America does not show more of this development, or more promise of
this. In the following essay it will be seen how our society
distributes itself into Barbarians, Philistines, and Populace; and
America is just ourselves, with the Barbarians quite left out, and
the Populace nearly. This leaves the Philistines for the great bulk
of the nation;--a livelier sort of Philistine than ours, and with the
pressure and false ideal of our Barbarians taken away, but left all
the more to himself and to have his full swing! And as we have found
that the strongest and most vital part of English Philistinism was
the [xxxi] Puritan and Hebraising middle-class, and that its
Hebraising keeps it from culture and totality, so it is notorious
that the people of the United States issues from this class, and
reproduces its tendencies,--its narrow conception of man's spiritual
range and of his one thing needful. From Maine to Florida, and back
again, all America Hebraises. Difficult as it is to speak of a
people merely from what one reads, yet that, I think, one may,
without much fear of contradiction say. I mean, when, in the United
States, any spiritual side in a man is wakened to activity, it is
generally the religious side, and the religious side in a narrow way.
Social reformers go to Moses or St. Paul for their doctrines, and
have no notion there is anywhere else to go to; earnest young men at
schools and universities, instead of conceiving salvation as a
harmonious perfection only to be won by unreservedly cultivating many
sides in us, conceive of it in the old Puritan fashion, and fling
themselves ardently upon it in the old, false ways of this fashion,
which we know so well, and such as Mr. Hammond, the American
revivalist, has lately, at Mr. Spurgeon's Tabernacle, been refreshing
our memory with. Now, if America thus [xxxii] Hebraises more than
either England or Germany, will any one deny that the absence of
religious establishments has much to do with it? We have seen how