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ART. XXI.

New York and the Crystal Palace.

THE newspapers inform us that the Crystal Palace, as a mercantile speculation, is a failure. We are sorry to hear this; for although not to be compared with its great predecessor or successor in London, it has ever appeared to us a remarkable exhibition; and we are sure, in its significant lessons to many a spectator beside ourselves, has been any thing but a mistake. As it is departing from us, we cannot resist the desire to write out the impressions of a visit to it soon after its completion. And as this "great exhibition" was emphatically the child of New York enterprise, we should do it injustice to separate it from its parent. We propose to record only the moral impressions made upon us by a month spent in our metropolis, and an admiring examination of what was then its greatest sight.

Even as a great city, New York arrests the attention of every thoughtful man. Here at the gate-way between the old world and the new, is a place that, in half a century, has grown from a town of moderate size to a cluster of cities inhabited by 800,000 people; crowded by the representatives of every civilized nation; already in luxury and magnificence of living rivalling cities of a thousand years; and in rapidity of growth and intensity of every mode of life surpassing any metropolis of ancient or modern days. For, turn where we will within this circle we behold life in its most astonishing developements. In its long, crowded Broadway, the great American street, itself a type of American existence, thronged as it is by as motley a crowd as ever trod pavement, and bearing in its shop-windows the proofs of the skill of the world; and in its institutions of charity and art, and its temples of religion exhibiting every form of worship, and every developement of human skill and benevolence; and in its glaring palaces of sin showing the modern forms of the old enemy of the race; hemmed in on either side by the abodes of poverty and vice, almost incredible to one who VOL. XI. 28

has not seen them, as if to present both sides of life; in its wharves darkened by a cloud of masts and sails; in its stately avenues lined with palaces, and its narrow lanes filled with the offscouring of the earth; in its railroads, steam-ships, telegraphs, and expresses, by which as by a hundred gigantic hands it seizes upon every part of the known world and compels distant lands to serve its caprice; in its metropolitan Press, by far the greatest concentrated mental power now at work in America, moulding the people more than the government at Washington; in its literary, artistic, industrial, commercial, political and religious activities, all working upon a scale larger and more intense than elsewhere on our continent; in its gorgeous hotels filled with strangers, and the decks of its emigrant ships pouring out the tribute of the old world into its clashing streets; in its hurried and exhausting domestic life, and its hundred thronged places of amusement;-everywhere we behold life in its effervescence, hurry, and almost reckless expenditure of energy. And at the centre of all, a sort of miniature of the great city, as that is of a continent, is the Crystal Palace; a monument of private enterprise, a triumph of architecture, full of the most surprising exhibitions of human skill; a sort of model, in which the man of this day may study the progress and destiny of his race. Regarded simply as a sight, a great existing fact, such a spectacle is full of interest. Whence came this glory and power which has shot up so quickly from the wilderness; what means this frantic human activity and its stupendous results? Is man, is America, to be the better or worse for all this? After the first astonishment has subsided, these thoughts seize upon a reflecting man and throw him into painful confusion till he resolves them, and tries, at least, to comprehend what relation this has to the temporal and eternal welfare of the human family. That I have solved this great riddle I do not pretend. I only now write the strongest feeling and thought that remains in my mind, after faithfully seeing and thinking of this wonderful monument of human power and skill.

The first and constant impression made by all this upon my mind is admiration of the power of man. In the country, nature is so constantly in the ascendant that we

hardly do justice to humanity. The most laudable improvements in a village appear insignificant beside the mighty work that is going on every day among the woods and hills, and along the shores of the sea. There the most laborious efforts of man in subduing and cultivating the earth are underrated, because included in the landscape. The grandest display of architectural skill, the largest show of industrial enterprise, the extreme refinement in living, always appear to me somewhat impertinent where God is so plainly speaking through his elder gospel. But in a great city, man seems to have the field more to himself. He has dared to invade nature, has wrested a space from her large domain, and there expressed his own creative power. And in such a place as that I have described, no thoughtful person can withhold admiration at his power. It is not the array of material splendor that we admire in the city. Rows of tall houses, crowds of people, fine shows in the shop-windows, jostling tides of vehicles, and busy wharves, are but a small part of it. The real cause for admiration is the immense energy which reared this out of a wilderness, the mental power that invented this system of trade, the human skill and taste that called into being such beautiful and useful works, the ceaseless tide of spiritual force that keeps this vast machine moving so regularly that it appears like a gigantic living creature. It is the mind of man that challenges our admiration in all this; and so far from a teacher of naturalism is the city, that a wise Christian never feels the strength of spiritual forces as in such circumstances. New York and its surroundings, or any great city, if truly and thoroughly known, is a complete refutation to that style of preaching which draws its inspiration from the fall of man and the meanness of human nature. Talk of the degeneracy of humanity—when before could man do such a work as this in a time so short? Instead of going down-hill ever since Adam lived in Eden, man has been going up-hill ever since the creation. The human race was never so strong, so full of life, so near God in creative power, as at this moment. The golden age did not exist six thousand years ago; it is coming now. When from the highest spire in New York I look down upon its picture-like expanse, enfolded by its two rivers, like strong arms pressing it to

the generous bosom of its beautiful bay, and as far as the eye can reach see only tokens of peaceful growth and cultivation, I feel that a man who thinks to serve God by proclaiming that the human race is utterly mean, weak, and inane, has undertaken a hard profession. I am willing to admire man when I behold such an astonishing spectacle; yea, and believe that he is so intimately united to God that even the city is in a literal sense God's work also. I heard in a pulpit, a few weeks since, this strange opinion: that God never assists man in what the preacher called human works; in science, philosophy, commerce, politics, and such affairs, man is left to blunder on in the dark, unaided by heavenly light. Yet the same preacher told us that man was utterly unworthy of respect and confidence'; not seeing that the two doctrines destroyed each other. For if man, out of his own sheer skill and energy, can create London, New York, Amercia, commerce, literature, government, social life, can subdue and civilize the world, he is not, begging the preacher's pardon, utterly unworthy of respect and confidence. These things are not the work of a mean, feeble worm of the dust, but of a God-like power and intelligence. And the preacher has this alternative: either God is in the soul of man, helping him to every thing useful and honorable, and thus sanctifying history and common life; or man is a God himself. Our Calvinistic friends should remember that no liberal Christian exalts man so extravagantly by contending that God is always with him, inspiring him in every worthy undertaking, as they, when they tell us that humanity, divorced from its Creator, has built such a fabric as human life in this world. It is too late to talk of man's feebleness and meanness. Every hour of the nineteenth century gives the lie to a theology that banishes the Deity from the world. God is here, all about us, and it is because He is here that man does such admirable things; so in admiring man we do not worship an idol, but the living infinite Power that is the life of his life, the soul of his soul.

A friend of mine, a merchant, said to me, that the great impression made upon him by a day in the Crystal Palace was, that man is immortal; and were any one so foolish as to deny this primal fact of religion, I would not try to convince him by books and subtle reasonings and preaching,

but would take him under that beautiful dome, show him those exquisite works of art, and when his soul was full of the sight, ask him if, as a man of common sense, he believed the spirit that created all this could perish forever? If a man can believe that Powers' marble statues will exist when the soul of Powers shall be annihilated; that the cloth, the porcelain, the furniture, the machinery in the World's Exhibition shall endure while the mind that fashioned them out of raw, shapeless materials shall be like a clod of earth, or not be at all; if a man can believe such a monstrous proposition as this, he has a credulity compared to which Christian faith sinks into insignificance! No; the creature that did this is neither destined to extinction, nor to degenerate into any Orthodox pit of perpetual weakness and misery. A nation that can build New York and the Crystal Palace on the site of a wilderness, in a century, is altogether too enterprising to burn in Hell forever, while there is a way out of it! 'These works of power on earth claim our admiration because they show that man has a force in him, that will not rest until he has overcome greater obstacles than a howling wilderness and a new country; even those barriers that rise between him and that virtue and intelligence which shall make his soul a glorious temple of the most High God.

And to my mind, such a spectacle as this is conclusive proof that man is advancing towards that state of holiness and power which is his destiny. I do not say advancing by hops, but advancing steadily. We have no right to expect that such a creature as man can reach perfection after a trial of a few thousand years, spent in subduing such a place as this world was when he, naked and poor, entered upon its possession. What folly for a preacher or moralist to say that humanity has made a failure of life under these circumstances! Here is a being made to live forever, placed, in the infancy of his being, in a world full of difficulties, amid a nature to be subdued. What have we a right to ask of him at first? That he shall subdue nature and make it his servant; that he shall learn to live on the earth, to create the family, and the state; that he shall try all his powers, obtain the use of his faculties, raise himself above poverty, disease, suffering, and those earliest foes of his progress. Are the few thousand years of human history

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