Page:Two Years of Church Progress.djvu/29

 and Puritanised, compulsory secular education has had full swing, and the ground is divided between intellectual infidelity, and all those last, most hopeless, phases of superstition, which are engendered not of blind faith, but of sated scepticism.

We have recently fallen in with an illustration of the popular religion, as we must by courtesy term it, in Boston, so significative that we make no excuse for quoting it, painful as it is to recapitulate such blasphemies. In that refined and intellectual city which, be it always recollected, holds up its head in such lofty contempt at the rowdyism of New York, a magazine is published by a gentleman universally esteemed the most respectable publisher in all the United States, called the Atlantic Monthly, and the November number commences with an article on George Sand in that fast style of moral sensualism, ill-copied from French models, which has invaded so much of our own periodical literature. The article would not have struck us as more particularly offensive than many which we have come across on this side of the Atlantic till we reached the peroration. Here the writer, worked up to enthusiasm by his subject, predicts for Madame Dudevant a future in the Walhalla of great women, not without their faults as he considerately admits, but still worthy of Bostonian canonization: 'For there is a gallery of great women, great with and without sin, where thou must sit between Sappho and Cleopatra, the Magdalen thy neighbour—nor yet removed wholly out of sight the Mother of the Great Forgiveness of God.' Our readers will not require to be told who is intended by the last phrase. We confidently assert that no English periodical which was not published with the express intention of shocking morality, would venture upon such an apposition to Madame Dudevant. Yet the Atlantic Monthly is the organ of the very cream of intellectual American society. We conclude, therefore, that this way of talking is considered religious in the city of Theodore Parker, Emerson, and Margaret Fuller Ossoli, and in the State where Andrew rules and Bigelow deals justice. One of the lights of Bostonian literature is Mr. Hildreth, the author of a popular history of the United States, and a prominent abolitionist. The most successful novel of that party, next to those of Mrs. Beecher Stowe, is Hildreth's 'White Slave,' a publication which, we believe, has had considerable vogue among religious circles both in this country and in the United States. Those of our readers who have not had the ill-luck to read it may be surprised when we tell them what is the plot of this eminently moral autobiographical romance. Mr. Mildreth, unlike Mrs. Stowe, starts by marrying his hero, the 'White Slave,' and leaves him, after many adventures, happy and prosperous.