10. CHAPTER TENTH.
A SERMON FROM THE TOP OF GIRARD COLLEGE,
By “A Writer of Immoral Books.”
Doth not a curse rest upon the Great City?
Is it not better to abide in the shadow of the
mountain top, where the air of God is free,
where the child learns Religion at the mother's
breast, where the calm scenes of unpolluted
nature—the valley dotted with houses, the
mountain rising above into the sky, the Susquehanna
singing on among its mountain
shores—lift the heart to Heaven at once,
without the medium of the Preacher's prayer
or the church's psalm?
It is good to dwell in the free country.
It is good to abide on the mountain side,
where the sunlight bathes your face, just
after it has left the gate of Heaven. It
is good to abide in the vast deep woods,
where every flower is a character of Lord's
handwriting, and where the summer air and
the winter blast are ever singing one great
anthem of praise.
But there is a Curse upon the great city.
A curse that takes many forms and speaks in
many voices, but is, ever—to-day, yesterday
and to-morrow—the same. At noonday, in
front of the Old State House, it stalks abroad,
in the form of the Unjust Judge, who has
learned his Religion from the bitter waters of
Hatred, and who only speaks in accents of
damnation. The Curse is in the streets in
these shapes of misery and want, these Lepers
of Civilization. It is in the Courts, where the
dock swarms with criminals, while the bench
is solemn with that Justice, whose sword is
sharp only for the poor man's throat.
There is a Curse upon the great city. With
the lowly poor in their dens of want, in the
narrow alleys where squallid crime drowns
the fever of despair in draughts of liquid fire,
and in the great mansion, where the revel,
bought with the poor man's labor, roars on
from midnight until break of day.
It walks into the office of the Editor, the
Curse of the great city. It pours vitriol into
his heart, and points with vitroil his pen. To
stab private character for pay — to pollute the
mind of youth with advertisements that give
immunity to lust, and for a price, offer to
poison the fruit of the Mother's womb — to
meet the cry of the poor man's agony with a
sneer — to crush with a pious lie, every hope
of reform, every throb of progress — to sell
the rights of Humanity for a Dollar, as Iscariot
for thirty pieces of silver, sold his God —
behold the life of an editor who is swayed by
the Curse of the Great City.
Sometimes it is found in the office of the
Lawyer. It turns him into a sower of crime,
and he plants dishonor so that he may reap
gold. With a brain palsied to all sense of
right or wrong, with a conscience seared
alike to the wail of Humanity or the still
small voice of God, with a hand always grasping,
always itching for the wages of pollution,
beheld the Lawyer, infected by the Curse of
the Great City. Gold! That word overspreads
the horizon of his life. Gold however
gotten, gold however won — wrung
from the widow's palm, or torn from the orphan's
heritage, or coined in the damnation of
the virgin's heart — always gold.
Whence comes the universal Curse?
Whence this universal fever for the fruits of
labor, without labour's honest work? Why
this eternal combat, between man and man,
between weak and strong, and all for the
wages of the poor man's toil?
It is because there is no such thing as
Justice for YOU, while YOUR NEIGHBOR has
one more dollar than yourself?
Does the Curse result from the unnatural
association of all classes of the human tribe
in a large city? Sad and pitiful spectacle!
Is there only one loaf of bread in the
world, that you and your neighbor, must take
knife in hand, and fight for the right to live?
Does this eternal warfare, engender a spirit
of avarice in its last extreme of lust, a morality
of selfishness, that can descend into no lower
depth of baseness, a Religion that has no more
heart than the stone on which you tread, a
Justice that, like the Hindoo Car, only moves
to crush the weak and rend the poor?
Jefferson, whose memory we will forever
wear in our hearts, thanking God who gave
us our apostle of Humanity, to say iron truth
in the face of brazen wrong, once uttered a
volume in this line —
“A great city is the sore of the body
politic.”
What an ulcer for the knife of the Great
Physician of souls. What a canker for Satan
to cure with his vast fund of quackery! With
Preachers that talk theology while man lies
bleeding in the last ditch of sufferance; with
lawyers that prate of Blackstone, while the
Law of Christ is trampled under their feet;
with Judges who whine forth words of smoothest
sound, while they pour the miserable and
the wronged, into the Alembic of the Penitentiary.
Sweep the roofs from this large City at
midnight. Look down upon the scenes: here
a murder — there a seduction — yonder a
forgery — then a midnight outrage that cannot
be named but in a whisper — all crowded together,
enacting at the same moment, going
on under this moonlit Heaven, while law and
judge and priest, are slumbering sound.
Gaze from the summit of Girard College,
upon the great city — the house-tops are uncovered.
The Anatomy of civilization lies
open to your gaze. Summon the fiends of
darkness to your side. How they chuckle as
these scenes unclose before their gaze! Then
with a voiceless prayer, beseech the Angels,
who watch yonder by the Throne, to turn their
gaze for a moment only, upon this dumb tragedy,
which only manifests its agony, in broken
throbs. Look! The tears are falling from the
Angels' eyes. Tears of blood?
Yonder at the lonely hearth the widow
starves, with her babe lying dead upon her
breast. Yonder the bank directors hold their
orgie, and plan a new and legal robbery of the
common people. Yonder the White Slave
toils at her needle, sewing the garments of
luxury with tears, and bartering her lungs for
a crust of bread.
Yonder glides the Priest, under the quiet
mantle of the night — he has just finished
some potent sermon — something against “the
Pope,” or maybe something flavorous with
sulphur, upon “Eugene Sue” and “French
Novels.” Ho! Sir Priest whither tends your
steps at dead of night? Shall you take wine
with the Deacon, or join the orgie of these
smooth robbers, who speculate upon the gain's
of the poor man's blood? Shall you, with the
odor of pulpit and sermon fresh upon your
garments, steal to these Homes of Baker
Street, and tell the Lepers there, that the Lord
Christ died for them? No — home to your
study. The wine is good, and the pen is
sharp. Before you spreads the Rent-Roll of
Trinity Church. Come — we are waiting.
Write straightway a good sermon, in favor of
Trinity Church and her Forty Millions of
Dollars. But while you are writing, look
yonder for a moment, to that lake of Galilee —
look firmly, though your gaze traverses the
mists of eighteen hundred years — and tell us
what do you behold?
“The Christ who has just been preaching
to multitudes of the Poor, is now sitting in
their midst, feeding these poor with actual
bread!”
Is this your answer Priest? Do you pretend
to believe in this Christ; you who preach
to the Poor, and at the same time rob them of
land, of bread, of the means of life, and of life
itself?
But look again from this summit of Girard
College.
Yonder in the lonely sick room dies the
father, gazing around with a glassy eye, while
the children and the lawyers are fighting about
his will.
Yonder in his snug room the Judge is sleeping
— and there, on your right, the Penitentiary
blackens on your sight. That great Coffin of
Stone, in which the living are buried. Judge!
how many of your victims are withering there?
The night is very clear, Judge, and the voice
of Abel's blood goes up yonder, from many a
cell of the penitentiary. Do you hear it? No?
But when you are dying, Judge, shall you not
hear it then? Jeffreys was once as brave as
you are now. Once seated on the Bench, he
talked of “good old English law,” and washed
his hands in blood. So legal and demure was
Saint Jeffreys. How did Jeffreys die? Can
you tell, Judge?
Another scene!
A maiden is kneeling at the feet of a rich
man's son. He is smoothly clad in fashionable
attire; she wears the faded garb of poverty.
She has worked so hard, she has worked so
long, for a wretched pittance per day — and
there is so much wealth, so much luxury to be
won by the mere sacrifice of her honor.
Even she the poor girl has honor. The Rich
Man's son is pleading — she is pleading at his
feet, hesitating ere she crosses the line which
divides Heaven and Hell. How eloquently he
pleads!
“No one cares for you. You work sixteen
hours for sixteen pennies. I have money.
You talk of Religion — what has the Religion
of the Church done for you? You talk of Law,
what has Law or Justice done for you? Poor,
you must give your life for a crust. But you
are young and very beautiful — ”
And do you blame the White Slave, that she
listens to the voice of Sin, when it comes clad
in gold, while Virtue by the custom of the large
city, only bears injustice, starvation, and cankered
lungs?
But we will descend from the roof of Girard
College. The sights that we see, and the
words that we hear, do not amuse us very
much. Yet ere we go, let us look back through
the shadows of eighteen hundred years, and
ask whether the Gospel which shone from the
casement of a Carpenter's Hut, shall ever
walk in its divine force, along the avenues of
the Great City, feeding while it preaches, and
transforming the wilderness of despair into a
Golden City.
A Golden City! Golden with brotherly
love, golden with justice higher and deeper
than “old English law,” golden with impulses
born of God, and working for the good, not of
the greatest number, but of the whole number?
O, if this leaf which I have written should
wander down the pathway of the next century,
and encounter the eyes of 1949, how will the
readers of that era, living admist a redeemed
civilization, wonder at the barbarous laws and
fiendish theologies of the year 1849?
