Hiram P. Crozier to Frederick Douglass, August 9, 1852
Mr. Frederick Douglass: Dear Sir:—
A few days after the delivery of Kossuth's Farewell Speech, I commenced a letter to you, the design of which was to place his views of the fundamental principles of religion, and politics, in as strong a light as his words would justify, and to make such application of views to our systematic dogmatism, and [atheletic] politics, as the cause of truth, and the wants of the times demand.
The consummation of this letter was prevented by an absence from home, of five weeks, from which I have just returned, I now renew my former intention, and submit the following, beginning with Kossuth's views of religion. He says:
"Every religion has two parts. One is the dogmatical: the part of worship; the other is the moral part.
The first, the dogmatic part belonging to those mysterious regions, which the arm of human understanding cannot reach, because they belong to the dominion of belief, and that begins where the dominion of knowledge ends—that part of religion, therefore, the dogmatic one, should be left to every man to settle between God and his own conscience. It is a sacred field, whereon worldly power never should dare to trespass, because there it has no power to enforce its will. Force can murder: it can make liars and hypocrites, but no violence on earth can force a man to believe what he does not believe."
This broad doctrine, that all the dogmas of religion should be left to every man, to settle with God, and his own conscience, is the very first doctrine of true protestantism, and vital in maintaining the right of protesting against the claims of Roman infallibility; yet have not all the protestant churches used this right merely as a matter of convenience, to justify the Lutheran reformation, and the right of secession; without practically extending the right to their membership, or to those who would otherwise seek alliance with them? Are they not all entrenched behind the bulwarks of dogmatic creed? Do they not all demand unity with their views, in order to church membership? Where is the Otherdox church that any person can join, without either conforming his belief to theirs, or vitually perjuring his soul? Not one. I know how this injustice is paliated. It is said, "we compel no one." "Who do not belive with us, can go elsewhere!" Yes, but the damning sin of this intolerance is in compelling a Christian to go elsewhere, for liberties and social privileges, which he has the right to claim and to enjoy, among any Christian people where he resides, in virtue of his admitted character. The gret sin is, in localizing and narrowing down to a hand's breadth, the universal principle of Christianity, making it comport with a sect—planting an organized ecclesiasticism upon the very threshhold of Christ's religion, and telling Christ's friends they may come to His feast, if they will come through its door; too narrow for many good souls at least.
What then has protestantism gained from the reformation, for liberty of conscience? It has merely transferred the claim of infallibility from the Pope to the church, or from one sect to another, and broken the unity of Romanism by establishing several diverse unities, to each of which, all must succumb, who would share its patronage and fellowships.
We have to learn from a foreigner, schooled in the very heart of European Despotism, what is the great idea of religious liberty, of Christian union, when he tells us, "that all the mysteries of religion, because they are mysteries, constitute the private domain of belief," that the "dogmatic part of religion should be left to every man to settle between God and his own conscience:" for we never attempt a religious organization without entrenching upon this private domain of faith, and without foisting our views of the mysteries of religion upon those we seek to take with us, in our various religious movements. Even our anti-sectarian churches, if they allow ever so wide a range to the private domain of faith in the common membership, split into factions, and run to mad and bewildered intolerance, when the rights of the minister are under discussion. ["]He must have no private domain of belief, in their esteem."His faith must be common ground—where his father's tabernacled. His sentiments must have the sign and mould of age—sentiments that drivelling idiocy itelf, would not fail to recognize, as ortherdox, else he has no right to preach, especially to anti-sectarian churches! Kossuth can teach our teachers something yet, about the province of dogmatic religion. Let us see what he can teach our politicians, about the province of practical religion. He says:
"Yet the other part of religion—the moral part—is quite different. That teaches duties toward ourselves and toward our fellow men. It can be therefore not indifferent to the human family; it can be not indifferent to whatever community, if those duties be fulfilled or not, and no nation can, with full right, claim the title of a Christian nation, no government the title of a Christian government, which is not founded upon the basis of Christian morality, and which takes it not for an all overruling law to fulfil the moral duties ordered by the religion of Christ toward men and nations, who are but the community of men, and toward mankind, which is the community of nations."
Here, the high law of Christian morality, which is admitted by all, should control the individual life, in the private relations, and duties that subsist between man and man, is elevated to the standard of public national law. The rule by which, not only the commercial intercourse of the nations is to be adjusted, but the rule, also, by which the duty of one nation to aid and bless another, is to be determined.
Is Kossuth right? Is the law of Christ to be applied to the active Home and Foreign policy of nations, and is this application by all means to be insisted on, by the Philanthropist, and Reformer, as a self-evident demand of justice? Then our Statesmen are all wrong, and our Reformers have yet to see some of the most imperative and comprehensive applications of the very principles they claim to understand.
The idea of national beneficene to Foreign powers as a measure of settled policy has yet to dawn upon the mind of the first American Statesman—has yet to find its recognition in the first political Text Book.
The Democratic doctrine is, to make government merely a shield of power, to throw around the possession of life, liberty, (to white folks,) and property. The Whig doctrine is the same, with the exception of stretching the idea of protection to the exclusion of foreign products, or admitting them under a tariff as onerous, that home protection, with poor facilities, is easy and profitable, and with another exception, that of granting special charters to capitalize
when it is well known the policy ripens into monopoly and oppression. Both Whig and Democrat, as distinct political schools, says, "let the rest of the world wag on, as best it can, so that it don't jostle our elbows!" The doctrine of both is home aggrandizement, even at the expense of jeopardizing the property of foreign powers! Crush labor in the Old World, to build up republican institutions in the New. This is the doctrine.
There is not a nation on the face of the earth that regulates its policy with reference to the claims of a world-wide philanthropy.—Patriotism is the modern gospel; and even D. D.'s will preach and pray their own mothers into slavery, for the sake of their country's glory!
But where, in the ascending scale from the individual to the national, does the responsibility of the Christian loose itself in that of the citizen? Where is the authority for vaporizing private Christian morality, in public life, in national policy? From what source has the nation the right to do a wrong, which the individual may not do? or to refrain from doing a good, in its associate capacity, which the individual is bound to do as a citizen? The true doctrine is obvious: the world is the community of nations, and nations the community of men. Neither in the community, nor yet in the nation, is man exempt from the law of Nature—that law of eternal justice, which is the harmony of the universe; nor can he, as a member of society, as a citizen, turn a cold shoulder upon that positive law of charity, of practical beneficence, which is the soul of religion, and the glory of God.
What is the "realm of charity, and what the historical proneness of man, to exalt in the place of his vital spirit of Christianity, a tedious and exacting regard for the minutest dogmas of religion, and for the smaller collateral queries incident thereto. Let Kossuth show in his own graphic language:
"Oh! Charity, thou fairest gift of Heaven; thou family link between nations; thou rock of their security; thou deliverer of the oppressed; when comes thy realm? Where is the man whom the Lord has chosen to establish thy realm? Who is the man whom the Lord has chosen to realize the religion, the tenets of which the most beloved disciple of the Savior has recorded from His divine lips; who is the man to reform, not Christian creeds, but Christian morality? Man! No, that is no task for a man, but for a nation.—Man may teach a doctrine; but that doctrine of Charity is taught, and taught with such sublime simplicity that no sectarist yet has disputed the truth. Historians have been quarrelling about mysteries, and lost empires through their disputes. The Greeks were controversially disputing whether the Holy Ghost descends from the Father alone, or from the Father and Son; and Mohomet battered the walls of Byzanezium, they heard it not; he witnessed the cross from Santa Sophia; they saw it not, till the scimeter of the Turk stopped the rage of quarrel with the blow of death—in other quarters they went on disputing and deciding with mutual anathemas the question of transfiguration, and many other mysteries, which being mysteries, constitute the private dominion of belief; but the doctrine of charity none of them disputes, there they all agree—
nay, in the idle [illegible] of scholastical [illegible], they have been quarrelling [illegible] the most extravagant [illegible] of a [scorched] imagination. Mighty [illegible] have been written about the problem, how many angels could dance upon the top of a [illegible] without touching each other? The folly of sub[illegible]lity went so far as to produce the sacred name of God, by disputing if He, being omnipotent, has the power to sin? If in the body wafer he be present dressed or undressed? If the Savior would have chosen the incarnation in the shape of a gourd, instead of a man, how would he have preached; how acted miracles, and how had been crucified? And when they went to the theme of investigating if it was a whip or a lash with which the angels have whipped St. Jerome for trying to imitate in his writings the pagan Cicero, it was but after centuries that Abbot Cartant dare to write that if St. Jerome was whipped at all he was whipped for having badly imitated Cicero. Still the doctrine of Christian charity is so sublime in its simplicity, that not even the subtility of scholasticism dared ever to profane it by any controversy, and still that sublime doctrine is not executed, and the religion of charity not realized yet. The task of this glorious progress is only to be done by a free and powerful nation, because it is a task of action, and not of teaching, individual man can but execute it in the narrow compass of the small relations of private life, it is only the power of a nation which can raise it to become a ruling law on earth; and before this is done the triumph of Christianity is not arrived—and without that triumph, freedom and prosperity even of the mightiest nation is not for a moment safe from interal decay or from foreign violence."
Every man has his limitations. When these are known, the charm of infallibility is broken, and the pure ideal grandeur with which the great are at first invested vanishes, till we see them as other men. We claim no infallibility for Kossuth. He indicated too painfully and too clearly, his boundaries in the evasive, jesuitic policy he was pleased to pursue on the slavery question, to curry favor with slaveocrats, and to get the money of oppression, for the good of Hungary. He forgot the law of Christ here, "No man can serve too masters." A slaveholder cannot be a true friend of Liberty, or of Liberty's best representative; for he is the embodiment of external despotism. As well pander the lust of the rake for the good of moral purity; the passion of the drunkard for the good of temperance.
Gerrit Smith has charitably said, "Kossuth is merely a patriot, not a philanthropist." We have no explanation for this break in his character. Aside from this, Kossuth is the best living realization of our ideal of the Civil Governor; and his Farewell Address indicates a view of religion, vast and glorious as charity itself. His is a religion, in the practice and worship of which all true souls can, and do unite. A religion without beginning and without end—infinitely above the conceit of dogmatism, its highest praise is known and sung in heaven.
H. P. Crozier.
New York, August 9th, 1852.