a struggling sense of political aspirations, and hints the possibility of good neighborhood and peaceful relations between an existing civil order and itself. From "scum" and "herd" and "horde" to "mob," from "mob" to "mass," from "the masses" to "the people," from "the people" to "the race," from "race" to "brotherhood," we have a regular ascending series of terms, recording the historic progress of the multitudes as plainly as the geological strata do the history of the earth's advance to a habitable condition. And it is easy to gauge the social and Christian status of any community, by observing the ordinary and spontaneous use of the terms in which the multitude is spoken of, and in which it speaks of itself. -- The great peculiarity of ante-Christian days was this: the multitudes were despaired of, and therefore both feared and despised. They were, it is true, courted by the ambitious, flattered by the cunning, but still feared and despised at once by the upper classes. All that we recognize in these days as philanthropy, a feeling and principle based upon a conviction that the condition of the masses is the fruit of unhappy and discouraging circumstances, which may be removed or relieved, with a certainty of improving their condition and character, this was unknown. It was not that the intelligent and superior classes in those days were less well-disposed, more selfish or cruel, than we are. But the relative proportion of the civilized and the uncivilized, the educated and the uneducated, the rich and the poor, was so much less favorable to hope, that the problems then offered to the wise and good were totally different from ours, and utterly appalling. It was inconceivable then that men everywhere could become educated, civilized, and sensible of the advantages of morality. The very fact of the unknown geography, the imperfect navigation, the slow and difficult intercourse, of ancient times fostered continual fears of possible eruptions of barbarians, first realized, indeed, in the destruction of the Roman empire, but always operating to prevent any generous hope of the common elevation of the race. The absence of any general commerce, with a total ignorance of the very name of political economy, rendered precarious supplies of food a proper ground of jealousy and dread, — a fear which is one of the most active and steady causes of hostility and division among men. Nations could not afford to be at peace with their rivals in the corn markets; it was a matter of life and death who had possession of the fertile fields: and so war, jealousy, and hatred seemed a necessary, and even a justifiable and statesmanlike, policy in the conduct of public affairs, and the relation of states with each other. When our Saviour appeared, his most affecting and characteristic quality was the new feeling with which he regarded the multitude. Objects of lively interest were the multitude, indeed, to the princes and rulers of those days. Herod did not dare, until lust and wine had driven him beyond reason, to behead John; for he feared the people. The chief priests. and scribes did not dare to lay hands on Jesus till they were backed by the Roman governor, for the same reason, that they feared the people, who had instinctively felt that they had found a friend in our Saviour. But it was not FEAR, but compassion, an entirely different kind of interest, that Christ was to manifest towards them. For, in the language of St. Matthew, "when he saw the multitudes, he was moved with compassion on them, because they fainted, and were scattered abroad, as sheep having no shepherd." The grounds of our Saviour's compassion are, it is worthy of notice, the very grounds of the fear entertained towards the people by his predecessors and contemporaries. Because they fainted with hunger, were maddened with unsatisfied appetite, and driven to reckless and ferocious ways, this, which moved the dread of them, and an ever-watchful and armed resistance to their gatherings and their demands, was the first spring of our Saviour's compassion for them. True, he who could multiply the loaves and fishes miraculously for its relief had less to fear from the rage of hunger than the commissaries of mere human princes. But Christ distinctly recognized want as the first cause of compassion for the people. This was their first, great misfortune, overshadowing all others, causing their degradation, and making them dangerous to themselves and others. He had to feed. even before he could instruct them; to become the maker of their bread before he could be the Saviour of their souls. A solemn and most tardily recognized truth was here divinely affirmed. The physical and material degradation of the world has been the first and the chief cause of its moral and spiritual destitution. The science of supporting great bodies of people upon this planet in any other than a predatory, uncertain, and clashing way, has been one of very slow and difficult. progress. But distinctly to recognize destitution, not as the curse of God upon those on whom it fell, but as the providential stimulus to effort, and the divine incentive to compassion; to regard it as a problem capable of solution, or worth the profoundest intellectual and moral sacrifices to fathom it,— was left to our Saviour. It was the mightiest step in human progress when the faintness of the people gained the compassion, in place of the dread and fear, of the great leader of the civilization of Christendom. To see and allow that men were made wicked, dangerous, and hopeless mainly by their wants; that thus they were shut up to criminality, kept base and fierce by the necessity of their condition; to pity them for this calamity; still more, to look upon it as one which it was the duty and privilege of the fortunate, the instructed, and the rich to relieve or remove, this was the longest stride on, the highest step up, which the gospel made, politically considered. But this is not all: the second ground of our Saviour's compassion for the multitudes is like unto the first. First, hunger, which stands for all other degrees, and implies all other forms, of destitution, moved his pity. Next, their unsocialized and neglected condition; or, to use his own words, because they were scattered abroad, as sheep having no shepherd." In that grazing country, infested with wild beasts, where the flocks of the opulent were never sent to pasture without a strong force of protectors, our Lord could not have used a more striking illustration than this. It was not exclusively, or even primarily, the want of spiritual instruction that he compassionated in the multitudes; but their lack of all social and civilizing guidance and protection. They were not considered as within the fold of society, but kept outside with the beasts, from a general conviction, that they must prey upon society if society did not leave them outside its pale to devour each other, or be devoured by want and exposure. The greatest misfortune the human race can experience grows out of, and is connected with, its greatest necessity and blessing. It cannot obey the first condition of its perpetuity, Increase and multiply, and possess the earth,— without general dispersion: it cannot have general dispersion without driving far the largest portions of the race outside the spheres of social culture and civil polity. The world, if the Scriptures are credible, did not commence in savagery or barbarism, but upon true civilized principles, in family life, and with rules of social subordination and order. But it necessarily fell, as a whole, into barbarism, through the inevitable disproportion which the rapid growth of its population bore to the slow increase in its machinery of intercourse and commerce. The people multiplied and dispersed faster, vastly faster, than law and order, traditionary truth and wisdom, could follow them. Civilization, young and delicate, was compelled to shelter itself within the most circumscribed limits; and, beyond its self-protecting walls, the masses of humanity were scattered abroad, without the means and materials of self-elevation. For many generations, the disproportion between the civilized and. the savage world must have been constantly increasing in favor of barbarism. Indeed, the ratio must have continued to become ever more and more frightful, as the geometrical increase of the earth's population faster and faster outstripped the arithmetical increase of its socialized and civil portions. In the absolute ignorance of the physical geography of the world, — which was not then even called a globe,- no bounds could be placed to the probable growth of this despairing disproportion of the savage to the civilized, of the predatory and outcast to the orderly and moralized, portion of the human race. So long as the earth held out, there was room for a boundless in crease in the ratio of ignorance, brute force, and animal necessity to cultivated and socialized humanity; and, had the world been a limitless plain, as it was deemed, there was even greater reason than was duly recognized, to fear the absolute extinction of civilization beneath the inroads of a myriadmouthed barbarism. The South-African natives, living far in the interior of their continent, when the great missionary of modern times, Dr. Livingstone, brought them to the coast at Loanda (the place where the wretched cargo of the "Echo," captured by one of our national vessels, was basely gathered), and they beheld, for the first time, the ocean, in describing to him afterwards their feelings, said: "We marched along with our father, believing that what the ancients had always told us was true, that the world had no end; but all at once the world said to us, ' I am finished: there is no more of me." If the circumambient ocean had not thus finished the world; if it had not been, in short, a moderate-sized globe, with an easily exhaustible area; if the extension of its population had not been thus positively limited (particularly as to its power to support, by spontaneous fertility, a population) to a number which was happily attained before the disproportion of the civilized to the uncivilized became so great as to be hopeless, there is no rashness in saying, that utter deterioration and absolute brutality must have been the final fate of our race. Doubtless, by the original plan of the Almighty, the limit of population was reached before this ratio was totally desperate; for the size of the globe may be considered as having been accurately adapted to the fortunes of the race for whom it was made. The moment the ratio became fixed, not increasing, there was hope; but a long pause was made on that line. The instant it began to diminish was the signal of Christ's coming, and the birth-hour of human redemption had arrived. The preponderance not in numbers, but in power, courage, confidence of the social and civil forces of society over the instincts and appetites of the uncivilized and barbarous masses of the race, is the only adequate cause, under God (who has had his own now obvious and glorious plan in human history), of the progress of - 8 |