~ JUN 7 - 1927 A = ZLocient gers mie ty Gt CaM ih 0 4 vith Wey: ein f Pp came vn PREACHING IN NEW YORK i JOSEPH FORT NEWTON, Lirt.D., D.D. PREACHING IN NEW YORK Diaries and Laperg |) aN ait BY wr JOSEPH FORT NEWTON LITT.D., D.D. Author of “Some Living Masters of the Pulpit,’ “The Sword of the Spirit,’ “Preaching in London,” etc. NEW os YORK GEORGE H. DORAN COMPANY COPYRIGHT, 1924, BY GEORGE H. DORAN COMPANY PREACHING IN NEW YORK — A— PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA To FRANK OLIVER HALL, D.D. MY BELOVED PREDECESSOR IN THE CHURCH OF THE DIVINE PATERNITY I inscribe these Memories of Preaching in New York with honor and affection He A i re nen MPT eRe, AY tt aR A) j i ; ye Pee x 2 | { Pek Pa AY iM UM THE VESTIBULE The kindness with which readers have re- ceived a few pages from my diary of Preaching in London, has encouraged me to hope that they may be willing to share some of my im- pressions and experiences of New York, of which Americans know almost as little as they know of London. Returning from the City Temple in November, 1919, I began my work. as minister of the Church of the Divine Pa- ternity, New York, on the first Sunday in December ; and the following diary, taking up the tale where the London diary left off, covers two years, made the more interesting by the new, strange, and almost terrifying America which I discovered on my return. The New York of today is unique, amazing, puzzling—bewildering even to its own people, too huge for intimate knowledge or affection— incredibly provincial for all its cosmopolitan- ism; no longer the “Little Old New York,” when Delmonico’s was on Broadway, and Tif- Vii Vill The Vestibule fany’s looked out on the fountains in Union Square, and a Daly first-night was like a large family party. It is a vast, far-spreading hu- man encampment of many races; a gigantic medley of wealth and want, of palaces of pleas- ure and hovels of poverty; an apocalypse of America at its brilliant best and worst; at once a problem, a challenge, and a prophecy. No doubt old New Yorkers will smile at more than one entry in this diary; but they must remember that the writer did not know our chief city before, save as a tourist and casual visitor, and that is hardly to know it at all. Condon is all of a piece, and one finds the same English life everywhere, whereas New York is a human hotch-potch, and no one knows what the next turn may reveal. These im- pressions, observations, and reflections, such as they are, may have a certain interest, if not as interpretations, at least as a series of pictures of men, women, and things in the most amazing city on earth. Certain pages from the diary appeared as a serial in the Atlantic Monthly, September and October, 1922; and the Editor has been good enough to allow me to use them here. The The Vestibule 1X papers added help to show how stimulating life may be in this city where world-end ideas and peoples meet; and in a book about Preaching in New York, it is not inappropriate to include a sermon on New York itself, a vision of its human wonder, an attempt to interpret its place and meaning among the great cities of the world, and its prophecy of the future in America. J. FN. The Church of the Divine Paternity, New York City : 5 Shek , Nes Mi "yk CAs , OF eae ays bead ae i x ; NR ae CONTENTS Diaries The New America ‘‘Bagdad-on-the-Subway”’ Papers At Tea with Tagore The New Curiosity Shop New York City PAGE 15 74 153 167 186 PREACHING IN NEW YORK PREACHING IN NEW YORK Diaries The New America November 14, 1919.—Farewell, England! How lovely it looked to-day, as we rode down from London to Southampton—like a huge park, neat and well-kept; its red brick houses half-hidden by vines; a soft haze hanging over the scene, like the mist of temperament in the hearts of its people. What a wonderful people! From the battle of the Somme, well- nigh four years gone by, until to-day, I have walked with them in the Valley of Shadow; and I know of what fibre they are made. I have seen the soul of England,—quiet, heroic, incredibly courageous, unconquerably cheery, its valor brightest when the day was darkest, 15 16 Preaching in New York —and to the end of my days I shall walk more reverently because of that vision. Shadows still hang over this lovely land, like frayed clouds after a storm; but they will lift and melt away, and the story of those bitter years will become a part of the sad annals of the world. Pray God this Island Home, so beloved by a mighty race, may never again be wreathed by clouds of war! November 16.—What shall we do, and how can we doit? In Russia they have turned the world upside down, and the stokers are on top. But revolution never rises above the spiritual level of those who make it. Tolstoy thought that all of us ought to take our turn at stoking; and there may be something in the idea, though his example came to little. Carlyle was sure that humanity must at last stumble across the line between Nonsense and Common Sense. But common sense is not enough. Welive ina common-sense world, and it looks like a Devil’s Kitchen. Something more divine, more dar- ing’, than common sense is needed, if we are to have common sense. Jesus was right, and all the facts confirm his vision: Brotherhood is The New America 17 the fourth dimension! So one dreams, sailing on a grey, fluffy sea from the land of day be- fore yesterday to the land of the day after to-morrow! November 20.—The news is that the Senate has rejected the Treaty of Peace. No wonder; it is a monstrosity—a league of idealism and a treaty of imperialism, each making the other null. Alas, one fears that the Senate rejected the idealism more emphatically than it did the imperialism. One is not surprised that Mark Twain wanted to meet the Devil, “if only to see a person who for untold centuries has been the spiritual head of four fifths of the human race and political head of the whole of it, and must have executive ability of the highest order.” At Paris he acted as president of “‘the heaven- and-hell amalgamation society,” and his feat was nothing short of a masterpiece. It reminds one of Joseph Parker and his famous sermon on “God and the Experts.”’ When he told a group of young ministers what was to be the subject of his sermon, he dared them to guess what his text would be. They tried valiantly, but failed. Nor did they find 18 Preaching in New York out until he mounted the high pulpit and an- nounced the words, “The stone which the builders refused is become the head stone of the corner.’’ Then, after a dramatic pause, he thundered: “The builders! The men who know all about stones!’’ Again, at Paris, the experts,—the statesmen who know all about states, and carry their pockets full of provinces, —having rejected the corner stone, have built a house that cannot stand. What different views one hears in the hum of talk on board this miniature world. Most for- eigners are puzzled, not knowing what to make of it all. Americans are depressed or elated, according to party. My British friends are irritatingly serene. Every one of them ought to be in an asylum for the hopelessly sane. They never lose their heads. Of course, they miss a lot of fun by not going crazy occasion- ally, as we do in America; but if they could be distributed over the earth in right proportion, they would keep the whole world from going mad. November 23.—As we near America all its history and legend throbs in my heart, vivid The New America 19 and thrilling, like a sweet habit of the blood. The very air is different, as if the spirit of home had run out to meet us on a lonely sea. Yet these years of tragedy have left in me a great veneration for the land whence our fathers came, and for its people. In America they are sure to be saying ugly things about England, as in England they said nasty things about America; and I shall be hurt both ways. It is plain that I am in for a hot time from now on, like a man torn between his wife and his mother, both of whom are adepts at snippy gossip. November 24.—Slowly our good ship crept through the gray mists of a late autumn morn- ing, passing Lady Liberty to whom a British friend took off his hat, saying that She ought to stand with her back to a land of Prohibition —ashamed! Then, dimly at first, we saw the wonderland of the city, rising sheer from the. level of the water, half-fantastic in its airy lightness, like a range of fairy mountains—only the sky line was broken with more precision than in the wild architecture of nature. Above all towered a peak which might be Matterhorn, 20 Preaching in New York which they told Cardinal Mercier was the spire of the “Church of St. Woolworth.” The Car- dinal, it is said, looked dazed, not remembering any such Saint in the calendar, but ready for any new adventure that might befall him in America. And so, home at last! It is bewildering to pass quickly from Old London Town, with its time-stained buildings and its whity-brown atmosphere, into the bril- liant streets of New York, with its newness, its youthfulness, its lucid sunlight in which every- thing stands out distinctly, and where the air is like champagne. Still more disconcerting is the difference in psychological climate. One is all repression, the other all expression. “Hush! It is so rude, don’t you know’’—that is England. “Hello! Hurrah! Where do we go from here?”—that is America, the land of talk, where people tell all they know and live with the blinds up. Meanwhile, the first letter I opened, from a great editor in the Middle West, was not very encouraging :— Why stop in New York, if you object to living in a foreign city? It is a meaningless conglomeration of humanity, swept together from the ends of the earth; an unhealthy coating on a stone tongue in the mouth of the Hudson—a wart on the nose of civiliza- The New America 21 tion. Its architecture, like its confusion of tongues, has the Tower of Babel backed off the map. The Jews own it, the Irish run it, the Americans visit it in rubberneck wagons. It is bounded on the east by Blackwell’s Island, on the south by Wall Street, on the west by Greenwich Village, on the north by Babe Ruth and the Polo Grounds. Its business is chasing the dollar, its diversion the leg-show, its political symbol a Tiger. When you land, buy a ticket to America! November 28.—Wandered for hours on Broadway last night, between 33rd and soth Streets, in a wilderness of lights, amid the clanging, honking traffic, jostled, buffeted in a polyglot procession—a stranger in the land of my fathers. How different it is from the dim lights of London, with its slow-moving, monas- tic multitudes, so reticent, so respectful, so soft- voiced. Yet how good it is to see people who are happy, and to hear the ring of laughter, even if it does hint of the vivacious shallowness which New York suggests. Europe is old, war-weary, gray with grief; America has hardly known sorrow at all. What a vast, illuminated billboard Broadway is—nervous, shifting sheets of many-colored electric transparencies, fantastic, ingenious, re- splendent; a thousand sparkling splendors all to exalt the virtues of a corset, a cake of soap, 22 Preaching in New York or a bar of chewing gum! If one could not read, it would be beautiful. It oppressed me, the garish glitter of it all, the shrieking impor- tance of unimportant things, the desecration of the sweet mysticism of the night by the crude, aggressive materialism of the day. Lightning stolen from the heavens and woven into shapes of fairy-like beauty to—sell pickles! This . morning, in the pitiless light of day, it looks so empty, so ugly, its colors a smear of dirty rogue, its flaming legends skeleton trickeries, its gorgeous palaces mere scaffoldings. O, America ! November 30.—Went to hear Dr. Kelman, at the Fifth Avenue Presbyterian Church, where he had just begun his ministry. It looked like a City Temple congregation, and I wondered if the preacher felt an atmosphere different from a Scottish church. He seemed restrained, as if hesitating to let himself go. I know the feeling. I had the same sense of strangeness the first six months at the City Temple, until one of the deacons said to me, with a smile, “Quit that pussyfooting, like a cat in a strange garret.” Dr. Kelman begins his The New America 23 ministry in an evil hour of rancor and reaction; but he will win through, as much by the gen- uineness of his manhood, as by his genius as a preacher. The first Sunday he was here a little child was run over by a car near the John Hall Mission, and he was soon knocking at the door of that beshadowed home. Such things mean more than much eloquence. Someone called Dr. Kelman a preacher of “the middle register”; it may be so, but he took our minds to church. There was no flowery emptiness, no pious pap. The sermon had the ring of reality, as of a man looking straight at the truth and telling it simply and vividly, in a style both noble and chaste, without sacrificing either candor or restraint. All the way through, I seemed to be listening to an old Greek who had seen Jesus in Galilee and Judea, and had journeyed to America by way of the land of Bunyan and Stevenson, of whom he has written with such fine interpretative insight. Long may he labor among us! December 10,—There is something new in American life, which I feel everywhere but find it hard to understand—a wild, shuddering fear, 24 Preaching in New York half-hysterical in its panic. When I ask what it means, I am told that we have been sleeping over a volcano, and that it is a fifty-fifty chance of saving our institutions. What nonsense! Our people do not trust one another, and speak in a whisper. When I tell of the freedom of speech in England, I am assured that it will never do here. The melting-pot does not melt; and after fifty years of immigration we are still a heterogeneous people, with every Euro- pean race and rancor represented. Free speech may be possible in England, my friends argue, where everybody knows every twist of the public mind; but it is different when an Irish Catholic policeman has to listen to an atheist Russian Jew on a soap-box at the street corner. Yet I have seen a London “Bobbie” keeping order in Hyde Park, while a Red Russian an- archist spoke his piece. No, it is all wrong. No doubt there are un- digested foreign groups in America,—chiefly in our cities,—but repression is a poor aid to digestion. If our people do not understand their new neighbors, it is high time they made their acquaintance. Wholesome fear is stimu- lating, but this paralyzing terror is absurd. The New America 25 December 21.—To-day the Buford sailed, with two hundred and fifty alien radicals, deported on charge of being anarchists; one of them was a boy eighteen—what harm has he done America? It is the war-mind gone mad, running down Reds as of old men hunted witches; but what strikes one is the absurdity of it all—tike calling out the heavy artillery to bombard mosquitoes. At the same time, one hears the most rabid abuse of the President, which does more injury to our institutions than all the Reds in Redland. If there is evil propa- ganda among us, surely it is to be met by propaganda of the right kind. America has more to fear from the blind rage of mob-mind- edness than from all the agitators. No one can really injure America but Americans; and they are in a fair way to do it by a terror-stricken intolerance to-day, followed by indifferent neg- ligence to-morrow. Only about half of our people ever vote! December 25.—Welcome the Spirit of Christmas—symbol of the Eternal Child, and “The Cradle endlessly rocking.” It is needed in this old world, if only to keep alive the souls 26 Preaching in New York of us, and to renew our faith in almost for- gotten dreams. May it flourish to the con- founding of all unkindness, all uncleanness. It takes us down from our towering pride, and teaches us humility and sweet charity. It brings us, on one day at least, to a simplicity of faith in the Golden Age, free of the shadow of the Night and the fear of the Morrow. Blessed Christmas Day—it rescues us, for a moment, from the tyranny of things, and gives such as have lost their child-heart hope that it will come back to them sometime, somewhere— if not on earth, mayhap out yonder with the dwellers of the City on the Hill. January 4.—To-day the following letter flut- tered down upon my desk:—‘“Dear Preacher: A guest at the San Remo Hotel, I attended the Church of the Divine Paternity for the first time three weeks ago. Frankly I was inter- ested, then puzzled, and finally delighted to find an orthodox preacher in a liberal pulpit. At first I was inclined to ask how, why, and by what right you are where you are? Now I am ready to put it the other way round: Why not? We have liberal preachers in orthodox The New America a7 pulpits, and I see no reason why we should not have an orthodox preacher in a liberal pulpit. Turn about is fair play, and it is a poor rule that works but one way. May the vision grow and abide till death hangs his sickle at your garden gate.” Yes, orthodox in experience and liberal in thought—if only we could keep the two to- gether—my ministry moves beyond the strife of tongues, seeking the higher unities of things which differ. In the debates now going on, which may mean a realignment of churches, I remember the example of Luther. When he went to Leipsic to dispute with Eck, he carried in his hand a bunch of flowers; and the record adds, “When the discussion became hot he looked at it and smelt it.” If in all our re- ligious debates each of us carried a bunch of flowers, there would be more sweetness and light, and less lightning, in our discussions. January 10.—By happy accident ran into Edwin Markham at the Club to-day. Had not seen him since five years ago, when we waylaid him on his flight from the Far West, and de- tained him for three snowy days in Iowa. 28 Preaching in New York Whatever the weather, it is always springtime in his climate. If white winter has settled on his good gray head, it is because the summer has gone to his heart, where there is always bloom and bird-song. Walking in The Shoes of Happiness, he knows how to join the joy of youth without its silliness, and the wisdom of age without its weariness. We talked of many things: of the blind spot in Whitman—as of one who went to séances where things get blurred; of the present state of poetry in Eng- land; of a long poem he had written, the title of which did not fit; of all the world and the rest of mankind. The upshot of an argument about the nature of poetry was that he prom- ised to come to my Recognition Service, and make an address on “The Poet and the Preacher.” Thereupon, as an advance deposit on that promise, he sat down and wrote a qua- train, which, he said, sums up my faith; as in- deed it does—only, alas, it makes most of us Christians of the Left Hand :— “No soul can be forever banned, Eternally bereft; Whoever falls from God’s right hand Is caught into his left.” The New America 29 January 11.—Received a letter from a noble and able man whom I had invited to my Recog- nition Service. His pessimism is the reverse side of his moral earnestness, but his letter shows how the war has revealed, as in a flash, “the looped and windowed raggedness”’ of or- ganized Christianity. He writes, expressing what is in many minds: “Dear Padre—Often we have talked about preaching, you insisting upon its utility, I argu- ing its futility. While we do not agree, I honor your tenacity to tradition: the church calls you with many voices—every voice a memory. To me the plight of the modern preacher is pitiful. If he is not a mere ‘seller of rhetoric,’ if he is spiritually alive and wants to speak for the whole community, he cannot do it. He is re- garded as the spokesman of a sect, sometimes so small as to be an insect. It is nothing short of tragedy, and he is not to blame for it. “The church in its present form is hopeless; its organization inefficient, its sectarianism a stupidity. If not dead, it is deadening, and the odor of decomposition is in the air. Yes, I know what you will say about renewing it from within; but it cannot be done. Twenty 30 Preaching in New York years ago it turned its back upon the new science, and lost the leadership of thought. To- day it rejects the social vision which is the word of God for our day. It is not that it fails to take Jesus literally; it fails to take Him se- riously. “Look at New York. Where do you find the great churches? It is where wealth is most evident! There are churches enough in Fifth Avenue, but as you go eastward the spires are few. The old downtown churches are sold for vast sums, and the money used to build gor- geous religious club-houses up town—retreat- ing from human need, leaving the masses in poverty and despair. Our church-life is a gratification, seldom a sacrifice. It coddles the prosperous, and forgets the dwellers in the abyss. It skims the middle class, nothing more. “Why waste time on the sermon-saturated pagans of the pew, who would be the same kind of persons without the church as with it? They are not hypocrites—not consciously so; they are the conventional type, loyal to a tradition for family or social reasons. They are the sort who put Jesus to death long ago, and they are trying to embalm Him to-day. Stay in the The New America 31 church if you can, Padre; some of us stay out in order to keep our religion.” January 12.—To-night a dinner was given in my honor, attended by fifty of the leading ministers of New York, representing all de- nominations. It was a fraternal hour, offering an opportunity for an account of my experi- ences in England as bearing upon the problem of Anglo-American friendship; and a discus- sion of the new function of the Christian min- istry in international affairs—my experience being significant only because it is related to the larger issue. The dinner was a gracious conspiracy instigated by Dr. Frederick Lynch, one of the most useful men in the nation, and one of the most lovable—a liaison officer in the service of Christ, whose life is a ministry of reconciliation, interpretation, and _ strategic good-will. Since my return I have done little else but speak in behalf of fraternity between English- speaking peoples; but I seem to be talking against the wind. My ship of good-will runs into all kinds of snags,—Irish snags, Japanese snags, naval snags,—and I do not get very far. a0 Preaching in New York Debt on one side, suspicion on the other, joined with lack of knowledge on both sides, make hard sailing. Whatever it is, apart from mere mischief-making, which has again aroused ill- feeling, it is a stupendous stupidity. Surely the friends of Anglo-Saxon fellowship make a mis- take in narrowing their appeal. It is not merely for the countries concerned that such unity is necessary, but for the peace and stability of the whole world; and in both countries the wider conception would do much to dissolve misunder- standing. Perhaps, in a better mood and under a clearer sky, we can at least see the snags and avoid, if not remove, them. January 18.—Bernard Shaw in his play, Pygmalion, has his Professor Higgins stand in Covent Garden and tell, by listening to their speech, the streets in which the passers-by live. Such a feat would be difficult in this town. New York is polygot cosmopolitanism in con- gestion; one can walk hours and never hear the English language. Even when one does hear English, often enough it is spoken with an accent as hideous as the Cockney accent in London. When I hear such a dialect, I can The New America an only make signs in reply. It is neither English nor American—Esperanto nor Eskimo—and when it talks slang, one is moved to pray for the Gift of Tongues. A story I heard to-day made me long for an interpreter. A second- hand dealer moved to Brooklyn and built a new home, which he called The Cloisters: “Tt’s a nice joint ye got here, aw’ right, aw’ right,’ said his partner; “but why do ye call it The Cloisters? Wot’s the big idea? Puttin’ on dog, eh?” “TI calls it The Cloisters,” the dealer ex- plained, “because I gotta be cloise to the movie palace, cloise to the trolley line, and cloise to the theayter. Get me, bonehead?” January 20.—The white magic of winter! Snow fell softly all night, and this morning the city stood out in the sunlight like a mighty sculpture in marble and porphyry and onyx, dazzling, gleaming, incredibly beautiful, as if the City of God had descended to earth—only, alas, it will soon be stained by smoke and smut, like the taint of mortal sin. Central Park looked like a woodland in fairy-land, where the White Queen holds court—all a-glitter in its 34 Preaching in New York blinding splendor. A swift gale swept out of the north, driving flocks of clouds, dappling the scene with light and shadow—sudden brighten- ings and equally sudden darkenings—tittle clouds, white above, gray below, flame em- broidered, scudding through the crystalline sky, flinging sharp shadows on the snow. It is the old enchantment, older than the city, as old as the hills—the enchantment of nature which is forever working wonders for such as have eyes to see. January 25.—To-night was my Recognition Service as minister of the Church of the Divine Paternity, and it was an hour of fraternal courtesy and Christian good-will. It is an old church, as we count oldness in the New World; and, like other churches, it has journeyed up- town with the years, from Pearl Street, opposite City Hall Place, to Seventy-Sixth Street, over- looking Central Park. Organised in 1838, it has had three ministers in the last seventy years, a record highly honorable alike to pulpit and pew. In 1852 its edifice stood on Broadway, near Spring Street, and there Thackeray de- livered his lectures on the English Humorists.. The New America 35 On Broadway, and later on Fifth Avenue, its pulpit was glorified by the genius of Edwin Chapin, whose eloquence made it a forum of liberty in the anti-slavery agitation, a shrine of patriotism during the Civil War, and an altar of faith until his death in 1880. Eaton and Hall each added a dimension to its history and its power. The church to-day, built in cathedral style with a Magdalen College tower, is rich in memorials, and its chancel is one of the loveliest in America. A mosaic of “Christ at the Feet of His Disciples” rises above bas-reliefs of Dr. Chapin by St. Gaudens, of Dr. Sawyer by Bick- ford, and a tablet to Dr. Eaton. A carved oak pulpit and an exquisite Tiffany communion altar stand between stately candelabra—which always make me think of that “Lamp of Poor Souls” kept burning in the ancient cathedrals. To the right, an American flag hangs from a staff cut from a rail off the old Lincoln farm. To me the Whitfield memorial organ, with its myriad tones and echoes, is a symbol of the faith of the church, as if foretelling the triumph of a Divine Love which shall yet woo every 36 Preaching in New York wandering human tone into one sovereign Harmony—a time beyond time, when the name- less pathos, which haunts all earthly music whatsoever, shall be heard no more. February 1.—From an English home in Eal- ing—shut in by vine-covered walls, the draw- ing-room door opening into a flower garden,— to a New York apartment house, is a novel adventure. Here we are, several hundreds of people, each family living on a separate shelf, like doves in their cotes, piled up, jammed to- gether, yet with no spirit of neighborliness! No one knows who lives above or below, and nobody cares. They show no curiosity one for the other ; they never speak, and seldom glance up, when they meet in the hallways. Yester- day a man was carried out in his coffin—tipped endwise in the elevator—and the fact of his funeral was the first knowledge we had that he ever lived. Opening the door of the dumb- waiter—at the risk of being guillotined—one gazes down a deep, narrow well, like the Bot- tomless Pit in the Mammoth Cave, hearing all kinds of languages, and seeing other heads sticking out at various angles. It is a new The New America 37 kind of life, requiring no little adjustment both of body and of mind. Outside a roar of traffic amid dizzy heights; a whirr as of invisible machines; the thunder of the overhead railway; the screech of police whistles; myriads of flashing lights and danc- ing electric signs, making the timid moon seem pallid and unreal; streams of people incessantly passing by—foreign, strange, seldom an American face—Greeks, Poles, Letts, Italians, Russians, all kiths and clans, chattering in un- known tongues—it is New York! If one could see it for a second, not in fragments, but entire, its mighty unimaginableness, its solitary multi- tudinousness—a shoreless ocean of humanity tossing up to the astonished skies its grey bil- lows of stone—it would break the heart. No wonder Blake was blinded by a vision of Lon- don; it charred his eyes. February 12.—Dr. Fosdick spoke at the Lincoln Night gathering of the church clubs, his topic being the future of New York—which he quickly dropped for matters nearer to his heart. Had not heard him since he came to preach for me in the City Temple during the 38 Preaching in New York war. While others feel dismay at the sulky, uppish mood in which America is flouting its own idealism, he is defiant, and some of his sentences flashed like zigzag lightning. Master of all the arts of speech, using jeweled phrases with inevitable ease, he made the issue of religion in our day and land startlingly vivid and compelling. Sturdy, picturesque, winsome, he is a prophet of that new note in Christianity heard by a small but gallant company of young men in all communions, who mean to preach it with gentle but relentless insistence in the days that lie ahead. He speaks as a man of insight, with the artist touch and the glow of genius. There is no fluffy prose-poetry, no per- fumed and prettified art decorating a candied Christianity; but a vital mind laid against the stuff of life—virility kindled by vision and softened by that pity which is the heart of all great preaching. Noman among us gives more promise of Christian leadership in a tangled time. February 26.—Some reporter caught a flying paragraph from my sermon to the Sons of the American Revolution; and now I am flooded The New America 39 with letters telling me what is wrong with the Church. Everything is wrong with it, ap- parently. Seven men take pains to tell me that religion is a narcotic, and the Church an “organised fake founded upon myth and mys- tery.” Conservatives think it is infected with radicalism, and radicals denounce it for its “abject, cowardly obeisance to organised and endowed injustice.” One man thinks it useful only as a nursery, an ambulance, or an under- taker. A long essay tells me how and why, if the pulpit adopted the gospel according to Henry George, the churches would be filled with eager multitudes. Some hold that the plight of the Church is due to its loss of the great expectancy of the speedy and dramatic coming of Christ; and others that it preaches a truncated gospel, bereft of the power of heal- ing. Numbers of letters tell of failure to meet ordinary obligations, lack of neighborliness, trickery, fraud, and scandal on the part of church people—it makes me sad to read about it. One woman insists that there is more “honest-to-God religion” outside the Church than inside, and that it would be just as well to close the churches, and in their stead to print 40 Preaching in New York a placard to be hung in schools, railway stations, and the post office bearing the words of Jesus: “Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy mind and all thy heart, and thy neighbor as thyself.” Besides, it would be less expensive. So it goes, leaving me bewildered, until I remember that the Church is just ourselves, with the faults of humanity, and will not be better till we have better material. Most of these letters affirm that economic issues are re- placing theological questions in the mind of to-day; a man from Detroit states it plainly: “Men are thinking to-day of the means of liv- ing, not of the meaning of life.”” What we are confronted with is not, specifically, indifference to religion, but indifference to nearly everything outside the circle of the Cult of Comfort. Shifting the emphasis from theology to! so- ciology will only mean a new sectarianism in place of the old,—a radical church on one corner, a conservative on the next,—and the last state will be as bad as the first. Amateur sermons on economics make a terrifying pros- pect ! Of course, the preachers come in for a hard hammering, and, as the late Dean Hodges used The New America 41 to say, “It is richly deserved by those who de- serve it.” Much of it is deserved, by reason of the conditions under which ministers work. They are an underpaid, overworked, heroic set of men, and the demands upon them are so exacting, so exhausting, that they have little time to be preachers, much less prophets. They have no easy task, trying to bring high truth home to moving-picture minds, in a day of moral chaos and paprika cleverness. The key- board of the modern mind is new, and they have not yet learned to play on it. But the realities remain, and the ancient needs of the heart; and if we interpret them in terms of our time,— not using a violin as if it were a ’cello,—there will be ears to hear. The Church is dead! Long live the Church! March 1.—Preached recently for the first time in old Plymouth Church, bringing the greetings and blessing of the City Temple, where the picture of Beecher still hangs in the lecture-room and the memory of his eloquence is a legend. Joseph Parker and Beecher were friends, and it behooves us to recall such his- toric ties at a time when voices of consideration 42 Preaching in New York are few and faintly heard. Each in his own distinction and power a supremely great preacher,—Parker a trumpet, Beecher an or- chestra,—both made their pulpits shrines, not only of Christian faith, but of international good-will. In Plymouth Church there sounded the wondrous voice of the greatest preacher to the people our race has known—the Shake- speare of our pulpit, whose genius seemed in- exhaustible in its fertility, whose ministry marked a new date both in the religion and politics of our Republic. From that pulpit he went on his memorable ambassadorship to Eng- land, to plead the cause of Lincoln in the forum of British public opinion; and his victory was one of the noblest triumphs of the spoken word in history. Whatever may be the chances and changes of the future, Plymquth Church and the City Temple must be kept as shrines of historic memory and thrones of spiritual prophecy. March 12.—Went the other day to a Free- thinkers’ society, and heard a lecture that filled me with amazement. I had thought that species of mind extinct; but it still persists, like a rut The New America 43 in an abandoned road, as archaic as the crude dogmatism which it denies. Ingersoll was de- lightful, with his rich humanity, his rippling humor, and his radiant prose-poetry—a posi- tive mind on the negative side of religious thought. Without his genius, “rationalism” looks like logic-chopping pettifoggery; a thing killed and stuffed. But it can be amusing, as when the great advances of religious thought are interpreted as retreats followed up by the Rationalist Army. They are like men who have been bombarding a position and find that the enemy has long ago moved elsewhere, unaware of their existence. But to save their face they must keep up the bombardment. Make-believe championship of free thought to-day is like going over the top of an imaginary trench— futile, not to say pitiful. The old dogmatism and the old rationalism, as much alike as two of a kind, are alike obsolete. They are not refuted: they are forgotten. It reminded me of old Wallaston, in the Autobiography of Mark Rutherford, whose ideas acquired long ago had “never fructified in him, but were like hard stones which rattled in his pockets.” 44 Preaching in New York March 14.—Somehow I have a curious feel- ing about the Drinkwater play, Abraham Lincoln. It handles the supreme figure of our history reverently; but, though he loved the theatre, it is hardly fair to put the least the- atrical of men on the stage. Something deep in me protests against it as a sacrilege. The play did good in London, as an interpretation of Lincoln to the English people, albeit not without error. The servants were too much like English servants, and the negro dialect was more like North American Indian dialect. Also, the drinking proclivities of General Grant were exaggerated. No doubt these defects have been removed ; but I doubt if any one ever called Lincoln “Abe,” even behind his back. We may be a nation of back-slappers, but there are some men with whom we take no liberties. The first act, except for one moving moment,—when Lincoln is alone, looking at a map of his coun- try,—has too much spurious prophecy. Yet the figure does grow portentously, and in a world of flesh and blood and spirit. Hook, the fictitious member of the Cabinet, embodying the distrust of Lincoln, is a happy stroke. What reception would the play have had if it The New America A5 had been the work of an American artist? As it is, a play from London, like a hat from Paris, is the thing. March 20.—These Lenten days make me think of the remark of “A.E.” to James Joyce: “1’m afraid you have not enough chaos in you to make a world.” Surely Joyce has chaos a-plenty—indeed, he has little else—and most of us areinlike case. In this matter it is better to begin at home; it is handy, and the facts are within reach. There are so many “selves” in us, all struggling for mastery, that it is not easy to detect the elusive, real Self. Which “me” is my actual “mer” There are a lot of them—the ragged fellow out at the elbow, the dandy in fine dress with a gold cane, the toady, the pretender, the penitent, the sceptic, the preacher, the silly ass who always wants his own way; and then, at times, a glimpse of an- other Fellow, who seeks to rule the whole motley congregation. Who is he? Who gave him the job? Will he get it done, making the variegated array of slovens, boasters, scullions, and the rest, by whiles obey? Betimes, if it is not easy to find the real self 46 Preaching in New York in ourselves, we ought not to expect always to find it in others. Each man fights a hard fight against heavy odds. If he does not always show his better self—well, neither do we. But the quest of personality—even if it is a game of hide-and-seek—is the only thing worth while. April 1.—Five Socialists were expelled from the New York Legislature to-day, after a long trial. All Fool’s Day was an appropriate time for such a proceeding; the deed fits the day. America must have lost its sense of humor. I am not a Socialist, nor the son of a Socialist; but surely a man has a right to be a Socialist in America, and to hold office as such, if fairly elected. Anything else makes our whole sys- tem a farce. Once men were burned for their ideas; now we ought to burn for their ideas and let the men live. Unless, indeed, we are afraid of ideas, as we seem to be. Respect for minorities, no matter how small, is a first prin- ciple of democracy. It is better to let folk blow off steam; it prevents explosion. If we tolerate only those who agree with us, what virtue is it? Even tyrants and bigots do the same. The New America 47 April 2—The Communion Service last night made me wonder anew why Protestants make such poor use of symbol and sacrament, the better to bring “folk of many families,” walk- ing many scattered ways, distracted and dis- traught, into a unity and fellowship of the Spirit, that all may know together what none may know alone, and become, in very truth, the Body of Christ, wearing His seamless robe —RHis cross the centre of consecration and the sign of conquest. But of that one may not speak, except to hope that we may yet find a truer expression of that ineffable Reality for which words were never made, and which our Cult of Ideas leaves unuttered. Wesley was wise in this, as in so much else, uniting what has been called the active and reactive forms of the religious life—method- ical with spontaneous mysticism. He was in- deed a Methodist, having a method of spiritual culture, fasting every Friday, and taking the sacrament of the Lord’s Supper, as his diaries show, every five days. He tells us that up to Feb. 16th, 1791, a fortnight before he reached his goal, he had taken the sacrament fifteen times since the New Year came in. 48 Preaching in New York Also, he made an evangelistic use of the Lord’s Supper, which seems well nigh to have been forgotten, inviting all who were seeking the Master to gather at His Table, as the place where they were most likely to find Him. In this he was influenced, no doubt, by the experi- ence of his mother, who received “‘assurance” at the Lord’s Table in August, 1739. He in- vited as many to the Lord’s Table as he invited to the Lord, and on the same conditions. That is to say, he was wise both in the seeking and the practice of salvation. April 4.—Easter Day! When an old civil- isation was dying and another was coming to birth, it was the Christian vision of the Eternal Life that gave relief and renewal; and that vision we must recapture for our troubled time. The idea of immortality current to-day is far removed from the faith by which the new, up- rising Christianity grasped the crumbling classic world and reshaped it. Indeed, we think only of a future life—‘‘a series of moments snipped off at one end, but not at the other,’— whereas Jesus saw each life as part of one great The New America 49 Life, which moves and cannot die. It is a day not for arguments, but for anthems! Never have I joined in a more impressive Easter service than at the beautiful Russian Church of St. Nicholas, in East 92nd Street. All the worshippers stood ready with unlighted candles; and the ritual includes a picturesque search for the Body of Christ, which had been symbolically laid to rest on Good Friday, but was now not to be found, since the Christ had risen. The procession of priests and deacons passed out of the Church and the chant died away, only to increase as the pageant re- appeared. Then, suddenly, the great crystal chandelier burst into flame, and, as the priests with lighted candles passed through the throng, the nearest worshippers lighted their own tapers and passed the light along—tlike love leaping from heart to heart—greeting each other with a smile as they crossed themselves. Then the Bishop took his post at the royal gate and called aloud, “Christ is risen!’ To which the people responded, “He is risen indeed!” Then, throughout the Church, people ex- changed kisses and the greeting, “He is risen, 50 Preaching in New York He is risen!”’ It was all so simple, so artless, so eloquent, so aglow with the poetry of faith. The hymn at the end, sung with passionate fervor, flooded the soul—like happy waters re- leased from the prison of winter to go singing to the sea. April 10.—While in England I was often asked about Frank Harris; but I knew him only in such books as The Bomb, a volume of his Portraits, and his study of Shakespeare— which made me mad in five spots at once. So I went recently to hear him lecture on Wells; but he told me little that was new,—except some personal reminiscences,—and he seemed less happy than usual in his power of depicting personality. There was a fine line about John Morley whom he followed as editor of the Fort- nightly: “The bleak face lighted up with a glint of wintry sunshine.” It reminded me of the description of Roosevelt by Wells years ago: “The friendly peering snarl of his face, like a man with the sun in his eyes.”’ With his moustache, his unreadable eyes, and his heavy voice, the lecturer looked more like a fighter of the Middle Ages than a modern man of letters. K ; ! The New America 51 He has that rare and precious thing called genius; but my impression was puzzling, as of a man at.odds with himself, or with the world; a proud, sensitive man, thwarted if not lacerated. Either he has had a bear fight with himself, or he has been the sport of ill fate. If, as I have heard, he is writing an auto- biography, perhaps it will tell us the secret of his enmity to England, which so many regret. There is something haunting in him, something wild, untamed, quixotic, but lovable withal; like a man ready to throw a bomb loaded with— pity! April 12.—John Morley said that Roosevelt was a cross between St. Vitus and the Ten Com- mandments. In this respect, as in so many others, he was typical of the city of his birth— so far, at least, as St. Vitus is concerned. After the quieter life of London, the driving energy of New York—feverish, furious, almost fanat- ical—is terrifying. Its activity is titanic, over- whelming, bewildering; and the faces of its people seem hurried, worried, and weary. Rushing to and fro, always going, doing, plan- ning, they are unable to be still—smitten with 52 Preaching in New York the strange disease of modern life, its sick haste. Here in this brilliant, splendid city even the night brings no repose, no hours of stillness. Its people are work-drunk; pleasure-mad. It is an obsession—like a man who thinks he is made out of fried eggs and cannot sit down except upon a piece of toast. It injures the home, making it little more than a hotel, and is the secret of much marital woe. It is reflected in our literature, in which we have fragments, glimpses of life, rather than a vision of the whole; observations not interpretations—a photograph, not a painting. It infects the religious life. The art of meditation is well nigh lost, for lack of time to practice it. Life in New York goes at a killing pace, and its tension tightens. No wonder the values of life are lost in the pell-mell medley of clattering activity. Even the man in the pulpit, harried by the peril of being always busy, finds his vision blurred by the clouds of daily dust, and the still small voice drowned by the din and hum and litter of his days. Evermore he must seek refuge with the Quietists, lest as the Wages of Hurry he lose his soul! The New America 53 April 14.—Religious work of a Protestant kind on Manhattan Island is an adventure these days, since only a little more than seven per cent of its population are of that persuasion. Neigh- borhoods shift swiftly, baffling the shrewdest forecast ; and a church often finds itself a lonely island in an alien sea. Old families break up or move away, and the young people seek the suburbs to rear their families. Homes give way to hotels, apartments, and boarding-houses, —poor substitutes,—making the tie between home and church tenuous. Many who come from smaller communities, not finding the old informal fellowship in the city, abandon the Church, or else become “church tramps.” Vacations lengthen and the church year shortens. The glitter of the city fascinates, its rush and hurry wear the nerves—making the “dear City of God” seem dreamlike and remote. What will be the fate of our city churches— except those that stand on old foundations— is hard toknow. No ordinary methods of work apply, yet the need of spiritual fellowship in the “crowded loneliness” of city life is appalling. Some of our customs try me, especially the funerals at night, as if in our neck-and-neck 54 Preaching in New York race for the nickel we did not have time to pay respect to our dead. No wonder Jesus wept over a city, knowing its brutality, its black wickedness, its nameless possibilities, and its aching pathos! April 18.—Dr. Holmes thought that preach- ers are in danger of becoming heathens for lack of religious instruction; and, as the old country preacher said of St. Paul, “I fully agree with him.” Anyway, I make it a point to hear preaching, and one of my shrines is the “Sky- scraper Church,” as the Broadway Tabernacle is called. There, for more than twenty years, one of the greatest living preachers has kept the light of God aglow amid the glitter of Broadway. Dr. Jefferson distrusts oratory,— he so fears unreality,—yet he is one of the noblest of orators, if one stops to think about it, having an amazing gift of lucid, fitly col- ored, persuasive speech. At first, he gives one an impression of austerity; but as he begins to speak, his rugged face is illumined by an inner brightness, and one forgets everything,—even the preacher himself,—and remembers only the Master. He takes us captive unawares, show- The New America 55 ing us the beauty of the Gospel and the mean- ing of our fleeting lives, our duty for to-day, and our hope for the morrow. It is an unique eloquence, simple, soft-spoken, searching; and if the ear is sensitive, one hears an undertone of pathos—as of one in whom faith and hope dwell at peace with pity and acquaintance with grief. Whata ministry for this gay and giddy- paced city—rich in culture, lofty in ideal, tender in comfort, valiant for righteousness! If some great Angel could gather the testimonies of its influence, what a record it would be! Mv 3.—Attended a meeting designed to discuss the religious training of the young for an hour on a week day. Such meetings make the cynic rise in me, asking whether it is be- cause the Angel of Wisdom has been so busy on some other planet that religious education has gone so awry here below. There is a type of training which Dr. Holmes fitly described as pathological piety, rich in tuberculous virtues. There is the merely mechanical variety, enforced by discipline without joy, and thrown off as soon as passing years make a way of escape. There is the opposite error of too 56 Preaching in New. York great vagueness; not over-feeding, but under- nutrition. As between old-fogyism and new- faddism, we flounder. Yet there must be some way of giving our children the truths that make us men,—simple as the speech of home, sweep- ing as the contour of the sky,—bringing memory, habit, and example to the nurture of the highest life. Surely this is the one eternal education; and yet we fall short of it both in content and in method. Men are materialists because, in the critical period of adolescence, one doorway of the spirit after another was allowed to close through neglect, until at last they came to regard the world of men and affairs as the only reality. Thereafter they live in an Euclidian world of three dimensions, “untroubled by a spark,” fancying that they are wise, whereas they are only hard and half blind. This atrophy of spirituality at the very time when the spiritual world ought to be near and real, is the saddest tragedy of life; and the fault lies equally with the home and the church. How can the transi- tion be made from the vivid, radiant faith of the child to the religion of the adult, without loss of the precious vision that interprets life? The New America (s/ May 12.—Years ago I wrote a rather long essay on “Realism in Religion,” the intent of which was to show that the mystics, so far from being visionaries, are the only true real- ists, in that they deal directly and at first-hand with reality. My thesis was that if it is possi- ble for man to reach reality at all, the masters of the spiritual life have attained it; else we wander in a world of phantoms. Greatly dar- ing, I sent the essay to William Dean Howells. In reply he said that he really thought I had made out a good case, and he was minded to print the essay. Howbeit, as a lad of twenty, I got stage fright and asked him not to do so. Something I had said about William Blake drew from him a few grave and simple words, showing his own attitude in these high matters. Those words returned to me to-day, now that his gracious, wise and gentle spirit has passed to where, beyond these shadows, there is Light. May 14.—Alas and alack, the Inter-Church World Movement seems to be on the rocks. It was a daring adventure, but ill-advised both as to time and method; an attempted advance in an hour of reaction. The undertaking came too 58 Preaching in New York late, at a time when sect means more than church, and party more than country. There is a revival, but, alas, it is a revival of national- ism in politics and of sectarianism in religion. Besides, the leaders are too far in advance of the rank and file. The emphasis on money, as if with enough millions the world could be re- deemed, was unfortunate. It looked like a bar- gain to buy a Day of Pentecost. What is sadder still, its collapse will set back organized co-operative effort a generation. It was propa- ganda, not evangelism; and public opinion can- not be manipulated into a Christian mood. In the life of the spirit size does not signify, num- bers do not count, and money is not important. No amount of machinery can bring new visions, new leaders, and a new creative spirit. Jesus had no machinery, no money; but He did more for the soul of man than all of us put together. What we fail to get clear is the relation be- tween the spiritual and the practical. Every- where this hiatus confronts us, making it diff- cult to pass from the spiritual factor to the practical undertaking. We think of the “spirit- ual” either as an inherent quality in things to be brought out, or a glamour floating about The New America 59 them ; something that can be spread, like butter, on things, or extracted, like honey, out of them. Which shows how firmly material-mindedness still clings to us. To be “practical” we feel that we must deal with material plans and rem- edies, and for a man to pin his faith to spiritual influences, is to have himself written off as a visionary or, worse still, a mystic. Hence a strange mishandling of the spiritual factor, be- cause material-mindedness holds the field. We lower the spiritual to the level of a force— potent, it may be, but too elusive for practical affairs—whereas it is everywhere the spiritual that creates the practical, and would shape it if we were brave enough to trust it. “Not by might, not my power, but by my Spirit!” May 18.—Everyday I read in the paper a “four-minute” essayette by Dr. Frank Crane; and they always make me “stop, look, and listen,” like the sign at the railway crossing. He is the same man I used to hear and admire years ago when he was a Methodist preacher; the same in spirit, only his method is different. In those days he wrote a book entitled, The Personal Influence of God, rich in insight and 60 Preaching in New York warm with human heart-beats. Then he spoke to thousands; now he writes for millions. “It’s the knack as does it,” said a woman in a George Eliot story. For he is still a preacher, and one is sure to find a text hidden somewhere down the page, ranging from St. Paul to the exegesis of an event. Aware of the allurement of a striking title, he is master of a terse, crisp phrase-craft, and he knows the art of apt allusion. His phrases grip and stick, but seldom sting. There is about him the freshness of the open-air, a sense of beauty and wonder, and a human touch. It means much to set people thinking right for the day, to give hurrying men a bit of cheer, a touch of vision, a glint of the Eternal in the midst of busy days. He is a great everyday preacher, engaged in the blessed business of cheering us all up. May 21.—Spent yesterday down in New Jersey, where flows the Rancocas, visiting one of my shrines—a quaint little brick cottage at 99 Branch Street, Mount Holly. It was built by John Woolman for his daughter Mary, when she married John Comfort, in 1771. The Friends bought it, along with two acres of gar- The New America 61 den, as a Woolman Memorial, in 1915; and for me its worn door-step is a holy place. There fell the feet of the one man of our New World —a simple, quiet, Puck-like tailor—worthy of rank among the saints of the Church universal. In the phrase of the Friends, he ‘underwent deep baptisms ;”’ how deep, his Journal reveals in words as simple as the prayer of a child. Daringly radical, divinely gentle, he was a sen- sitive, suffering humanist who felt in his heart the woes of mankind; yet he kept always “an inward stillness and happy humility of heart.” Early he had a “concern” about slavery—food cooked by slaves he could not eat—and went to and fro among the Friends, an embodied con- science, until they became ill at ease about “‘the holding of fellow-men as property.” A quietist in faith, Woolman was a crusader in his labor in behalf of liberty, purity, and peace—a man to know whom is to find it easy to believe in Jesus. “Get the writings of John Woolman by heart,” said Charles Lamb, who more than once pays tribute to the gentle saint. Besides the Journal, in which we read the story of his inner life, there are a number of essays, like the one entitled ““A Word of Remembrance 62 Preaching in New York and Caution to the Rich,” which show that he was one of the first to plead for justice in in- dustrial relations. Masterman has an essay on “Chicago and St. Francis ;” some one ought to write another of John Woolman and Broadway. It was a day of blessing, driving back the gray fog of cynicism which envelops us in these days. May 23.—Went to see a collection of old time dime novels, including all the ‘‘classic” Diamond Dick dead-shot stories, in the Public Library. It was expected that there would be a rush of boys to read the adventures of Hair- breadth Harry and his pals. But evidently the old thrillers do not thrill the new boys—not a boy turned up. Instead, only men, middle-aged men—dignified, gray-headed—came slyly, as if it were still forbidden, to inspect the treasures. “Tt’s like renewing youth,” said a bewhiskered pirate, as he looked fondly at the Beadle books which made his heart beat like a drum in days that come not back. Out in the park a group of old men were sunning themselves and swapping yarns—the kind who doze over papers in the Library, haunt the park benches, and sleep heaven The New America 63 knows where at night. All were well over sixty, varying in type from a dapper, sprightly old gentleman with ruddy cheeks and a polka- dotted scarf, to a rather ragged, unshaven old man whose hair would have been whiter had it been washed. But in the fraternity of the park class distinctions are unknown, and they were happy together—no matter what the mor- row might bring. The dapper old man was holding forth, tell- ing of the golden days when he was young and his journey to the South Seas, while a small Italian bootblack was shining his elastic- sided shoes, stopping the while to listen, his dark eyes looking up into the old face. It was a tableau, and the story lost nothing in the telling. The shine finished, he waited for the story to end, and then arose and went his way. As he passed me I smiled and he grinned, and, pointing with his thumb over his shoulder, said: ‘Some nut!” May 25.—What strange notes one hears in, the poetry of to-day, in which young men—old before their time—are asking the ultimate ques- tion, ““What’s the use?” Either they have lost 64 Preaching in New York sleep, have a sluggish liver, or do not get the right things to eat; else they would not an- nounce so lugubriously that human life is not really significant, and hardly worth the living. They have prematurity, not maturity; and they are as solemn as owls. They sing as if a dry- rotted world were crumbling about them, and their souls were falling apart. They have nothing to live on except a few hard stoic maxims, and their poetry is a mingled query and protest, because, forsooth, the valet service in this All-Men’s-Inn is not of the best, and truth and beauty and divine reality are not brought to the door before breakfast on a silver platter. Away with such prophets of futility; young men who despair of life before they have lived at all, and move like pale wraiths in a robust world were there is truth to seek, evil to fight, and love to win. They are decadents, invalided out of the ranks before they even see the front- line trench, must less the battle scene—whining because the world is not as dainty as a pink tea and safeasa nursery. What we need is a great poet to do for us what Browning did for our fathers—set our hearts a-tingle and aglow; The New America 65 such a singer as Stevenson describes in his unpublished lines: Away with funeral music—set The pipe to powerful lips— The cup of life’s for him who drinks, And not for him that sips. June 2.—Have been to Ellis Island studying our imported Americans; and it makes one think. One does not actually see the immi- grants disembark, as in the old days; they are saved such embarrassment by passing directly from the boat through underground passage- ways into the main building for medical in- spection. If they are physically fit, they are directed with their bags, bundles and babies into the large auditorium. Huge American flags hang from the railings, and each alien, as his name is called, steps forth, led by an in- terpreter, to be finally examined before passing out. How timid and obsequious they are to the officers, as they had need to be in the lands they left. Meantime, eager friends and relatives, who have obtained passes to the Island, sit in the waiting-room opposite, talking in many tongues and with much gesticulation. The moment 66 Preaching in New York word comes that some one has passed, they rush to the Kissing Post, as it is called, where more pent-up emotion finds release than on any spot on earth. Laughter, tears, and unintelligible exclamations mingle in reunions after long parting, and sorrow is turned to joy. The con- trast between the newcomers, with their shawls and rough shoes, and their alert, well-dressed relatives who meet the boats, is very striking. It makes one wonder at what America does for those who seek its shores. Within a few years the newcomers will walk erect, dress neatly, and their kiddies will be singing in our schools. No wonder they sell all they have, break old ties, and make adventure, seeking a more kindly fatherland. Alas, what disillusionment awaits many of them, what loneliness and homesick- ness, as they are herded together in a quarter or colony, and hear themselves called “wops,” or “ginneys,” or “kikes,’”’ as if they were to be always aliens. What wonder that some of them grow indifferent to American ideals; we do not show them any. They must be friends, not foreigners. It is not so much a matter of up- lifting the poor, benighted foreigner, as of teaching our own people what should be a plain, The New America 67 human duty to the strangers within their gates. Americanism is not a formula; it is a friend- ship. June 3.—Some of the folk I saw at Ellis Island yesterday haunt me, especially the face of one old woman, so gentle, so sad; such a face as one often sees among the old people on the Fast Side. It was a face charged with a pathos too great for one mortal life, telling of the harsh attrition of foregone generations. Moulded after a noble design, in pure lines, the broad forehead, the mouth firm, drooping, yet tender ; a face in which Nature, the great tragic dramatist, had carved the sorrows of a race. Its chief feature was the eyes, large, dark, haunting, a little dulled by the film of years, as if the vision were inward rather than outward; eyes that brooded over their own depth, and saw things that were far away. She was startled at first when I smiled at her; then the deep lines in her face filled with the glow of a sunny kindness. There she sat, her bags at her feet, her hands—old, blue-veined, hard with toil—crossed in her lap, waiting at the gates of America. 68 Preaching in New York June 15.—If one lives in New York, one does not need to travel; the world is at our doors. Just turn to the right from Chatham Square, and you are in—Chinatown! It is a different world; its very silence has a foreign sound, as if its citizens walked in felt-soled shoes. The streets are almost as narrow as the sidewalks, and are so crooked that one of them—Pell Street—describes a semicircle, and, with true Oriental courtesy, brings you back where you started. There is a feeling of something sin- ister, stealthy, prowling, suggesting melo- dramas of opium dens and highbinders, and one looks into dim alleys and dark hallways; but that is all imagination. For, if you expect to find an opium dive, you are more likely to run into a poker-game! At No. 5 Mott Street stands a new building containing the new Joss House and the Oriental Club, devoted to Americanizing its members; on the top floor a newspaper office—a daily pub- lished twice a month! In the Joss House the great carved wood altar is covered with vases of bronze and cups full of joss sticks, a row of candles giving a theatrical touch to the scene. Quietly, piously the worshipper enters, lights The New America 69 his incense stick, burns his quota of sacred money, pours out a few drops of rice wine, repeats his formula, bows his face to the floor, and departs—having paid his debt to the gods. Outside a carryall full of loud-voiced tourists passes, and a party of society folk a-slumming. The streets are gay and odd enough at any time—hung with shields and banners in place of signs—and the shops are devoted to celestial foodstuffs, pottery, jewelry, porcelains, ivories, silks, fans, screens, idols, and—laundry sup- plies. On festal days they bloom with yellow silk pendants, lanterns, and tasseled cloths, mak- ing a patch of color in the crazy-quilt pattern of New York. July 2—Went to Broadway Tabernacle to hear Dean Brown, of Yale; and he spoke a word for the hour. Taking as his text the scene of Elijah under the juniper tree making request to die, he showed how the Divine physician seeks to heal us of the dismay, akin to despair, that haunts us in these dispiriting days. First, God gave the prophet something to eat; then He put him to sleep; then another meal. When rested of his fatigue, he was told to go forth and stand 70 Preaching in New York before the Lord, who gave him a new task. Things are never so bad as we think they are when we are weary and overborne. Elijah thought he stood alone, whereas there were seven thousand who had not bowed the knee to Baal. It was all so simple, so human, so wise withal and winsome. No wonder the Dean has so rich a ministry; he is a teacher of preachers by example as well as by precept. There were no chips in the sermon, no shavings. It was clear-cut, forthright, fortifying, and one forgot the fine art of his homiletics. While never fall- ing into slang, he spoke the familiar language of everyday, with now a glint of humor, and now a flash of insight into the lonely places of the soul. Like Dolly Winthrop in the George Eliot story, we went away “all set up” for the week. July 10.—According to our Constitution it seems that we have to go clean crazy once in every four years, when we elect a President. The hysteria and hub-bub of the hour, the swirl- ing oratory, the thought-saving slogans, the awful Wilson-phobia, are unmistakable signs that the fever is now upon us. How strange The New America 71 that folk otherwise sane become victims of de- lusions, megalomanias, and every kind of lunacy when they act in groups, and especially as na- tions. Until we attain to something like col- lective sanity, anything may happen, and war will never be far away. Thinking in a passion is like playing with dynamite. As for the can- didates, it is six of one and a half dozen of the other ; but most of our Presidents have revealed their greatness after they entered office. What one misses more than anything else in the pub- lic life of to-day is that fine thing—delicate but strong—never better described than by the wise philosopher who edits Life, whose business it is to shoot folly on the fly: “What is the spiritual quality? It is not piety in the common sense of it; it is not neces- sarily religiousness; but though it may be con- sistent with any kind of religion, I do not under- stand that it can be consistent with none. It is consistent with money-getting and with in- difference to money; with ambition and with modesty; with great powers and lesser ones, but hardly with stupidity, for it is itself a quality of intelligence. Let us call it a grasp of certain great truth$, the knowledge of which 72 Preaching in New York is revealed to some babes and denied to some learned; which comes more by conduct than by study, and more, perhaps, by breeding and the grace of God than either. Emerson had it. Lincoln had it. McKinley had it, and the shrewd Hanna recognised it in him. Able men lacking or losing this quality cease to be able to inspire, and fail of leadership.” July 29.—Death is a ruffan! Now it has taken William Marion Reedy, and something fine and lovely went with him out of the world. He was a man made to be loved, brave, true- hearted, generous, his humor a gentle ridicule of his own pathos—my dear friend these twenty years. St. Louis will be a lonesome town for me now, remembering his huge figure and his dazzling mind, what times we talked the hours away. If he seemed to squander life, he did it lavishly, laughingly, and with a wide-sweeping sympathy which is another name for religion. As a bookman I have never known his like. He seemed to have read everything and to have for- gotten nothing. His ability to recall a scene, a character, an epigram in a story or play years gone by, was amazing. His criticisms were not The New America 73 only appreciative, but creative, and a volume of them would be a treasure. Years ago I edited a little book of his essays entitled The Litera- ture of Childhood—dainty, wistful, elfin in spirit—showing that he had kept the child- heart, despite the tramp of heavy years. The man was reflected in his paper, The Murror, revealing a mind alert, keen, beauty-loving, far- ranging, watching, now with indignation, now with amusement, and always with pity, the often strange medley of human events. Every- thing that he wrote, even a postcard, had the artist stroke. “I am tired,” he said in his last letter: And now on tired eyes There softly lies The stillest of all slumbers. “Bagdad-on-the-Subway’” September 17.—Yesterday a huge bomb was exploded in front of the Sub-Treasury Build- ing in Wall Street, leaving death and wreck in its path. Who did it and why no one knows, but it sent a shudder of horror through the city. To-day our Chapter of the Sons of the American Revolution marched to the spot, where we are wont to celebrate Constitution Day. The line formed at St. Paul’s Church— our oldest house of prayer—led by two com- patriots dressed in the garb of 1776, with fife and drum, and wended its way through a vast, excited throng to Trinity Church—where Hamilton lies buried—thence down Wall Street to the steps of the Treasury Building, under the shadow of the statue of Washington, on the spot where he took his oath of office. There, beside a river of humanity—literally a flowing, swirling river of faces—we performed our sacrament of citizenship, in defiance of anarchy and crime, pledging our souls anew to the Con- 74 “Bagdad-on-the-Subway” ahs stitution as the basis of law and ordered life in our Republic; the bulwark against which the anti-social forces beat in vain! October 10.—If anyone would see Nature in all its multi-colored loveliness—ripe, mellow, and touched with the pathos of vanishing things —let him take a journey down the Hudson from Poughkeepsie in October. The trees are clad in their most gorgeous raiment—like a final ceremonial before the advent of winter—some of them in robes of flame which, like the Burn- ing Bush, glow without being consumed: now pale yellow, now dusky red, against a back- ground of ever-greens. The oak does not affect a garish attire, but a modern bronze. The dif- ferent kinds of maples wear different shades of crimson and feathery gold, while the birches put on bright yellow; and as the breeze strikes them and scatters their leaves, one thinks of the Tennyson line: “And the flying gold of ruined woodlands drove through the air.” Here and there a tall blasted tree covered with creepers glows like a torch, as though the lightning flash which withered it had got tangled forever in its spectral branches. The fold of the hills, the 76 Preaching in New York rugged cliffs, the majestic winding river, and over all the solemn splendor of autumn—it fills one with a wild, sad joy for which words were never made, like a sacrament in praise of the Eternal Beauty! October 15.—It is always a joy to hear Dr. Felix Adler who, for more than forty years, has been a seeker after “the secret of the good life,” both as to its philosophy and its practice. Bred in the austerities and depths of Hebrew faith, he fell under the spell of the ethics of Kant touched by the teachings of Jesus, and the result was a fine, firm, ethical mysticism, worth more to his country than many battleships. His system is now set forth in a stately volume entitled, dn Ethical Philosophy of Life, aglow with a passion for righteousness, rich in spiritual gleanings, surveying the whole field of human relations. It is a new version of the Golden Rule: “So act as to elicit the unique personality in others and thereby in thyself.” Still, it is a philosophy, not a gospel; the will to religion, without the power of reconciling duty and joy. There is struggle, discipline, and moral passion, but not the emancipating vision. “Bagdad-on-the-Subway”’ ry October 18.—Went to hear a lecture on “How to Control the Subconscious Mind,” and learned many things. From what I can gather, after reading Freud and Jung, we do need a policeman in the basement. Once only a store- room, the Subconscious has become the seat of morality, the custodian of health, and the arbiter of fate. Whether friend or fiend, is un- certain; it knows no rest and does its works while we sleep. Though apparently om- niscient, it has curious streaks of stupidity. The way to control it, according to the lecturer, is by auto-suggestion; that is, by saying a thing over and over,—like beating a tom-tom,—until the subconscious mind gets the idea. As Punch once put it,— There was a young man of Kilpeacon, Whose nose was as red as a beacon. But by saying, ‘It ’s white,’ Twenty times, day and night, He cured it, and died an archdeacon. What fads people will take up, willing to turn themselves into automata rather than undergo the effort and discipline needed to organise the inner life. Surely it is not the Subconscious, but the Divine Conscious, of which we must 78 Preaching in New York lay hold, if we are to live in “the glory of the lighted mind.” October 20.—As I listened last night to Mr. Root on the League of Nations, the words of Roosevelt were in my mind: “The greatest man that has arisen on either side of the Atlantic in my lifetime.” It was a large re- mark, and must not be taken too literally, like his estimate of himself as “a mediocre intellect highly energised.” It was a very impressive scene—a little gray man, speaking in quiet, measured words, and a vast audience listening as to an oracle. It used to be a saying in New York: “If you loot, see Root, before you scoot; which was a tribute to his acumen as an attorney. Since then he has had great causes and whole nations for his clients; but he is still an attorney—having all the handicaps that go to make up wisdom, but lacking the seer-like mind. Yet it means much to have a mind of such gravity, sanity, and clarity devoted to the public service. For thirty years or more he has lived at the centre of affairs, without yielding to cynicism. Time has mellowed his spirit, making him more magnanimous; but one misses ““Bagdad-on-the-Subway’’ 79 in him a rare thing not easily defined. Manner, magnetism, wit? Call it, rather, the spiritual quality, the poetic touch, the haunting accent that moves the heart. Men admire Elihu Root; they loved John Hay. November 2.—The Hard Church of modern times has suffered a loss of poetry, no less than of piety, by letting the day of All Souls drop out of its calendar. More winsome, more humane is the older faith, as in those parts of Ireland where old and sweet customs are not forgotten. There, as Kettle once said, in every cottage and farm house the hearth will be clean-swept and a new fire laid down, with a chair set before it for every member of the family who has passed out of shadows into realities. For it is believed that they are privileged to revisit to-night the place of their childhood. “Dead names will be cried about the winds—the names of those who achieved, the names of those who were broken or who broke themselves. Not a heart but about its portals will flutter a strange drift of memories; for it is the Day of all the Dead.” If religion 80 Preaching in New York is poetry believed in, surely here is a touch of beauty, pity, and piety. November 4.—Spent an evening with Eamonn de Valera, and found him a man of real power and charm—much more, methinks, than a mere doctrinaire. Tall, somewhat angular, he might easily be awkward, if not austere, and his keen eye and square jaw show the fighter. Winsome and gentle-hearted, one gets an impression of character made firm by loyalty to a principle. When he talked of Ire- land, there was a light in his eyes which re- vealed what reverence and devotion really are. Asked what he would do with Home Rule if and when he got it, he said the first thing would be to declare Ireland independent and free. Such men are easily misjudged, but his sincerity is unmistakable. Patriots are rebels till they triumph—then they are heroes. The evening left me asking a question like that of Pilate, only in a different mood: What is wisdom? Where are we to draw the line between an erect, unbending devotion to an ideal, and an adapt- able attitude, which deals with facts, takes half “Bagdad-on-the-Subway” 81 a loaf when it cannot get the whole, and achieves results? November 6.—Had a bite and a chat with Huneker at the Players. What an amazing man, alike for his vitality of body and his verve of spirit, his incredible knowledge, his sensitive- ness, his generosity, and, above all, his critical eye for the good. Asa romantic raconteur, he is supreme, and there is no one near him. Such talk—full of stories, pictures, flashing epi- grams, and news from every realm of art. Listening to him is like riding on an express train through a multicolored tangle-wood. Flaubert, Gautier, and Emerson are among his masters, and in music, Chopin and Bach. He thinks, as he writes, in terms of music. My suggestion that Paimted Veils ought to be reckoned among his sins evoked such a running critique of fiction as I never heard before in my life. Outside, in Gramercy Park, stood Quinn’s statue of Booth as Hamlet—lonely, pensive, heroic; and over the fireplace, inside, hung Sar- gent’s portrait of the Booth his friends knew and loved. We agreed that nearby there ought 82 Preaching in New York to be a memorial to William Winter, the Plutarch of our stage and the greatest critic of the drama America has known. It was an hour of enchantment, made so by the gay heart and the glittering mind of my host. November 11.—Armistice Day, and what memories it evokes! They are gone, those years, dark, senseless, and confused—like the hideous shapes of some strange, horrible dream. It seems a century; and what did it come to? After two years we are just where we were, with no assurance that a like calamity will not befall us again. Did nothing happen to us in the night? Apparently not; everything seems to be the same as usual, only more so. Ruth- less, swinish selfishness reigns, finding expres- sion in the vulgar phrase: “I’m gonna get mine, see?” Another such war and the scrag- gly chaos we call civilisation will disappear ; but we have no time to bother about it. Unable, unwilling to untangle our thoughts, we walk in a world of chimeras and catch-phrases, refusing to face realities. Manifestly the old order is a wreck, but we go on make-believing that it is as good as ever. At times we bethink ourselves “Bagdad-on-the-Subway”’ 83 of our plight, till the first toy balloon floats by, and we go off after it, dancing jazz. Meantime many of our soldier boys are homeless, work- less, and distraught—the victims of an imper- sonal cruelty. Yes, we remember sentimentally, but we forget practically. ‘Gratitude is the Cinderella of the virtues.” November 24.—It has taken the Pilgrim Fathers almost a year to land this time—due, doubtless, to their advanced age; and a party of Britishers came over to help get them ashore. To-day we gave a farewell luncheon to the dele- gation, and like all such meetings since the war it was a bore. What struck me was the end- less flow of mealy-mouthed flattery, so sicken- ing to honest minds on both sides of the sea. Everybody seemed afraid that somebody would say something to the point. Mr. Harold Spender—author of a sugary biography of the Prime Minister—did venture “one frank remark,” to the effect that he thought America rather intolerant of minorities: an observation as old as de Tocqueville. Yet one ought to be grateful for even ‘‘one frank remark” on such occasions; it is more than we usually get amid 84 Preaching in New York the gush and slush of after-lunch oratory, which nobody means and nobody believes. Why so much oily hypocrisy in our Anglo-American friendship, if it is real? Friends who cannot be frank are not real friends, in spite of all their tiresome talk about the things they have in com- mon. If only Dean Inge would write an Out- spoken Essay on the subject, it would clear the air of cant. It would mean some plain-speaking in public, as there is now in private; but there would be a better understanding, and a firmer basis for an honorable and enduring friend- ship. Anyway, we have good banquets, for the sake of which one is willing to endure the palaver.* * Since this entry was made Dean Inge has written an out- spoken article on the subject in the London Evening Standard, in which he lets us see realities. He puts it frankly: “It is doubtful whether we have improved matters by the mealy- mouthed flattery which we are accustomed to use in public, though not in private, when we speak of America.” There is a touch almost cynical in his remark that sheer necessity makes friendship with America the “sheet anchor” of British policy; a necessity based on the “knowledge that we could not defend Canada from invasion.” Which makes one feel that “the curious mixture of idealism and chicanery in the Ameri- can character,” is not peculiar to America. The article was refreshing in its honesty, but disappointing in its conclusions. Happily Chesterton recanted his solemn promise not_to write his impressions of America, and his book, What I Saw in America, is by far the best book ever written about America by an Englishman. “In international relations,’ he says, “there is far too little laughing and far too much sneering. I believe there is a better way which largely consists in laughter; a form of friendship between nations which is “Bagdad-on-the-Subway’”’ 85 November 28.—My English friends keep writing of New York as a glittering, heartless place, hoping that I may make my church a centre of friendliness in a cold city. Every actually founded on differences.” So he does not give us a “comedy of comparisons,” but a rollicking interpretation of what is most uniquely and distinctly American; describing all sorts of queer things with sparkling phrases, quips, conceits, prods, puns, and, of course, paradoxes, as for example: “The worst way of helping Anglo-American friendship is to be an Anglo-American.” He knows the sanctity of difference, and he never mistakes difference for inferiority. He seeks the meaning of things unfamiliar—some of his explanations being fearfully and wonderfully made—and what he cannot under- stand he adds to his stock of mystery stories. Writing in The New Witness, Mr. Belloc recalls that until our Civil War the English policy was hostile to America. The effort to divide and weaken America, having failed, the next move was to make friends with us. No sacrifice was thought too great, but it went too far, seeking an Alliance, which he regards as “a grave political error,” since England, in Alliance with America, would see herself forced to actions which would weaken her, and upon motives repugnant to the national char- acter—which is exactly what America thinks about it. Hav- ing “gone too far to draw back,” Mr. Belloc thinks that the present propaganda is doing injury to real friendship. Talk of “an English-speaking world’ does no immediate tangible harm, but carried into the real world of armies and navies, oil and iron, it means a heavy crash, as if one “should step out of a fifth-storey window through taking too literally the metaphor of ‘walking on air!” So the matter stands, the irritating Irish issue having been mercifully removed; and it was not greatly changed by the idealism of Lord Robert Cecil or the eloquence of Mr. Lloyd George, who paid us his long-promised visit, enchant- ing us with his picturesque personality, and, having given the Goddess of Liberty his autograph, returned happy and in good heart. My own conviction, as the result of sad experi- ence, is that the best service to Anglo-American friendship is to let it alone. If it is written in the Book of the Will of God it will grow—as, indeed, it is growing—and a nobler necessity than a fear of invasion or a desire for an Alliance will dictate a higher friendship. 86 Preaching in New York city is cold and cruel,—not with the ferocity of a tiger, but with the indifference of a cart wheel, which rolls over a stone or a human head with equal ease,—New York not more so than London. Indeed, the frigidity of New York is only a pretense and a bluff, as Raggles discovered in the O. Henry story, “The Making of a New Yorker.” Nor does one have to be knocked over in the street, as he was, to learn that, underneath its glitter and show, it is almost foolishly warm-hearted. Half its people are from smaller communities and long for the old neighborliness—but dare not show it. They are like billiard balls in a game: they “kiss” and pass on, little knowing the pent- up kindness under the polished surface. New York is a huge mass of scrambled human- ity,—many races, creeds, colors,—but it is wistfully, pathetically human, after all. At the present rate, like Raggles I shall soon be saying “Noo York,” thinking that the sun rises in East River and sets in the Hudson. December 5.—Genius! It is a mystery; no one knows whence it cometh or whither it goeth. The rest of us follow the Drummer— “Bagdad-on-the-Subway”’ 87 it hears a still, small voice. No other magic could have wrought such marvels as Bliss and Other Stories, by Katherine Mansfield: she is not a comet, butastar. Her stories tell so little, yet mean so much. She knows the tremendous meaning of trifles—how a fugitive mood may change us more than a great event. She has a story called “The Wind Blows,” in which nothing happens, yet it makes the soul stand still and listen. A fragile thing it is, made up of bits of nothing—just a little grey wind, moist with soft mist, such as one may meet at any turn—yet it gathers into a few lines all the old heart-ache and homesickness of soul which made the Psalmist cry out, ages ago, “I am a stranger here, and a sojourner, as all my fathers were.” Yes, the wind blows; its sound is heard but its source is secret. December 10.—What a picture lower New York makes seen from the river on a crisp, frosty day, when the purple wing of evening brushes the grime away. On the left a sky of pearl and old silver; on the right the City, shrouded in violet haze, with row on row of lighted windows rising like fairy-palaces until 88 Preaching in New York it seems fantastic, dream-like, unreal. It seems incredible that frail man should have uplifted such cliffs and peaks, here in shapes like stalag- mites, there in slender towers. Yet he has done so, making his masonry rival the mountains of God. The sun sinks, the fog deepens, and as the soft night falls over the scene the elevated trains look like sinuous, slow-moving comets gliding to and fro through a human Milky Way. December 18—A city lodging-house; a human waste-basket—a cemetery of the un- buried dead! There one sees such pathetic shapes as haunt the benches in the parks, list- less, dull-eyed, without energy, aim, or hope. Men lose heart, give up, let go, and drift like pieces of dead wood in a stream. Drudgery wears them out; disease and despair dog their steps. The Ledger reads like a Diary of De- feat, in which one finds such entries as these: J. B. Twenty years old. Began work at ten; worked steadily for eight years. Did not get ahead, seemed discouraged. Low vitality. Gave up. Passed on.” “W.H. Twenty-eight; Pennsylvania. Be- gan work at nine, as dog in glass works. _“Bagdad-on-the-Subway”’ 89 Steady for seven years; gave out. Restaurant work three years. Tramping since. Power gone.” It is a forlorn procession, a shambling, shuffling, aimless march to a drab and dingy end. They wander through the streets, the liv- ing dead, whose weary eyes tell that they had a brother Cain. Perhaps, if we knew the hearts of men as God knows them, we might read in the Ledger of Life an item like this: “J.P. Thirty-five. Began career at twenty; well educated. Worked ten years. Made money, but lost his ideals. Thought religion a good thing to subdue the masses. A model of fashion. Power gone. Passed on.” December 25.—History is eager with the effort of men to find a Happy Prince, whose power shall be gentle, wise, and just, and to establish Him in dominion over their broken lives and warring wills. Long ago they found Him; but all who find Him lose Him, though all have found Him fair. The eager dream came true when from a little town in Judea there came a Man of Good Will, the lover of the race. Each year, for a brief day, so swift to go, Lord go Preaching in New York Christ rules over us. Each year we give Him Christmas Day, permitting his will to prevail, and his brooding spirit to rest upon the nations. Toward that happy interlude we look forward longingly; and when it is ended, we look back lovingly to the time when we were good to- gether. Strife, anger, tumult, and the hurry of little days are forgotten. A while we dwell in his kingdom, and in his authority there is peace. Alas, the Day of Christ is gone while the welcome is still on our lips. He comes and He passes, because we are troubled about many things. If He might abide, it would be well with us, and pity and joy would walk the com- mon ways of man. January 5, 1921.—Went to hear a Socialist friend lecture, he having promised, of his own accord, not to snipe the church. He laid the idealism on thick, but it is no use. It is like whitewash; if you touch it, it rubs off. The trouble with socialism, like the individualism which it attacks, is that both work on a basis of materialistic thought, in terms of wealth, not of faith or of reason. Because socialism is a protest against an extreme individualism, its _“Bagdad-on-the-Subway” Ql advocates believe that they are idealists. They talk of the welfare of society; but so do the opposite school. The difference is one of method, not of ideal; for the real ideal of both is wealth. One emphasizes the production, the other the diffusion, of wealth; but it is wealth all the time. Neither seems able to rise above it. Both preach rights, and say little of duties; how expect man to do other than demand the one and ignore the other? And there we are, deadlocked between the falsehood of two ex- tremes. Unless we can find some fourth dimen- sion, the argument will go on forever and get nowhere, like the duel in the Chesterton story, The Ball and the Cross. Unless humanity can be moved from within by a higher spiritual im- pulse, we can never untie the tangle. Howbeit, there were good lines in the lecture, as when he said that “A living wage is one that keeps the soul of the employer alive.” January 10.—It has been a dark night all day; H died at dawn, going out with the morning star. What a stillness death makes when it passes by! Yesterday he was as gay and facetious as ever, albeit knowing that his Q2 Preaching in New York end was near. He gave mea paper to be read at his funeral, but not to be opened till needed. It would relieve me of embarrassment, he ex- plained. There would be less stupidity and ly- ing, he said, if every man wrote out, before dying, what he wished said. It makes a lump climb into my throat to read it, setting forth in simple words his faith about life and the world —a kind of spiritual pantheism, in which per- sonality as well as beauty transcends man. In our talk he always avoided such issues, and posed as an awful unbeliever. But I knew it was not so. He was of those whose faith hath centre everywhere, nor cares to fix itself in form. His life was his religion, and his pass- ing atriumph. Death was there, of course, but nobody minded him. King of Terrors? No, nor king of anything. A boy-like thing, I figured him, like the little genius of Greek art, waiting about to open the door. O, my friend! January 14.—New York is the rendezvous of our Young Intellectuals, to whom nothing old is sacred and nothing new unwise. They are an “unco-squad,” suffering from a Superiority Complex, but charming withal in their cock- “Bagdad-on-the-Subway” 93 sureness. They take themselves very seriously, and that makes no end of fun for the rest of us. They have the contortions of genius, if not its inspiration, and their casual omniscience— tricked out with a garish cleverness—makes a circus seem tame. The chief of the tribe is Mencken—a blend of Brann and Nietzsche, with a dash of Swift—who raids the bour- geoisie trenches on Broadway now and anon, exploding grenades and wit bombs, to an accom- paniment of Rabelaisian laughter. Next day he repeats the performance in Baltimore, hilarious and unashamed. Oddly enough, what fills him with unholy glee makes the others mad, sad, and disgusted. They find America crass, stupid, provincial—‘“‘So crude, don’t you know” —and they refer to it with sardonic scorn as “These Benighted States.” If there is anything they hate worse than Puritanism, it is Pro- hibition. Victorian romance is taboo; they go in for realism, by which they seem to mean emptying a garbage can in the parlor. It is the way of youth; it fills its belly with the east wind and blows the twisted bugle of revolt. One does not wonder that they rebel against the smug, timid, pious, prudish priggishness of Q4 Preaching in New York other days; but surely it is no advance if it ends in a gospel of futility, tempered by vulgar hedonism. January 20.—Went “down in Water Street” to the McAuley Mission; “dry dock of a thou- sand wrecks.” What a Carpenter-shop for the making and mending of men—broken men, pieces of men, “Ex-men,” as Gorky would say. They actually advertise for sots, bums, down- and-outs, and those who have lost hope—like Christ writing a “Want-Ad,” asking for the refuse of the world. And around Him, as He predicted, are gathered a strange, weary, for- lorn company of men whom life has defeated— the sick of soul, the palsied of will, the demon- haunted—seeking, as of old, His healing touch, His forgiving word, His hand put forth in the darkness, which tells them that they may still hope, for the impossible is true! It is like read- ing an old page from the Gospels, or a new chapter from the Acts of the Apostles. January 22.—Heard a good story about dear Robert Collyer, the memory of whom is like music, showing his wisdom and his humor. “Bagdad-on-the-Subway” Q5 When John Haynes Holmes came to the Church of the Messiah, the old man became pastor emeritus, and he was in his pew at every service. No two men could be more unlike, but the old saint was loyal to the young prophet. After a while, when some of the older folk began to be ill at ease under the newer teach- ing, one of them asked Collyer how he liked the new minister : “Fine, fine,” he said, “he is a bright young man, and he will do big things; we are very fortunate.” Not satisfied with such a reply, and feeling that there was something Collyer had not con- fessed, after a brief pause the questioner put the matter point-blank: “Honest, now, Doctor; don’t those sermons make the snakes run up and down your back?” “Yes, they do,” Collyer admitted, drawling out the answer. “But you just wait. After a while some young fellow will come along and make ’em run up and down his back, too!’ January 24.—Listening to Chesterton lecture is a joy undefiled, as much for his manner as for the niceties of his insight and his ever- 96 Preaching in New York present humor. His huge figure, his shock of tousled gray hair, his accent, beginning a sen- tence in the treble key and sliding down, his shy, winning smile, captivate, the while he pricks our absurdities and pronounces prohibi- tion a violation of the constitution of the uni- verse. His second lecture, “Shall We Abolish the Inevitable?” was an annihilating analysis of the pervasive, easy-going fatalism which is nothing short of a curse. At the close of one of his lectures, a woman in the top gallery asked him why he used paradox in his writings. He expressed surprise, saying that he had searched his books in vain for a parodox, the quest having suggested a ereat epic poem to be entitled Paradox Lost. If he can help America to recover its lost sense of humor, he will be a benefactor; and he can do it by telling us what the London papers would say if the Autobiography of Margot Asquith had been written by an American woman!” January 27.—No church is more rich in its munificence, or more strategic in its labor to stem the tide of paganism in New York, than “Bagdad-on-the-Subway”’ 97 the Episcopal Church. Its missions are marvels of sagacious and prophetic Christian enterprise. For that reason all who labor in this diocese are deeply interested in the election of a new bishop; but it is a pity that we always have a big row and get all mussed up about it. As a partisan of the rector of Grace Church,— whose spiritual insight and literary charm have been among my blessings for years,—the result does not make me happy, save as a rebuke to the Anglo-phobes, who attacked Dr. Manning on the ground of his British origin; which is like excommunicating George Washington, who was a British subject before he became an American citizen. Let us hope the new Bishop will finish the slowly rising Cathedral of St. John the Divine,—about which James Lane Allen wove his lovely story, The Cathedral Singer,—and show us the function of a cathe- dral ina democracy. If only our varied fellow- ships could be united in one great communion, making the Cathedral a central shrine at the gates of the University, joining a Home of the Soul and a City of the Mind in the service of a many-tongued metropolis—is it only a dream? 98 Preaching in New York January 28.—The annual dinner of the Poetry Society last night reminded me of the dim nights in London when we used to discuss the heavenly art between air raids. How in- teresting it is to meet singers whose faces you have never seen, but whose songs have opened windows of divine surprise toward the City on the Hill! Though I have long been a devotee in the Temple of Song, Le Gallienne, Rice, Kemp, Sara Teasdale, Elsa Baker, and Ina Coolbrith were among the members of the choir I had not met. Mukerji came near being the hero of the hour, with his story of the wan- dering poets of India, begging alms for which they pay in bits of wisdom and song. If we did not understand the meaning of the lines he recited, we felt the rhythm of the music. Markham, in his welcome to Tagore, said that in the Land of Poetry there is no East and West, but one cup of the universal communion. In the speech of Tagore one felt the ache of his heart in his words, as of one depressed, if not deeply wounded, by the mood of America. He pleaded for men of world-mind, who see that we are all citizens of one Kingdom of the Spirit, members of one Beloved Community. “Bagdad-on-the-Subway’”’ 99 February 4.—Every time I hear Rabbi Wise, it makes me want to play truant from my own church; he is so vital, so vibrant with intellectual power, so aglow with moral electricity—like a bit of human radium. ‘Tall, athletic, graceful, his dark brown eyes eagle-like in their bright- ness; his deep bass voice soft as velvet in appeal, and resonant in denunciation; his style bristling with epigrams, swift epitomes, and phrases that sting the mind with the surprise of beauty— his charm as an orator is equal to his daring as a prophet. One moment he is walking to and fro like a lawyer at the bar; another, he is exploding some injustice or absurdity with a quick sabre-thrust, with now a glint of humor and now a gleam of prophetic indignation. Emerson said that the man who speaks the truth will find life sufficiently dramatic. It has been so with Rabbi Wise, who early took for his motto: “I will try to see things as they are, and then I will try to say them as I see them.” His gallant fight for a free pulpit in a Free Synagogue is memorable in the religious life of America. As chivalrous as he is fascinating, in New York he is not only a personality but an institution,—admired, feared, and idolised 100 ~+=Preaching in New York by turns,—a leader of his own people and a captain of the forces making for social justice, civic honor, and national idealism. February 11.—Spoke at a Settlement on the East Side, to a company made up largely of Jewish young people, the most intent and eager listeners I have had in many a day. My talk was about Lincoln, the emphasis being on the idea that we must support the State and not expect the State to support us. When question- time came, I learned that my audience did not agree with much that I had said, and they refuted me by quoting Karl Marx, whose writ- ings they knew, giving chapter and verse, chiefly from Das Kapital—using it as an authority much as theologians use the Bible. When we got away from Marx, and dealt with issues on their merits, they were not so certain, and I accused them of playing leap-frog over hard facts. The religious idea they dismissed with a sort of triumph, even with scorn. Not all of them were Marxians, and they had a picturesque debate among themselves, while I acted as umpire. Having told them that I pre- ferred Lincoln to Marx, I went away—wishing “‘Bagdad-on-the-Subway” 101 the while that all young people had as keen an interest in public affairs. Alas, apart from making money and having a good time, so many of them seem to be dead from the eyes up. February 12.—A mountain is a mystery; such was Lincoln. It is tall, isolated, and alone; soishe. It has fissures and crevices that would disfigure the beauty of a hill, but which con- stitute no blemish on its massive nobility. Amid its crags are sheltered nooks where flowers bloom and streamlets flash in the sunlight. But there are also huge masses of denuded rock which tell of the harsh attrition of earlier times. The clouds that gather about its peak lend it an air of aloofness and melancholy. Mighty storms make war upon it, with the swift strokes of lightning and the deep cry of thunder. But it remains unchanged, unshaken. In all moods, in all mists, its mission is the same. The same God that made the mountain made the man, and His ways are past our finding out.’ *Lincoln is not simply a figure in our history; he is an article of our faith. For, strangely enough, of all those who have sat in the White House, no one has left such a legacy of spiritual eminence. Toward the end, when his thin, worn face looked like a mask of pale bronze, and his eyes, deep- sunk, became two pits of brooding shadow, men saw as in a 102 +#Preaching in New York February 14.—How many influences play upon preaching. My sermon to-day simply did not go; something was wrong. Water in the carbureter, the spark dead, or something else. It was a fairly good sermon, and not ill-con- sidered, but it had no life, no fire, no power. When that is so, preaching is the hardest work on earth—harder than pounding rock on the street, or making brick without straw. It is strange and baffling. A dumb, dismal mood creeps out of the mists of the mind, and seals up the fountains of the spirit. One is helpless against it, unable to achieve release of person- ality. St. John was “in the Spirit on the Lord’s Day.” He trod on air, his feet walked among the stars. But perhaps on other days it was not so. God keeps His sacred wine for the ereat sacramental feasts of life. The wind bloweth where it listeth; to-day it was calm, and the oars were heavy. February 16.—Ruskin saw in Yorkshire, among the new buildings that covered its once vision that to which they entrust their souls.. Waldo Frank, in Our America, wrote golden words :—“A materialistic world saved by a religious man. A practical union saved by a poet. A rational society saved by the abiding love of a mystic. Here at last is our miracle.” “Bagdad-on-the-Subway” 103 wild hills, churches and schools mixed with mansions and mills. The churches were almost always Gothic, the mansions and mills never Gothic. When Gothic was invented, he remem- bered, homes were Gothic as well as churches. Why should it not be so now, since beauty is as cheap as ugliness? To-day we live under one kind of architecture and worship under an- other, because, he insists, we have one religion from life. No doubt; all the same it is a joy to pass from the hurry of Fifth Avenue into the Gothic beauty of St. Thomas’s Church, so massive and stately, so reverent and graceful. A poem in stone, a bit of the eternal mysticism made visible, it rests the soul, and renews a sense of wonder and awe—like distance in a painting, or a strain of music breaking through the racket of events. What a blessing it is, unveiling, for a moment, a long vista of the spirit where the Infinite woos the finite into its mystery. February 22.—Lord Dunsany in his drama, The Gods on the Mountain, tells how on top of a hill in remote India there once stood six green stone gods. Six beggars conceived the 104. Preaching in New York idea of palming themselves off on the simple village folk as those six stone gods come to life. All of the villagers fell victim to the hoax, ex- cept two, who started off to see if the stone deities were still on the hill. Before they arrived, the gods had been stolen and carried away. Convinced that they had actually turned to living men, they hurried back to the village, and bowed low before the six beggars. Then, to their amazement, the six beggars turned to stone, and sat in a semi-circle—inert and solid. Some such fate has befallen Washington; he has been turned to stone, and his face looks like the Sphinx. Every human wrinkle has been ironed out of it, leaving a bloodless abstraction or a steel engraving. If only he would come to life and swear, or do something human, it would make him more real to us. As it is, he is hidden in a cloud of commonplaces, and our homage is apt to be perfunctory, in spite of ourselves. February 25.—Fifth Avenue, from Madison Square to the top of Central Park, is a fine lady, elegantly dressed and well mannered, the very pink of fashion, and with the way of one secure ““Bagdad-on-the-Subway’”’ 105 in her position and social standing. She has wealth and power, and the great churches she passes add dignity without solemnity to her de- portment. If her skirts are cut as befits the fashion,—alow or aloft,—she is no flirt like Broadway, much less what Wells calls a “painted disaster of the street; it is a differ- ence not of inches, but of intention. She moves with fair grace, but without striking sinuous- ness. She dines at the Waldorf, worships at Brick Church, St. Thomas’s, or the Cathedral, as her heart inclines, reads at the Public Library, and keeps a museum of art for her guests. If she smokes, it is in the seclusion of her stately clubs, any one of which would make the palace of an Oriental monarch look like a rummage sale. At times she is haunted, me- thinks, by the dread of horrible shapes of poverty hidden in the shabbiness into which the city shades off toward the East. It is a brilliant, gracious avenue, more high-heeled than high- browed, but kind-hearted withal; in short, a glorified Main Street. February 27.—The following words in a letter from a great banker touched me deeply, 106 Preaching in New York and set me thinking how simple religion is in its real meaning and duty:—“I am very ill /at expression in religious matters, my creed being a plain and practical one. I think if every person would everyday do some kind act to some person other than themselves, the burden of the world would be lifted; and I try not to wait for the others to begin. And it seems to me that such a practice leads directly to spirituality. The step to realisation is such a short one, and the world is doing everything else but taking it. The millennium is next door to us, and we go the other way.” It is all there; no word need be added—a man could preach for an hour and not say as much as that. February 28.—Have been making a little study of “illicit preaching” in New York, in hotels and halls where all kinds of cults hold forth. What strange philosophies folk run after, drifting hither and yon, seeking magic and the moon—anything to tickle curiosity. Restless, troubled, hungry of heart, they take *Further along in these pages, in the form of a dialogue, I have ventured a more detailed description and discussion of this extraordinary phase of metropolitan life, which has not received the attention it deserves. “Bagdad-on-the-Subway” 107 refuge in the occult and the esoteric, in quest of some formula, some charm, to heal their ills and unify the disarray of the inner life. It would be grotesque if it were not so tragic— this search for power without discipline and salvation without sacrifice. Which was the more interesting, the audi- ences or the lecturers, is hard to know. Of course, the seekers after sensation were there, as everywhere; the kind of women who adore Wagner and Theosophy one week, and the next hang on the lips of the oldest shop-worn celebrity from Europe, or the newest boy-violin- ist. But most of the audiences were serious, earnest folk, to whom religion had evidently been only a tradition or a memory; and some of them had known bitter sorrow, for which they had found no healing. Wistful, unhappy, a-weary, it was pathetic to see them listening to strange, half-baked philosophies. Many of the lecturers were plain fakes, con- juring with the magic words, Health, Happi- ness, Success; harping upon variations of one theme: “How to Get What You Want.” One posed as “a curative psychologist and person- ality-builder ;’ another offered “healing in the 108 Preaching in New York involuntary way;” and still another talked learnedly of ‘““The Hidden Giant’’—the Subcon-, scious—followed by “classes in Healing, Con- centration, and Prosperity.”’ Fortunately, a few of them were real teachers of spiritual truth, trying to help people to make use of spiritual energies in daily life. Each of these cults betrays some lack on the part of organized religion—chiefly its neglect of the mystical element—and the penalty of neg- lect is exaggeration. The tragedy of our time is the schism between the head and the heart, the divorce of science from mysticism; the failure to see that the inner life is a realm of law where order is the trophy of obedience. Alas, the church seems able to deal only with the intelligent, the prosperous, and the perfectly well; with the sick of body or of soul it is help- less. Has our religion nothing to say to physical beings who have a bodily life to live? Has the church no help for the sub-normal, the distressed, the over-borne, and those whose minds seem scattered by the dizzy whirl of city life? Has it no art of healing, no technique of inner realization? Before the church attacks “Bagdad-on-the-Subway” 109 these new cults, it ought to study how far its own failure to minister to human need has brought them into being. March 4.—To-day a great, lonely man passes from the White House into private life, broken in body but not in spirit, reviled and idolized by turns—a mighty soldier sadly wounded. His epigram will live: ‘I would rather be defeated in a cause that will one day triumph, than to triumph in a cause that will one day be de- feated.” So, appealing from the hour to the years, from mad passion to calm intelligence, he can wait while Desolation and battle, and long debate, Councils and prayers of men, And bitterness and destruction and witless hate, And the shame of lie contending with lie, Are spending themselves. Time, if not tragedy, will show that his in- sight was authentic; and his words, uttered with the dignity of a golden voice, will echo in the hearts of men. He may have been too plaint abroad and too unyielding at home; he may have been unfitted by temperament for team- work—trying to do it all off his own bat. But he alone had the spiritual touch, and his vision 110 Preaching in New York will grow and abide, though, alas, his mortal eyes may not see its fruition. Wilson has won; Clemenceau is defeated ! March &8—No doubt Adam and Eve were wotried about the younger generation, as we are, despite their own expulsion from the Gar- den of God. Our young’ folk are as gay, as vivacious, as irresponsible and superficial as ever young folk have been; only more so. Like everything else, the old feud between youth and age was made acute by the war, which left the world neurotic, erotic, and in so many ways idiotic. Old restraints are thrown off, old standards have been upset, emptying the under- world upon the stage and into our fiction. At best the mood of youth is an engaging sauciness; at worst a downright defiance. Some are seekers after truth, more are seekers after thrills, and if a few affect to be con- scientiously unmoral, and at great pains to be flippant, all are adepts at the old game of Shock-My-Aunties. It is a new kind of hypoc- risy. Once bad folk pretended to be good; now the nicest kind of boys and girls pose as cynics, sceptics, and awfully wicked. It is mostly a ‘“Bagdad-on-the-Subway”’ 111 bluff, their interest in indecency being more childish and inquisitive than unwholesome. None the less, it is a mistake to think that youth is not serious just because it refuses to be solemn. A generation is growing up which has read little, but lived much. They despise books, as if they had actually heard of the famous phrase: “Reading is thinking with a strange head instead of your own.” Most of the past is not even a past for them; it is dead and gone—blotted out by the red mists of War. They have as much Christianity as is embedded in our social order, and that is very little. They have courage and honor; they have little faith and no theology. A gifted and high-minded young editor put it to me thus, recalling his austere up-bringing in New England: “It is like a nightmare to think of it. Sunday was as dismal as funeral. Joy was a sin, an idea an agony. Every happy impulse and in- stinct was trampled upon, suppressed, as if it were a thing vile and shameful. God was a big policeman always on watch with a club. Facts about sex were unclean, and I grew up in ignorance of my own nature. If one asked a human question, the old extinguisher was 112 Preaching in New York brought out and applied. All inquiry about religion was squelched forthwith, as if one had touched a taboo. We had to swallow it whole, willy nilly, take it or leave it. Art was a blas- phemy and science and invention of the Devil.” ‘No, it’s vall off,”) he’ added, *.“‘I’m: done. They got God and the Devil mixed. They put the war over on us, but they can’t put their religion across. They think we are a wild, god- less set. It may be so, if they mean their petty, fussy little God, who is harder to please than a spinster school-mistress. We are not irre- ligious, but we want reality. What is the church going to do about it? No preacher un- der forty can speak our language, and the young fellows shy at the pulpit. No, I don’t talk this to the old folk—they would not under- stand.” There was more of a sort similar, only more stinging, showing how repression had re- bounded into rebellion. And I “listened in,” agreeing with much of it, wondering the while how the younger generation could make a worse mess of the world than we have made of it. Anyway, it will soon be in their hands, and pray God the insight of Meredith may be “Bagdad-on-the-Subway”’ 113 fulfilled, when he saw that youth and age must unite “to rear the temple of the credible God.” March 12.—Somehow, in a most baffling fashion, one of the most famous ministers of New York rubs all my fur the wrong way; and it is not his fault. A brilliant speaker, a cap- tivating personality, a prodigious worker, he has many of the elements of a prophet—includ- ing a lucid, vivid, pungent style, which leaves no shadow upon his meaning. Yet, strangely enough, as much as I love peace, if he advocates universal brotherhood, he makes me want to fight. How stupid of me. With much that he has to say I fully agree—until he says it! He has all the dogmatism of Athanasius; he lacks only the dogma. But there is not the rub. It is not his dogmatism that makes my bristles rise, nor yet his dogma—though he is by genius a radical, and I by grace a conservative—since it is a part of my religion to grant every man his opinion, as I take mine, whether he has a right to it or not. No, it is a difference of tempera- ment, a thing far back, deep down, and hard to get at. How can one deal with a bias so subtle, so elusive, so ingrained in the fibre of 114 Preaching in New York being? It puzzles me much. Anyway, I love my brilliant fellow-worker, admire his shining gifts, wish him every blessing, and March 18.—David Swing was right. Snakes crawl, birds fly, and rabbits run, but man talks himself forward. Having discussed a thing for half a century, he takes a cautious step in ad- vance, and then sits down and reopens the in- finite conversation. Take the matter of Church Unity, about which we are having a series of very able lectures at the Brick Church. All agree that a divided Church is wasteful, as well as stupid and ineffective; but the pace of a snail is swift beside our progress toward unity. In- deed, beyond the evil of overlapping, we do not know what we mean by Church Unity, much less how to bring it about. It makes one think of the saying of Rose Macaulay in What Not: “To organise religion, a man must have the talents of the Devil, or at least of an intelligent Civil Servant.” Anyway, the sons of darkness outwit the sons of light, and the cohesive power of greed outruns the coherence of Christian enterprise. Must the Church always be last, riding in an oxcart in a day of express trains? “Bagdad-on-the-Subway’”’ 115 March 20.—One of the finest feats of “or- ganised preaching” in New York is the Madi- son Avenue Presbyterian Church, under the leadership of Dr. Coffin. Standing on the bor- der-line between a fashionable apartment house section and a gray, polyglot slum, by a sagacious strategy it has brought the extremes of society together, as few churches have been able to do. It is a notable achievement, as much for its tact as for its vision, uniting personal piety and social ministry. Within all its many activities the genius of a great preacher is present to in- spire, to edify, to guide. A scholar, a teacher, a master of what Beecher called “executive Christian ideas,” he thinks like a statesman and preaches like a prophet. He convinces by his conviction, persuades by his earnestness, and ennobles by his compassion. But there is a something more in Dr. Coffin not to be defined, a union of adamant and star-light which makes his ministry a sacrament, and his character a consecration. March 22.—Found a gem in Brentano’s to- day, a plain, modest little book, rather drab in dress, the like of which has not been written 116 Preaching in New York since the Middle Ages. It is called A Soldier’s Confidences With God, Spiritual Colloques of Giosue Borsi; and if it is not already a classic, it surely will be. A Diary of the Soul for the strength and comfort of the writer in the trenches, it was not meant for other eyes. He was no cloistered mystic, but a young man of the world, a poet, a scholar, an actor, a dra- matic critic, a commentator on Dante, a darling of the salons of Rome and Florence. His father taught him to hate the Church, but, like Augus- tine, he had a wonderful mother whose piety won him to faith. He was killed in action in 1915, leading his men. So the Diary came to light, like a white star to guide the war-weary, bewildered souls of men. Its abject humility, its fearless searching of heart, its awed in- timacy of fellowship with God, and, not least, its gem-like beauty of style—bright, yet tender —make one think now of The Imitation, now of the Confessions of St. Augustine. No Protestant can write such a book—why is it so? March 23.—What a pity that Lent, instead of being a period of inner discipline, has become a relief from the dizzy social whirl; a time of ““Bagdad-on-the-Subway”’ 117 moral manicuring! Penitence? For a few de- vout souls, yes; but for the mass of church folk it is little more than a form. What fills one with deep disquiet about the Christianity of to-day is that it is so tame, so timid, so tepid, so sugary—a kind of glorified lollipop. No doubt we need to deal with the little gray sins that eat away our peace; but is there to be no prayer and fasting for social sins that make human life a hell? The ancient prophetic words flash like lightning: “Js not this the fast I have chosen? To loose the bonds of wicked- ness, to undo the bands of the yoke and to let the oppressed go free, and that ye break every yoke!’ To-day, as Jesus said long ago, we strain at gnats and swallow camels. The words of Forsyth are like swift sword-thrusts: “Our religion belongs too much to the re- ligion of indulgence, immunity. Piety takes the place of faith. Love becomes an affectional infinite instead of a moral absolute. We are melted without being moulded. We have tem- peramental piety instead of moral insight. Hence the public impotence of religion. It eases but does not cure the public case. It is for easy edification more than hard obedience. 118 Preaching in New York We detach individual experience from the righteousness of God, with its almost automatic judgment on godless civilization. A church catholic is sought otherwise than by a church holy. We lose the vision of nations in solemn covenant round the great white throne. Weare fumbling at a social, national, international religion with the small key of a private piety and a provincial faith.” March 24.—The Maundy Thursday service to-night made me think of a remarkable Bible I saw in London, the legacy of James Smetham, the Methodist artist-preacher of the last cen- tury, whose letters are so rich. It was inter- leaved, and on the blank pages he had jotted down all manner of suggestive comments and meditations. Because, as an artist, he thought in pictures, his comment on a text often took the form of a thumb-nail-sketch. In the Gospel of St. John, the 18th Chapter, stands the story of the betrayal: ‘Judas Iscariot, who also be- trayed Him ’*" The comment of Smetham is a delightful little etching, half-an-inch square—a tiny baby, lying in a cradle, with rounded cheeks, and innocent eyes, and a mouth one “Bagdad-on-the-Subway” 119 would love to kiss. Underneath is written the name: Judas Iscariot! March 26.—As a lad, I knew nothing of Catholicism, save as a strange superstition called Popery, which I heard denounced as Antichrist, and every kind of ugly name. So, © reading in the paper about Cardinal Gibbons, I made bold to write him a long letter, telling him of my case and the awful things I had heard about his Church. In closing I asked him to name a book from which I might learn what the Church really taught, and something of its history. In due time came a letter, two pages long, written with his own hand, gentle and wise of spirit; and a few days later an auto- graphed copy of his little book, The Faith of Our Fathers. To-day I attended the service in his memory at the Cathedral on Fifth Avenue, drawn equally by veneration of a noble char- acter and gratitude to a great man who took time to answer the scrawling letter of a little boy eleven years old. Once more I felt the power of the Church, opening its arms alike to rich and poor, to the learned and the unlearned, flinging across their troubled lives the mantle 120 ~=Preaching in New York of an august memory and an eternal hope— flooding the mortal scene with music and color and the romance of holiness! March 27.—Once again Easter Day builds its great Arch of Promise over the homes of our living and the graves of our dead. “If it were not so, I would have told you,” said Jesus; to which I love to add the words of St. Ignatius: “Those who have heard the word of Jesus can bear his silence.” He confirms faith without satisfying curiosity, but always he lets light through the Shadow. When he spoke of his own death He simply said, “I go to my Father.” No place is named, only a Presence. He thought in terms of life, and death was but a cloud-shadow floating over the human valley. Eternity is now, God is here, and death is but the shadow of life! O my soul, remember and rejoice! Friend, surely so, For this I know: That our faiths are foolish by falling below, Not coming above, what God will show. April 10.—Broadway is a parable of human life. Born amid the rocks of Spuyten Duyvil, it has an innocent, if rather ragged, childhood, ‘““‘Bagdad-on-the-Subway”’ | and it is ready for school by the time it reaches Columbia and Union Seminary—though one may doubt if it learns much theology. Leaving the University, it behaves very well at first; but by the time it arrives at Columbus Circle, its mind runs to automobiles, which is not a good omen. Alas, between Broadway Taber- nacle and the Flatiron Building, it is a gay and giddy-paced street, garish in manners if not in morals,—all lit up and flashy,—known as “the Street of Seven Sins,” though it is not as bad as it is painted. By the time it gets to Grace Church, it is a sober, middle-aged street, the elitter of the White Way having faded into the light of common day. At the City Hall it mixes in politics, but to no good purpose. Gradually it becomes the Street of the Dreadful Height, until it ends in a Grand Cafion, and thinks only of money, as if smitten with the avarice of age. Toward the end, even its churches are very rich; which makes one ponder the words of Jesus about the end of a “broad way.” April 15.—On a soft-spoken day in spring, when the sky is clear, with only bits of lacy clouds here and there, it is no good trying to 122 Preaching in New York stay in and study; so I go a-rambling. New York is so vast,—like a human ocean,—that one may wander any whither: from Feather Bed Lane to the Bowery, from Hell Gate to Green- wich Village. On top of a bus I floated down the human river called Fifth Avenue, landing at Seventeenth Street, on my way to Irving Place, ‘the heart of the O. Henry country.” His house at No. 55 still stands, but he seems to be everywhere in New York, as the spirit of Dickens haunts London. Though not a New Yorker, no one was ever more penetrated by the genius and flavor of New York, its comedy, its tragedy, its endless surprise. Thence to the top of the Woolworth Tower, where, as from the peak of Matterhorn, one sees a maze of streets northward, through which Broadway and Fifth Avenue run like dual motifs of the city. From that dizzy pinnacle, what an incredible vista is unveiled—the hills of Jersey, the distances of Brooklyn, the harbor nearby, the blue tumbling sea, and Ellis Island, with thoughts of the inpouring tides of peoples of all lands, making one wonder what our America will be like fifty years hence. Be- low, the people on the streets look like a colony “Bagdad-on-the-Subway” 123 of ants crawling on the pavement; and Trinity and St. Paul’s are only toy churches, with tiny Spires, where men play with religion. Which thing is a parable, as if another philosophy of life had found vogue—an aggressive, gigantic, ambitious materialism; yet those tiny temples still bear witness to the things of the spirit. Once New York nestled under their shadow; now it towers above them. Taking lunch with the Old Banker at the India House was like escaping from New York to dine in the days of Charles Lamb; after which I strolled through Wall Street, on to the east and north, “where cross the crowded ways of life,” and found myself in the Bowery— which sorely needs a bath. The East Side is like the world of to-day, jammed together and slowly learning to live together, not without friction and fuss. By sunset I had strayed into Brooklyn, to the corner of Fulton and Cran- berry streets, where Walt Whitman set up and printed Leaves of Grass; and after a suffocat- ing journey in the Subway jam, I reached home, knowing of a truth that the line in the Pepys Diary is the greatest line in literature: “And so to bed,” 124 Preaching in New York April 19.—Went with the throng to hear the President speak at the unveiling of the statue of Simon Bolivar in Central Park. It was a bril- liant day, and my heart behaved like a child when he appeared—tall, nobly formed, stately, benign, a little ill at ease, as if not yet used to the ways of his high office, and its loneliness, but with a haunting voice, and the kindest face I have ever looked into. He is a symbolic figure, with the vestiture upon him of the will and purpose of a nation; and we need not apolo- gise to any sentiment of equality for regarding him with reverence. When he is running for office, he is only a man; when elected, he is something more. The accolade of the national will makes him a priest of humanity in this land, where—please God—great ideals are being worked out. What the President does before the world he does for and through us, typifying the nation as no mere ruler could typify it. Huis character is our character, his work our work. God save the President! April 20.—Sir Philip Gibbs is one of the noblest and most lovable of living men, a bril- liant reporter, a great-hearted world-citizen. “Bagdad-on-the-Subway” $25 During the war he dipped his pen in the wells of agony, heroism, and pity and told us all he was allowed to tell of the holocaust of youth; and one felt, between the lines, that he was on the side of the Boys against “‘the old men” who sent them into the shambles. To-day he is as picturesque in painting a new world as he was in describing the ruin of the old. It is all so vivid, so near, just a jump away; but, alas, there is a yawning abyss, and our heavy-footed humanity is afraid to leap. Once such apoca- lyptic writing would have made our hearts beat high, but accumulated disillusion leaves us cold. Such men think in pictures, not in processes. What we need now are great engineers, patient bridge-builders, wise path-finders, if we are to cross or go around the abyss of impotence and despair that yawns at our feet. If less impres- sive as an interpreter than as a reporter, Sir Philip Gibbs does help to keep our souls alive by his vision and his pity—his trust in God and his faith in youth—and his character is worth more than a fleet of ships. April 24.—At lunch to-day some one told how Beecher answered the following letter :— 126 Preaching in New York “Dear Sir: I journeyed over from my New York hotel yesterday to hear you preach, ex- pecting, of course, to hear an exposition of the Gospel of Christ. Instead, I heard a political harangue, with no reason or cohesion in it. You made an ass of yourself.” To which the great preacher replied: “My dear Sir: Iam sorry you should have taken so long a journey to hear Christ preached, and then heard what you are polite enough to call a ‘political ha- rangue!’ J am sorry, too, that you think I made an ass of myself. I have but one con- solation; that you did not make an ass of your- self: the Lord did that.” As Samuel Butler said long ago, some people are “equally horrified at hearing the Christian religion doubted, or at seeing it practiced;” content to worship Christ on Sunday and follow Machiavelli on week days. They do not see that a sermon in defence of the present order of things is as much ‘“‘po- litical preaching” as a sermon in criticism of it! May 5.—Picked up a bargain in a second- hand book store, Women and Theatres, by Olive Logan, (New York: Carleton, 1869) all for fifteen cents! Two chapters interested me— — “Bagdad-on-the-Subway” 127 “About the Leg Business” and “About Nudity in Theatres’—showing to what extent our stage was given up to the worship of Lubricity in the decade following the Civil War. The author tells of a certain popular actress who, “stripped as naked as she dare, trots down to the footlights, giggles, winks at the audience, and rattles off some stupid attempts at wit;” and yet she made more money than “the poetic Edwin Booth, infinitely more than the intellec- tual E. L. Davenport.” Of the entire list of New York theatres, only Booth’s was clear of the charge of giving “nude exhibitions;” as a critic of the times put it, “legs are lyrics and beauty is only skin deep.” At one time, in 1868, only two theatres in the city were offering legitimate drama. One manager, after losing money on a classic play, “rubbed his dry old hands together” and said, “T’ll put a woman on my stage without a rag on her.” It is not ex- actly pretty reading, but it does make one cheer- ful about the theatre of to-day, which we are told is headed for Hades at lightning speed. Things are bad enough, but not as bad as they were in the “good old days”—thank goodness! 128 Preaching in New York May 14.—What is the great American sin? Extravagance?) Vice? Graft? Nos it 4s a kind of half-humorous, good-natured indiffer- ence,—a lack of ‘concentrated indignation,’ as an English friend described it,—which allows extravagance and vice to flourish. Trace most of our ills to their source, and it is found that they exist by virtue of an easy-going, fatalistic indifference which dislikes to have its comfort disturbed. For years a tide of immigration has poured in upon us, threatening to inundate our institutions ; but America did not care—lacking public-mindedness. Lawlessness runs rife for the same reason, in this city of cliff-dwellers and cavemen. The most shameless greed, the most sickening industrial atrocities, the most appalling public scandals are exposed; but a half-cynical and wholly indifferent public passes them by with hardly a shrug of the shoulders; and they are lost in the medley of events. This is the great American sin, inviting the thunder and lightning of the wrath of God. May 23.—Standing on the pier at Hoboken to-day, in the presence of the remains of five thousand boys brought back from the fields of “Bagdad-on-the-Subway” 129 France—each casket draped with a flag, until the whole scene looked like one vast Flag of the Dead—the President said with a sob in his voice: “It must not be again. We shall not forget.” If those words, so apt and fitly spoken, express anything more than a vague wish—pious, sentimental, negative—what are we going to do about it? What can we do, sunk in an awful apathy, born of disillusionment and dismay, with red revolution on one side and black reaction on the other? War was simple and exciting; peace is complex and dull. Yet, if our devout prayers are to be answered, we must somehow organize to answer them, since God will not do for us what it is our duty to do. At least we can renew our faith at the Altar of Memory, recalling Hankey, Chapin, Seeger, Brooke, Sorley, Kilmer—a rosary of genius— who kept “rendezvous with death,” and, dying, left one shining phrase, “Carry On,” which should be the first command of the living! They were not cynics. They did not fear, or falter, or fail—how can we bow to the foul mud | gods of greed and hate in the presence of such a cloud of witnesses! By their faith we must 130 Preaching in New York win the victories of Peace, as they won the victories of War. June 10.—Have been out in Jowa—what a relief after the din and rush and hurly-burly of New York! One gets tired of noises, tired of foreign tongues, tired of the panorama of strange faces, tired of a kaleidoscopic cosmo- politanism. It was a joy to escape from the crowded confusion into the wide spaces where there is room to breathe, room to think, and where, by the mercy of God, Silence like a poultice came To heal the blows of sound. Also, it is good to get away, betimes, from the New York point. of view, which so easily sees things all awry. Iowa thinks as little of New York as New York thinks of Iowa; they are two worlds, as unlike as two planets. Both are provincial, but in different ways, and one is needed to off-set the other. To neurotic city eyes Main Street may seem drab and dismal, but how little they know of its neighborliness, its unveneered humanity. Iowa is at the heart of America, and if the Lord will let me stop there a while before I go hence, I shall loiter as “Bagdad-on-the-Subway’”’ 131 long as I can, until “a sweeping Garment, vast and white,” shall brush me off the earth. June 19.—There is an O. Henry story in which a Westerner came to New York and well nigh died of lonesomeness. He hungered for conversation, but no one had time to talk. Fin- ally, he compelled the keeper of a cafe, at the point of a revolver, to enlarge upon his curt comment on the weather, and talk at some length about the baby, about the new piano, about all manner of heartening topics. In Lon- don the tale would be believable; but not in New York! At least not in summer time, when folk from the South and West, and everywhere— buyers, tourists, gad-abouts, and all sorts— invade the city. To Southerners this swelter- ing, sizzling town is a summer resort, and their leisurely ways, their courtesy, their infinite talk make it seem like an over-grown village. If you speak to a man these days, in the softest voice he will tell you his autobiography, all about the “doings” down south, and an elaborate yarn besides. Meantime, the papers say “New York is empty!’ It may be for those whose homes are 132 Preaching in New York boarded up in May, not to be opened till Novem- ber, while, in far off shady woods, beside placid lakes or blue seas, they escape the conscription of daily toil—gayly unmindful of the multitudes who stifle in the brazen furnace of interminable streets. How little New Yorkers know of New York! It is in fact a series of villages held together by a loose bond; the rich dwell in one, the poor in another, knowing next to nothing of each other. Life is specialized. We run in a rut, go ina set, forgetting the human universe about us. June 20.—Went to the East Side, to offer a gentle prayer over a little child run over and killed by a car. Up four flights of stairs, in narrow halls lit by dim gas-jets, over floors creaky and uneven, I reached the tenement “home,’’ where I witnessed a heart-breaking scene. Half-a-hundred people had gathered in the rooms and halls, a testimony to the kindli- ness and neighborliness of the poor. After the service, as the little body was carried out, the children who had been playing in the street assembled, their bright, pretty faces bestreaked “Bagdad-on-the-Subway’”’ ac with dirt, making a picture, as they stood in silence. For hours I wandered along the dingy streets, littered with rubbish, where people are so crowded that life treads on life, and solitude must be unknown. The sidewalks swarmed with children; the air rang with their shouts or curses, as they darted to and fro amid the rumble of the wheels, playing games. To one watching the scene, it has a kind of repulsive picturesqueness; but to be in it, with no hope of a better lot, would make the best people of the city anarchists within a week. Yet it is accepted with patient fatalism by people whose dwelling-places are more like lairs and dens than homes. Only the joy of the children re- deemed its drabness from utter desolation. Rambling on into the Jewish quarter, I found the sidewalks thronged with peddlers and pur- chasers, and everybody trafficking eagerly. There were little girls of Madonna-like beauty, with oval faces and olive tints, and clear, dark eyes, relucent as evening pools; and on boxes and in doorways, old men with long beards of jetty black or silvery gray, and the noble pro- files of their race. Among such as these, I 134 Preaching in New York remembered, Jesus walked, and from among them He chose his disciples and friends. As I walked homeward in the falling daylight, the scene was touched by the gentleness of evening, blurring its harsh realities with beauty—like the mercy of God softening the brutality of man. July 1.—Coney Island in July! It is the in- flamed appendix of ‘“Noiseville-on-the-Hud- son,’ where human beings battered by the whirligig of life in New York, enjoy assault and battery by super-noises, extra-loud, long, and shrill. Its very architecture yells, its pillars barber poles, its decorations gilded bas-reliefs like the tops of the cages in the circus. What is a shout on Broadway is a shriek at Coney. Every auto keeps its klaxon going, and not a peanut-roaster but has a whistle that never stops. Jazz goes on fourteen hours a day, barkers chant, scream and roar their wares, and even toy balloons explode with the wail of a dying pig, while the brass band plays in Bedlam. It is glorious! After a “hot dog” sandwich and a Babylonian brick of ice-cream, we go up on the Ferris wheel, down the long-legged “Bagdad-on-the-Subway’’ 135 trestles on the roller-coaster, and round and round on the Merry-go-round, to the grinding rhythm of an artificial xylophone. In the park lovers loll and “spoon.” Betimes, we hire a suit at the Jew-nicipal bath-house, and splash up and down in the sea, or toss rings for Kewpie dolls, or shoot at leaping tin rabbits, and eat pop-corn. Or, dizzy by thrill on thrill, we just watch the human moving picture show, till eve- ning falls and the electric lights, looped and festooned above us, add glitter to our glee. Then, having climbed the Swiss Alps, ‘“‘with a real water-fall,”’ and looked into a dreadful opium den, ‘a replica of one on the Barbara coast,’ we fight, shove, crowd our way into airless cars for home, packed like sardines— jammed, jolted, happy! Joy, joy, it is the life! July 4.—In spite of the corrosive spirit of the hour, and the cataleptic muscular contractions of nations, each trying to huddle within itself, the great words of Edmund Burke still tell the truth, like a transcription from the _ hiero- glyphics of God. In his Reflections on the French Revolution, he wrote: “Society is indeed a contract. It is a part- 136 ~=6 Preaching in New York nership in all science; a partnership in all art; a partnership in all virtue, and in all perfection. As the ends of such a partnership cannot be obtained in many generations, it becomes a partnership not only between those who are liv- ing, but between those who are dead, and those who are to be born. Each contract of each particular state is but a clause in the great primeval contract of eternal society, linking the lower with the higher natures, connecting the visible with the invisible world, according to a fixed compact sanctioned by the inviolable oath which holds all physical and all moral natures, each in their appointed place.” July 8.—At 110th Street and Amsterdam Avenue, not far from the gates of Columbia University, stands the Old Gospel Tent, where revival services are held. Nowhere is real evangelism more needed than in New York, but, alas, the men of the Old Gospel Tent think it more important to denounce Darwin and defy the University—challenging its Professors to debate, describing them as “baboon boosters,” “monkey-lovers,” and the like. What a spec- tacle, a narrow, pietistic religion camped at the “Bagdad-on-the-Subway”’ 139 gates of a great University! To such a depth has Christian evangelism fallen that it must play at clap-trap, belittling philosophy and ridiculing science. Truly Erasmus was right: “By identifying the new learning with heresy you make orthodoxy synonymous with ignor- ance!’ How one longs for the tender, human appeal of Gypsy Smith, the spiritual common sense of Moody, or the winsomeness of George Truett. July 10.—When there is a parade on Fifth Avenue, which is always the centre of the stage, —whether it be the Circus and the elephants, or the “Old Soaks” protesting against Prohibition on the Fourth of July—New York is like a village. People otherwise aloof are friendly, gossipy, and charming. To-day, by contrast, the Christian Endeavorers marched to the music of “Onward, Christian Soldiers.” One banner they carried arrested attention: “A Warless World by 1923!” All wished it might be so, but many thought it too brave a prophecy. But I remember a similar slogan carried in 1911: “A Saloonless Nation by 1921;” and it came true, with time to spare. Who shall say 138 Preaching in New York that the principle of world peace shall not swiftly prevail, since the pressure of grim facts is proving, by a Divine pragmatism, that war is suicide! The Church is not dead, least of all when it marches and works in unity. July 17.—Dr. Albert Parker Fitch, the sum- mer supply at the Brick Church, moves me as few other living preachers, as if he had the key to a secret door in my nature. A keen, critical modern intellect, alive to the issues and agita- tions of our day—its social passion, its scientific quest—he is also an ancientist in his faith. He strikes a chord hardly heard since the Middle Ages, which makes our new pragmatisms and old naturalisms seem petty and superficial; a note aloof and haunting, evoking a spell tender and terrible, as old as the world and as mys- terious as the wind in the trees. Aye, he knows that Our destiny, our being’s heart and home, Is with infinitude, and only there; and that our dream of social justice will end in defeat, unless a profounder Life of the Spirit upholds it, transfigures it, and gives it consecra- tion. To-day I rode fifty miles to hear him “Bagdad-on-the-Subway” 139 preach, and the prayer alone was worth the journey. It was meat and medicine to my soul. Nay, more; something deep in me, half-uttered and half-dumb, found voice in its winged words. After all, preaching, if it strikes “the depth beyond the bottom,” has no rival in the human heart. July 21.—From my study on Riverside Drive I look down upon the majestic, broad-breasted Hudson as it nears the sea which is its eternity. Its moods are as many as my own, varying with the hours: now lucid and revealing, now overhung by a soft haze of dreamy meditation, now swept by drifting mist, like a blue dust of rain. It has become almost personal in its friendliness, and I seem to feel its bafflement when the inflowing tide pushes its waters up- stream, like the pressure of the Eternal Will thwarting my impulsive spirit. None the less, it is calm, having won by depth what all the world is seeking—peace! How God must love beauty. Every evening I watch the Divine Artist painting a new sun- set over the New Jersey hills, and marvel at his masterpieces. Last night the whole sky was 140 Preaching in New York aglow with gorgeous colors shining through long bars of clouds—awe-inspiring in its loveli- ness. First a mass of molten splendor,—like Dante’s great rose of gold,—with a founda- tion of dark vapor. Gradually the gold changed to delicate, tender green, then to pale lavender, deepening into soft purple as night came down—like a shade slowly drawn over a latticed window in the City of God. September 11.—The birthday of O. Henry! It ought to be honored all over New York, in whose teeming, whirling, variegated life he saw a perpetual Arabian Nights entertainment. He was steeped in it, intoxicated by it. From the lower East Side, where, in August, “kids on fire-escapes with their tongues out try to get a bit of fresh air that hasn’t been fried on both sides,” to the bright lights of the Great White Way “calling moths from miles, from leagues, to come in and attend the singeing school,” he knew the wonderland of New York. To him it was “the Great Big City of Razzle Dazzle,” and his stories, if taken together, are its best biography. He seems to have been most at home in lower New York, in Green- “Bagdad-on-the-Subway” 141 wich Village, Gramercy Park, the Bowery, and along Broadway. Only once, it is said, did he venture as far up town as Seventy-second Street and Riverside, and then he asked with an injured air if he had “not passed Peakshill!” It was New York as a laboratory of human nature that held his insight and interest, and in its medley of comedy and tragedy he was happy, learning the while how to Turn to a woman a woman’s Heart, and a child’s to a child. September 18.—By the kindness of a British friend I have received one of the most remark- able books of theology in recent years, The W orld’s Redemption, by E. C. Rolt—a book of living insight into the deepest mystery. It is an unfinished, unpolished book, and was little noticed when it appeared; the work of a dying man writing away from his library—its pierc- ing insight due, perhaps, to the ministry of pain and the near presence of death—yet, while not invulnerable to criticism, revealing more authentic theological genius than any book I remember. It deals with the wonder of the love of God in a manner unique and profound, 142 Preaching in New York almost penetrating the mystery into which the writer was so soon to pass—lingering at the portal while he wrote. September 28.—The Preaching of To-mor- row! It was the theme of one of the most thrilling addresses I have ever heard, by Dr. Johnston Ross, at the opening of Union Sem- inary to-day. Having spent his year of rest in the Orient, along the Christian frontier, he returned to tell us what preaching must be against that background. The ultimate end of religion, he said, is the production of “a dis- position of respectful, ministrant good will,” which will make use of science for the more skillful service of humanity. The address was an example of the kind of preaching it proph- esied. No one will ever forget its vividness, its flash and play of insight, humor and pathos, and its revelation of personality by which truth is made real and winsome—which remains the secret of preaching to-day, as it will be to- morrow. Somehow, with his far-sweeping sympathy, his catholic faith, his soft sure in- sight, his brooding beauty of phrase, and an “ineffable remainder” which eludes words, Dr. “Bagdad-on-the-Subway”’ 143 Ross finds me at deeper levels than almost any preacher among us. September 30.—James Bryce, Henry van Dyke, and Lyman Abbott sitting together at a luncheon given by the American-Armenian So- ciety—we shall hardly see that picture again. Three tiny men physically, yet what influence and power they have in church and state and letters. Now they are faring toward sunset, and one feels about them what Carlyle felt in Chalmers, a serenity as of “the oncoming eve- ning and the star-crowned night!” A chat with Dr. Abbott gave me opportunity to ask him some questions I had long wanted to ask him. He thought his Theology of an Evolutionist had been his most influential book, but he had put more of himself into his Life and Letters of Paul. If he were to rewrite his commentaries, he said, he would make no special change in John and Romans, but would modify some things in Matthew, Mark, Luke, and the Acts. His rules of work are, first, never to do anything himself which he can get any one else to do; and second, to take his rest before his work, not as a restorative after it. 144 Preaching in New York As Lord Bryce spoke of the Armenian horrors, his eyes filled with a mist of tears, and his voice trembled on the edge of a sob, remem- bering the inconceivable cruelties of the slow, ghastly crucifixion of a nation—a crime un- paralleled in modern history, a red blot alike on Christianity and civilisation! October 8.—During the last seven years I have heard much preaching, in London and in New York, and it has given me a new under- standing of the man at both ends of the sermon. Many kinds of preaching I have heard—good, bad, thrilling, ineffective; not much preaching in the older and more stately style, with pol- ished phrases and elaborate homiletics; some pretty, perfumed preaching, as hard to endure as slangy, sloppy preaching; much virile, force- ful, interesting preaching, topical, journalistic, often striking, and at times picturesque; very y little expository preaching, as in the days of Maclaren and Dale; too much catch-penny preaching, taking up topics of the day in a cheap, sensational fashion; a great deal of wholesome, inspiring, edifying preaching, good to hear and wise to heed; and now and then “Bagdad-on-the-Subway”’ 145 the haunting notes of a New Preaching, simple, vivid, direct, human, challenging. The New Preacher is a man of culture to his finger-tips, alive to the ideas and issues of his age, aware of all that goes on in science, let- ters, and life, whether in the drawing-room of the human heart or in the basement—but he wears his learning lightly. Abjuring the old vocabulary of theology—an unknown tongue in a day of spiritual illiteracy—he uses the speech of his day in a style familiar, colloquial, conversational, with no filigree oratory. If he approaches religion from the humanitarian and ethical side, it is a stroke of strategy and tact, taking men as he finds them, welcoming such faith as they have as a point of contact. He is not dismayed when a bright, jazz-minded lad says, with a superior air, speaking of Heaven and Hell: ‘On that line there’s nothin’ doin’.” He knows how to go forth on the hills, and bring home wild asses with bridles on their necks, Not yet has the New Preacher become an evangelist, as he must be if his Social Gospel is to have individual appeal. But he knows his age, lives in it, loves it, and he is learning 146 Preaching in New York to play the ancient, eternal music on the strange key-board of the modern mind—knowing that behind its airy cleverness there hides the old wistful need of God, without whom the human theorem has no answer. He sees that Jesus saw straight and knew what he was talking about, and until men make trial of His truth they will flounder in a bog—like a car in the ditch. Against war, racial rancor, industrial brutality, and the new sensualism he aims his darts, hating hokum, hocus-pocus, and all un- reality, the while he laughs at sectarianism. In England we have Studdert-Kennedy, a prince of New Preachers—who learned the need and knack of it amid the fire-rains of War—with Orchard, Norwood, Sheppard, Maude Royden, Berry, Sykes, and others next of kin. In America we hear such voices as Fosdick, Hough, Gilkey, Sockman, Luccock, Sperry, Roberts, to name no others. These, and others of like kind, bespeak a New Pulpit, alike in technique and teaching, in which a real- ism of insight is united with a richness of sym- pathy, the old values with the new vision—an emancipated intellect joined with the eternal orthodoxy of the heart—prophesying the rule “Bagdad-on-the-Subway” 147 of the Law of Love in the lives of men and its reign in a new social order. October 10.—Spent a glorious hour in the studio of Gutzon Borglum, the sculptor, hidden away in a woodland near Stamford. The Master was not at home, but his tools were there, and the miniatures of his masterpieces, among them a tiny model of the noble face of Lincoln now in the Capitol at Washington—a face to fortify by its firmness and bless by its gentleness. There, too, was his Roosevelt, in- stinct with energy and incandescent vitality, uniting an effervescent temperament with a vivid simplicity of thought and a swift sagacity of action. What a personality! Only genius could have caught and fixed its reflection in the eternal repose of granite. The Newark War Memorial is unfinished, but slowly taking shape, showing in outline the pageant of American history. Outside the studio the autumn woods were as full of color as a painter’s shop, and the falling leaves made a cloth of gold. October 14.—The Methodists are a wonder- ful folk. Alike on the far frontier, where the 148 Preaching in New York “circuit-rider” carries a Bible in one side of the saddle-bags, and a hymn-book in the other, or in the human wilderness of New York, they never falter nor fail. Down on John Street, “the Mother Church of American Methodism” has held an every-day-in-the-year noon-day service for more than thirty years. Inthe glare of the Great White Way, “ninety-nine steps from Broadway,” they have a Union Church Social Centre where human service is a fine art, whether it be teaching the Bible, or getting a job for a toe-dancer, or helping a chorus-girl over a hard place. If one method does not work, they try another, as Wesley did long ago. Manhattan Island will soon be missionary ter- ritory for Protestant churches, but the Method- ists will never give up, never be defeated. October 25.—Have been showing an English friend the sights of New York, and it was as good as a story-book. He had never seen the city before, and if I stretched matters a little, the Lord will surely forgive—I simply had to make New York better than London. Of course, it is no use dragging all the skeletons from the closet, so I avoided certain sections “Bagdad-on-the-Subway” 149 of town. He was a good sport, pretending to accept my version of facts; but when I said that the Pennsylvania Station takes the shine off Buckingham Palace, he had his doubts. Up Riverside Drive to Grant’s tomb, through the University and Union Seminary, and lunch at the Russian Inn, where some artist has told fairy-stories in a riot of color. Down town to Trinity, St. Paul’s, and Wall Street, and tea at a famous French café in Greenwich Village. Washington Square, the O. Henry Country, and Gramercy Park, and dinner at the Armen- ian Restaurant. As we parted at the Prince George Hotel, he said with a twinkle in his eye: “To-morrow you must let me see the American quarter!’ The rogue! With other beings made in the image of God I rode home in a stuffy car, thinking Subway thoughts. November 1.—As the Washington Confer- ence draws near, all kinds of thoughts, hopes, and misgivings mingle in my heart. Memories throng upon me, especially that day in 1917 when I took part in the burial of five hundred and twenty-seven boys. When I close my eyes, the scene comes back; the long rows of silent 150 Preaching in New York figures, each with a cloth thrown over it. Of course, we are bidden not to be sentimental but very “practical”; yet I feel that the boys who gave their bodies to the shells—fathers of dream-children, never now to be born—ought to have something to say at the Conference. If those millions could pass in procession before our imagination, surely the hesitations of diplomacy and the fanaticisms of nationality would be forgotten! Facts are the presence of God—physical facts, economic facts, no less than moral facts —and by no stretch of words can the facts of the world to-day be called practical. They sug- gest either iniquity or imbecility, or both. To- day, as is always true in the long last, even financial facts confirm the moral demands, and that is the hope that something may be done. After all, it may be the mission of economic determinism to teach righteousness, as it is the function of religion to reveal meanings and values—as the seers of old read the will of God for their times in the courses of history and the exegesis of events. Happily the sky is less cloudy, the public mind less torn by party rancor and personal ‘“Bagdad-on-the-Subway” Wort venom; and the whisper of grief is subdued from a sob to a sigh. Perhaps, by the mercy of God, we may take one timid step, if no more, toward that far off, long dreamed of goal of a frontierless and unfortified world, ruled by moral intelligence and creative good will. But the facts will not let us hope too much. The apathy is deadening, the inertia appalling; humanity learns so slowly and forgets too quickly, and the flood of years sweeps the past away. “To build and build and build on running sand How terrible it must be to be God!” November 6.—If I had my way, there would be no Minister at the Church of the Divine Paternity, but only the great Organ, with its myriad keys, tones, and echoes, played by the gentle-hearted, spiritually-minded Artist who for twenty-three years has made his instrument an Altar. Such music is both priest and prophet to me, uttering those wistful yearnings which well up in every human heart, but which no tongue can speak, and whispering those 152 Preaching in New York white truths mortal words discolor. When I hear it I begin to see the hint of a meaning in the turbid ebb and flow of human misery about me, albeit only a glimpse, only the vague shape of a reason that floats into my heart, and melts as quickly away. But in rare moments, by the mercy of God, I feel a ground swell of pro- phetic rhythm—an undertone of all-sustaining melody—running through our tangled mortal life, prophesying a fair, far time when sorrow and sin shall cease, and the soul of man shall be happy and free—learning in love the truth it has lost in hate. And sometimes, as he plays, life drops its veil, the tumult of time is hushed, and those who have vanished seem near—Eter- nity murmurs on all my horizons, and the noise- less knocking of a Presence is at my Gate. Papers A Tea With Tagore “What is wrong with the world? Why is it so upset and out of joint? What truth have we missed that we cannot set it right, cannot find a way out of the bog into which it has fallen? What can the great, deep mind of the Fast tell us for the healing of humanity?” Questions such as these were in my mind as I went to a meeting with Rabindranath Tagore, the Hindu poet and seer, kindly arranged for me by a young man of India whom I had learned to know and love in London. There came back the scene from The Talisman, by Sir Walter Scott, telling how, a truce having been called, Richard and Saladin met and a test of skill was proposed. The big brawny man of the West with one blow cut a bar of iron in two, and the man from the East was amazed. Then Saladin, in his turn, drew a 153 154 Preaching in New York keen scimitar and in an instant, as with the twist of the wrist, laid open a pillow of down. King Richard was amazed at his dexterity. It was a parable of the East and the West, in their qualities of mind, and I wondered if they could ever really understand each other. Kipling said no. East is East, he said, and West is West, and never the twain shall meet. But they have been meeting for ages. The Bible we read is a book of the East, and he whom we follow as the Master of Life wore a turban and a tunic. Time out of mind the thought of the East has been fertilising the West, opening seeds of faith and beauty. The Light of Asia, even when seen through the stained glass of poetry, warms us strangely— touching our prosaic life with the glow of that eternal mysticism out of which the great re- ligions were born. A common afflatus pervades — the epigrams of Goethe, the oriental poetry of © Hugo, the music of Verdi, and the essays of Emerson—the wandering brotherhood of the winds having brought a rich pollen from afar. It was in 1866 that Keshub Sen gave his great lecture, Jesus Christ, Europe and Asia; and three years later the same voice was heard A Tea with Tagore 155 in the question, “India Asks Who Is Christ?” The answer was that he is a prophet of the East, and that the men of the East may, per- haps, know and understand him better than we who live in the West. Four years later came that golden book, unique in our annals for its spiritual insight and beauty, The Oriental Christ, by Mazoomdar, afterwards the dear friend of David Swing, who described him as “a soul perfumed by the winds and flowers of heavenly places, a shadow of the early Chris- tians who followed Jesus with shouts and palm branches.” Yes, Kipling was wrong; no one can compute the debt which the men of the West owe to the men of the East. It was in the Algonquin Hotel, and the room in which I was received had a touch of eastern light and color, as if the poet had brought a bit of India to America. Standing beside the tea-table, he greeted me with a gentle, stately simplicity of courtesy, friendly without being too formal, and we began talking of his various visits to our country—the first when his son was a student at the University of Illinois, the second when he came in the interest of his school, this being the third. As he talked his 156 Preaching in New York exquisitely soft voice was like music, and the impression of a great spiritual personality made an atmosphere in which one thought only of the highest things. His oriental robes, his dome-like forehead, his long iron-gray hair and beard, his beautiful dark eyes, made a picture of singular winsomeness, as if some figure had stepped out of the pages of the Bible. As he talked on, speaking with the English accent—beginning a sentence in the treble key and sliding down—I remembered how when Yeats sought to find some one with whom to compare Tagore, he went back to Thomas a-Kempis. But a-Kempis was obsessed by the thought of sin, and Tagore seems to have as little thought of sin as a child. Say, rather, that he is a kind of blend of Walt Whitman and Francis of Assisi—a soul to whom the law and life of the world is love, comradeship, joy. My mind went back to my first reading of his poetry, in Song Offerings, and the enchant- ment of it—like floating, far off music, with a wistful elusive sadness, yet with touches to remind one of the Song of Songs, its imagery so tenuous at times, like filmy smoke-tapestry— and how, later, I had a happy argument with A Tea with Tagore 157 Alfred Noyes as to whether it is poetry at all or not. From these memories I was called sharply back by what he was saying about America: “It is indeed strange,” he said. “When I walk the streets of your brilliant city, people look at me as if I were a man of another planet. I am acomic figure. They smile at me, curi- ously. What can it mean?” “No, our people are not unfriendly,’ I hastened to assure him. “Your oriental dress is odd and unfamiliar, and they look at you with the curiosity of provincials. They do not mean to be unkind. In London men of the East are often seen, but in New York it is not so. Your people do not come often enough.” “But you will not let them come; you shut them out as despised Asiatics,” he replied. “They are ‘the scum of the earth’ to you, ap- parently. America does not want us. Our ancient culture, our old and sweet customs mean nothing to it. Our ways are wrong because they are different. America lacks respect for unlikeness, for otherness. Its democracy seeks to make all men alike, to run them into one mould, to rob them or shame them out of their 158 Preaching in New York picturesqueness of diversity. Americanization seems to mean that when all accept a certain formula it is enough; but old racial traits and cultural characteristics cannot be ironed out of humanity. Nor should they be. It is not a melting-pot that is needed, but a flower-garden, where each race may bloom and add its beauty to the commonwealth.” “Tt is only too true,” I admitted, for he had put his finger upon the absurdity of regimented democracy which seeks equality at the expense of liberty. “But America is young, as the lives of people go, and we have much to learn. Our faults are the faults of youth, and may be over- come. To go from America to England, for example, is like leaving a foot-ball team to attend a faculty meeting. America needs India, and, if I may say so, perhaps India needs America.” ‘Ah, it is well said,” he agreed, emphasizing his approval with a graceful bow of the head; “it is good to hear you say it. So few men of the West think that India has anything to give to the world—forgetting our high philoso- phy and our rich literature and our treasure of song. They come to us for what they can get, A Tea with Tagore 159 not for what we can give—seeking to exploit us, not to understand us. They are not com- rades, but conquerors. They think we are inferior to them because we are unlike them: Our culture is ignored in their universities— they do not know us, lacking the sympathetic insight needed to see a different point of view.” There was a tone of pathos in his voice, the echo of a great heartbreak at thought of the chaos of the world and the tragedy of India. It was a sadness hard to know from despair, deepened, I felt, by his glimpse of our metallic, touch-the-button civilisation in the West, and the tide of materialism and narrow national- ism now flowing. Like all the finer minds of the world, he is bereaved; and I reflected that he spoke as a poet commanding the largest audiences that any poet ever won. From end to end of India his songs are sung, especially his songs breathing a passionate love of his ancient motherland. “What is wrong with the world that we mis- understand each other so sadly? Why have we gotten so snarled and twisted and seem to see no way out? After all, we are brothers made to share the large innocence of nature and the 160 Preaching in New York unfailing love of God. Why have we gone so far astray?” I asked, thinking to lead up to other matters that I had in mind. “The world does not know the truth,” he said simply. “It has no common idea about which its life may unite and cohere. It has for- gotten, if it ever discovered, that down below race, rank, religion there is a fundamental humanity—man as man—which is universal and everywhere the same. I ama man of India as to my origin, training, and outlook; but I am something else—I am a human being, a man of humanity. I have learned that, though our tongues are different and our habits are dis- similar, at bottom our hearts are one. The clouds, generated on the banks of the Nile, fertilise the distant shores of the Ganges. East is East and West is West—God forbid that it should be otherwise—but the twain must meet in amity, peace, and mutual understand- ing. Their meeting will be all the more fruitful because of their differences. Humanity will be perfect only when diverse races and nations shall be free to evolve their distinct character- istics, while all are attached to the stem of humanity by the bond of love. I do not think A Tea with Tagore 161 in terms of nationality, but in terms of humanity.” “Not even in terms of Indian nationalism?” I ventured to ask, interrupting. “You do not support the nationalist movement of India, rumors of which we hear from time to time?” “Yes, even Indian nationalism; J am beyond all that. We need a new vocabulary as well as a new mind in the world. I am as much at home in America—if you will allow me to be— as laminIndia. Besides, India is not a nation; it is many nations, many races. It has an ap- pearance of unity only because it must seem to stand together against the dominance of big empires. All imperialism—except the imperial- ism of love—is wrong. It brings little nations and various races together, like chips in a basket, but they do not unite; they are simply held together. There is no bond of union.” “Will not the League of Nations tend to bring men and nations together in a different spirit and upon a better basis?” I inquired, little dreaming what the answer would be. “No, no,” he cried, with more force and fire than at any moment before. “It is a League of Robbers. It is a failure because it is founded 162 Preaching in New York on force. It does not really care for small nations, except aS pawns in the old game of dicker and grab. It has no spiritual founda- tion. The time is not ripe. Humanity is not ready for it. A new machine is of little ad- vantage if it be run by the old power and for the old ends. Organisation is not brotherhood, and God cares more for a brother than He does for an empire. The great war was one of the blows of God seeking to break down our mate- rialism, our selfishness, our narrow national- isms. It made a dent, but only a dent, in the crust. Other blows will fall betimes. Until we learn to live together by the real law of our nature—the Law of Love—a veil will hide the beauty and wonder of the world, leaving us to wander alone or struggle together in confusion and strife.” “In short,” I interjected, “what we need is the law of love, as Jesus taught it, and the vision of the Kingdom of Heaven as it shone in his mind.” “Yes, Jesus was right,’ and he spoke the great name with evident love and reverence; “and he was a man of the East. His words are not simply whiffs of fragrance—they are indeed A Tea with Tagore 163 poetry, but poetry believed in—but also great laws of life and truth; as much so as the laws of chemistry. But you do not believe in Jesus. If you did, America would be happy, and joy and laughter would walk the common ways of men. But America is not happy. It seeks pleasure, but it does not find joy. God is wanting ‘ Of a sudden a light came into his face, as if he saw a vision, and he talked—more to him- self than to me—about the love of God. I shall never forget it. The rush and roar of New York was hushed, and the room became a sanctuary. In this far country his mind had found its native land of the spirit. I might have been listening on the hillsides of Galilee, or beside the sea, while Jesus taught. I dare not try to reproduce his words. They were simple words, but they had such radiance of reality as I have never seen or felt before. I felt the everywhereness of God and His all- encompassing goodness. It was like a revela- tion. I shall never bow in prayer again with- out thinking of that moment, and how real, how lovely, how ineffably near God was. “May he grant us the beneficent mind,” he said, softly, 164 Preaching in New York quoting from the Upamishad, and neither of us spoke for a spell. “How can we make this vision real to men?” I asked, reluctantly breaking a silence that was sacred. “The more lovely it is the more one feels impelled to seek some method whereby to communicate it to others.” “Tt will triumph,” he said, “because it is true and beautiful. In every land where I go—espe- cially on this journey, which has taken me to France and Belgium before coming to America —I find numbers of men who seek the truth and are yearning for its realization. They are out- casts, for the most part, vagabonds, poets,— as Jesus was in His day. But they are witnesses of the truth, keepers of the soul of humanity. What we need is a League of Vagabonds, so to name it, some kind of fellowship between these men of God whom one finds in the most unexpected places. Yet everywhere they recog- nise one another, as if they had some password between them. ‘They have the secret for the healing of the world. They know God who is known not by words, but by love, by joy.” Continuing, he said that such a conception might seem, at first, visionary in our practical A Tea with Tagore 165 America; the mere fancy of a poet. But it is not. Once, by the mercy of God, a truth is born into the world, it can never be expelled, Nor can it be defeated. All who see it are thereafter conscripts in its service. We must have faith in truths, in ideas, in the finer forces that work quietly, as seeds grow, and never tire, never sleep. At the same time, we must use all means within our power to realize our ideals in practical life. “That is one thing that brings me to America, to know your people, to see your vast, uprising young nation, and to divine, if it may be, what its spirit is. Hereafter my life and all that I have—which is only a little—is to be devoted to establishing first in India, and then else- where, if possible, a university in which the better minds of all races, to whom we must look for leadership, may mingle, and the culture of the East and the culture of the West may be united in fellowship. It is men of world-mind that we need, men of the spirit, who see that we are all citizens in the Kingdom of Ideas. In this way, long after I am gone, when in the purpose of God the time does come for a real League of Humanity, there will be men large 166 Preaching in New York enough to see the human scene as a whole, who understand that the good of humanity as a family actually exists, and we shall not suffer such a bankruptcy of constructive faith and vision as we have in our day.” Such, imperfectly reported, and lacking the art to reproduce the atmosphere of a noble and stimulating personality, was my talk over the tea-cups with Tagore. My feeling, as we parted, was that I had met one of. the most remarkable men, and surely the greatest lover of God, it has ever been my joy to know. If the things of which he talked, as I report them, seem vague, it is to be remembered that they are no more to be uttered than the ecstasy of spring mornings or the light that lies on purple hills. But it is to that open window of spiritual vision that we must look for real guidance, and it is the poet-prophet who must lead in the way and will of God. The New Curiosity Shop “New York is the greatest religious Curiosity Shop on the earth,” said the Poet, at the meet- ing of the Rainbow Club in the home of the beloved Physician. “If you doubt it, just read for once the Church page in the Saturday morn- ing paper, and you will see what a theological menagerie we have in this town. Besides all the regular varieties of religion, Catholic, Protestant, Hebrew—Trinitarian, Unitarian, Communitarian—we have the most variegated assortment of Cults anywhere to be found. Listen and learn: Christian Science, Mental Science, New Thought af “Near Thought, is what you ought to call it,’ said the Physician, with fine scorn. “Science, indeed! It is bootleg religion parad- ing as science. Fads, freaks, fakes, the lot of them, supported by women of a certain age suffering from suppressed religion. They are no more akin to Science than a kangaroo is like an archangel. It makes me tired. These long- 167 168 Preaching in New York haired men and short-haired women run hither and yon, knocking at the doors of dead pagan- isms and modern theosophies, hunting for new gospels which shall unlock the mysteries of life and destiny. Their religion is reduced to a pleasure excursion or an infatuated search in the dark continents of the occult. When they do not get lost in the jungles, they come back with nothing better than some grotesque fetish of low-type religion, or some fantastic dogma which runs counter to all the verified facts of science. Some people will swallow any dogma if only it is unreasonable. It is the Will to Believe gone to seed. It is a He “Wait! Hold your horses,” cried the Poet; “let me finish the list. At the League of the New Life you may learn “The Use of Color Vibration in Healing,’ and surely that ought to appeal to a man of your profession. In the McAlpin Hotel there is to be a lecture by the President of the College of Divine Metaphysics, after which ‘Audible treatment will be given.’ Here is another man who speaks of himself, with commendable modesty, as ‘the most in- teresting personality in the twentieth century’ —why miss an opportunity like that?—and his The New Curiosity Shop 169 lecture is followed by ‘Classes in Concentration and Prosperity.’ If that is not attractive enough, try “The Money Man, Free Lectures on Success,’ and stay for the ‘Success Demon- stration’ at the after-meeting. Or if you like deep stuff make note of the following: “ “Bahai Brotherhood, Universal Religion, Universal Peace, Universal Language. Every Sunday morning at the Genealogical Hall.’ ““Vedanta Society, founded by Swami Viveka- nanda, lecture by his Disciple, Swami Bodhanada, on Inward Man and Inward Life.’ “*‘Rosicrucian Mystic Lectures on The Three Magic Words, or The Harmonious Consciousness, at Amorc Matlin “Have a heart! That is enough and to spare!” said the Physician, with a vast disgust. “The Church page in the papers makes me want to go in the other direction—as far as my money will take me. What are we coming to, anyway? For the honour of God, for the sake of the soul, let us hunt for truth in every age and on every shore. Let us read our Bible by the light of every torch; but this vagrant, hotel religion which is nothing but an intellectual picnic, which is perpetually asking questions of every ship that comes into port; this religion which, the last of the month, pulls out its 170 Preaching in New York memorandum-book to write down a new creed, ‘ever learning, and never coming to the knowl- edge of the truth’—it is a sham and a shame! What is the matter with the church? Has it gone to pot?” “Seems to me,” said the Preacher, at whom this last shot was aimed, “that something has gone wrong with the medical profession, too. Else why do so many people go to these new cults to get their corns cured? ‘Audible treat- ment given,’ I like that touch of unconscious satire. The world is sick just now, and its ill- ness is far more mental than physical. It suf- fered shell-shock in the war, and hysteria supervened. It is easy to denounce, but it is better to understand. Suppose we investigate; suppose we attend some of these meetings and see what they are like—seriously, I mean, in the effort to discover what may be the meaning of it all—and report at a later meeting of the Club.” “Agreed; now you are talking sense,” said the Physician, who pricked up his ears at the word investigate. “Since the honors are about even as between the pulpit and the laboratory, by all means let us find out the facts—though The New Curiosity Shop 171 I dare say it will be like looking for needles in a hay-stack. Still, I am willing to investigate anything, and a theological Zoo is as good a place as any to make research. Some of the theology the good Preacher dopes out to us would hardly bear investigation, methinks— but, as Kipling would say, that is another story.” The reports at the next meeting of the Club were worth going miles to hear, especially the experiences of the Physician, whose stories never lose anything in the telling. With a solemn, affidavit face he told how he took his daughter with him to the Ansonia Hotel, where they heard a thin, cadaverous looking person deliver a sermon on “The Religion of the Solar Plexus.” Hitherto he had thought that religion had its home in the human soul, but he had. learned a new theology which would make him nervous about going to prize-fights. Another lecture on the Science of Succe$s, followed by a Healing Meeting, had interested him greatly— the more because some of his patients were in the audience. The Science, as set forth, con- sisted, he said, of a certain formula which, if repeated often enough—like an incantation— 172 Preaching in New York would do the trick; like a hair-tonic growing a wig on a billiard ball. He said it was too much like the process of shaving a pig. There is a lot of noise, but no wool. However, it was plain that he was interested, and it turned out before the evening ended that he had been doing some thinking betimes. As for the Preacher, he had been sorely de- pressed by his explorations, and not a little puzzled. He found mysticism and occultism all mixed up, whereas the two things are world- far apart. Mysticism seeks to give; occultism tries to get. It was all a jumble, made up of the heel-taps of philosophy and the fag-ends of superstition—quaint survivals of antique ideas, long since cast aside, announced as new dis- coveries in high-sounding words borrowed from psychology. Indeed, he had heard so many unheard of gospels taught by Parlor Magi, that he was dizzy—swimming round and round in puddles of words. Besides, he had found some of his former parishioners at every meeting he attended, and that did not add to his joy. The Poet had been more fortunate. He enjoyed the Rosicrucian lectures, and had The New Curiosity Shop 173 been delving into the romantic lore of the Fraternity. Indeed, he had actually joined the Lodge, and had much to say about the beauty of its ritual, suggesting that the church would do well to have a ritual of initiation. He was a little surprised when the Preacher told him that the Church, in the early ages, had such a ritual, called ‘““The Discipline of the Secret,” after the manner of the Mystery Religions of the Roman Empire. The Physician opened the discussion: “Tngrowing religion—that is my diagnosis of the case,” he said; but it was clear that he had much else in his mind. “Not once did I hear the social note struck in any meeting that I at- tended. It is a Crossless Christianity, and no wonder it is popular. These people set little store, apparently, by charity, pity, or renuncia- tion, and the idea of social service has never entered their heads. They think only of their own personal health, or luck, or success, or peace of mind, and the optimism they emphasise —easy, evasive, dishonest—is not compatible with humility of heart. It is a self-centered, wall-eyed optimism which, when it does not 174 Preaching in New York blink the hard facts of life, makes men think too much about themselves—as an actor keeps his mind fixed on his face. It is a subtle selfish- ness trying to wear the robes of mystical faith. Our age of hurry and unrest, when people take up with anything and make a religion of it, gives it vogue. It is the Religion of Jolly. Emerson was its Messiah and Stevenson its Prophet.” “There you are wrong, utterly wrong,” said the Poet, defending his fellow-singers. “Stevenson was no teacher of a cheap, imperti- nent optimism which consists in not looking at the facts of life, but nursing a pleasant mood without regard to them. Far from it. He prayed to be delivered from cheap pleasures, and refused to cheat himself into any blind- folded light-heartedness. He saw all the bitter, old, and haggard facts, but he found some good things too, and concentrated on the good—a very different thing from the ostrich attitude of refusing to admit the evil. When he saw no good at all, by sheer grit of faith he believed that “*This world’s no blot for us, Nor blank; it means intensely and means good.’ ” The New Curiosity Shop 175 As for Emerson, it is not fair to blame him be- cause others have taken his heavenly wine and diluted it into a narcotic.” “Perhaps I am unjust to the poets,” said the Physician. “If so, I take it all back, and wish I had said more to take back. The fact seems to be that people want religion, but do not know how to get it. They have acquired a certain knowledge of physiology and mental science, and have become keenly interested in them- selves. They have discovered that soul and body are inseparably bound together on earth, and must learn to work together in harmony. They have learned that the mind has great power over the body for health, for the upbuild- ing of character, and for the mastery of their moods. They have found that they can change the climate of their lives by thinking—can save themselves from many maladies, and attain a brighter, stronger existence. They are receiv- ing their first training in mental hygiene and moral sanitation.” “So far, good,” the Preacher interrupted. “No doubt Noah must have known that much when he landed from the Ark. Hope and joy are curative powers; despair and sorrow, if pro- 176 Preaching in New York longed, not only lower the vitality but actually poison the body. Worry kills, and happiness gives life. It is nothing new. By laying emphasis on a subordinate aspect of Christian- ity they form a new religion. New churches are founded and flourish, which doubtless have the worship of God as their purpose, but their chief purpose, apparently, is the healing of the body and mind. They teach people to use God, rather than to be used by Him—the old self- obsessed piety in another form. Jesus taught us to forget ourselves in the service of others.” “Even so,” replied the Physician; “ ‘nor soul helps flesh more, now, than flesh helps soul,’ as Browning put it. What if they do use God? He is willing to be used. Jacob began his prayer at Bethel with a bargain, and God kept His part of it. The plain fact is that we are living far below the limits of our possible selves, floundering in the misery of weakness when there are open to us sources of power which will free us for a life of energy and usefulness. The limits of possibility in our daily lives are defined less by the body than by the mind, and the secret of power is more spiritual than physical. These cults are seeking a new tech- The New Curiosity Shop 177 nique of religion, a method of laying hold of a Power always at hand—trying to help dis- tracted folk to personal efficiency through spiritual experience—and their aim is right, whatever we may think of their teachings.” “Right you are,” said the Poet, with more enthusiasm than at any time in the discussion. “The people who haunt our hotels on Sunday mornings are seeking power—power to master the ills that beset and the dark fears that be- cloud their lives; and if religion cannot help them it is no good. In the Mark Twain story of the Yankee at the Court of King Arthur, as you remember, the Yankee saw a saint swaying to and fro in his ecstasy. It seemed to him a waste of power. So, finally, he rigged up a device whereby to harness the saint and use his motions to run a sewing machine. In other words, if our religion has not enough power in it to run a sewing machine, it is not worth much. It ought to ventilate our minds, keep us in health of spirit, and help us to do the day’s work with joy. For my part I think Susan Yellum was not far wrong when she said: ‘Faith in A’mighty God have more to do wi’ the stomach than most folks think on.’ It seems 178 Preaching in New York to me that Christian Science has hold of a big idea, and I prefer the new denial of the bad to the old denial of the good.” “Christian Science, of course, is three things,” said the Physician, whose opinion of this matter was eagerly awaited. ‘First, it is a religion, and I respect it as I do all other religions. Its great achievement is that it fixes attention on God. It is amazing how little people think about God, save as a dim idea or a vague First Cause. We live many a day with- out thinking of Him at all, wondering betimes why He seems unreal. When Falstaff was ill and cried out ‘God, God,’ his friends were alarmed! They did not think the time had come to think about God. Christian Science fixes the mind on God, not as far off and long ago, but as a reality here and now. Second, it 1s a system of metaphysics, and as such it must run the gauntlet of criticism, along with other systems; and I am bound to say it does not stand the test. Third, it is a method of healing, and here again it must be judged by its results—by its failures no less than by its victories—regarding which I could give testimony. It draws people away from the churches because it does actually The New Curiosity Shop 179 help them to lay hold of God, live in Him, and find refuge, peace, and strength.” “The truth is,” he went on, disregarding the signal of the Preacher, “that medical science fails because it is not spiritual enough; and the church fails because it is not scientific enough. We Protestants need, in a different form and adapted to modern uses, what the Catholics call the Office of Direction—that is, specific and detailed guidance in the spiritual life, which those persons who have the gift of healing— and there are such—are peculiarly fitted to give. The physician must not simply tell his patient to be well, he must tell him how to do it. He must tell him how to live—in detail, I mean—what to eat, how to exercise, how to sleep, and all the rest. The church ought to do the same for the moral and spiritual life. To-day it tells men to pray, but it does not tell them how to pray. Prayer is a high, austere art, if we are to believe the masters of the spiritual life. It took St. Theresa years to master it. There are difficulties, of course, in handling mental and spiritual hygiene in the pulpit. But people need help—specific instruc- tion—and in their need they are going else- 180 Preaching in New York where. Urged by a great desire to understand the workings of their own souls—whereof psycho-analysis has made them curious—and how they can overcome disease and temptation and worry, they go where they think they can find help. No doubt much of the teaching they hear is inadequate, but it is better than none. The mercenary quacks, the half-baked charla- tans flourish and grow rich because they have so many victims of sheer nerve, especially in our cities where we ride on a merry-go-round, and life is scattered and peeled. “Speaking of prayer,” said the Poet, “I got the shock of my life to-day. William James did it with his theory of the emotions. Hitherto, he said, we have held to this order: We meet a bear, are frightened, and run. We lose our fortune, are sorry, and weep. But the truth, he holds, is just the reverse. We see a bear, then follows the physical excitement, and that in turn is followed by the emotion of fear. If that is so, then by forcing the body into certain expressions, we evoke corresponding emotions. By resolute smiling, for example, we may be- come glad. I do not defend the theory; but I do know that there is not much real prayer The New Curiosity Shop 181 unless a man has the will to kneel—actually kneel—before God. It is not enough to sit bolt upright and listen to a prayer, as most of our people do in the churches. We go to church to have our praying, like our singing, done for us. It will not do.” “Too many people,” said the Preacher, “if I may be allowed to get in a word edgewise, seem to think that in religion it is only enthusiasm, impulse, emotion that count. Religious observ- ance becomes the sport of caprice. They at- tend church, or they pray, if they feel like itt, whereas if we do not feel like going to church that is the time we ought to go. Feeling is made the weather-cock of the religious life. It is not so in other things. In business, even in sport, we have system, method, discipline, but in religion we live at haphazard. This lack of method in the culture of the spiritual life accounts for much of the unrest, not to speak of the uncertainty, in such matters. It is a wonder that we have any faith at all, so little care do we take to cultivate it. People want the joy and power of religion without paying the price for it. They will not submit to dis- cipline. Asceticism is simply a disciplined 182 Preaching in New York effort to gain and end, nothing more. An athlete goes into training and by renunciation, _ by obeying rigid rules, makes his muscles firm and his nerves taught. When men are willing to do as much in order to keep spiritually fit, they will have their reward.” “At every meeting I attended,” he proceeded, “T found books appointed to be read, so much time to be spent every day in reading. That is a start in the right direction—but such books! Bereft of beauty, devoid of insight, with never a glint of genius! Suppose one should study art in that manner, leaving out of account the masters and taking up with some poor dauber. Yet that would not be more pathetic than what these restless, troubled souls are doing to-day. If there is such merit in method, as there surely is, why not employ it in studying the masters of the spiritual life? Better still, why not de- vote the hours spent on some poor scribbler to the Bible, which shows us, as in a mirror, what we are and what we ought to be? Why not give our own religion a trial before running after the latest toy balloon?” “But, my dear Preacher,” said the Physician, “the Bible is a hard book to read, and few know The New Curiosity Shop 183 how to read it at all. It requires years of study to know how to read it, much less how to in- terpret it aright. If people would begin with the Life and Laws of Jesus, they might get somewhere. My method is to take a scene, a passage, from His life every day, and ponder it intently, reproducing all its vivid human color in my imagination, until I can hear the voice of the Master, and see His gesture when He puts forth his hand to heal. At first it was hard work, but it has become a habit. In this way I get back into the atmosphere of Jesus, into the spirit of his mind, and, somehow, he does not seem far away. For, in these matters distance does not count and time does not sig- nify. Say what you will, in fellowship with Jesus a man begins to become master of him- self through some moral energy that is asso- ciated with Him. It reaches to the core of our being, to the divided self that has been struggling for expression and control.” * “Tn short,” he added, “we need to realise that the inner life is also a realm of law, and when we obey the laws of Jesus he can do for us to-day what He did for men in days of old. 1 Man and the Attainment of Immortality, by J. Y. Simpson. 184 Preaching in New York The power that was in Him is with us still— abundantly with us, if we have the will to lay hold of it and use it. But we must not use it merely for selfish ends, else it will be denied us. Jesus was never ill, because He knew how to live. His gospel is not a stick of candy, but a way of life—happy, wholesome, healthy—a full-orbed human life, radiant and radiating. Some day, taught by Him—science learning equally with theology—we shall learn how to master ourselves, how to make a new world by tapping sources of power always at our dis- posal, and change a wicked industrial order into a system of fraternal service. Perhaps we may even save the church, and make it the centre of all the redemptive forces of society.” “Quite a speech,” cried the Poet; “and when the Physician preaches better than the Preacher, it is time to go. However, I must have my say. I rise to tell you that the Battle of Armaged- don is now being fought, and America is the battlefield. It is the old battle—old as the world—between mechanism and mysticism, be- tween materialism and spirituality. If America goes religious, the world will be saved. If we are inundated by a tide of materialism, if we The New Curiosity Shop 185 give way either to the Moloch of Money or to the Cult of Comfort—we are lost. It will be a fight to a finish, and every man who loves the things of the spirit must fit himself, train him- self, and be a soldier in the Wars of God!” New York City’ I The history of humanity, as told in the Bible, begins in a Garden of God and ends in a City of God. It moves between two mighty seers— Moses, whose vision brooded over the dark chaos of old, singing the song of creation and the epic of human beginnings; and the Prisoner of Patmos, whose insight forecast in solemn apocalypse the final issues of man and the world. In that picturesque setting we are shown the meaning of the human drama, its struggle, its tragedy, its slow triumph, in the light of eternity. For, manifestly, men are here upon the earth not simply to wander under green trees, but to learn to live together right- eously, kindly, humanly, after the Divine ordinance of society. Such is the theology of history as the Bible *Sermon preached in the Church of the Divine Paternity, Dec, toth, 1922, “Ye Olde Settler’s Association of the West Side” joining in the service and celebration. 186 New York City 187 interprets it, reading the meaning of the human drama in the presence of God. What a ro- mance it recites! It begins at the beginning, with the wandering shepherds and wayfarers in the dim morning of time. We see the rise and the home and the family, of the tribe and the nation; a race passing through slavery to civilised life; the gradual building of a rich and complex social order; its prosperity, its splendor, its testing time, its final fall—and its dream of a City that hath foundations, where there is no sadness nor weeping, neither pain nor death, and Society has become a Temple. The story of mankind is thus a story of its great cities, and a prophecy of the one City. Hitherto four cities have stood out in the annals of man as centres of the highest life of the race, and about them are gathered the vastest accumulations of history and of legend: Jeru- salem, Athens, Rome, and London. No city has, no city may ever hope to have, the same place in the spiritual geography of mankind as Jerusalem. If Rome is the Eternal City, Jerusalem is the City of the Eternal. For four thousand years that old grey city has been an altar and a confessional of humanity. There 188 Preaching in New York our poor, tempted, troubled race has meditated, repented, and aspired, lifting up hands of sup- plication. There the spiritual in man has found voice, as nowhere else, in the melody of song, the importunity of prayer, and the solemnity of prophecy. There the Unutterable has spoken in words the simplest, the most profound, the most artless, in which the deep eternal wish of the soul that drifts Godward has received an- swer in the Psalms of David, the visions of Isaiah, and the words of Jesus. There was re- vealed the unity of God, His spirituality, His holiness, and His loving-kindness which is better than life. There, through long centuries, man has poured out his agony and ecstasy of soul, and felt the response of a Pity, a Power, a Purity which endureth forever. Often cap- tured, often destroyed, that old city still stands, time-stained and immovable, as indestructible as the Faith of which it is the symbol. Re- ligiously it is the capital of the world, if only because Jesus walked in it and wept over it. It is not far from Jerusalem to Athens—only a short sail over soft seas—yet what a differ- ence in atmosphere and association! Athens shines like a white star in the great world’s New York City 189 crown of intellectual glory. Its very name is an inspiration. It is the City of the Intellect, the city of philosophy, of art, of the worship of the god of bounds and the vision of the holi- ness of beauty. No constellation of great minds has ever surpassed that which shone in Athens in its Golden Age. Though ages have passed, and “the glory that was Greece’ has faded, those voices still speak to us concerning the things of the mind. Socrates is still a great master of man, alike by his wisdom in life and his nobility in death. Plato still discourses of his Divine philosophy, and the stately tragedies of Atschylus and Sophocles unrolled the awful secrets of life and destiny. To-day, if a bit of Grecian marble is dug up from some old ruin, it makes a new date in the story of art. No- where else has the human mind attained to such splendor, and ancient Athens still stands, despite the mutations of time, a bright City of the Mind built against outward distraction for inward consolation and shelter. Rome ruled the world from her seven hills of power, but the grandeur of that imperial city has vanished. Once her great stone roads drew the earth into a unity of empire—first by the 190 ~=6Preaching in New York military genius of Julius Cesar, and then by the statesmanship of Augustus—and her legions tramped the world. To-day the Forum, where the twelve tables were promulgated, where the Preetorian edicts were announced, and where Antonius and Cicero argued on points of law and ethics, is an expanse of utter wreck, where antiquarians search for the vestiges of great events and the foot-prints of great men. The triumphal arch of Titus—who captured Jeru- salem—still stands, but under it no triumphs sweep on to the capitol. The Roman Empire is dead and we may stand by its grave; but its executive genius, its jurisprudence did not die. It went forth to be a blessing to the whole human race and the basis of universal law. This is the real empire; this, like the empire of science, knows no bounds. It is not propagated by violence. It knows no decay. It still lives, long after the vast aggregations of territory piled together by human ambition have dis- solved and disappeared. London, with its mist, its fog, its rain, its monotonous and melancholy houses, built ap- parently without plan or design, the far past blending with the near future in its mingled New York City 191 misery and magnificence, is the home of a wise and ordered Liberty and the mother-city of a mighty race. From the first song of Cedmon, the serving man, to Alfred the Great, on down the long, tragic, heroic history, it has been a sanctuary of civilisation, in whose genius two essential but seemingly opposing factors have been united—individual freedom and subjection to law. No wonder we love it, knowing not which London we love best, the London of fiction or the London of history, or that blend- ing of both, the London of Literature. If ever London Bridge does fall down, as Macaulay predicted it would, and a man from the ends of the earth sits on a broken pier and muses on the ruins of St. Paul’s Cathedral, he will testify that on the banks of the Thames there once stood a great citadel of liberty and a shrine of law. These are the great cities of the Old World—with Paris a centre of art and fashion, a Woman with a rose in her hair—vast as- semblies of humanity, each memorable in his- tory, and emblems, respectively, of Faith, Philosophy, Law, and Liberty. 192 + Preaching in New York il New York is the city of the future—an old city in the New World, a new city by Old World reckoning—already a peer of any city on earth, and destined to be the greatest city the world has ever known. In 1820 it had one hundred and thirty thousand inhabitants; in 1920 six millions; and a century hence, by its present rate of growth, it will be a metropolis of more than twenty millions—a human encampment so bewilderingly vast as to stagger the imagina- tion. Even within a single generation, by virtue of its location, its genius, its enterprise, it has almost grown beyond the knowledge of its own people. Never since time began has there been such a flowing together of races, such a blending of bloods; and by that token, as Jerusalem is a symbol of Faith, Athens of Philosophy, Rome of Law, London of Liberty, so New York, by the spirit and prophecy of its history, must be a City of Fraternity. A place where world-end peoples meet—drawn_ to- gether, jammed together—it is a Tower of Babel alike in its architecture and in its medley of tongues, and it will end in confusion and New York City 193 disaster unless there is a Pentecost of Brother- hood. Heh No city in the New World has a history more romantic, more fascinating than New York, and no city is more indifferent to its own his- tory. As some one has said, it is as if the city had somehow been aware, from the first, of its national and cosmic role, and has sacrificed as provincialism and local color what other cities would have cherished as a treasure. Boston, by dint of emphasis, has made the history of America read like the story of New England; 1620 an epoch-making date, and Plymouth Rock the Gibraltar of the New World. Indeed, it has well nigh made Puritanism a national cult, its narrowness a nobility, its harsh intol- erance the hardiness of the pioneer, its May- flower the shining symbol of adventure. Penn still presides over Philadelphia, and Inde- pendence Hall adds its heroic background to a cozy conservatism. By contrast, in his apology for the Knickerbocker History of New York, Washington Irving was surprised to find how few of his fellow-citizens were aware that their city had ever been called New Amsterdam, “or cared a straw about their ancient Dutch 194 Preaching in New York progenitors.”” Fewer still, perhaps, know that their city was once named New Orange. No, in New York the local is lost or forgotten; the great fact is not its history, but the wonder of the city itself, rising like magic, drawing the ends of the earth together, as cosmopolitan in its origin as in its genius, an epitome of hu- manity, a prophecy of the unity of mankind— a human ocean where no man is more than a tiny wave, and no event more than a passing ripple. None the less, a glimpse into the past is needed, if we are to realise what a human miracle has come to pass on Manhattan Island since the sturdy Dutch traders found it in 1613—buying it from the Red Men for twenty- four dollars, and paying for it with beads and rum. My friend Rufus Wilson, in his New York, Old and New, gives us a picture of the Island in its native beauty: “its lower end made up of wooded hills and grassy valleys, rich in wild fruits and flowers, and its middle portion covered in part by a chain of swamps and marshes and a deep pond, with a tiny island in the middle, while to the northward it rose into high rocky ground, covered with dense forest, New York City 195 which was filled with abundance of game. Small ponds dotted the island in various places, and these with a score of brooks and rivulets swarmed with fish.” It is a far cry from the maze of criss-cross avenues and the wilderness of sky-scrapers to-day back to that sylvan scene, where the thrifty Dutch traded with the Indians before the Pilgrim Fathers landed, built their rude huts of bark, and soon were cultivating their bouweries, or farms, the while they wel- comed wanderers of many races and many faiths. A hardy, God-fearing, liberty-loving folk, they transplanted to the shores of the New World the wise tolerance of their motherland —a legacy more precious than all the gold in all the hills. Boston Common has a place of honor in the story of the Revolution, and no one can dim its lustre; but who celebrates the thrilling scenes around what is now City Hall Park in New York? There, six weeks before the Boston Massacre, the Sons of Liberty fought the King’s soldiers, and an unknown sailor boy re- ceived a mortal thrust from a British bayonet —the first to give his life for the Republic! A monument to Attucks and his fellows stands on 196 ~=Preaching in New York the Common, while only an obscure tablet in the dingy post-office building marks the Battle of Golden Hill. Manhattan Island and its environs saw many a hard-fought battle, when the cause of freedom hung in the balance. For six years New York was the capital city of the nation. Here Washington took the oath of office as President; here he struggled with diffi- culties almost beyond mortal power; here he worshipped in old St. Paul’s church. Here Jefferson and Adams took counsel, here Ham- ilton sleeps. Faneuil Hall remains in Boston, but the old Federal Hall in New York, in which the first Congress assembled, has vanished. Cherry Street, where Washington and Hamil- ton lived, is now a dismal slum, where squalor has erased well nigh every trace of a mighty past. Fraunce’s Tavern and St. Paul’s Church with its village graveyard—its dark, slender, graceful spire looking like a toy alongside the towering monoliths on every side—are almost the only links with the old New York where Washington walked, planned, and toiled. Only faint touches linger here and yonder to tell us of our history, the Mansion in State Street, parts of the Church of St. Mark’s-in-the- New York City 197 Bouwerie, to which we must add a bit of the old Jewish burying-ground in the new Bowery, set apart to its holy uses in 1656. Yet, strangely enough, no one foresaw what New York was destined to be, though its strategic location, its incomparable Harbor, and its rapid growth, might have given at least a hint. Even in 1803, when the City Hall was built, it was faced on three sides with marble, and on the north side with red sandstone, be- cause, it was believed, “few citizens would ever reside on that side.” Not many can even name the villages and hamlets nestled amid the woods and lakes of the upper reaches of old Manhat- tan, now obliterated by the advance of the city —save here a jog in a street and there a wind- ing, eccentric alley. Greenwich Village quaintly survives as the Quartier Latin of New York, and the names of Murray Hill and Harlem remain, but who can locate Yorkville, Chelsea, Richmond Hill, Bloomingdale, Carmansville, Odellville, Bull’s Head, and Mount Pleasant? In Boston the Back Bay and Charlestown still have colorful identity, and in London Chelsea and Clapham have individuality and charm; but the lovely hamlets of Manhattan are hardly 198 Preaching in New York even figures in “the linoleum carpet of New York.” The Dyckman House and the Van Cortland and Jumel Mansions are happily pre- served in upper New York; North Washington Square is still partly intact—like Union and Madison Squares, a Potter’s Field reclaimed— and Stuyvesant Place and Front Street keep memories of the charm of the olden time. With ruthless might the uprising city has moved on, leaving its past and forgetting local pride in its vision of a stupendous future. Itt What, then, is the New York of to-day and to-morrow? It is the world in miniature, at once a metropolis and a maelstrom, a frontier where the Old and the New Worlds meet; a vast human laboratory in which all kinds and conditions of men,—all races, creeds and colors,—are being wrought, by the chemistry of contact and good will, into a new Fraternity. As there are many Londons—the London of the Tower and the Abbey, of Downing Street and Piccadilly, of Bethnal Green and the Strand —so there is the New York of Fifth Avenue and Orchard Street, of Broadway and the New York City 199 Bowery, of Park Avenue and Greenwich Vil- lage, of Wall Street and San Juan Hill, of Chinatown, Central Park, and Riverside Drive; of Edith Wharton and O. Henry. Fabulous in its wealth, abysmal in its poverty, glaring in its contrasts yet gracious in its spirit; it has a new Jerusalem on the Lower and Upper East Side and in the Bronx; a new Rome south of Washington Square; a new Athens on Pearl Street; a new Africa in Harlem; and a little Syria on Hudson Street. What a social marvel, what an incredible human compound, what a challenge to a creative fraternity—no wonder it stirred the soul of a mystic like Whitman, in whose ample vision its moving multitudes found sympathy and song. Pray God it may be a New York of many races without rancor, and many faiths without fanaticism! Three things are taught by New York, as mutch by its history as by its genius and growth; and the first is that in such a concourse of peoples racial rancor must give way to mutual respect and mutual service, if we are not to live on a human volcano. Those who deride New York as a “polyglot boarding-house,” as if its mingling of many races were a_ recent 200 #£2Preaching in New York “scourge,” do not know its ancient lineage, much less its spirit. As early as 1650, eighteen languages were spoken on Manhattan Island. From the first New York has been a city of the large and liberal air, drawing its citizens from many lands, not only Dutch, English, and Irish, but Germans, Swedes, French, Jews, and, in later years, dwellers of the uttermost parts of the earth and the isles of the sea. For that reason it must know no Saxon race, no Teutonic race, no Slavic race, but only the Human Race, of which it is a centre and a symbol. Never, perhaps, has the world seen such an experiment of mankind living together ; nowhere else do so many people of so many races live so close to- gether as on this Island—neighbors by neces- sity, as they must learn to be in spirit and pur- pose. It is the Metropolis of Democracy, in which a boy born in a swarming ghetto may die in a palace on Fifth Avenue, and the son of a hod-carrier may become the Mayor of the City. Therefore, any man who sows suspicion or in- jects racial rancor into the life of our city be- trays its history and belies its spirit and prophecy. New York is vast, many-faceted, myriad-tongued, but there is no room in it for New York City 201 hate, prejudice, or contempt of man for man. What is true of the need of racial fraternity in New York, is equally true of its religious fellowship. Happily the Dutch brought to the shores of the New World their wise policy of religious toleration, and it attracted swarms of exiles from many nations, tormented folk of many faiths, Waldenses of Piedmont, German Lutherans, French Huguenots, Scotch Presby- terians, English Independents, Moravians, Anabaptists, Jews, and Quakers. Except for a sad interlude under Peter Stuyvesant, a fanatical Calvinist—whose spirit ‘was as un- bending as his wooden leg—this spirit of “‘live and let live, think and let think,” has ever been the genius of New York. When the Puritans of New England, who had dared so much for liberty of faith, began to persecute the slightest dissent, their fleeing victims found refuge in New Amsterdam—among them Roger Wil- liams and Anne Hutchinson. With such a legacy of liberty and good will, we dare not allow an evil spirit of bigotry to flare up among us, poisoning the community. It behooves right-thinking men of all races and religions to join hands against those who would “Ulsterise”’ 202 +#Preaching in New York New York, making its streets the scenes of tragedies such as have terrified Belfast. Happily, by the mercy of God, we are learn- ing a larger outlook and a more catholic con- fidence, and we know that all religions are holy —Christian, Hebrew, Catholic, Protestant— and most of all the common, eternal, religion in which the service of man is the truest token of faith in God. But toleration is not enough; we must have insight, sympathy, and understand- ing. Exclusiveness must be excluded, bitter- ness must be banished; for surely it is only by fraternal righteousness among men that we may hope to realise atonement with the Father of Men, whose love embraces all peoples and fulfils all faiths. In His presence, and in face of a need as appealing as that of New York— where iniquity is so appalling, and spiritual loneliness so pathetic—bigotry of any kind is blindness, and sectarianism is stupidity. If ever upon this earth we are to attain to the new synthesis of spiritual insight, enterprise, and co- operation, so long dreamed of, which shall make our present sects seem like men playing with the toys of religion, it must be in this amazing city. Perhaps, in the long last, we shall see New York City 203 the fulfilment of that great Russian apocalyptic story, forecasting the final battle of spirituality against materialism, in which Jew and Gentile fight together, singing “the Song of Moses and the Lamb.?? IV For New York is an apocalypse of America, and a prophecy of its future—the centre of its finance, its fashion, and its fraternity—and if it is to be redeemed from materialism and futil- ity, it must be the focus of a creative patriotism, a wise moral idealism, and an authentic spiritual vision. Democracy is not a panacea; science is nota saviour. Unless the spiritual quality is *More accurately, it is less a story than a “conversation,” and may be found in a remarkable book entitled “War and Christianity,” by Vladimir Solovyof, with an introduction by Stephen Graham. (Constables Russian Library.) In a re- cent symposium of opinion and prophecy on the future of civilization, a Frenchman, a Russian, and a Spaniard all agree that the present chaos is due, primarily, to a lack of “world- feeling”—lack of religion—and that there is no way out of the bog without a creative spiritual renewal. It is significant that all three turn to Russia as the East out of which will dawn a new spiritual day, finding their clue in the experience of Christ in the Russian soul, especially in the great, tor- mented, Christ-seeking Dostoeivsky. What if out of the deep, pitiful soul of Russia—despised and rejected by the world— there should come an altogether other dimension of faith, redeeming the western world from materialism, brutality, and futility! Long ago another prophesied “a great White Christ rising out of Russia,” a vision to heal a wounded world. Stranger things have happened, and the ways of God are past finding out. 204. Preaching in New York made vivid and victorious, both in private char- acter and in public-mindedness, the multitudes of our metropolis will become a mob, its wealth a gilded confusion, and its poverty an abyss of misery and despair. In New York, of all places on earth, men ought to think in terms of one humanity and one religion, and learn that the good of the race as a whole does actually exist; which is the first fact and corner-stone of any world unity. Only as we toil in the light of the Kingdom of God may we ever hope to build the Commonwealth of Man, making many races, creeds and colors into a Community of Humanity in which justice shall join hands with joy. Without such a vision our city will perish, as other cities have perished before us; because our human life is from above downward. Ex- cept the Lord build the city they labor in vain who build it; and He builds it in the degree in which His will is the law of its life. Citizen- ship at its best—sagacious, forward-looking, prophetic—is found in the ancient words: “And I saw the Holy City.” William Blake knew whereof he wrote: New York City 205 I will not cease from mental fight, Nor shall my sword sleep in my hand, Till we have built Jerusalem In England’s green and pleasant land. If we forget Jerusalem—with its mighty faith in God, its passion for righteousness, its sweet- toned voice of prayer—Rome fails, London fails, and New York fails! Without the faith and vision which burned in the city on Mount Moriah, our race loses its way in the dim coun- try of this world, and its life becomes a brawl in the dark. Evermore “a dream cometh with a multitude of business,” and it is the dream that redeems the business from brutality. If we have a vision of the Holy City where there is no trafficking in human souls, we can the better face without dismay the unholy city where heart treads on heart. Fifty men may have fifty different methods to be followed, but if all see the Holy City they will find a way to work together toward it. A great living master of practical mysticism has used this illustration, as apt as it is pic- turesque. It is said that when the huge Hell Gate Bridge was a-building over the East River in New York, the engineers found the hull of an old ship embedded in the river just where 206 += Preaching in New York one of the central piers was to go down. No tug boat was able to move it, much less lift it out of the ooze. They were perplexed, until some one hit upon the idea of making the sea move it. They chained a flat-boat to the sunken hull when the tide was out, and waited. Slowly the tide returned, pushed by the sea and pulled by the moon, and the old ship was lifted inch by inch. Then it was floated out to sea and dropped where it would never again be in the way. The pier was sunk, the bridge built, and over it the shuffling feet of multitudes cross the river. Just so, there are tides of the Spirit, vast laws of the moral and social life which, if we learn how to use them, will lift our bigotries and out-worn rancors, and clear the way for that bridge which shall join the streets of New York to the streets of the other City of God, wherein, at last, the souls of the whole world shall assemble. THE END. ¥ L vi oH Wt Dil a Mat hak a, 4h ’ Koval ae i aa Wah “hy , Sie! Date Due i 42 = olden SPS 5, wae Il Library D ” i > 7) a Ih | iN ns at eter ntg