t least, if it does not monopolize, the
promised good.--_Ibid._

THE DOUBTS OF COLUMBUS.

Prof. DAVID SWING, a celebrated American preacher. Born in
Cincinnati in 1830; graduated at Miami University in 1852; was for
twelve years Professor of Languages at this university. In 1866 he
became pastor of a Presbyterian church in Chicago. He was tried for
heresy in 1874, was acquitted, and then withdrew from the
Presbyterian church, being now independent of denominational
relations.

Columbus was not a little troubled all through his early life lest there
might be over the sea some land greater than Spain, a land unused; a
garden where flowers came and went unseen for ages, and where gold
sparkled in the sand.

THE ERROR OF COLUMBUS.

From a sermon by Prof. SWING, printed in Chicago _Inter
Ocean_,1892.

The present rejoices in the remembrance that Columbus was a student, a
thinker; that he loved maps and charts; that he was a dreamer about new
continents; but after enumerating all these attractive forms of mental
activity, it comes with pain upon the thought that he was also a kind of
modified pirate. His thoughts and feelings went away from his charts and
compasses and touched upon vice and crime. Immorality ruins man's
thought. Let the name be Columbus, or Aaron Burr, or Byron, a touch of
immorality is the death of thought. "Whatsoever things are true,
whatsoever things are beautiful, whatsoever things are of good report,"
these seek, say, and do, but when the man who would discover a continent
robs a merchant ship or steals a cargo of slaves, or when a poet teaches
gross vulgarity, then the thinker is hemmed and degraded by criminality.
It is the glory of our age that it is washing white much of old thought.
What is the emancipation of woman but the filtration of old thought? Did
not Columbus study and read and think, and then go out and load his ship
with slaves? Did not the entire man--man the thinker, the philosopher,
the theologian--cover himself with intellectual glory and then load his
ship with enslaved womanhood? Was not the scholar Columbus part pirate?
What was in that atmosphere of the fifteenth century which could have
given peculiar thoughts to Columbus alone? Was he alone in his piracy?
It is much more certain that the chains that held the negro held also
all womanhood. All old thought thus awaited the electric process that
should weed ideas from crime.