THE MORALITY AND RELIGION OF NEW YORK.
The following is an extract from a letter to a Chicago paper, giving a description of N. Y. City. Most of the preachers of the day tell us we are near the millennium. The United States is probably the most Christian of all the so-called Christian countries. Look at this description of the religious means in New York, and tell us what hope there is of the conversion of that city! If the whole world should become as much Christianized as the metropolis of our Christian land, what a millennium there would be! Truly, iniquity abounds in the churches, as well as out of them. Lord, “spare thy people!” The wickedness of New York no one pretends to deny. It is a city of moral filth and spiritual decay. You learn that a fine house in a good location is to let at a very low rent, for the simple reason that next door is a brothel. New York is horrible in the indulgence of the basest of appetites. Tens of thousands of men who go that road alone into the company of women, and as many women to whom dress and pleasure mean corruption. The aristocracy of New York is not an aristocracy of wealth, but of self-indulgence. The ambition of the young bloods is not to have plenty of money, but23to riot, with money or without, in gilded sinks of iniquity. And these gentlemen of the metropolis, whose blood grows fouler every day, are as well pleased with themselves as the proudest lords of the proudest aristocracy in the world. Nowhere can you see faces baser and more insolent than you may see in Fifth avenue. The unceasing scramble for gain, and horrid squabble of half-mad scramblers, fill the whole stage of life in New York. Selfishness is the law, and success the gospel, of the millions whose noise fills the day here, as it were, with the groan of an earth-demon. Nobody cares, nobody hears, if any voice is raised but the voice of the market, and the song of pleasure. I speak, of course, with a reservation as regards the voice which may come direct from kind Heaven, through some inspired man or some signal event. Such a voice these hucksters and harlots would undoubtedly hear; but, alas! who is inspired of all the talkers, pious and profane, in the Babylon of our land? New York has no great preacher. Beecher, on the Brooklyn side, draws crowded houses year in and year out; but he is not a great moral power. His decided inclination to comedy has no redeeming background of tragic earnestness: hence the hearers of Mr. Beecher are entertained, but are not convinced. The fullness and charm of Mr. Beecher’s sensibilities undoubtedly edify his disciples, and please the crowd, as fine sentiments on the stage please the crowd. But they do not convict and convert. Mr. Beecher is essentially a weak man, because he plays with the truths of religion. People go to be entertained. And they go away merely entertained, because the great pulpit performer does not deal in downright, consistent, and powerful intellectual convictions, but in changing, inconsistent, and practically feeble imaginations. The dreams of Mr. Beecher’s soul are profoundly radical and heretical. The theology which he professes to teach, is strictly orthodox. To avoid getting into trouble, Mr. Beecher attempts to discard logic and theology in favor of piety and religion. The result is that Mr. Beecher builds on shifting sands. He involves himself in a kind of intellectual dishonesty, which is fatal to his power. He plays fast and loose with truths of absolute importance, until he becomes a player merely. If he could pass his nights for a while, watching through the streets, with the leprous victims of sin, until a grand, grim earnestness became the supreme impulse of his soul, and then could sift, and weigh, and utter, the soundest truths in a terrible honesty of clear conviction, his weakness would become strength. Instead of this, he puts his soul into a novel, and sells the novel for thirty thousand dollars to the Ledger. Theodore Tilton, the much-praised and much-abused editor of the Independent, is throwing away his chance precisely as Mr. Beecher does. He is playing at piety and religion—and very finely and nobly too—when the time demands a thing much finer and nobler than any play, the most earnest work with the most honest ideas. “No Theology in the Independent,” says Mr. Tilton. This simply means, no definiteness in the religious ideas of the Independent. The rule is broken constantly and deliberately by the more orthodox contributors. Thus an article on the personality and power of the Devil, in a recent issue, was as definite and as orthodox as anything ever said on the subject. But Mr. Tilton takes no such ground. He could not take it. He is heart and soul a free and rationalistic believer. He avoids the logical conclusions of his own principles, the logical development of his own ideas, by turning his back on theology. But his “no theology” practically means, in presence of the current insensibility to spiritual sentiments, “no God.” The atheism of the market and of society is too much for this emasculated religion. Nothing less than clear, intense, strong, and well-reasoned convictions can touch the masses, high or low. Mr. Tilton, instead of making the Independent a religious power, confronting the irreligion and atheism of the time, makes it simply a pleasant religious newspaper. Instead of dealing great blows at the falseness and vice of the age, through the clear utterance of honest religious convictions, Mr. Tilton fills his stage with sham orthodoxies in the rear, and in front represents good sentiments and politics. Dr. Chapin has never broken out of the limits of well-paid duty. He has sold sermons and lectures, as Beecher and all the rest do; never has he preached the gospel to the poor. His trick of rhetoric is a fine one; his spirit is always elevated; he drives a fair bargain with hearers; but he never attempts to go out into the highways and hedges, and compel them to come in. If you turn to Dr. Spring, in Fifth Avenue, behold a magnificent brick church, that and nothing more, as far as the New York masses are concerned. Turn to Dr. Adams, in Madison avenue, and you have a conventicle of aristocratic Presbyterianism, as elegant and happy a conventicle as you can wish to see, and a pulpit in which the suaviter in modo gives the Holy Ghost the most inoffensive and delightful manner. Under the richly-decorated ceiling of the Madison avenue conventicle, you may even see lust in clean raiment smiling generously upon the smiling parson. We improve upon the method of Paul, who made men tremble; we charm them with the agreeable manners, and fine eloquence, fine though cheap, of our scented and gloved apostles. What the Episcopal churches are, as a rule, in respect of speaking directly and with force to the people, need not be told. In New York, they are little better than religious theatres. It is the thing with all fashionable people to attend an Episcopal church. And the wide spread of unreality and formalism in religion builds up these churches amazingly. They are thronged by young men whose god is enthroned in the organ loft, if, in fact, they look for a divinity any further than to the gay girl in the next pew. At present, universal demoralization goes unchecked; corruption hangs out her signal on every hand; every species of infidelity runs riot.