John Seely Hart

“ The past shows, the present hopes for, and the future promises this; but fearful are the doubts, the despondencies, and the agonies, through which society must pass to attain its highest tone! Around each great truth is gathered a crowd of errors—deceitful reflections of its beauty—giving to the mischievous a pretext for ill, and often, with ignis fatuus light, misleading even the true-hearted and the good. ”

“ We are not ultra reformists;—far from it;—and yet we are of those who see, in the present condition of the world, the waking up of a new era. We are of those who believe in,—if not the perfectibility of man, at least his great, lasting, and boundless improvement. Thought is roused, mind is awakened, which never again can sleep. Vainly are we told that preceding ages have shown equal civilization and similar improvement. ”

“ Not you, nor we, nor he—nor any chosen one—nor ten, nor twenty—but man,—now claims the right to think for himself. He claims it; he will have it; he ought to have it. Let but those who are ahead in the race of knowledge give to those who need; guide those who stumble in the dark; and each, thus putting in his mite of well doing in the cause, ward off, as much as possible, the calamities which necessarily hover round the great and progressive change through which the world is passing. Great changes are oftenest wrought out only through great convulsions. ”

“ Let truth be but heard: there is in the heart of man an instinct to know and to seize it. Error is simply negative; like shadow, it is only want of light. Heaven’s sunbeam on the material world—reason’s effulgence on the thinking soul—alone suffice to work God’s purposes. Man, his humble instrument, cannot make the light ”

“ It alone enjoins upon its disciples to follow, step by step—to sift to the bottom its theories and their remotest effects—before launching the world upon untried experiments. It alone gropes patiently its way, grappling with doubts and difficulties, making sure and clear its footing, before calling upon society to follow. ”

“ Never has the great heart of civilization cast, as now, by its every pulsation, its life-blood to the farthest extremes of a universe, rousing itself from unconscious infancy to the full action of a reasoning being. ”

“ There are crises in the world’s course, when, rousing from temporary lethargy, reason seems more than usually wide awake to the influence of truth and light. But, in this very waking, is she also more subject to the misleading influence of error. The craving heart—the longing, seeking, hungering for truth—is roused ”

“ The world is in labour of a great truth, but its sick fancy is cheated with the bewildering dazzle of its own delirious dreams.
One of society’s closest guards—a kind of shepherd’s dog, as it were, of the flock—stands political economy. ”

“ Great as were the efforts of the ancients—great as were the results of those efforts—they were confined to little corners of a world, which now basks under the full radiance of extended and extending light. ”

“ I have the right to labour!”
Within this specious formula—“the right to labour”—lie concentrated the greater number of those terrible fallacies which now threaten to overrun and devastate civilized society. The hydra of communism holds struggling in its deadly folds the Hercules of truth. That the latter conquers, who can doubt? Man’s nature, his soul, and instinct, alike lead him to the light. The world is progressive. ”

“ These certainly do show—these have shown—progression and retrogression, rise and fall, as the great pulse of humanity has throbbed in its breathing of ages; but never has the world-soul been roused, as now, by the expansion of thought, circulating to distant points of our globe, whose very existence was not dreamed of by the wise of ancient days. ”

“ This can never die—this can never be crushed. If driven from the East it would seek the West; crushed in the West still could it breathe in the East. A civilized state may fall back into barbarism; a civilized world—never! ”

“ The soul of their civilization, as each sank in its ruins, was breathed into the survivor, until at last, in the great crash of Roman power, the shattered remnants of its pride and its knowledge, scattering through Europe, laid the basis of modern civilization. ”

“ Without examining into the practicability of their own schemes, they give way to a misty vision of goodness—a kind of foggy virtue—which, often but the rush-light of their own unregulated fancy—too indolent or too cowardly to probe to its source, and follow to its end—they imagine an inward light, a transmitted beam of heaven, and so dream on! ”

“ Credit dead; industry paralyzed; commerce annihilated; her starving people now sinking despondent under their difficulties—now driven to the madness of revolt, against they know not whom—asking, they know not what. ”

“ That terrible fallacy compacted in the words, “The right to labour,” is rapidly working its mischief. “The right of man to labour, and of land whereon to labour,”—what is it, as our communists interpret it, but the right to rob? They would not labour for nothing, nor yet for such compensation as the true value of their labour, given where it is wanted and paid for as it is needed, will produce. They have the right to labour, be it for good or for ill. They have the right to be paid for that labour, let the capital they force into their use be theirs or another’s. ”

“ In earlier ages, learning, information, thought, being limited to the few, the masses took the word from these high-priests of reason, whose veiled holy of holies was sacred from the intrusion of the crowd. ”

“ Watching, barking, wrangling at every intruder, suspicious of outward show, nor satisfied with skin-deep inspection, it examines, before admitting all pretenders as true prophets, and strips many a wolf of his sheep’s clothing. ”