When you see a brace of iron bars laid parallel upon the ground, and a harp of wire strung along beside it, you see the fragment of a man that can never indulge in a soul without borrowing one. It is the line of a mighty muscle, and the thread of a fine nerve. On the one, thoughts fly--thoughts that are "up and dressed" in their verbal clothes. On the other, things. The one is seven-ninths of a Scriptural aspiration five-ninths realized: "O that I had the wings of a dove, that I might fly away--and be at rest." The other is the consolidated arm of Christendom, the common carrier of the movable world. But grand as it is, and priceless as are the treasures it is bearing, it was too late for the holiest burden of all time. There was no train to Jerusalem, and the Lord of Life rode into the city in the humblest guise, upon a donkey.
At Omaha, one day, I saw a steam caravan come in from what used to be a "forty years in the wilderness" region, direct from the Golden Gate. It was the tea-train from the Celestial Kingdom. It was nothing to look at--the dingy, battered cars, the engineer as if he had been wrestling with a coal-heaver--but it was much to think of. That cargo came right out of the West, straight from the "Drowsy East." The bars of the trans-continental railroad had careened the horizon with their mighty leverage, and let the cargo through--the very cargo for which they waited in the old days with their faces toward the rising sun, like a praying Israelite. The locomotive had wheeled the rolling globe a half revolution, brought the tide of commerce to the right-about, like a soldier upon his heel. It has proved to be anything but what it was suspected of being--the locomotive has--for, made to be a common carrier, a gigantic, quicktime dray-horse, it is a civilizer, a builder of cities; and if the three W's, Messrs. Wesley Brothers and Whitefield, will forgive me, a sort of--_Methodist_; in fact, an outright circuit-rider, and a missionary, withal! The preachers of flesh and blood denounced the seraglio and the harems of the American Desert, but nobody minded it. The law-makers frowned upon them, and they grew like a garden of cucumbers; were about as far beyond their jurisdiction as the household economy of "the man in the moon." The locomotive made for them at last, from Atlantic and Pacific; it brought the Gentiles and the "Saints" shoulder to shoulder; its mountain-eagle elocution rang through the valleys of Utah, and sooner or later it will whistle that barbarism of the Orient down the wind.