: The Atlantic Monthly Volume 09 No. 55 May 1862 A Magazine of Literature Art and Politics by Various - American periodicals The Atlantic Monthly

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ATLANTIC MONTHLY

A MAGAZINE OF LITERATURE, ART, AND POLITICS.

MAN UNDER SEALED ORDERS.

A vessel of war leaves its port, but no one on board knows for what object, nor whither it is bound. It is a secret Government expedition. As it sets out, a number of documents, carefully sealed, are put in charge of the commander, in which all his instructions are contained. When far away from his sovereign, these are to be the authority which he must obey; as he sails on in the dark, these are to be the lights on the deep by which he must steer. They provide for every stage of the way. They direct what ports to approach and what ports to avoid, what to do in different seas, what variation to make in certain contingencies, and what acts to perform at certain opportunities. Each paper of the series forbids the opening of the next until its own directions have been fulfilled; so that no one can see beyond the immediate point for which he is making.

People are beginning to imagine that the career of the human race is something like this. There is a fast-growing conviction that man has been sent out, from the first, to fulfil some inexplicable purpose, and that he holds a Divine commission to perform a wonderful work on the earth. It would seem as if his marvellous brain were the bundle of mystic scrolls on which it is written, and within which its terms are hid,--and as if his imperishable soul were the great seal, bearing the Divine image and superscription, which attests its Almighty original.

This commission is yet obscure. It has so far only gradually opened to him, for he is sailing under sealed orders. He is still led on from point to point. But the farther he goes, and the more his past gathers behind him, the better is he able to imagine what must be before him. His chart is every day getting more full of amazing indications. He is beginning to feel about him the increasing press of some Providential design that has been permeating and moulding age after age, and to discover that be has been all along unconsciously prosecuting a secret mission. And so it comes at last that everything new takes that look; every evolution of mind, every addition to knowledge, every discovery of truth, every novel achievement appearing like the breaking of seals and opening of rolls, in the performance of an inexhaustible and mysterious trust that has been committed to his hands.

It is the purpose of this paper to collect together some of these facts and incidents of progress, in order to show that this is not a mere dream, but a stupendous reality. History shall be the inspiration of our prophecy.

There is a past to be recounted, a present to be described, and a future to be foretold. An immense review for a magazine article, and it will require some ingenuity to be brief and graphic at the same time. In the attempt to get as much as possible into the smallest space, many things will have to be omitted, and some most profound particulars merely glanced at; but enough will be furnished, perhaps, to make the point we have in view.

We may compare human progress to a tall tree which has reared itself, slowly and imperceptibly, through century after century, hardly more than a bare trunk, with here and there only the slight outshoot of some temporary exploit of genius, but which in this age gives the signs of that immense foliage and fruitage which shall in time embower the whole earth. We see but its spring-time of leaf,--for it is only within fifty years that this rich outburst of wonders began. We live in an era when progress is so new as to be a matter of amazement. A hundred years hence, perhaps it will have become so much a matter of course to develop, to expand, and to discover, that it will excite no comment. But it is yet novel, and we are yet fresh. Therefore we may gaze back at what has been, and gaze forward at what is promised to be, with more likelihood of being impressed than if we were a few centuries older.

If we look down at the roots out of which this tree has risen, and then up at its spreading branches,--omitting its intermediate trunk of ages, through which its processes have been secretly working,--perhaps we may realize in a briefer space the wonder of it all.

Once there were only the elementary discoveries of the lever, the wedge, the bended bow, the wheel; Tubal worked in iron and copper, and Naamah twisted threads. Since then what a jump the mechanical arts have made! These primitive elements are now so intricately combined that we can hardly recognize them; new forces have been added, new principles evolved; ponderous engines, like moving mountains of iron, shake the very earth; many-windowed factories, filled with complex machinery driven by water or its vapor, clatter night and day, weaving the plain garments of the poor man and the rich robes of the prince, the curtains of the cottage and the upholstery of the palace.

But to go on with a few more contrasts of the past with the present. Once men wrote only in symbols, like wedges and arrow-heads, on tiles and bricks, or in hieroglyphic pictures on obelisks and sepulchres,--afterward in crude, but current characters on stone, metal, wax, and papyrus. In a much later age appeared the farthest perfection of the invention: books engrossed on illuminated rolls of vellum, and wound on cylinders of boxwood, ivory, or gold,--and then put away like richest treasures of art. What a difference between perfection then and progress now! To-day the steam printing-press throws out its sheets in clouds, and fills the world with books. Vast libraries are the vaulted catacombs of modern times, in which the dead past is laid away, and the living present takes refuge. The glory of costly scrolls is dimmed by the illustrated and typographical wonders which make the bookstore a gorgeous dream. Knowledge, no longer rare, no longer lies in precarious accumulations within the cells of some poor monk's crumbling brain, but swells up like the ocean, universal and imperishable, pouring into the vacant recesses of all minds as the ocean pours into the hollows under its shore. To-day, newspapers multiplied by millions whiten the whole country every morning, like the hoar-frost; and books, numerous and brilliant as the stars, seem by a sort of astral influence to unseal the latent destinies of many an intellect, as by their illumination they stimulate thought and activity everywhere.

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