^8 RELIGIOUS PROGRESS AND CHRISTIAN CULTURE, 



own corn and pack it home on their shoulders or starve. Oh, it was hor- 

 rible! horrible! It burned and burned in my mind, and I swore a deep 

 oath to God that it should not be so. I didn't set up for a reformer, but 

 I saw a rattlesnake in my path and I smote it." 



And the same lusty hand smote down another rattlesnake. The mur- 

 der of Alexander Hamilton at the hand of Aaron Burr aroused his wrath, 

 and in its white heat he forged there at East-Hampton those discourses 

 which needed no repetition, but swept out forever from the Northern mind 

 that false standard of honor which demanded blood-atonement for real or 

 fancied insult. 



In no respect, perhaps, is the contrast between this century and the 

 last so great as in the systematic and unceasing benevolence which charac- 

 terizes our religious life. It would seem as if every form of human want 

 material and spiritual had now its own organized charity. Pipes are laid 

 from the reservoir of the churches' wealth to almost every species of neces- 

 sity. They are not kept as full as they ought to be, nor as full as they will 

 be when men shall have come under the full pressure of the constraining 

 love of Christ. But the brotherhood of all men, irrespective of race or 

 color, or language, or condition, is asserting itself A want pressing with- 

 in the polar circles announces itself almost instantaneously in the tropics. 

 The whole earth has become sentient. Nervous cords cover it as it were 

 some mighty organism .quick with tender feeling. Suffolk is not a frag- 

 ment of Long Island, but a member of the world. It has felt the throb- 

 bings of most distant pain.' It has responded with generous aid. To the 

 ends of the earth have gone its money, its bread, its Bibles; yea, its living 

 teachers — its own life blood. Through agencies our fathers never dream.ed 

 of, but for which they nevertheless faithfully prepared the way, and for 

 which the honor is due more to them than to their children, through Bible, 

 and tract, and missionary, and Sunday-school, and temperance societies, 

 the old Puritan faith is spreading like leaven in the meal. That same old 

 faith is getting into the world's secular life. Dropping its hardness it has 

 become facile and fusile, using the sunbeam rather than the blast to work 

 its way. It runs along the lines of good neighborhood. It asserts itself 

 in wholesome law. It makes itself felt in the elevation of social customs. 

 It rises in the increasing intolerance of untruth and unrighteousness. It 

 glows in the charitable fellowship of men who think diversely in non- 

 essentials. It compels more and more the assent of men to the supreme 

 excellence and beauty of Christly character. This, sons and daughters of 

 Suffolk, is your best inheritance — the faith of your Puritan ancestry. It 

 made them brave. It has made you prosperous. It will make your chil- 

 dren what you wish them most to be, high-minded, pure, and safe. 



