January 3, 1861 (Thursday)

"I have great faith in a seed...I am prepared to expect wonders"  Henry Thoreau

"The question is, not whether you or your grandfather, seventy years ago, did not enter into an agreement to serve the Devil, and that service is not accordingly now due; but whether you will not now, for once and at last, serve God --  in spite of your own past recreancy, or that of your ancestor -- by obeying that eternal and only just CONSTITUTION, which He, and not any Jefferson or Adams, has written in your being.  The law will never make men free; it is men who have got to make the law free. 

The church has much improved within a few years; but the press is, almost without exception, corrupt.  I believe that in this country the press exerts a greater and a more pernicious influence than the church did in its worst period.  We are not a religious people, but we are a nation of politicians.  We do not care for the Bible, but we do care for the newspaper.  At any meeting of politicians, how impertinent it would be to quote from the Bible!  How pertinent to quote from a newspaper or from the Constitution!  The newspaper is a Bible which we read every morning and every afternoon, standing and sitting, riding and walking.  It is a Bible which every man carries in his pocket, which lies on every table and counter.  It is, in short, the only book which America has printed and which America reads.  So wide is its influence.  The editor is a preacher whom you voluntarily support.  But how many of these preachers preach the truth?  No country was ever ruled by so mean a class of tyrants as, with a few noble exceptions, are the editors of the periodical press in this country.  The people who read them are in the condition of the dog that returns to his vomit.

It chanced the other day that I scented a white water-lily, and a season I had waited for had arrived.  It is the emblem of purity.  It bursts up so pure and fair to the eye, and so sweet to the scent, as if to show us what purity and sweetness reside in, and can be extracted from, the slime and muck of the earth. 

Slavery and servility have produced no sweet-scented flower annually, to charm the senses of men, for they have no real life; they are merely a decaying and a death, offensive to all healthy nostrils.  We do not complain that they live, but that they do not get buried.  Let the living bury them:  even they are good for manure."  (Slavery in Massachusetts, Henry David Thoreau)