As they have not proposed themselves to the work, neither can
they lay any the least claim to an option or determination of the
spirit in which it is conceived, or to what is peculiar in the
design. In that respect, they have obeyed, though with great joy,
the strong current of thought and feeling, which, for a few years
past, has led many sincere persons in New England to make new demands
on literature, and to reprobate that rigor of our conventions of
religion and education which is turning us to stone, which renounces
hope, which looks only backward, which asks only such a future as the
past, which suspects improvement, and holds nothing so much in horror
as new views and the dreams of youth.
With these terrors the conductors of the present Journal have
nothing to do, -- not even so much as a word of reproach to waste.
They know that there is a portion of the youth and of the adult
population of this country, who have not shared them; who have in
secret or in public paid their vows to truth and freedom; who love
reality too well to care for names, and who live by a Faith too
earnest and profound to suffer them to doubt the eternity of its
object, or to shake themselves free from its authority.
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