Prayer
meetings, morning, noon and night; prayer meetings in town, village, and
hamlet, North and South. The whole thing is an emotional contagion
without principle. This revival, judging from the past, will promote
meanness, not manliness; delusion, not intelligence; the growth of
bigotry, not of humanity; a spurious religion, not genuine piety."
Theodore Parker denounced the mania too, and was attacked for it by
Methodists and others. He sew that the North had its rain gods, its
prosperity gods, its bread and butter gods, its rituals and devotions
for these gods; and that the South had the same number of gods.
What then of the law of God? Douglas was at one with Garrison and Parker
in this criticism of the religious mania.
Thus we talked along together. The principal thing about Abigail was
that she despised the South, but for the reason that there was nothing
there but the political mind and that it was concerned almost entirely
with the negro. It had no literature. Longfellow, Emerson, Whittier,
Lowell were producing works of merit; and the South was doing nothing.
Poe was born in Boston, had lived South, but had written out of nowhere.
He had died about a year before, discouraged and broken.
The most silent voice at the table was Dorothy's. She did not really
enter into these discussions.
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