If all this be true, the mischievous effects of the pseudo-culture of which we have spoken above may be readily estimated. A society of ignoramuses who know they are ignoramuses might lead a tolerably happy and useful existence, but a society of ignoramuses each of whom thinks he is a Solon would be an approach to Bedlam let loose, and something analogous to this may really be seen to-day in some parts of this country. A large body of persons has arisen, under the influence of the common schools, magazines, newspapers, and the rapid acquisition of wealth, who are not only engaged in enjoying themselves after their fashion, but who firmly believe that they have reached, in the matter of social, mental, and moral culture, all that is attainable or desirable by anybody, and who, therefore, tackle all the problems of the day--men's, women's, and children's rights and duties, marriage, education, suffrage, life, death, and immortality--with supreme indifference to what anybody else thinks or has ever thought, and have their own trumpery prophets, prophetesses, heroes and heroines, poets, orators, scholars and philosophers, whom they worship with a kind of barbaric fervor. The result is a kind of mental and moral chaos, in which many of the fundamental rules of living, which have been worked out painfully by thousands of years of bitter human experience, seem in imminent risk of disappearing totally.
Now, if we said that a specimen of this society had been unearthed in Brooklyn by the recent exposures, we should, doubtless to many people, seem to say a very hard thing, and yet this, with the allowances and reservations which have of course to be made for all attempts to describe anything so vague and fleeting as a social state, is what we do mean to say. That Mr. Beecher's preaching, falling on such a mass of disorder, should not have had a more purifying and organizing effect, is due, we think, to the absence from it of anything in the smallest degree disciplinary, either in the shape of systematic theology, with its tests and standards, or of a social code, with its pains and penalties. What he has most encouraged, if we may judge by some of the fruits, is vague aspiration and lachrymose sensibility. The ability to dare and do, the readiness to ask one's due which comes of readiness to render their due to others, the profound consciousness of the need of sound habits to brace and fortify morals, which are the only true foundation and support of a healthy civilization, are things which he either has not preached or which his preaching has only stifled.