang from the brake—to subjugate a continent and to create sovereign states out of the rudiments of empire which yet lay plastic and warm in the wilderness.
The spirit of unrest, of adventure, of expansion, seized all classes and occupations; and the pioneers of the Cross pressed into the wilderness side by side with the bearers of the ax and rifle.
Not the least remarkable feature of the evolution of this people was the deepening of the religious spirit. Wars, indeed, are generally followed by seasons of revival; but now the sobered thoughts of the American people seemed to increase as they receded from the war period, and realized the burdens of a new nationality, of self-government, and of continental subjugation which they had taken upon themselves. They had not only cut loose from the mother country, but had cut loose from all the ancient traditions of government and the experience of mankind. Responsibility brought seriousness; daily perils inclined men’s thoughts to hear whoever would discourse of eternal things. Thus the movement of the time at once prepared the way for the work of gospel spreading, and raised up strong men to do it.
One of the young men who was “set on fire of freedom” to this work was Lorenzo Dow. Never was more unpromising candidate for the ministry. He was eighteen years of age (1795), thin, angular, ungainly, eccentric in manner, illiterate, diffident, and, worst of all, an invalid, supposed to be a consumptive. No wonder the proposition of this sick, gawky boy to go upon circuit without any preparation met with opposition from his parents and brethren, was discouraged by those who dared not contradict his solemn protestations of an irresistible call, and was rejected by all the authorities of a church most liberal in its requirements of licentiates of any then extant.
“I do not believe God has called you to preach,” bluntly declared the minister in charge after having Dow try to preach, and seeing him faint dead away in the pulpit.
“Why?” demanded the weeping candidate.
“For five reasons.—(1) your health; (2) your gifts; (3) your grace; (4) your learning; (5) sobriety.”
“Enough, enough!” exclaimed the boy, aghast. “Lord, whatamI but a poor worm of the dust?”
Just the same, all this did not change his determination one whit. Nay, in a foot-note to this incident in his book he makes this finishing reference to his critic of this time with evident satisfaction: “He is since expelled the connection.”
Those who opposed him little knew of the reckless earnestness of his character—the trait which lay at the bottom of his whole remarkable career, and brought him success in spite of all his disabilities and all the external chances against him. He seemed to have accepted as his all-sufficient credentials the Lord’s charge to his disciples in the tenth chapter of Matthew; accepted it as literally and confidently as if it had been delivered specially to a sickly young convert in Connecticut about the close of the eighteenth century, instead of having been given to certain other illiterates in Judea eighteen centuries before. He always took the whole Bible literally, and acted and talked it in dead earnest. So providing neither gold, silver, brass nor scrip in his purse, nor two coats, nor shoes, nor staff for his journey, he started to “go into all the world and preach the gospel to every creature.” He stood not on the order of his going, but went at once. If any would receive him, well; if not, worse for them, as saith Matthew x:14. He asked no gifts nor collections; rejected most of that which was voluntarily offered—giving frequent offense thereby—taking only what would suffice for the day. Sleeping in woods and under fences was small privation to him, for he never slept in beds, any way; the floor or a bench was his choice, on account of the asthma, he said. He was used to long fasts, and would travel fifty miles and preach half a dozen times without food. Indeed, his defiance of all precautions against sickness, and reversal of all physical conditions gave him rather a grewsome reputation with the simple folk among whom the invalid exploited, and some were afraid to entertain him. What a saint he would have made in those good old times when asceticism, energy, fanaticism, piety and dirt were of the popular odor of sanctity! A modern Peter the Hermit on a crusade!
To talk and to walk were his chief functions, and he rarely intermitted either. At that time the qualifications of a circuit preacher were said to be covered by these points: “Is he converted; is he qualified to preach; has he a horse?” Lorenzo had no need of the last of these qualifications. He was the champion pedestrian of the day. He could out-travel the public conveyances and tire out any horse over such roads. He was known throughout the south as “the walking minister.” But through New England, New York and Canada his quaint figure, queer actions and rude and vehement exhortations soon got him the general sobriquet of “Crazy Dow.” We read in his journal:
“As I entered the meeting house, having an old borrowed great-coat on and two hats, the people were alarmed. Some laughed, some blushed, and the attention of all was excited. I spoke for two hours, giving them the inside and outside of Methodism. I besought God in public that something awful might happen in the neighborhood if nothing else would do to alarm the people. For this prayer many said I ought to be punished.”
“As I entered the meeting house, having an old borrowed great-coat on and two hats, the people were alarmed. Some laughed, some blushed, and the attention of all was excited. I spoke for two hours, giving them the inside and outside of Methodism. I besought God in public that something awful might happen in the neighborhood if nothing else would do to alarm the people. For this prayer many said I ought to be punished.”
Again:
“Here, too, it was soon reported I was crazy. I replied, people do not blame crazy ones for their behavior; last night I preached from the word of God, when I come again I will preach from the word of the devil. This tried our weak brethren.”
“Here, too, it was soon reported I was crazy. I replied, people do not blame crazy ones for their behavior; last night I preached from the word of God, when I come again I will preach from the word of the devil. This tried our weak brethren.”
Hardly to be wondered at, one would say. At one time he got an audience into a school house, and planting his back against the door so they could not escape, preached at them two hours, hot and strong. At another time he hired a woman for a dollar to give up one day to seeking her soul’s salvation; and again, following a young woman on the road importuning her to seek God, when she took refuge in a house; he sat on the steps, declaring he would not let her proceed till she had promised to pray. His nervous impatience of rest often impelled him to steal from a hospitable house at dead of night, and at daylight he would be found in another county drumming up a meeting.
These eccentricities, perhaps, brought him as much success as opposition; but the chief source of his troubles came from his independence, and even defiance of his own church. His impatience of limitations, regulations and authority of any kind caused an irrepressible conflict between him and the church from the beginning to the end of his labor. Four times the first year of his ministry did they try in vain to send him home. Though constantly, and with many tears, besieging conferences, bishops and elders for license, as soon as a circuit of appointments was given him, he would fly the track and be found traveling on another minister’s round, as complacent as a hen setting on the wrong nest. Regularity was death to him. Once he had been persuaded to take a circuit, and he says, “I had no sooner consented to try for a year, the Lord being my helper, than an awful distress came over my mind.” He staid the year, with an occasional escapade into other circuits, but says of it: “Scarce any blessing on my labors, and my mind depressed from day to day.” Yet he insisted, to the day of his death, that he was a Methodist preacher, and refused indignantly all propositions of his admirers and converts to organizea following of his own—“Dowites,” as they would call themselves, “Split-off Methodists,” as he dubbed all such schismatics. When his presiding elder, the renowned Jesse Lee, sent him injunctions against irregular traveling, under pain of expulsion, he replied to the messenger: “It does not belong to Jesse Lee or any other man to say whether I shall preach or not, for that is to be determined between God and my own soul. It only belongs to the Methodists to say whether I shall preach in their connection.”
“But,” said his monitor, “What will you call yourself? The Methodists will not own you, and if you take that name you’ll be advertised in the public papers as an impostor.”
“I shall call myself a friend to mankind,” said Dow, expansively.
“Oh,” exclaimed the advocate of regularity, “for the Lord’s sake—don’t! You are not capable of that charge—who is!”
One would think so, for Dow was at this time only eighteen years old, and the callowest fledgeling in all green New England. It was no use. This young eccentric would not work to any line. He obeyed only dreams, impulses and “impressions,” which he accepted as divine guidings. At one time they thought they had laid out for him in Canada a field sufficiently large, wild, unorganized and forbidding to give him “ample scope and verge enough” wherein to wander, preach and organize churches. It did seem that almost the whole boundless continent was his. But a continent has limitations. That thought tormented him. He tramped till he got to the edge, and then was seized with “a call” to carry the gospel into Ireland! and despite all remonstrance, opposition and threats he sailed for Ireland without a government passport, without church credentials of any kind, minus an overcoat and change of linen. Three dollars, a bag of biscuits, and unlimited confidence in his ability to “get through some way,” constituted his missionary outfit. His real reason for going, however, was the hope that a sea-voyage would improve his health, as he admits in his “Journal.”
Thereafter, wherever Dow pushed his peculiar mission he found the reputation of a schismatic and rebel against church authority had preceded him, and turned the Methodist clergy and laity against him, and generally closed their homes and houses of worship to him. This coldness, and sometimes enmity, he had to overcome before he could begin his work in any place. Nevertheless, he prosecuted it vigorously for over forty years with few interruptions, diverting all the converts of his ministry into the Methodist church that he could, and giving not only his services, but much of the proceeds of the sale of his books to that body. To the last he declared, like Wesley, “my parish is the world!” and extended his circuits to all parts of the Union, to Balize, the West Indies, and the United Kingdom. He would lay out routes of three or four thousand miles, covering appointments months or years ahead, and he rarely failed to appear on time or to find an audience awaiting him.
“The camp meeting era,” which began about the commencement of Dow’s ministry, was his great opportunity. These meetings were free, catholic, and welcomed all workers. They were the legitimate outcome of the religious necessities of the time. The land was ablaze from backwoods to sea-beech with that popular excitement which soon got the expressive name of “The Wildfire.” A host of preachers—Methodists, Presbyterians, Baptists, Quakers—went from camp to camp preaching, singing, exhorting. The meetings were going continuously. The country seemed to give up all other pursuits for religion. Twenty thousand often assembled at one place, coming hundreds of miles. One Granada, “the western poet,” wrote many “Pilgrim Songs,” rude but spirited, for camp meeting use, and these traveled, unprinted, on the air. That peculiar psychological phenomenon called “The Jerks,” appeared and spread like an epidemic. Penitents in this death-like trance were laid in long ranks under the trees and the weird torchlights, as if ready for interment. Three thousand fell in one night at Caneridge, Kentucky. It was common practice to prepare the camp meeting grounds by cutting all the saplings about six feet from the ground, leaving the stumps for the infected ones to grasp, to keep them from falling, and Dow records that the ground around them was torn up as if horses had been hitched there. At times a sudden influence would come over the multitude, which would strike preachers, singers, mourners and listeners speechless, so that not a word could be spoken for a period—a hush more awful and inexplicable than the jerks or the shoutings.
Into this work Dow plunged with the abandon of a knight-errant, and with wonderful success. His thin, skeleton frame, pale, sharp face, luminously black eyes, long hair, curling to his waist, sharp, strident voice, fierce, jerky sentences, qualified him to add intensity to the prevalent excitement. And he was fond of appealing to the fears and superstitions of humanity. He was full of dire predictions. The world was in travail for the last day. Napoleon was wading knee-deep in the blood of Europe. The last vial of wrath seemed to have been poured out upon the earth. The prophecies and the apocalypse were drawn on for texts, which he used literally. Any local calamity—and a long list of sudden or accidental deaths within his ken—were worked upon the minds of his hearers, as links in the chain of these awful portents. If there was any “scare” in a man or woman or child, he’d frighten them to their knees. He used theargumentum ad hominemliberally, and if there were a conspicuous atheist reprobate or Calvinist in the audience—all of whom he classed together—the man was sure to be singled out for direct attack. A favorite device was to ask the audience to grant him a favor, and require all who were willing to do so to stand. When up, he would bind them to pray three times a day for a week for salvation, and abjure them not to add the perjury of a broken promise to their many other sins. This he exultantly calls “catching ’em in a covenant,” he expecting to make converts of nine-tenths of those who kept the promise into which they had been thus trapped.
The quality which gave Lorenzo Dow his greatest power with the “lower million”—to whom, after all, his mission went—was his courage. He was as bold as a man seeking martyrdom. His mien was defiant and his language brusque and aggressive. He belonged to the church militant by one of those contrasts which make the tender-hearted and sensitive seem rough and pugnacious. He fought against the wild beasts, on two legs, not at Ephesus, but from Boston to Balize. Rowdies dreaded his tongue more than any physical force, to which he never resorted. At New Kent, Va., a large billet of wood was hurled at him through a window. He immediately leaped through the window and gave chase to the assassins, yelling “Run, run, the Old Sam is after you.” Returning, he took the billet, cut the words “Old Sam” in it, and nailed it to a tree, installing it as “Old Sam’s monument.” He then proceeded logically to this demonstration: “You disturbers of the meeting, your conduct is condemnable—which expression means damnable; hence, to make the best of you, you are nothing but a pack of damned cowards, for not one of you durst show his head.” “Old Sam’s monument” stuck to the tree for years, and Dow records with great satisfaction that one of the ringleaders in this assault, a few months later had hisnose bit offin a fight, and another was flung from a horse and had his neck broken—all of which he cited as redounding to the glory of God and the vindication of Lorenzo Dow.
On another occasion, being apprised of the approach of a mob of several hundreds, sworn to take his life, he left the pulpit, took his wife by the hand, and marched out to meet the enemy. When met, he mounted a stump and poured out upon them a tirade of hot reviling, the very boldness of which overawed them. The result was that he led them back to camp, and in a short time had the most of them on the anxious seat.
At times, however, his enemies and opponents were too muchfor him. Detraction and back-biting hurt him worst, coldness cut him deeper than opposition. At one time, every man’s hand was so against him that he cut his way into the depths of a Mississippi cane swamp, built a hut, and there he and his wife lived recluse for months, surrounded by wolves and snakes, whose society he found less objectionable than that of the best friends he had in the country. One of the chief causes of enmity was jealousy, because he had made a little money by the sale of his writings. I fancy, too, that the popular feeling was mingled with one of contempt for a circuit-rider, who could be so easily beaten in a horse trade—a man who, equipped with a gallant mount on Monday morning, would turn up before the week was gone on a sorry, broken-down “plug,” against which he had paid beside more “boot” than his own horse was worth—could not command the respect of such people as he labored among.
It is hard to realize that the man is an invalid, working without fee or reward, unrecognized, and receiving more curses than coppers, of whose exploits we read such passages as these:
“August 24.—After preaching at Ebenezer, Pa., I silently withdrew, and taking my horse, traveled all night until ten next morning, when I spoke at Bethel, and then jumping out at a window from the pulpit, rode seventeen miles to Union; thence to Duck Creek Cross Roads, making near eighty miles travel and five meetings without sleep. These few weeks past, since the eruption was dried up and the asthma more powerful and frequent, I feel myself much debilitated.”“I returned to Dublin, having been gone sixty-seven days, in which time I traveled about 1700 English miles and held about two hundred meetings.” “To Warrington, having been about fifty-two hours, held nine meetings and traveled about 50 miles.” “Sunday, July 20, my labors were equal to seven sermons, which gave me a fine sweat that was very refreshing, and added to my health. In speaking twice in the street I addressed five thousand.”“In the space of twenty-two days I traveled 350 miles and preached seventy-six times, beside visiting some from house to house and speaking to hundreds in class meetings.”“October 28, 1803.—After an absence of about seven months, I arrived back in Georgia, having traveled upward of four thousand miles (through the Mississippi Territory and Florida). When I left this state I was handsomely equipped for traveling, by some friends whom God had raised me up in need. But now on my return I had not the same valuable horse, my watch I had parted with to bear my expenses. My pantaloons were worn out. I had no stockings, shoes, nor moccasins for the last several hundred miles, nor outer garment, having sold my cloak in West Florida. My coat and vest were worn through to my shirt. With decency, I was scarcely able to get back to my friends.”
“August 24.—After preaching at Ebenezer, Pa., I silently withdrew, and taking my horse, traveled all night until ten next morning, when I spoke at Bethel, and then jumping out at a window from the pulpit, rode seventeen miles to Union; thence to Duck Creek Cross Roads, making near eighty miles travel and five meetings without sleep. These few weeks past, since the eruption was dried up and the asthma more powerful and frequent, I feel myself much debilitated.”
“I returned to Dublin, having been gone sixty-seven days, in which time I traveled about 1700 English miles and held about two hundred meetings.” “To Warrington, having been about fifty-two hours, held nine meetings and traveled about 50 miles.” “Sunday, July 20, my labors were equal to seven sermons, which gave me a fine sweat that was very refreshing, and added to my health. In speaking twice in the street I addressed five thousand.”
“In the space of twenty-two days I traveled 350 miles and preached seventy-six times, beside visiting some from house to house and speaking to hundreds in class meetings.”
“October 28, 1803.—After an absence of about seven months, I arrived back in Georgia, having traveled upward of four thousand miles (through the Mississippi Territory and Florida). When I left this state I was handsomely equipped for traveling, by some friends whom God had raised me up in need. But now on my return I had not the same valuable horse, my watch I had parted with to bear my expenses. My pantaloons were worn out. I had no stockings, shoes, nor moccasins for the last several hundred miles, nor outer garment, having sold my cloak in West Florida. My coat and vest were worn through to my shirt. With decency, I was scarcely able to get back to my friends.”
But we can not forget Peggy. Peggy was one of Lorenzo’s earliest converts, and throughout the most of his crusades was his faithful companion, through exposures and trials, through evil report and good report. She was the loveliest trait in his character. The courtship was unique. Let him tell it:
“Dining at the house of her foster parents, he learned that she had declared if she was ever married it should be to a traveling preacher.”
“Dining at the house of her foster parents, he learned that she had declared if she was ever married it should be to a traveling preacher.”
He continues:
“As she then stepped into the room, caused me to ask her if it were so. She answered in the affirmative; on the back of which I replied: ‘Do you think you could accept of such an object as me?’ She made no answer, but retired from the room.”
“As she then stepped into the room, caused me to ask her if it were so. She answered in the affirmative; on the back of which I replied: ‘Do you think you could accept of such an object as me?’ She made no answer, but retired from the room.”
When about going away, he remarked that he was going a circuit of a year and a half in the South.
“If during that time,” he said to her, “you live and remain single, and find no one that you like better than you do me, and would be willing to give me up twelve months out of thirteen, or three years out of four, to travel, and that in foreign lands, and never say, ‘Do not go to your appointment,’—for if you should stand in my way I should pray God to remove you, which I believe he would answer, and if I find no one that I like better than I do you—perhaps something farther may be said on the subject.”
“If during that time,” he said to her, “you live and remain single, and find no one that you like better than you do me, and would be willing to give me up twelve months out of thirteen, or three years out of four, to travel, and that in foreign lands, and never say, ‘Do not go to your appointment,’—for if you should stand in my way I should pray God to remove you, which I believe he would answer, and if I find no one that I like better than I do you—perhaps something farther may be said on the subject.”
An ardent popping of the question, surely! But she waited, and they were married, and were happy. He was a very devoted husband, subsidiary to his appointments. He was away preaching when both their children were born, and on one occasion left his wife among strangers in England, ill, so that her death was hourly expected, and their infant child also being ill and dying in another place, for a chance to preach. Neither parent attended the child’s funeral. Peggy never murmured. She was as consecrated to his work as he—perhaps more unselfishly so. Minister’s wives often are, I have heard.
Applying to Lorenzo Dow a purely intellectual analysis, I should say he was a man born with a morbidly nervous temperament, which only ceaseless activity could satisfy. Rest was physical and mental poison to him. This helps explain his extraordinary energy. Egotism took the form of conceit for haranguing and influencing masses of people, and of believing himself competent to fill a world-wide field. Consciousness of his own weakness and supersensitiveness led him to shrink from the restraint and criticisms and evade the duties of church affiliation. He wanted the notoriety and gratification of ministerial life, without its responsibilities; he could not take the responsibility of becoming the founder of a sect.
In short, as I read Lorenzo Dow, he had a mania for haranguing people, and he gratified it in the easiest and most popular way then open to an uncultured, lawless, irresponsible nature, with strong natural tendencies toward religious exercises. If Dow had been born seventy-five years later, he would have made a first-rate demagogue and communist, but it is doubtful if he could have got any one to hear him preach in these days. He served the time and purpose well, and reached hundreds whom perhaps no one else could have influenced.
His eccentric behavior was due partly to lack of education and culture, and partly to physical causes, viz.: A morbid, nervous organization, which could only keep keyed up by excitement. His seeming violence and extravagance were probably assumed at first to cover diffidence and sensitiveness, and afterward became habits of pulpit address. He was affectionate, honest, sincere and brave.
By GRANT ALLEN.
If we were not so familiar with the fact, we would think there were few queerer things in nature than the mode of growth followed by this sprouting hyacinth bulb on my mantelpiece here. It is simply stuck in a glass stand, filled with water, and there, with little aid from light or sunshine, it goes through its whole development, like a piece of organic clock-work as it is, running down slowly in its own appointed course. For a bulb does not grow as an ordinary plant grows, solely by means of carbon derived from the air under the influence of sunlight. What we call its growth we ought rather to call its unfolding. It contains within itself everything that is necessary for its own vital processes. Even if I were to cover it up entirely, or put it in a warm, dark room, it would sprout and unfold itself in exactly the same way as it does here in the diffused light of my study. The leaves, it is true, would be blanched and almost colorless, but the flowers would be just as brilliantly blue as these which are now scenting the whole room with their delicious fragrance. The question is, then, how can the hyacinth thus live and grow without the apparent aid of sunlight, on which all vegetation is ultimately based?
Of course, an ordinary plant, as everybody knows, derives all its energy or motive-power from the sun. The green leaf is the organ upon which the rays act. In its cells the waves of light propagated from the sun fall upon the carbonic acid which the leaves drink in from the air, and by their disintegrating power, liberate the oxygen while setting free the carbon,to form the fuel and food-stuff of the plant. Side by side with this operation the plant performs another, by building up the carbon thus obtained into new combinations with the hydrogen obtained from its watery sap. From these two elements the chief constituents of the vegetable tissues are made up. Now the fact that they have been freed from the oxygen with which they are generally combined gives them energy, as the physicists call it, and, when they re-combine with oxygen, this energy is again given out as heat, or motion. In burning a piece of wood or a lump of coal, we are simply causing the oxygen to re-combine with these energetic vegetable substances, and the result is that we get once more the carbonic acid and water with which we started. But we all know that such burning yields not only heat, but also visible motion. This motion is clearly seen even in the draught of an ordinary chimney, and may be much more distinctly recognized in such a machine as the steam-engine.
At first sight, all this seems to have very little connection with hyacinth bulbs. Yet, if we look a little deeper into the question, we shall see that a bulb and an engine have really a great many points in common. Let us glance first at a somewhat simpler case, that of a seed, such as a pea or a grain of wheat. Here we have a little sack of starches and albumen laid up as nutriment for a sprouting plantlet. These rich food-stuffs were elaborated in the leaves of the parent pea, or in the tall haulms of the growing corn. They were carried by the sap into the ripening fruit, and there, through one of those bits of vital mechanism which we do not yet completely understand, they were selected and laid by in the young seed. When the pea or the grain of wheat begins to germinate, under the influence of warmth and moisture, a very slow combustion really takes place. Oxygen from the air combines gradually with the food-stuffs or fuels—call them which you will—contained in the seed. Thus heat is evolved, which in some cases can be easily measured with the thermometer, and felt by the naked hand—as, for example, in the malting of barley. At the same time motion is produced; and this motion, taking place in certain regular directions, results in what we call the growth of a young plant. In different seeds this growth takes different forms, but in all alike the central mechanical principle is the same; certain cells are raised visibly above the surface of the earth, and the motive-power which so raised them is the energy set free by the combination of oxygen with their starches and albumens. Of course, here, too, carbonic acid and water are the final products of the slow combustion. The whole process is closely akin to the hatching of an egg into a living chicken. But, as soon as the young plant has used up all the material laid by for it by its mother, it is compelled to feed itself just as much as the chicken when it emerges from the shell. The plant does this by unfolding its leaves to the sunlight, and so begins to assimilate fresh compounds of hydrogen and carbon on its own account.
Now it makes a great deal of difference to a sprouting seed whether it is well or ill provided with such stored-up food-stuffs. Some very small seeds have hardly any provision to go on upon; and the seedlings of these, of course, must wither up and die if they do not catch the sunlight as soon as they have first unfolded their tiny leaflets; but other wiser plants have learnt by experience to lay by plenty of starches, oils, or other useful materials in their seeds; and wherever such a tendency has once faintly appeared, it has given such an advantage to the species where it occurred, that it has been increased and developed from generation to generation through natural selections. Now what such plants do for their offspring, the hyacinth, and many others like it, do for themselves. The lily family, at least in the temperate regions, seldom grows into a tree-like form; but many of them have acquired a habit which enables them to live on almost as well as trees from season to season, though their leaves die down completely with each recurring winter. If you cut open a hyacinth bulb, or, what is simpler to experiment upon, an onion, you will find that it consists of several short abortive leaves, or thick, fleshy scales. In these subterranean leaves the plant stores up the food-stuffs elaborated by its green portions during the summer; and there they lie the whole winter through, ready to send up a flowering stem early in the succeeding spring. The material in the old bulb is used up in thus producing leaves and blossoms at the beginning of the second or third season; but fresh bulbs grow out anew from its side, and in these the plant once more stores up fresh material for the succeeding year’s growth.
The hyacinths which we keep in glasses on our mantelpieces represent such a reserve of three or four years’ accumulation. They have purposely been prevented from flowering, in order to make them produce finer trusses of bloom when they are at length permitted to follow their own free will. Thus the bulb contains material enough to send up leaves and blossoms from its own resources; and it will do so even if grown entirely in the dark. In that case the leaves will be pale yellow or faintly greenish, because the true green pigment, which is the active agent of digestion, can only be produced under the influence of light; whereas the flowers will retain their proper color, because their pigment is always due to oxidation alone, and is but little dependent upon the rays of sunshine. Even if grown in an ordinary room, away from the window, the leaves seldom assume their proper deep tone of full green; they are mainly dependent on the food-stuffs laid by in the bulb, and do but little active work on their own account. After the hyacinth has flowered, the bulb is reduced to an empty and flaccid mass of watery brown scales.
Among all the lily kind, such devices for storing up useful material, either in bulbs or in the very similar organs known as corms, are extremely common. As a consequence, many of them produce unusually large and showy flowers. Among our lilies we can boast of such beautiful blossoms as the fritillary, the wild hyacinth, the meadow-saffron, and the two pretty squills; while in our gardens the tiger lilies, tulips, tuberoses, and many others belong to the same handsome bulbous group. Closely allied families give us the bulb-bearing narcissus, daffodil, snowdrop, amarylis, and Guernsey lily; the crocus, gladiolus, iris, and corn-flag; while the neighboring tribe of orchids, most of which have tubers, probably produce more ornamental flowers than any other family of plants in the whole world. Among a widely different group we get other herbs which lay by rich stores of starch, or similar nutritious substances, in thickened underground branches, known as tubers; such, for example, are the potato and the Jerusalem artichoke. Sometimes the root itself is the storehouse for the accumulated food-stuffs, as in the dahlia, the carrot, the radish, and the turnip. In all these cases, the plant obviously derives benefit from the habit which it has acquired of hiding away its reserve fund beneath the ground, where it is much less likely to be discovered and eaten by its animal foes.—“Knowledge” Library.
History presents to us the life of nations, and finds nothing to write about except wars and popular tumults: the years of peace appear only as short pauses, interludes, a mark here and there. And just so is the life of individuals a continued course of warfare, not at all in a metaphorical way of speaking, with want or ennui, but in reality too with his fellow men. He finds everywhere adversaries—lives in continual struggles—and dies at last with arms in his hands. Yet, after all, as our bodies must burst asunder if the weight of the atmosphere were to be withdrawn from it, so, too, if the heavy burden of want, misery, calamities, and the non-success of our exertions, were taken away from the life of men, their arrogance would swell out, if not to the length of explosion, at all events to the exhibition of the most unbridled folly—nay, to madness. So that every man at all times requires a certainquantumof cares and sorrow, or necessities, as a ship does ballast, to enable him to go forward steadily and in a direct line.—Schopenhauer.