Superficial Culture of the Age.
FROM an excellent essay on the “Importance of Radical Training,” by D. E. Maxwell, D. D., read before the Alumni of Alfred University, and published in the Sabbath Recorder of July 11, 1872, we take the following extract showing the present degraded state of popular taste and sentiment. It is calculated to lead one seriously to inquire what can be expected of an age in which the tastes and feelings of the masses are influenced by such motives and run in such channels. He says:— There may be good reasons why Horace Greeley should not receive the suffrages of the American people for President. I think there are. But some of us will keep insisting on better reasons than those suggested by the caricatures of Harper’s, and yet those eminent journalists know full well that up to date, their strongest hold is upon those superficial qualifications of the American voters which would be much sooner moved to party lines by the picture of the great journalist riding to the Cincinnati convention on a pig, than by any solid reasons for the fitness of things. And on the other hand, we have the saddest commentary on the truthfulness of our indictment against the superficial culture of the age, in the fact that the pictures of our staunch standard-bearer must be considered incomplete if not rounded out by the professional whiff of smoke, which they say Gen. Grant can beat any other American in making. Since the days of “Tippecanoe and Tyler too,” when log-cabins, raccoons, and hard cider, elected a President, I have not had a more painful illustration of my theme than the other day, when in a Grant ratification meeting in New Jersey, one of the speakers made what he seemed to think his best point, and which brought down the house, to his most evident satisfaction. He said Grant was passionless, emotionless, and never to be credited with feeling, and esthetical satisfaction, by any thing, except when perchance he succeeded in projecting a more than commonly graceful curl from the outward end of his ever present Havana. (Great cheers). It is humiliating enough to meet this vulgar habit and abominable vice all along the highways and byways, and be compelled to inhale the fetid stench second hand, from every loafer’s mouth and nose, but it is intolerable to have it thrust upon us as one of the chief excellences of a presidential candidate, and to know that the American people are yet so superficial, so vulgar, as to be moved upon by just such appeals, as men riding pigs and whiffing smoke from a roll of tobacco leaves, more than by anything that appeals to sound sense and correct thinking as to what kind of a man he should be who aspires to stand for the suffrage, and be the representative man of a professedly enlightening and Christian nation. Rum drinking and tobacco smoking and chewing are the giant twin vices that are to-day debauching the American people, undermining their physical, mental, and moral health. The figures which stand for the extent of this practice are perfectly staggering, and the statistics of their destruction of health and life and happiness, as well as their debauching effects upon the public morals, are still more bewildering, and yet, as a people, we have scarcely yet thought through the skin of this subject. No man can tell how many young men have been led to the cup that has in it the “poison of dragons and the cruel venom of asps,” by the example of our great statesman, Wm. H. Seward. The last time I saw him he was pouring down his throat a full glass of intoxicating liquor, right before five thousand young men whom he had come to see and bid be good soldiers, and yet that wicked example, he then set them, was more than everything else what prevented men from being good soldiers, good citizens, good Christians, good husbands, good fathers. Who can tell how many young men will be led into the degrading servitude to tobacco, or confirmed in it, by the pictures, too true to life, of the man standing for us all, with the inevitable badge of his own weakness, and slavery to lust, blurring his otherwise manly face? I do not wish to complain superciliously. I only wish to compass the theme set me. Let us train ourselves to think all through and through the problems of the hour, and adapt our instruction to the cultivation of such thorough thinking and acting as shall take hold of the heart of men and outwork all manliness of endeavor.