PREFACE. THE favor with which the following publications were received, when separately given to the public, has led the author to believe that their usefulness, if any they have, might be prolonged by being collected into a single volume. Scattered pamphlets are soon lost, mislaid, or destroyed, even if they contain matter of permanent interest. The subjects discussed in the following Miscellanies are generally such as do not depend for their importance on time or place. Though called forth by special occasions, they apply, with nearly the same force, to all times and all places. It may seem to some a violation of good taste, to mingle, in the same volume, things sacred and secular, thus apparently putting them upon the same level. The author has been disposed to take a different view. Truth and duty he considers the highest objects of the present life. It is impossible to know what is duty, until we know what is truth. The things about which there is the greatest ignorance, are the commonest affairs of daily life, the relations of capital to labor, the relations of trade to production, of property to money, of government to society. Without a knowledge of these things, with the best intentions, a man is liable to commit the grossest mistakes. To the man who is anxious to do right, a knowledge of these things is second in importance only to those higher relations which the soul sustains to God. Indeed, our allegiance to our Maker is best displayed by a conscientious discharge of the most common obligations, those of the citizen and man of business, as well as those of the husband, son, father, and friend. All duties centre in religion as the point from which they radiate, and to which they converge. And no part of human duty can be foreign to the calling of a religious teacher. It is for these reasons that the author has ever been ready to lend his aid to enterprises of literary and scientific culture, and it is for the same reasons that he now submits to the public a work of a character like the present, made up, for the most part, of public addresses, delivered on occasions both sacred and secular. BALTIMORE, August, 1845. MISCELLANIES. CAUSES AND CURE OF HARD TIMES.* IN choosing a subject for your entertainment this evening, I have been guided entirely by a regard to practical utility; and I shall lay before you, as far as I am able, within the limits of a single lecture, the causes and the cure of hard times. I shall inquire why the times are harder at one period than another; and thus, like the physician, by investigating the causes of disease, enable the patient to choose the right remedy, and apply it in the right place. The cry of hard times is always in men's mouths, for the simple reason that, while their desires are boundless, their means are limited. They are always stretching themselves beyond their means, and would be, were they ten times as great as they now are. Hence the cry of hard times. A Lecture delivered before the Mechanics' Lyceum, Baltimore, 1843. |