Church so foully misrepresents. But it is better so
than nohow. These people have no fine arts, no literature,
no great men to boswellize, no fine speculation to entertain
their family board or their solitary toil with. Their talk
is of oxen and pigs and hay and corn and apples. Whatsoever
liberal aspirations they at any time have, whatsoever
spiritual experiences, have looked this way, and the Church
is their fact for such things. It has not been discredited
in their eyes as books, lectures, or living men of genius
have been. It is still to them the accredited symbol of the
religious Idea. The Church is not to be defended against any
spiritualist clamoring for its reform, but against such as
say it is expedient to shut it up and have none, this much
may be said. It stands in the history of the present time as
a high school for the civility and mansuetude of the people.
(I might prefer the Church of England or of Rome as the
medium of those superior ablutions described above, only
that I think the Unitarian Church, like the Lyceum, as yet
an open and uncommitted organ, free to admit the
ministrations of any inspired man that shall pass by: whilst
the other churches are committed and will exclude him.)

I should add that, although this is the real account to be
given of the church-going of the farmers and villagers, yet
it is not known to them, only felt. Do you not suppose that
it is some benefit to a young villager who comes out of the
woods of New Hampshire to Boston and serves his
apprenticeship in a shop, and now opens his own store, to
hang up his name in bright gold letters a foot long? His
father could not write his name: it is only lately that he
could: the name is mean and unknown: now the sun shines on
it: all men, all women, fairest eyes read it. It is a fact
in the great city. Perhaps he shall be successful and make
it wider known: shall leave it greatly brightened to his
son. His son may be head of a party: governor of the state:
a poet: a powerful thinker: and send the knowledge of this
name over the habitable earth. By all these suggestions, he
is at least made responsible and thoughtful by his public
relation of a seen and aerated name.

Let him modestly accept those hints of a more beautiful life
which he m