THE MONTHLY ANTHOLOGY.

FOR

NOVEMBER, 1809.

[The observations of Bishop Gregoire on the Columbiad, which we recently inserted in the Anthology, have drawn a reply from Mr. Barlow; and the editors of publick journals, who have admitted the original letter, are called on to insert the answer. As our motive for printing the letter was, not because it contained an attack on Mr. Barlow, but because we thought it in itself both interesting and eloquent, we do not feel our obligation to give a place to the answer to be very imperious. We have the misfortune to find nothing of sufficient importance in Mr. Barlow or his opinions to induce us to make any extraordinary exertions to lessen his influence. We think him to be but an indifferent poet, a sorry politician, and a still worse philosopher; and we can have no motive therefore to bestow on him any attention, except when he comes before us in the regular exercise of our critical vocation. As however he thinks he has some claims on our justice; and as his letter, if we pardon some bad English, and a good deal of French idiom and French sentimentality, is not badly written, we have no objection to comply with his request. The letter of Mr. Barlow has not raised our opinion either of his ingenuity or his candour. His first apology is, that the frontispiece of the Columbiad was executed in London. But as the book itself was printed in this country, and bound up under his own eye, it was in his power to have suppressed any thing objectionable; he has clearly therefore made himself responsible for every thing he has tolerated. This ground of defence however he himself abandons, and sets up, as nearly as we can understand him, two others; 1st, that the cross is considered in our country, not as the emblem of christianity, but of the superstitions of the Roman Catholicks; and 2dly, that all emblems are in their nature absurd, and in their tendency pernicious. In point of fact we think the first of these positions incorrect. We believe that if any christian among us were asked "what is used as the emblem of your religion?" he would answer, "the cross." At any rate it is not considered as the appropriate emblem of the Roman Catholicks, for we see the cross on the flags of Protestant nations, and nothing is more familiar to our ear than the expression, the "triumphs of the cross," among protestant writers. As far as his observations on the abuse of emblems of all kinds are intended to vindicate him from the charges of the bishop, they are entirely without bearing on the question. The object of his plate is certainly not to ridicule the use of emblems, but the things themselves, which these emblems are intended to represent. The case therefore, which the bishop puts, is perfectly in point; "you would be offended to see the symbols of liberty trampled under foot before your

eyes." "Not at all," replies Mr. Barlow, "provided the great realities of freedom are left me." It is very true, that if he knew the person doing this was really at the same time a lover of the great realities of freedom, the action would be unimportant. But if the person were more than suspected of being an enemy to the cause of freedom, the action would then be considered as expressive of his hostile disposition to the thing signified by the emblem on which he trampled; and he would incur the indignation, we do not say of Mr. Barlow, but certainly every sincere friend to freedom.

We really, however, think that very few of our readers will require to have the shallowness of Mr. Barlow's reasoning any farther exposed. What we have been most disgusted with in reading his letter, is the unmanly and disingenuous ambiguity, which is visible throughout his letter. His object appears to be to impress on the hasty reader the idea of his being a christian, and at the same time to use no expression which is not capable of being explained away. He seems desirous of seeing how near he can come to making a direct assertion of his belief, without actually doing it. "I am not one of the unbelievers," he says. But when we examine the connexion, we find that this may only mean that he is not one of those unbelievers, who have attacked the christian system. "I have never renounced christianity;" that is, we suppose, he has never publickly abjured it; or he never had any to renounce. There is abundant evidence in several passages, and indeed in the whole strain of the letter, to prove that these conclusions are not too harshly urged. For a man, who professes a conscientious incredulity in the religion of Christ, we can feel only the most sincere pity. But when the evident infidel attempts to assume the appearance of christianity, in order more securely and fatally to wound it, we confess we feel a somewhat warmer emotion. But Mr. Barlow, we suppose, has read the XV and XVI chapters of the Decline and Fall; and he is desirous of the honour of imitating Mr. Gibbon. He has it. But he must suffer us to tell him, that the only point, in which he can hope to imitate him, is one, in which Mr. Gibbon can be wished to be imitated by no honest man. It is only when Mr. Gibbon abandons the character of a fair and honourable foe, to assume that of the secret assassin in the hour of sleep, that he can find a rival in Mr. Barlow.]

EDITORS OF ANTHOLOGY.

LETTER TO HENRY GREGOIRE,

BISHOP, SENATOR, COMPTE OF THE EMPIRE, MEMBER OF THE INSTITUTE OF FRANCE, IN REPLY TO HIS LETTER ON THE COLUMBIAD. BY JOEL BARLOW, L.L. D. FELLOW OF THE AMERICAN PHILOSOPHICAL SOCIETY, &c.

My Dear Good Friend,

I HAVE received your letter, at once complimentary and critical on the poem I sent you. Our venerable friend, archbishop Carroll, informs me that he has likewise received from you a copy of the same letter; and he has expressed to me in conversation, with the same frankness that you have done in writing, his displeasure at the engraving which has offended

you.

While I assure you that I sincerely mingle my regrets with yours and with his on this subject, permit me, my excellent Gregoire, to accompany them with a few observations that I owe to the cause of truth and to my own blameless character.

Yes, my friend, I appeal to yourself, to our intimate intercourse of near twenty years, when I repeat this claim of character. It cannot be denied me in any country; and your letter itself, with all its expostulating severity, is a proof of the sentiment in you which justifies my appeal.

The engraving in question is gone forth, and unfortunately cannot be recalled. If I had less delicacy than I really have towards you and the other catholick christians whom you consider as insulted by the prostration of their emblems which you therein discover, I might content myself with stating, what is the fact, that this engraving and the picture from which it was taken, were made in England while I was in America; and that I knew nothing of its composition till it was sent over to me not only engraved, but printed and prepared for publication. My portion therefore in the crime, if it is a crime, is only the act of what our lawyers term an accomplice after the fact. But my affectionate regard for an offended brother will not suffer me to meet his complaint with so short an answer. I must discuss the subject, and reply to the whole charge as though it were all my own; premising, as I have already done, that I am sorry there is occasion for it, and regret that the engraving was ever made.

How much our religious opinions depend on the place of our birth! Had you and I been born in the same place, there is no doubt but we should have been of the same religion. Had that place been Constantinople we must have been musselmen. But now the musselmen call us infidels; we pity their weakness and call them infidels in our turn. I was born in a place where catholick christians are not known but by report; and the discipline of our sect taught us to consider them, not indeed as infidels, but as a species of idolaters. It was believed by us, though erroneously, that they worshipped images. We now find that they employed them only as instruments of worship, not as the object. But there is no wonder that to the vulgar apprehension of our people it should appear as we were taught to believe; and that those nations who bow the knee before these emblems of deity, and address their prayers to them, should be considered as really worshipping them. This idea was perhaps corroborated by their prayers being uttered in an unknown tongue.

The decalogue of Moses had inspired us with an abhorrence for images, and for those who bow down to them and worship them; and hence arose our unhappy aversion to the catholicks. We were told that their churches were full of pictures, statues and other visible representations, not only of the blessed virgin, of all the apostles and many of the saints, but of every person in the holy trinity. Our fathers had protested against that great section of the christian family which calls itself the mother church, not merely on account of the sale of indulgences,

against which Luther had led the revolt, but likewise on account of its making these pretended images of the inimageable God.

The sect of puritans, in which I was born and educated, and to which I still adhere for the same reason that you adhere to the catholicks, a conviction that they are right, were the class of reformers, who placed themselves at the greatest remove from the mother church, and retained the least respect for her emblems and the other ceremonials of her worship. They could suffer no bishops, no mitres, crosiers, crucifixes or censers. They made no processions, carried no lighted candles through the streets at noon day; neither did they leave them burning in their churches through the night, when no human eye was there to see them; having entirely lost sight of this part of the institutions of Zoroaster, Isis, and Ceres. They would not allow their prayers to be written in any language, not even in Latin, though they did not understand it. But they chose to utter their supplications extempore, like their other discourses, to communicate their own ideas, to express their wants and offer their confessions directly to the invisible God; through a mediator indeed, but without holding him in their hand, or having him fixed in effigy on a cross before their eyes. They had no organs in their churches, no instrumental musick in their worship, which they held to be always profane.

These people made use of no cross but the mystical one of mortifying their sins; and if they had been called upon to join in a crusade to the holy land, they must have marched without a standard. They would have fought indeed with as much bravery as saint Louis or the lion Richard; but when they had reconquered the tomb of Christ they would have trampled on the cross with as fervent a zeal as they would upon the crescent. They were not conversant with what we call the fine arts; they spoke to the ear but not to the eye; and having no reverence for images or emblems, they despised those that had, though they were doubtless wrong in so doing.

I mention these things, my worthy friend, not with the least idea of levity or evasion; but to prove to you how totally you have mistaken my meaning and my motive; to shew by what chain of circumstances, mostly foreign to our own merits or demerits, our habits of opinion, our cast of character are formed; to shew how natural it is that a man of my origin and education, my course of study and the views I must have taken of the morals of nations, their causes and tendencies, should attribute much of the active errours that afflict the human race to the use of emblems, and to the fatal facility with which they are mistaken for realities by the great vulgar of mankind; how the best of christians of one sect may consider the christian emblems of another sect, as prejudices of a dangerous tendency, and honestly wish to see them destroyed; and all this

without the least hostility to their fundamental doctrines, or suspicion of giving offence.

I never supposed that those Hollanders who, to obtain leave to carry on commerce to Japan, trampled on the cross, as a proof that they did not belong to the same nation with the Portuguese who had done so much mischief in that island, really meant to renounce their religion as christians, when they trod upon its catholick emblem. The act might be reprehensible, as being done for lucre; but it must appear extremely different in the eyes of different sects of christians. To a catholick, who identifies the cross with the gospel, our only hope of salvation, it must appear a horrid crime; but to a protestant we may easily conceive it might appear of little moment, and by no means as a renunciation of the gospel.

You have now furnished in your own person an additional example, and a most striking one, of identifying the symbol with the substance. In your letter to me, you treat the cross and the gospel as the same thing. Had I been sufficiently aware of the force of that habit of combination among the catholicks, especially in a mind of those acute perceptions and strong sensibilities which I know to belong to yours, I should surely have suppressed the engraving.

You must perceive by this time, that you have mistaken my principles and feelings in another point of view. You suppose I should be greatly offended" to see the symbols of liberty, so dear to me, trampled under foot before my eyes." Not at all my friend. Leave to me and my country the great realities of liberty, and I freely give you up its emblems. There was no time in the American revolution, though I was then young and enthusiastick, when you might not have cut down every liberty pole and burnt all the red caps in the United States, and I would have looked on with tranquillity, perhaps have thanked you for your trouble. My habits of feeling and reasoning, already accounted for, had accustomed me to regard these trappings rather as detrimental than advantageous to the cause they are meant to support. These images we never greatly multiplied in this country. I have seen more liberty caps at one sitting of the Jacobin club in Paris, than were ever seen in all America.

You will say perhaps that it is the difference of national character which makes the distinction. This is doubtless true; but what has been the cause of this difference in the character of our two nations? Has not the universal use of emblems in one, and the almost universal disuse of them in the other, had as great if not a greater effect than all other causes, in producing such difference? I do not say that our national character is better than yours; far from it. I speak frankly, I think you undervalue the French character. I have a high esteem for that nation. They are an amiable, intelligent, generous, hospitable,