THE GUARDIAN: A Magazine Devoted to the Interests of Young Men and Ladies. VOL. VII. OCTOBER, 1856. No. 10. THE PULPIT. BY THE EDITOE. MUCH has been said and sung of the influence of the pulpit upon the well-being of the world. Scarcely too much can be attributed to it as a moral power. It molds and keeps alive the public conscience, and does more than armies and navies to preserve the peace and permanency of the State. The ungracious and wholesale reflections which it is of late fashionable with a certain class of secular papers to cast upon the pulpit, remind us of a rude boy who curses his mother. For the State without the influence of the pulpit would be something like a rowdy boy who had no mother to warm him into life and love. Secular papers did not teach the American community to respect the pulpit at first, nor will they succeed in teaching them to cease respecting it. When all the semi-infidelity that now so patriotically prates for the public good has gabbled its last, the pulpit will still utter, with holy anointing, that eternal truth which will not only preserve but save the nations. There is one particular aspect of the pulpit which is perhaps not remembered as it deserves to be; we mean as it conserves and cultivates the public taste in a literary point of view. Eloquence, it is known and confessed, has much to do in keeping alive the polish of the public mind, and the delicacy of the public taste. Its influence is like that of music, great in civilizing and refining the minds of men, but not easily traced, and measured, and described. An eloquent address, like a lovely song, makes a man better even though not one sentiment may have been permanently lodged in his mind. Now, where do we find eloquence? It is universally acknowledged, even by lawyers themselves, that there is no more any eloquence in court houses. The legal profession has taken entirely a business shape; and everything is done in a prosy style, as dry and uninteresting to an audience as to listen to the casting up of a column of figures. No one leaving a court-room, even after having listened to pleadings, feels as if a charmer had held a spell over him, or an Orpheus had raised his spirit higher as with the risings of song. The bar honestly confesses, "It is not in me." Do we find eloquence in the political arena? Now and then you meet something of the kind, which may be called eloquence; but as a general thing you find political speeches bald and bombastic, vapory and vulgar, full of cant and castigation, abounding in low wit and rude abuse. If such a speech stirs at all in the mind, it is rather the rough, fiery, and tumultuous part, than the deep, silent, and aspiring. The listener's mind becomes rather like a stream, swollen by muddy waters, than like a serene landscape after a shower, when the sun shines mildly upon it. The political forum says, "It is not in me." Shall we seek for eloquence in our national halls? Here we would be more successful; but this does not reach the masses. Even this, moreover, is only a power that moves in the sphere of this world; and is fast losing its crown, degenerating and taking the form-not only figuratively but really-of fists, brickbats and bludgeons. The men are growing mightier in brags and blows than in words of beauty and power. Instead of "Thoughts that breathe and words that burn," they prefer using "Knives that cut and canes that stun!" And instead of convincing one another by arguments and ideas, by the power of truth and the charm of eloquence, they seem to think that the best way to make a convert is to bruise his bones or blow out his brains. Alas, dignity has given place to daring. The "old men eloquent" are in their graves. The voices that once rung their silvery tones through those halls are silent amid the shades, and a generation has succeeded them upon which their mantles have not fallen. Our national halls say, "It is no more in us." Let us now return from the vain chase, amid the riot of passion and the clashing of tongues, to the stillness of the Sabbath and the sacred retirement of the sanctuary. Let us go with the crowd of those who gather around the pulpits of our land. Here, after all, is found that eloquence which eminently deserves the name. The man that speaks is grave, courteous and respectful. He is mild, affectionate and earnest. He falls like a lion upon sin, and hews the Agags of wickedness in pieces, till every heart inly responds, Amen. Then he soothes the sad and sorrowing; and his words seem like angels that wave their quieting wings over the congregation, and, feeling the sacred power near, the weary are at rest. As a general thing, what may be called good speaking is now confined to the pulpits of our land. We do not mean to say that all pulpit speaking is good, or that all is faulty outside of it; we wish only to say, that the pulpit is the conservator of eloquence. Take ministers in mid dle life, and you will be the more struck, the more carefully you observe and listen, with their dignified and deliberate address, the logic of their thoughts, the chasteness of their style, the propriety of their words, the distinction and correctness of articulation and pronunciation, and the mellowness and impressiveness of their intonations. We know that men sometimes speak of the dullness of preaching; but no censure is more undeserved. The fault is not in the pulpit, but in those who make the charge. The pulpit is earnest, but the taste of bearers is vitiated. That boisterous kind of speaking which is so common on the rostrum and in out-door gatherings is not earnest; it does not carry a struggling soul in it; it is more swell on the surface than a power from within. Nor is anecdote-telling public speaking eloquence, though it may hold an audience on their feet for hours. It is but another kind of comedy to please a very low part of our nature, and always passes away with the hour. The anecdote may be remembered, but scarcely the truth which it was designed to illustrate. But the age loves excitement, and the speaker that can excite the multitude for a moment is called eloquent. How unjust, however, is it to disparage the pulpit by a comparison with such a character of oratory. He that has a taste for system, substance, and a correct use of language must look to the pulpit for it. The students of the land are the ministers. It is a rare thing to find a literary lawyer, physician, or politician. You may find here and there a noble exception; but as a general thing the scholar is swallowed up in the profession. A letting down to the popular level is found to pay better, and the temptation is often too strong to be resisted. On the other hand you find hundreds of ministers who, while they are diligent in all the details of ministerial duty, keep their minds in living sympathy with the progress of pure science, and make literature in its highest form contribute to the true, lasting dignity and influence of their profession. The question may be asked with confidence, Who sustains and control the higher institutions of learning in the land? They are not only founded by the church, but their chairs are filled, not wholly, but prevailingly by divines. From them proceed also the majority of textbooks in the higher departments of science. The ablest Reviews of the land are the religious Reviews. Again we say, let all exceptions that can be justly made to what we have maintained have their full weight; let much that cannot be praised be found in the pulpit, and much that can out of it, yet we believe we rightly claim for the pulpit of the land the honor designated in this article. Should the thousands of our pulpits become silent-should these high places around which the millions gather to keep themselves from sinking into the common level of earth and sense, be leveled by the strong force of the lower attractions; what besides could save all true literary interests from gradual neglect and sure destruction, and all social life from rudeness and barbarism. The poet never said a truer word than "The pulpit Must stand acknowledged, while the world shall stand, MY PILGRIM'S POUCH. V. BY NATHAN. "Wer reisen will, Der schweig fein still, Und Lasse heim die Sorgen." Which being freely rendered into prosy English, might be made to read as follows: To travel pleasantly, speak sparingly, Walk slow and straight ahead, lie not late a-bed; At Basel I forwarded my little baggage to Constance, which I expected to reach after a four-weeks' tour over the Alps, and set out with a small traveling pouch about twelve inches square. After proceeding to Geneva, I spent several days along "placid Leman," whose pleasant stillness admonished the unhappy Byron "To forsake Earth's troubled waters for a purer spring." At the upper end of the lake is the Castle of Chillon, once used as a dungeon for the oppressed. Here is a pillar to which the Duke of Savoy had chained Bounivard, Prior of St. Victor, at Geneva. You can still see the smoothly-worn path on the pavement, where he spent his weary hours in walking around the pillar, so far as his chain reached, to which Byron indignantly refers in his "Childe Harold." At Martigny I made my headquarters for a week. The inhabitants of this part of Switzerland nearly all belong to the laboring classes, and most of them laboring hard enough. Their language is a mixture of French and German. The body is French, but the woof is inwrought with fragments of German, and so unlike either that a knowledge of both is scarcely sufficient to understand them. I spent two days in visiting the Great St. Bernard, which I reached through a burning July sun and wintry snows, after a very fatiguing day's journey, a distance of thirty miles, all the way up hill. The second day I returned to Martigny with a more agreeable walk, except the last ten miles which I made through a drenching rain. But even this was not unmixed with good, as a cooler after a long walk through the hot sun. The following day I proceeded to Chamouny, over the Col de Balme. The first three hours' walk the road steeply ascended through a rough valley, partly cultivated, then again descended for a short distance, and from here ascended three hours again up the Col de Balme. At first awhile the path wound along its shady sides in zigzag style, which finally entered large pastures covered with soft, thick grass, over which herdsmen and their flocks were scattered. Its topmost cone, 7,000 feet high, was clad with snow and vegetation. I plucked large Alp-violets on the borders of the snow-bank as memorials. The summit of the Col de Balme commands an excellent view of Mont Blanc. But its crown is so frequently veiled with a cloud, that few can enjoy the view. For a few moments the king of European mountains stood out before me in all his white, dazzling majesty, then thick clouds rolled up from below and swept around me such a night-like darkness that I could see my path down but a few paces ahead. Soon I got below the clouds again, and in a few hours reached Chamouny. Chamouny valley is celebrated for its large glaciers. Seven of these ice-rivers slowly slide their large blocks down from Mont Blanc towards the valley. The origin of these glaciers, and their influence upon the earth's surface, is extremely interesting. The region of ice and snow begins at 8,000 feet above the level of the sea. From here upwards it never rains. The cloud deposites are in the form of granular snows, which in those cold heigths have accumulated their everlasting masses for thousands of years. Along the border of the melting temperature large quantities of ice are found. In the day time the sun and atmosphere melt the snow, after night it freezes into ice, with which the falling snow again combines, pushing their masses down the mountain side through gorges and ravines, thus forming the glaciers. They look like frozen mountain rivers, whose tumbling torrents were instantaneously converted into ice by a sudden change of the temperature. Some are from ten to fifteen hundred feet thick. They are broken up into blocks separated by large fissures, which, from a distance, look like frozen waterfalls and ice-waves. The stream moves imperceptibly slow. Some of them only from one to two feet per day. I believe Agassiz ascribes their motion to the expansion of the glacier occasioned by the falling snow and rain, and the trickling of water, melting away from the ice into the fissures, where it freezes again. It is difficult to see what becomes of the immense masses gorging in above, when the stream moves so slowly. Doubtless the action of the sun and the atmosphere consume much, but it seems impossible that it should amount to such a quantity. Every glacier has a stream at its base, through which its meltings rush away. Some of the largest rivers of Europe, the Rhone and others, have their origin in glaciers. They exert an amazing influence upon the earth's surface. Their crushing quantities, with their tremendous lateral pressure plough up high banks along their course, tear up rocks and push them up steep mountains until they tumble back on the bosom of the stream. I met with many large furrows of extinct glaciers, running far down into the valleys, whose tracks were strewn with huge boulders. Many geological phenomena may one day be shown to have originated from the action of glaciers on the motion of ice in some other form. From Chamouny I ascended Montavert, which commands a view of the Mer-de-Glace, a large lake of ice, into which Mont Blanc pushes its discharges. Hedged in by the lofty cliffs of surrounding mountains, between which its blueish rough surface extends for six miles, it slowly and heavily pushes its contents down through the glacier Des Bois towards the valley. The stream carried on its surface large boulders |