Under the
fictions and customs which occupied others, these have explored the
Necessary, the Plain, the True, the Human, -- and so gained a vantage
ground, which commands the history of the past and the present.
No one can converse much with different classes of society in
New England, without remarking the progress of a revolution. Those
who share in it have no external organization, no badge, no creed, no
name. They do not vote, or print, or even meet together. They do
not know each other's faces or names. They are united only in a
common love of truth, and love of its work. They are of all
conditions and constitutions. Of these acolytes, if some are happily
born and well bred, many are no doubt ill dressed, ill placed, ill
made -- with as many scars of hereditary vice as other men. Without
pomp, without trumpet, in lonely and obscure places, in solitude, in
servitude, in compunctions and privations, trudging beside the team
in the dusty road, or drudging a hireling in other men's cornfields,
schoolmasters, who teach a few children rudiments for a pittance,
ministers of small parishes of the obscurer sects, lone women in
dependent condition, matrons and young maidens, rich and poor,
beautiful and hard-favored, without concert or proclamation of any
kind, they have silently given in their several adherence to a new
hope, and in all companies do signify a greater trust in the nature
and resources of man, than the laws or the popular opinions will well
allow.
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