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

my sense of the sacredness of private integrity. All men, all
things, the state, the church, yea the friends of the heart are
phantasms and unreal beside the sanctuary of the heart. With so much
awe, with so much fear, let it be respected.

The great majority of men, unable to judge of any principle
until its light falls on a fact, are not aware of the evil that is
around them, until they see it in some gross form, as in a class of
intemperate men, or slaveholders, or soldiers, or fraudulent persons.
Then they are greatly moved; and magnifying the importance of that
wrong, they fancy that if that abuse were redressed, all would go
well, and they fill the land with clamor to correct it. Hence the
missionary and other religious efforts. If every island and every
house had a Bible, if every child was brought into the Sunday School,
would the wounds of the world heal, and man be upright?


But the man of ideas, accounting the circumstance nothing,
judges of the commonwealth from the state of his own mind. `If,' he
says, `I am selfish, then is there slavery, or the effort to
establish it, wherever I go. But if I am just, then is there no
slavery, let the laws say what they will. For if I treat all men as
gods, how to me can there be such a thing as a slave?' But how
frivolous is your war against circumstances. This denouncing
philanthropist is himself a slaveholder in every word and look. Does
he free me? Does he cheer me? He is the state of Georgia, or
Alabama, with their sanguinary slave-laws walking here on our
north-eastern shores. We are all thankful he has no more political
power, as we are fond of liberty ourselves. I am afraid our virtue
is a little geographical. I am not mortified by our vice; that is
obduracy; it colors and palters, it curses and swears, and I can see
to the end of it; but, I own, our virtue makes me ashamed; so sour
and narrow, so thin and blind, virtue so vice-like. Then again, how
trivial seem the contests of the abolitionist, whilst he aims merely
at the circumstance of the slave. Give the slave the least elevation
of religious sentiment, and he is no slave: you are the slave: he not
only in his humility feels his superiority, feels that much deplored
condition of his to be a fading trifle, but he makes you feel it too.
He is the master. The exaggeration, which our young people make of
his wrongs, characterizes themselves. What are no trifles to them,
they naturally think are no trifles to Pompey.

We say, then, that the reforming movement is sacred in its
origin; in its management and details timid and profane. These
benefactors hope to raise man by improving his circumstances: by
combination of that which is dead, they hope to make something alive.
In vain. By new infusions alone of the spirit by which he is made
and directed, can he be re-made and reinforced. The sad Pestalozzi,
who shared with all ardent spirits the hope of Europe on the outbreak
of the French Revolution, after witnessing its sequel, recorded his