Page images
PDF
EPUB

without "respect of persons." Our American German generally presents a less exalted type of feeling. He has never enjoyed the intuition of the modern Eleusinian Mysteries: The mystic word, the Feldgeschrei, required by the hierophants is still Greek to him. But withal, his common-sense, methodical, childlike temper, with its every whim, yet with its golden fortune of truthfulness, suits our taste to a tie. His companionship with the Scotch Irish is marked, on both sides, by strong practical sympathy. We may, by reversing the rules of rhetoric and comparing great things to small, trace a very distant similitude between this unsophisticated attachment and the bond which holds between the crusty fretted urchin and his impatient elder brother, who are wending their way, hand in hand, by maternal direction, to the district school. The lads may torment each other, they may scold like parrots, but, with all that, doubt not their mutual affection: for should danger assail one, the other true as steel will side with him against the whole world of boyhood.

We now ask the grace of our readers whilst we trip lightly through some adjuncts of our subject which we have no wish to survey at large, and then we'll make our exit. The religious element, as we have seen, is the loadstone of the Scotch Irish mind. In all their primitive settlements the " Meeting-house" was the orb, around which social and civil as well as spiritual interests constantly revolved, and whose monitory radii swept without a shadow the purlieus of the entire community. The pulpit was the oracle, whose infallible utterances decided all the grave questions of the day, and, by condescending to define the common proprieties of conduct, gave dignity to social and domestic scruples. Parents, in accordance with the bluestocking notions entertained in regard to the sanctification of the Sabbath, brought methodically all the members of the household, down to the newly baptized babe, to the church. Accordingly, during the time of religious service, it was sometimes impossible, in consequence of the crying of infants, for a stranger, who might be present, to follow the logic of the sacred desk. Not so with the descendant of the Covenanter! There he sat,-like a vision looming up from the far off realm of our boyhood,―with his coat off in the sultry summer day, and his still blue eye upturned upon the glowing face of the good old preacher, and the sabbatic side of his mind profoundly intent on the concrete disquisition of the day! There he sat; and, as they tell us that the plaintive guitar used to aid with its familiar accompainment the ancient troubadour in composing and reciting his extempore bal

lads, so here the wail of infancy, with the occasional snarling and conflict of petty curs, far from distracting our auditor, seem. ed in truth to nerve his mind and endue it with additional reach and power for digesting the pending theme. The conditions of distance and weather, so generally paramount considerations, had little to do with the attendance at church of the Scotch Irish. Judge Wilkeson in the American Pioneer thus describes this trait of their character in Western Pennsylvania. It was common for families to ride from ten to fifteen miles to meeting. The young people regularly walked five or six miles, and in summer carried their stockings and shoes, if they had any, in their hands. I believe that no houses of worship were erected in the country until about 1790. Even in winter the meetings were held in the open air. A grove was selected, a log pulpit was erected, and logs furnished the audience with seats. Among the men who attended public worship in winter, ten were obliged to substitute a blanket or coverlet for a great-coat, where one enjoyed the luxury of that article."

The Old School Presbyterian Church, which in all its borders embraces the manly energy of the Scotch Irish element, presents in a religious form the hereditary conservatism of the race. Devoted as this body has ever been to the support of liberty, and anxious as it is for its constitutional extension, as was made abundantly apparent by the conduct of that section of it found in Kentucky, which, with Robert Breckenridge at its head, struggled almost to a man to give the emancipation sentiment the ascendency in the recent State Convention; yet by its General Assembly, as well as by its lower courts, it has breasted from the first the storm of Abolitionism which for years has menaced the integrity of the Union. The polity of the Federal government, which is constructed so closely upon the model of Presbytery, and whose foundations were cemented with the blood of its holy men, has been ever cherished by this church, like the image of Diana by the Ephesians, as a sacred gift from heaven. In it they hold up to a distracted desponding world an element of promise and power, the brazen serpent of nations. They would resist to a man then all measures tending to imperil the Federal Compact; holding it justly to be the grandest exterior adumbration of their church scheme, the hearthstone upon which the branches of their scattered family may meet in the Western world, and the grand model of democratic efficiency provided divinely for the direction of the nations.

It seems to us, indeed, as we look back at the proposition with which we set out, that the changeful glowing map of our coun

try, when historically considered, reflects, to the view of the philanthropist, the beneficent mind of God as manifestly as ever did the "molten looking glass" of the oriental heavens to the wondering gaze of sage or shepherd. And, to be particular, we think that the remarkable adaptation of the Ulster emigration to the parallels which the brightness of its progress has illumined, when considered in its magnificent bearings upon the union, and through it generally upon the world, displays the wisdom and goodness of the Divine will in their most exalted operation. The mission of this race through the land is like the march of Arcturus and Orion through the blue cope of night.

The great satisfaction we feel when surveying the prominence of the Scotch Irish race in the States is ever diminished, when we take a side-look at the pretensions of Puritanism. All the world has heard of "Forefather's day," and how each orator then of the Pilgrim stock, from the lofty stand of Webster down to the lowest rundle of the intellectual ladder, enjoys the Godlike prerogative of claiming as a family work the creation of the United States. His arrogance meets no rebuke, for on that day he speaks ex cathedra, and his person is, as "Typee" would say, tabooed. In these vauntful diatribes, constructed upon the great model given by Nebuchadnezzar of Babylon, the help afforded toward the formation of the Union as it is, by the Middle and Southern States, under the direction of Virginia and the great Washington, is altogether overlooked. And the genius of Patrick Henry, to whose electric flashes we have always felt greatly indebted for enlightening as they did the midnight pathway of the first Congress, was after all it seems as to its benefits worthless as the Jack o'lantern which beguiles the traveller in the glens of his Scottish ancestry. But who would complain? We stand upon the sunny side of our heteroscian neighbors;we may smile at the adroitness with which they purloin the laurels that have bloomed upon the mountains of the South, wherewith they embellish their festivals. It is a Spartan theft. Aye, let them year by year "take the timbrel and harp and rejoice at the sound of the organ." It is a venial sin, we think, for those who like it, to indulge like Haman in fanfaronade upon the family hearth and among their admiring kindred. But when the descendant of our Scotch Irishman stoops at the door, and begs a seat upon that hearth, then is our sense of dignity wounded. Just as if it were not enough for the vain household to respond one after another to the notable question, "Who killed cock robin?" but our kinsman must volunteer to bear testimony to the deed, after the manner represented in the second stanza

of the nursery rhyme. We can fully appreciate, with such a scene in our view, the sentiment expressed by the greatest of the Caesars when giving up the life struggle, and yielding himself to a sad sublime resignation he exclaimed, "Et tu Brute!"-or the feelings of one greater than Caesar, who is described as showing his wounds, and saying "I was wounded in the house of my friends."

Sewickley, Pa.

D. E. N.

PONTIUS PILATE.

THERE are different methods of acquiring fame or notoriety in this world. Some seek and attain earthly glory and immortality, by the splendor and extensive influence of their achievements, mental, moral or military. Others become notorious, by their association, with persons, and objects of great interest and importance. There was once a Hero who found his way to fame, by firing the temple of Diana, one of the wonders of the world. Another will be held in everlasting remembrance, for having destroyed the Alexandrian Library, far more valuable than all the temples of ancient mythology! To this latter class, belongs Pontius Pilate, the Roman Procurator, " damned to everlasting fame," from his association with his illustrious victim, the greatest and best of all beings, and the incorporation of his name into the Apostles' Creed.

Unquestionably the Biography of the Bible, as well as every other part, was written for our knowledge and edification. Yea, "all scripture, given by inspiration of God, is profitable" and the design of the whole is to make "the man of God, perfect, thoroughly furnished to every good word and work." The excellencies of character, portrayed in those prayers by the pen of inspiration, are designed for our imitation. And they become more imitable, by assuming the concrete form of action. On the other hand, failures and sins are designed for our warning and correction, and on the same principle are more impressive and useful, when inwrought into personal life, than when presented as abstractions. With this view, not only are good men, but bad men, introduced to our consideration, in the Bible. We have on one hand the impetuosity and imprudence of Peter, and on another the vacillation and truckling of Pontius Pilate! We propose in this paper, to consider some of the features of

character, belonging to this notorious Personage, as developed in, or easily deducible from, the scripture narrative.

Our first remark is, that Pontius Pilate may be taken as a representative of the average character of thoroughly worldly men, in all ages, whether in church or state. This, probably is not the usual impression; but we can come to no other conclusion, from a careful collection of incidents of the scripture narrative, and the facts derived from the testimony of profane history. We are apt to imagine that there was something almost demoniacal in the wickedness, that could consign such a Being as the incarnate Redeemer, to the ignominious death of the cross, at the instigation of a loathsome existing Hierarchy, and notwithstanding his acknowledged innocence. In our circumstances, and with our knowledge of the true character and mission of the Messiah, this is all very natural. But the illusion vanishes, when we analyse the state of Pilate's mind, and his relations to the Jewish people and their peculiar religious economy. Pilate's point of vision, was intensely and exclusively worldly. His feelings were thoroughly contemptuous towards the whole Jewish nation, high and low alike, sunk as they were then in the lowest depths of degeneracy. The Pharisees were the very personification of formalism and sanctified hypocrisy. The Sadducees, of levity and reckless devotion to pleasure. The mystic and ascetic class of Essenes had probably never crossed the path, or awakened the curiosity, of the Procurator. In this state of things, the controversy between the Hierarchy, and the Lord Jesus Christ, would possess in his estimation nothing but a personal, or at farthest a national interest-a strife for power, where both parties in turn had courted and secured the voice of the populace. To him as Governor of Judea, under Tiberius Caesar, "Jesus of Nazareth, the King of the Jews," though in reality the most glorious of all beings, and engaged in the work for which, the whole theatre of the universe was originally built, was but a state criminal, to be disposed of simply on the principles of an ordinary legal transaction, or according to his own personal determinations. "Knowest thou not" says he to the Saviour, "that I have power to crucify thee or to release thee?" He was one of "the Princes of the world, that came to naught,” "and knew not the Lord Jesus." From his brief personal intercourse with the Saviour, he must have been satisfied of his innocence. He must have been struck also, if not awed, by the evidences of superiority, flashing forth amidst that wonderful scene of examination. He must have felt the sublimity of his silence. He knew moreover the low and mean motives, which

« PreviousContinue »