"Emerson, Ralph W. - Lecture on the Times" - читать интересную книгу автора (Emerson Ralph Waldo)

The actors constitute that great army of martyrs who, at least
in America, by their conscience and philanthropy, occupy the ground
which Calvinism occupied in the last age, and compose the visible
church of the existing generation. The present age will be marked by
its harvest of projects for the reform of domestic, civil, literary,
and ecclesiastical institutions. The leaders of the crusades against
War, Negro slavery, Intemperance, Government based on force, Usages
of trade, Court and Custom-house Oaths, and so on to the agitators on
the system of Education and the laws of Property, are the right
successors of Luther, Knox, Robinson, Fox, Penn, Wesley, and
Whitfield. They have the same virtues and vices; the same noble
impulse, and the same bigotry. These movements are on all accounts
important; they not only check the special abuses, but they educate
the conscience and the intellect of the people. How can such a
question as the Slave trade be agitated for forty years by all the
Christian nations, without throwing great light on ethics into the
general mind? The fury, with which the slave-trader defends every
inch of his bloody deck, and his howling auction-platform, is a
trumpet to alarm the ear of mankind, to wake the dull, and drive all
neutrals to take sides, and to listen to the argument and the
verdict. The Temperance-question, which rides the conversation of
ten thousand circles, and is tacitly recalled at every public and at
every private table, drawing with it all the curious ethics of the
Pledge, of the Wine-question, of the equity of the manufacture and
the trade, is a gymnastic training to the casuistry and conscience of
the time. Antimasonry had a deep right and wrong, which gradually
emerged to sight out of the turbid controversy. The political
questions touching the Banks; the Tariff; the limits of the executive
power; the right of the constituent to instruct the representative;
the treatment of the Indians; the Boundary wars; the Congress of
nations; are all pregnant with ethical conclusions; and it is well if
government and our social order can extricate themselves from these
alembics, and find themselves still government and social order. The
student of history will hereafter compute the singular value of our
endless discussion of questions, to the mind of the period.

Whilst each of these aspirations and attempts of the people for
the Better is magnified by the natural exaggeration of its advocates,
until it excludes the others from sight, and repels discreet persons
by the unfairness of the plea, the movements are in reality all parts
of one movement. There is a perfect chain, -- see it, or see it not,
-- of reforms emerging from the surrounding darkness, each cherishing
some part of the general idea, and all must be seen, in order to do
justice to any one. Seen in this their natural connection, they are
sublime. The conscience of the Age demonstrates itself in this
effort to raise the life of man by putting it in harmony with his
idea of the Beautiful and the Just. The history of reform is always
identical; it is the comparison of the idea with the fact. Our modes
of living are not agreeable to our imagination. We suspect they are