BX 9225 .P374 A3 1923 
 Parkhurst, Charles Henry, 
 1842-1933. 
 
 My forty years in New York 
 

 
 
 
 
MY FORTY YEARS IN 
 NEW YORK 
 
Digitized by the Internet Archive 
 in 2019 with funding from 
 Princeton Theological Seminary Library 
 
 https://archive.org/details/myfortyyearsinneOOpark 
 
33 ^ . /"/\ 
 
MY FORTY YEARS 
 IN NEW YORK 
 
 BY 
 
 / 
 
 REVEREND C. H. PARKHURST, D.D., LL.D. 
 
 jReto gotfc 
 
 THE MACMILLAN COMPANY 
 
 1923 
 
 All rights reserved 
 
Copyright, 1923 
 
 By THE MACMILLAN COMPANY 
 
 Set up and printed. Published, October, 1923 
 
 Printed in the United States of America 
 
A FOREWORD 
 
 The tests applied to a New York City preacher are 
 severe and conclusive. They all are summed up in 
 whether he can endure the place and whether the place 
 will endure him. Can he stay? One of the ablest 
 Bishops of my Church who served successfully two 
 terms in the city, in what was our most prominent 
 church, told me that New York City sifted a preacher 
 as no other place in the world, and that every year men 
 were ground to dust between the upper and nether mill¬ 
 stones of the pulpit. The fact that a man was invited 
 back to the same pulpit in New York was a vindica¬ 
 tion of his powers, and that was said when the term 
 of service was only five years. Dr. C. H. Parkhurst 
 remained more than seven times that time, including 
 a period of intense controversy and strife. Through 
 storm and calm his enemies never flattered themselves 
 with the thought that they could substitute for him 
 another occupant of his pulpit. They brought to bear 
 upon him every force possible but every year saw him 
 victorious over his foes and gathering to himself in¬ 
 creasing power. If you were to ask me what that 
 power was I would answer you with the single word 
 "pulpit.” 
 
 Since the Apostles there have been remarkable pulpit 
 
VI 
 
 FOREWORD 
 
 demonstrations. The pulpit of Dr. C. H. Parkhurst 
 is one of them. It was not a collective pulpit; he 
 preached alone, while good men questioned the expe¬ 
 diency and the wisdom of such preaching. Why, such 
 conservatism at such a time, when the issues were as 
 moral as the Ten Commandments and their spiritual¬ 
 ized forms the beatitudes is amazing! Politics was 
 prudent; business was cautious; friends were timid; 
 the foe was vicious; the church kept its sacred robes 
 respectably out of the mire. Wise counsels talked a 
 misapplication of the wisdom of the serpent and left 
 the dove to flutter out of his charms as it could, or more 
 often, could not. One pulpit, fastened to a rock, built 
 into the rock, aimed its rifled gun against the most con¬ 
 spicuous iniquity in the continent’s greatest city. Dr. 
 Parkhurst preached the devil into the light where his 
 hideous form was revealed, and showed men that he 
 could be conquered by preaching. He had been too 
 great a devil for any other force to handle. All forces 
 had been conquered by him and had joined with him, 
 and he had derisively grinned and leeringly flung out 
 the old question, “What are you going to do about 
 it?” And that devil devouring our municipal author¬ 
 ity, corrupting the defenders of our homes, treading 
 on our virtues, shaming us unutterably in the whole 
 civilized world, was preached to death by the single- 
 handed and lone Presbyterian preacher on Madison 
 Square. He shot holes through him. He captured his 
 minions and put them on exhibition before the people. 
 He toyed with that devil’s champions of patronage and 
 made them contemptible; he penetrated his jungle and 
 
FOREWORD 
 
 Vll 
 
 lair and wrought dismay and consternation in that 
 devil’s mightiest counsels. To all of their defense and 
 apologies, their threats and defamation, through the 
 press and otherwise, the preacher aimed the rifled gun 
 of the Madison Square pulpit and aimed it straight! 
 
 Do you tell me that the courts woke up and great 
 lawyers came to the help of the preacher,—yes, that is 
 true, and no one has more cheerfully given every credit 
 to them than Dr. Parkhurst. But what he would not 
 claim, thousands now see; it was the preacher who 
 aroused the courts from the slumbers and quickened 
 the public conscience and made the logic of resistance 
 to the monster of iniquity an appeal of all the people. 
 
 The pulpit has always been a signal power. It is 
 measured by fearless application of force when all else 
 has failed and its power has shot out in tongues of 
 flame. It appeared among the prophets of old; it 
 counted not its life dear to itself among the Apostles; 
 its enemies have been potent along the peaks which 
 have lifted centuries into ranges of conquest and 
 progress. It has been a call of God when nothing else 
 would do the work, and the work seemed too great for 
 a voice and no other voice would be heard. And there 
 came the man; the man who heard nothing but that 
 voice. Prudence was against it; taste, comfort, repu¬ 
 tation were against it, and it stung the conscience; it 
 deafened every other sound; it thundered; it roared 
 like a tempest; the stars were out of their courses, and 
 the inner man cried out: “Here am I, send me! Send 
 me! Not with a sword, not with my friends, not 
 with wealth, not with the wisest and best, but against 
 
FOREWORD 
 
 • • • 
 vm 
 
 them; against my friends, against my confidential ad¬ 
 visors, against riches and power and influence. Send 
 me with a sermon; with a pebble and a sling, but I 
 will go, and I must go, and I can go because Thou art 
 sending me.” 
 
 Forty years ago there was no more brilliant preacher 
 in New York than Charles H. Parkhurst. He was the 
 preacher of a great ecclesiastical body, signalized for 
 its loyal part in the Revolutionary War, consecrated 
 to the best things for humanity. His church was up¬ 
 town on one of the city’s great squares. His pulpit 
 was historic. He was a cultured son of Amherst Col¬ 
 lege; his tastes were literary; he was gathering to his 
 hearing some of the foremost lights of the western 
 hemisphere’s Metropolis. Chapin’s sacred oratory was 
 a setting sun; Bellows’ graceful eloquence was drop¬ 
 ping its fragrant petals; John Hall had come for a 
 service fast maturing; Parkhurst was without a rival 
 in the pulpit; he suggested no rival. Among the fad¬ 
 ing lights no one of them suggested him; he was of 
 himself and needed not to covet any man’s gift who 
 was passing out before him. He could afford to be 
 himself in the fear of his God, but Dr. Parkhurst 
 turned aside from all of this and went out whither the 
 Lord would send him. He had a vision; he saw his 
 city fast being given over to the wicked one. He saw 
 a few men in an unequal fight; there are always a few. 
 He preached; he put on an armor that did not fit him, 
 but he made it fit him, and he preached on, and changed 
 the current of his life—what it might have become; 
 not what God meant it should be, but what human 
 
FOREWORD 
 
 IX 
 
 wisdom and prudence mapped it out to be. What dis¬ 
 appointment it secretly must have been, but what a 
 triumphant entry into immortality! What he could 
 not do he had compelled others to do by his preaching. 
 He had forced a lawyer as brave as himself and as 
 resourceful to use the courts. He had revealed to his 
 fellow citizens the fires of Hell in the nostrils of the 
 monster of corruption, consuming the innocent and de¬ 
 stroying a city which he was sent to save and for which 
 God had prepared him among the hills of New Eng¬ 
 land. And it was to be done as it always must be done, 
 by preaching. 
 
 Whatever may be your estimate of Dr. C. H. Park- 
 hurst you will have to concede his greatest power was 
 his preaching. That he might have developed other 
 talents there can be no doubt. He had the qualities 
 of a statesman, but he would have failed as a politician 
 of his times when you use that term in its best defini¬ 
 tion, for he was not politic. There was no balancing 
 of probabilities or possibilities; there could be but one 
 possibility, and that must square with what he under¬ 
 stood to be eternal right and before right all men must 
 go down or stand upon right at any cost. No man 
 measures anything by any other scale. That is where 
 the preacher differentiates; what is the commission; 
 who utters the command? It permits no such thing as 
 a bargain or a price. The world has always feared 
 such men; if it had had enough of them a chance of 
 a speedy millennium would have been infinitely im¬ 
 proved. Its greatest lack today is that such men are 
 too scarce in the pulpit. But while this is a simple 
 
X 
 
 FOREWORD 
 
 statement, it is not all of it; it carries many and funda¬ 
 mental qualities. 
 
 The man who preaches is a messenger who gives 
 himself daily to the message he receives. Anyone who 
 knows C. H. Parkhurst feels the force of his whole 
 consecration. Preaching with him is not a profession; 
 it is not to get a living or for fame; it is talent as a 
 trust for which there is an accounting to be given and 
 to which there attaches a daily conscience. It has an 
 objective. 
 
 A sermon is not a passing entertainment. It is not 
 to please an audience. It might be the opposite of all 
 that; it will depend upon the manner of man you are 
 who hear. It is a tremendous responsibility which is 
 imposed; how it weighs will explain the preacher; his 
 vision, his interpretations of personal privilege and lib¬ 
 erties; the values attaching to his ministry, what he 
 may do with it and what call attaches to it. A call 
 to preach is not a voice and an answer from which a 
 departure is taken and at which a date is fixed, and 
 that is all; it is a day by day affair as much as one’s 
 daily bread. The preacher must renew it to know that 
 he has it; he cannot lay it off in periods, he must live 
 it. It is a life. He synchronizes it with the rhythm of 
 his heart. You never will understand Dr. Parkhurst 
 until you feel his preaching call in the consecration of 
 his being. There can be no retreat. To carry on from 
 day to day appears in the freshness of perpetual ver¬ 
 dure and bloom of thought. Every sermon, even if 
 a repetition is attempted, is a new application which 
 sounds like the melody of a new truth. You never 
 
FOREWORD 
 
 xi 
 
 heard it on this wise before. It has been growing new 
 roots in the heart; it has been preparing for new fruits 
 in its blossoms. There are bloomings for ornament 
 only. The Japanese cherry never fruits; it riots in 
 blossoms. There are sermons like it; they dazzle with 
 illustration but the boughs never bend under fruit. The 
 hearer of Dr. Parkhurst’s sermon must solve a ques¬ 
 tion of obligation; he must choose sides. There is 
 nothing indefinite or merely ornamental about what he 
 has heard; it is not a Japanese cherry tree to admire 
 simply! 
 
 Among the traits of Dr. Parkhurst as a preacher 
 you would expect courage and you are not disap¬ 
 pointed. But it is a high quality of courage. There 
 is a courage which is belligerent and provocative; it 
 arouses antagonism; it is combative. There is another 
 which is quiet and unassertive; its source is conviction 
 of right and duty. It is never boastful but it is always 
 respected. It does not need to count the cost, it has but 
 one price and that is fixed by the justice and merits of 
 the cause. There is a courage which shouts with the 
 crowd and it goes with the crowd and it disappears 
 when the crowd does. There is a courage which stands 
 alone, having settled the issue and already taken the 
 consequences; that courage is dangerous. There is 
 always a demand for such courage in the preaching 
 which conquers. 
 
 Incisiveness is a potent quality of the pulpit; the 
 power of analysis; the separation of truth from error, 
 or of truth into its parts and setting them forth in their 
 relative values and claims. It is not that analysis which 
 
Xll 
 
 FOREWORD 
 
 refines, tediously, distinctions to satisfy the uncertain¬ 
 ties of one’s own mentality. A listener to Dr. Park- 
 hurst always carries away the impression that the truth 
 under discussion has had an impartial hearing in the 
 study of the preacher, in all of its bearings, before it 
 is submitted to the hearers in the audience. No es¬ 
 sential parts are missing. There is no blundering by 
 anatomical carelessness; it has been divided at its joints 
 and resolved into its components, that God’s thoughts 
 may be seen and followed in their order. The trouble 
 with many who feel compelled by their impulses to 
 build sound morals, is their failure to appreciate rela¬ 
 tions of the truth in its application to humanity as a 
 
 harmonizing whole. The analytical, incisive mind does 
 
 \ 
 
 not embarrass his cause by such blundering; and this 
 leads to another preaching quality somewhat kindred. 
 That is the comprehensive gift. It may be cultivated 
 but it seems to me first a gift. Some minds will see 
 only one thing in a landscape; it may be only moun¬ 
 tains or all lakes or all sky lines. But there are valleys 
 and foothills; there is White Face and forest preserves, 
 and meadows and gorges. It is the high art of the 
 preacher to discuss them all. 
 
 One of the high qualities which has fitted Dr. Park- 
 hurst to lead the thoughts of men has been the teaching 
 character of his preaching. Nothing has ever been so 
 great that it could be enthroned to the exclusion of all 
 things beside, and nothing is so small that it could be 
 laid aside as of no consequence, in any great appeal 
 which must go forth in the name of God. A judgment 
 of relativity should be classed among the ten talents, 
 
FOREWORD 
 
 • • • 
 xiu 
 
 or one talent equal to ten. In this Dr. Parkhurst quali¬ 
 fies superbly and he should be often heard and 
 faithfully studied by forcible reformers who fail to 
 comprehend the value of comprehensiveness. 
 
 As a constant preacher Dr. Parkhurst has much to 
 aid him in the free gifts, which if cultivated, are what 
 they are because they were present to be cultivated. 
 An impressive personality; an attractive style; a clear 
 voice; a quiet earnestness and intensity; a happy illus¬ 
 tration passing from classic literature to life’s common 
 story in striking simile, sometimes relieving the hearer 
 from the tension of his thought, sometimes flooding 
 the whole subject with a light like a sunburst, so radi¬ 
 ant, so happy, that you wonder it did not occur to you. 
 They are not overwrought, they are not conceits, they 
 belong to Parkhurst, and they bear his trademark. 
 They are surprises in the landscape through which he 
 takes you. They illumine logic. 
 
 Dr. Parkhurst is well timed. He comprehends his 
 subject and has no trouble in making you comprehend 
 it, but he does not exhaust it nor himself nor you. You 
 always wish there were more of the same sort. It is a 
 pity that so many preachers spoil their sermons by over¬ 
 preaching them. 
 
 Dr. Parkhurst uses a manuscript. I have wondered 
 whether he would do better without it; I doubt it. That 
 question he doubtless has raised and settled. Some 
 preachers spoil themselves by trying to be extemporane¬ 
 ous without the gift or the nerve control. Some never 
 can handle a manuscript successfully. Dr. Parkhurst 
 uses the manuscript most effectively and when he is 
 
XIV 
 
 FOREWORD 
 
 through you lack nothing of aroused convictions and 
 you are glad that it is in form for preservation and he 
 has it as he thought it and said it and not as a reporter 
 spoils it. 
 
 The friends of Dr. Parkhurst hail with delight the 
 announcement that after the retiring hour of the army 
 and the courts is past, a church of another denomina¬ 
 tion has persuaded him to give his great city another 
 year’s preaching. We envy this congregation, but 
 those of us who have the privilege of his sermons in 
 the summer among the Adirondacks will insist that the 
 vacation period shall not be shortened because a con¬ 
 gregation from all over our country will be waiting 
 eagerly one of America’s greatest preachers! 
 
 James R. Day, 
 
 Ex-Chancellor Syracuse University. 
 
A TRIBUTE 
 
 Os 
 
 “That young minister has the right spirit. He will 
 be heard from yet.” Thus commented the late Bishop 
 Henry C. Potter after a visit to the “white church on 
 the hill” at Lenox, where he heard Doctor Parkhurst 
 preach. In the writer’s presence the Bishop in 1904 
 narrated this circumstance as attending his visit to the 
 church in Lenox. At that time Doctor Parkhurst was 
 unheard of outside of the community where he minis- 
 tered to his rural congregation. His transference to 
 an opulent metropolitan church was to him, of course, 
 an event of great importance, but to citizens of New 
 York it proved of even greater importance. 
 
 At that time conditions in the municipal life of New 
 York were what was publicly described as intolerable, 
 and yet there seemed to the people no means of relief. 
 Like a pall there settled down upon the city that feeling 
 of apathy which not infrequently is characteristic of 
 democratic institutions and which expresses itself in the 
 popular saying “Oh, well, we cannot change things. 
 Let us make what we can out of them.” Since the 
 close of the Civil War, by the process of political party 
 accretion there had been accumulating misgovernment 
 and political corruption. The people were thoroughly 
 aware of their existence, but seemed to be either in¬ 
 capable or unwilling to relieve themselves from the 
 
 XV 
 
XVI 
 
 A TRIBUTE 
 
 ever-increasing burden of odium and taxation. To the 
 student of the workings of democratic institutions, it 
 must be cause for deep concern to observe on the one 
 hand the apathy of the well-meaning, comfortable citi¬ 
 zen who is satisfied to drift along with the tide because 
 it would be too much trouble to pull against it, and on 
 the other hand the large number of men who have 
 either an interest or a profit, actual or expectant, in the 
 existent political order. 
 
 Party rule or ascendancy as such cannot be held re¬ 
 sponsible for bad government or political corruption. 
 It is the perversion of the party machinery to evil pur¬ 
 poses by men who work into control and who cleverly 
 utilize party feelings and loyalty to subserve their own 
 evil designs. 
 
 Several efforts were made to break the domination 
 of the “ring” that held the city in its iron grip, but 
 with one exception they all lacked sincerity and were 
 simply the noise made by the “outs” trying to break 
 into the “ins.” That exception was resultant from the 
 exposure of the Tweed plunderers, and when the pub¬ 
 lic-spirited men that led that movement passed from 
 the stage of activity the city relapsed into a passive 
 quietude which was occasionally ruffled by the spas¬ 
 modic efforts of the various brands of democracy seek¬ 
 ing the stamp of regularity. Almost every year a 
 movement for reform was started. Sometimes the re¬ 
 formers were partially successful, but when they were 
 the reformers after a short time needed reformation. 
 Generally speaking, the struggle for municipal control 
 was for the offices, the patronage and the consequent 
 
A TRIBUTE 
 
 XVII 
 
 pickings. There was no genuine attempt to purify the 
 city government and construct a better system in its 
 stead. It was before the era of great corporate fran¬ 
 chises and industrial development that have made politi¬ 
 cal favors so valuable. The prevailing vices of govern¬ 
 ment affected the people in their intimate relations of 
 life, and, consequently, were the more galling. 
 
 The maintenance of peace and order and the safety 
 of person and property were of personal interest to the 
 citizen, and the department of the city government 
 charged with these functions was the one that bore the 
 most intimate relations to the people in their lives and 
 daily occupations This department, known as the 
 Police Department, had been for years made the foot¬ 
 ball of party politics, had been used as an instrument 
 for party advantage, and incidentally as a means of 
 profit to the favored among party supporters. It 
 would be difficult to conceive a more effective method 
 to accomplish these purposes than the one that had 
 been put in operation, known as the bipartisan commis¬ 
 sion. This consisted in the requirement of law that the 
 Department of Police should be governed by a com¬ 
 mission consisting of four members, two from the 
 Democratic Party and two from the Republican Party. 
 In selecting their respective commissioners, the party 
 leaders took good care that the most trusted, useful 
 and serviceable men to their party were selected, and 
 from this system there sprang the most odious, oppres¬ 
 sive and corrupt system of police administration that 
 ever disgraced municipal government. 
 
 Appointment on the force as patrolman could only 
 
XVI11 
 
 A TRIBUTE 
 
 be obtained by purchase, and thereafter every step of 
 preferment had to be paid for. Efficiency in the per¬ 
 formance of duty was of but slight consideration. 
 The rank of captain was highly prized, eagerly sought 
 for, and commanded a purchase price in proportion to 
 the illicit revenue to be derived. A police captain was 
 a veritable czar in his precinct. He exercised arbitrary 
 power over every person and business that could be 
 brought within police regulation or interference. Nor 
 was this surveillance confined to those occupations that 
 existed by infringement of municipal ordinance or vio¬ 
 lation of law. It extended to the trader and merchant 
 in legitimate trade and commerce. Police protection 
 of premises or property that should have been given as 
 matter of right and duty was obtained only by pur¬ 
 chase. All occupations or lines of conduct that were 
 followed in defiance of law and morals were subjected 
 to tribute. From the liquor saloon to the gambling 
 house, from the policy shop to the pool room, from the 
 fashionable house of ill fame that had to pay monthly, 
 according to the neighborhood and number of its in¬ 
 mates, to the unfortunate street-walker that had to pay 
 nightly for the privilege of walking the patrolman's 
 beat—every source of blackmail and extortion was 
 utilized and formulated into a system, so that the trail 
 of graft was traceable through nearly every channel of 
 municipal life and activity. 
 
 Mere accumulation of wealth through graft was not 
 the only pursuit of the police captain. He was ex¬ 
 pected by his political sponsors to see that the election 
 districts in his precinct made suitable returns on the 
 
A TRIBUTE 
 
 xix 
 
 night of election. In fact, there were few things in 
 the life of the city in which this omnipresent official did 
 not participate. The extent of his manifold activities 
 was well expressed by the Bohemian people who re¬ 
 sided in a certain precinct and who from a painful 
 experience found a word in their Czech language to 
 convey their understanding of his multifarious charac¬ 
 ter, and that was the “Pantata,” which meant “Father 
 of all things.” 
 
 But while corruption ran riot and its flood was taken 
 as a matter of course, it was not the worst affliction on 
 a citizenship that seemed inert and supine. That afflic¬ 
 tion was the abject and cringing submission to police 
 violence. Clubbing was the order of the day. No 
 police duty could be performed without clubbing. No 
 matter how slight the infraction of peace, the offender 
 had to be clubbed, and it was not all done in public. 
 Frequently the unfortunate who resisted arrest or other¬ 
 wise aroused the wrath of the guardians of the peace, 
 was beaten in the police station cell. Occasionally a 
 citizen who had been wantonly assaulted by a policeman 
 sought legal redress, and he was laughed out of court. 
 The quickest and shortest route to popular or official 
 favor was brutality in the use of the club on the citizen. 
 Indeed, the most popular, if not the most potential, 
 officer of high rank on the force was generally known 
 
 as “Clubber -Withal there was thorough 
 
 efficiency by the police in dealing with the declared ene¬ 
 mies of society, such as burglars and robbers. From 
 the very nature of their criminal pursuits they could 
 not be arranged or reduced to a system that would 
 
XX 
 
 A TRIBUTE 
 
 yield tribute. Besides, when drastic methods were used 
 to protect banks, houses and highways, the people, by 
 way of compensation, became acquiescent to* the reign 
 of the club and the welter of graft. 
 
 These twin evils so encrusted New York that her 
 people became deadened in civic pride and American 
 citizenship to such extent that it seemed nothing short 
 of a moral earthquake could arouse them. And it 
 came, and from a quarter least expected. In the month 
 of February, 1892, Dr. Parkhurst delivered his mem¬ 
 orable course of sermons in which he with vigorous 
 and scathing language riveted the attention of the people 
 to the shameful and degraded condition of their city. 
 At first he was derided, then he was jeered, then he 
 was challenged, and finally dared to proof. That a 
 mere minister should use his pulpit as a hustings plat¬ 
 form from which to fulminate political harangues was 
 a disgrace to the church and should not be tolerated. It 
 was eminently proper that a minister of the Gospel 
 should in general and glittering terms denounce Satan 
 and all his works and extol piety and all its fruits; but 
 that he should denounce crime flourishing with the con¬ 
 nivance of the public authorities was a thing unheard 
 of and calculated to scandalize religion. This was the 
 chorus of condemnation joined in by the thoughtless, 
 indifferent, bellwethered crowd, while those for who 
 because of interest or guilt felt the well-aimed shafts, 
 language failed to plumb the depths of their indigna¬ 
 tion. The public authorities whose duty it was to in¬ 
 vestigate whether the conditions described existed, 
 laughed at the Doctor’s charges with scorn and refused 
 
A TRIBUTE 
 
 xxi 
 
 to take any official notice. Then arose a demand from 
 press and public for proofs. This it was confidently 
 believed would silence the Doctor and extinguish him 
 in the confusion of failure. 
 
 How could such proofs be adduced in the face of re¬ 
 iterated declaration by the sworn officers of the law that 
 the charges were groundless? Here was a test. To 
 meet it required the very highest quality of moral cour¬ 
 age, a courage that did not partake of the qualities of 
 the animal or brute, but one that searched the very soul 
 for strength and fortitude. Failure meant all that the 
 word implies, and in addition the derision of the mob 
 and the mockery of the accused. The test was met 
 triumphantly. The proofs were produced, and the 
 challengers were confounded. Immediately the public 
 conscience was quickened, civic bodies such as the 
 Chamber of Commerce commenced to move. The 
 Grand Jury began to inquire. Civic movements sprang 
 into existence. A halting legislature decreed an inves¬ 
 tigation. And there followed an exposure of corrupt 
 practices in municipal government that shocked the 
 country. 
 
 The influence and effect produced were not confined 
 to the City of New York. Large and small municipali¬ 
 ties throughout the United States took warning and 
 adopted measures for protection against the spread of 
 the evil contagion. 
 
 While it may be true that lapses have occurred, yet 
 on the whole there has been a great improvement in 
 municipal government. The moral tone of the people 
 in relation to it has been elevated to a higher and 
 
XXII 
 
 A TRIBUTE 
 
 healthier plane. Particularly is the change made mani¬ 
 fest in the attitude of the policeman to the citizen. No 
 longer does he twirl and use his “locust” on the un¬ 
 offending citizen as if it were his legitimate function. 
 The citizen now has rights which even the uniformed 
 paid public servant must respect. To Dr. Parkhurst 
 beyond all other men must be accorded the credit for 
 this great change. His genius and courage were the 
 sparks of ignition. He has been classed as an idealist 
 in pursuit of a dream impossible of realization. He 
 recognized that by man-made law alone men could not 
 be made honest nor women be made virtuous. He did 
 not set himself up as an evangel to abolish the social 
 evil. What he did direct his efforts to was the destruc¬ 
 tion of the criminal combination between the licensed 
 violators of law and morals and the officers of the law 
 who were sworn to prevent such violations and who for 
 their tolerance and participation derived wealth and 
 power. 
 
 John W. Goff. 
 
CONTENTS 
 
 PART I—EXPERIENCES 
 
 CHAPTER PAGE 
 
 I. Early Days . 3 
 
 II. Amherst College . 28 
 
 III. My First Pastorate. 45 
 
 IV. My Second Pastorate. 59 
 
 V. Mountaineering ... 78 
 
 VI. The Ascent of the Matterhorn. 99 
 
 VII. Successful Assault Upon the Tammany 
 Interest, Conducted Under the Aus¬ 
 pices of the Society for the Prevention 
 of Crime in 1892-1894. 106 
 
 PART II—REFLECTIONS 
 
 1. Am I a Trinitarian?. .. 149 
 
 2. Undervaluation of the Old Testament... 153 
 
 3. Fitness for the Ministry . 160 
 
 4. The Study of Theology . 166 
 
 5. Denominationalism ._. 171 
 
 6. The Church Militant. 174 
 
 7. The Doctrine of Immortality. 178 
 
 xxiii 
 
XXIV 
 
 CONTENTS 
 
 CHAPTER PAGE 
 
 8. Religion . 183 
 
 9. Faith . 189 
 
 10. The Sheep and the Goats. 192 
 
 11. Does the Heavenly World Differ Funda¬ 
 
 mentally from the Earthly One?. 196 
 
 12. Darwinism and the Church . 200 
 
 13. Compulsory Morality . 206 
 
 14. An Education Is No One’s Exclusive 
 
 Privilege. 211 
 
 15. The Fellowship of Nations . 215 
 
 16. Mother and Child . 220 
 
 17. The Art of Longevity. 225 
 
 18. Innovations . 228 
 
 19. National Character Is Dependent on 
 
 Domestic Character. 232 
 
 20. The Men Who Labor .. .... 236 
 
 21. The Determination of His Life Work.... 240 
 
 22. Treating Criminals as Moral Invalids. .. . 244 
 
 23. A Primary and an Auxiliary Life’s Purpose 248 
 
 24. Our International Future . 252 
 
Part I 
 
 EXPERIENCES 
 
CHAPTER I 
 
 EARLY DAYS 
 
 To give the public the story of my life is to make my¬ 
 self public property, to do which is not presumptuous, 
 for it is to the public that every man belongs. 
 
 Life has its inner and outer side. Neither is com¬ 
 plete without the other. One’s habit is to uncover 
 thoughts and impulses only after having screened them 
 through the fine meshes of prudence and reserve. Like 
 dealers in household commodities, we place in the show- 
 window only such samples of stock as will invite ap¬ 
 proving attention. We all like to pass for better and 
 wiser than we are ; and when we confess in the assembly 
 of the saints to the Lord our depravity, we do it in 
 pursuance of an accepted ritual and not with the expec¬ 
 tation that we shall be taken seriously by our human 
 auditors. The story of a man’s life then should be the 
 record not only of what he has been doing and attempt¬ 
 ing to do, but also of what he has been thinking, feeling 
 and dreaming, and of the way in which he has reacted 
 upon the impact of outward events. 
 
 What we call our life is only so much of our history 
 as is bracketed between two momentous events, Birth 
 and Death; sunrise and sunset: one short day between. 
 We are treading here so closely upon the margin of the 
 
 3 
 
4 MY FORTY YEARS IN NEW YORK 
 
 unknown that we need to step carefully. Birth and 
 death are common but never commonplace. Though 
 billions have passed through these twin experiences 
 there has been no instance of either that was not 
 shrouded in impenetrable mystery and invested with 
 unspeakable solemnity. It is a fault of our nature that 
 frequent repetition and continued familiarity despoil of 
 its meaning even that which is essentially marvelous. 
 We become able to stand with our back to either the 
 rising or the setting sun, and to walk in the night with 
 no consciousness of the stars. We are common suf¬ 
 ferers under the blight of blunted sensibilities. 
 
 BIRTH 
 
 I was sufficiently advanced to be able to be born on 
 the 17th of April, 1842. My life was the continuance 
 of my father’s and mother’s life, as was theirs the pro¬ 
 longation of life inherited from an indefinite, not to say 
 infinite, series of foregoing generations, creating for 
 me therefore an origin lying back in remote antiquity. 
 
 The genealogical table recorded in St. Luke’s Gospel 
 makes “Seth the son of Adam, who was the son of 
 God.” Between the last two named in the series— 
 Adam and God—there can be interpolated as many 
 generations as imagination may extemporize or science 
 justify. According to the authority of the latter, the 
 table of descent, if complete, would have to enumerate 
 generations sufficient in number to fill fifty or a hun¬ 
 dred thousand years. And if the race to which we 
 belong sprang from a single source then I am lineally 
 descended from the original human, saying nothing of 
 
EARLY DAYS 
 
 5 
 
 what the original human may have developed from. 
 All of which, as I look back from April 17th, 1842, 
 affords me material interesting to contemplate; and 
 others, of course, have the same fascinating retrospect 
 offered them. 
 
 In all of this I am very serious. There is an eternity 
 behind us as well as one forward of us; and with the 
 one that is behind us we appear to have personal con¬ 
 nection. And because the chain of my descent con¬ 
 tained just such links as it did, I was able to be born on 
 the 17th of April, 1842. 
 
 There is no question or dispute as to the origin of my 
 body. But where did my soul come from? It is my 
 soul that makes 1842 significant either to me or to those 
 interested in me. Soul and body are not identical. 
 There is no fact of which we are more conscious, 
 especially in our vivid moments: closely connected they 
 are, of course; wonderfully interlocked undoubtedly; 
 but no immediacy of interlocking constitutes identity. 
 And what is more, the more advanced the point to 
 which we carry the culture of the soul the more assured 
 we become that body is one thing and soul something 
 distinctly else. This is so essentially a part of my creed 
 that I could not consistently omit its mention. 
 
 Also it is only when I am conscious of the separate 
 and substantive character of the soul that I am able to 
 be confident of immortality. People whose experience 
 is housed in their bodies have not such a practical belief 
 in immortality as to make of it a working conviction. 
 Physical sensation and “the power of the endless life” 
 are incompatible. We may entertain the idea, but an 
 
6 MY FORTY YEARS IN NEW YORK 
 
 idea that is registered in our creed is not necessarily an 
 element of our conscious and sustaining faith. 
 
 But if soul can exist after it leaves the body there is 
 created a presumption that it might have existed before 
 it took the body. Why not? It is certainly worth con¬ 
 sidering. Going into eternity would be balanced by 
 coming out from eternity. We may have existed in our 
 spiritual connections a great deal longer than it seems 
 we have in our bodily connections. There is no harm 
 in thus knocking at the door of the great undisclosed 
 secrets of life. “There are more things in heaven and 
 earth than are dreamed of in our philosophy.” There 
 is no danger that our conceptions will outmeasure reali¬ 
 ties. We see more when we look up than when we look 
 down. One may be a visionary, but a visionary is 
 nearer the truth than a contented materialist. 
 
 We may not confidently base our religious convic¬ 
 tions upon the pictorial representations made in the 
 early chapters of Genesis, but it is worth noticing that 
 what is there recognized as the original man is repre¬ 
 sented as having been composed of two elements, one 
 from the ground, the other from the Creator. If from 
 the Creator it could carry no date. There might also 
 be cited the frequency with which we are in Scripture 
 designated as God’s children, and once by St. Paul as 
 God’s offspring. But to be a child imports the entrance 
 into it of some element that was a quotation from its 
 father. So that I cannot be properly called one of 
 God’s children unless, with the human that is in me, 
 there is combined something that came to me from 
 
EARLY DAYS 
 
 7 
 
 God; eternal therefore; undated; eternally prior to 
 
 1842. 
 
 These are some of the thoughts that cluster around 
 my birth. I doubt if they bear the mark of any theo¬ 
 logical seminary—an institution which, perhaps unfor¬ 
 tunately, I never attended. As will appear later on, I 
 have always been more fascinated by the study and by 
 the preaching of individual truths, than by the process 
 of dovetailing them into each other and framing them 
 into a theological system. My preference for the for¬ 
 mer rather than for the latter may have been indiscreet. 
 If I could have my way—which would very likely not 
 be a good way—I would take what are called “theolog¬ 
 ical seminaries” and rebaptize them as “schools of 
 Christian learning.” Perhaps that would do something 
 toward minimizing the necessity for competitive insti¬ 
 tutions. 
 
 MY ANCESTRY 
 
 Everything that is essential has already been said ex¬ 
 cept what pertains to my immediate parentage. 
 
 My father, Charles F. W. Parkhurst, was a farmer. 
 His property, which consisted of arable land and wood¬ 
 land, lay in Ashland, Mass., and was an inheritance 
 from my grandfather, Ephraim Parkhurst. Some¬ 
 thing detailed must be said about him as well as about 
 my mother, for their character was so pronounced as 
 almost to predestine the character of the son. 
 
 It has often been related of those who afterward 
 became ministers that they were born of poor but pious 
 parents. My father was not poor, but, for a New Eng- 
 
8 MY FORTY YEARS IN NEW YORK 
 
 land farmer, was quite comfortably fixed. Nor was 
 he pious; on the contrary his religion was altogether 
 sound and wholesome. He had an academic education, 
 and already at the age of nineteen, and while still car¬ 
 rying on his farm work, commenced teaching winter 
 school, a course which he followed for twenty-one suc¬ 
 cessive years. He was a thorough student of English 
 and never committed any thought to writing without 
 giving to it felicitous expression. This followed natu¬ 
 rally because of the wealth of his vocabulary. During 
 a three months’ illness he had devoted himself ex¬ 
 clusively to Webster’s dictionary. 
 
 He was thoroughly New England. His spirit was 
 one of uncompromise. What was right was right; 
 what was wrong was wrong. He believed in heaven 
 and believed just as much in hell. His theology was a 
 quotation from the Bible, which he interpreted literally 
 and accepted implicitly: “God began the world Mon¬ 
 day and finished it Saturday.” 
 
 He was head of the household and also its priest. 
 Every morning he read us a chapter from the Bible and 
 followed it with prayer; always asked a blessing at 
 table; every Sunday, whatever the weather, took us all 
 to church, sat at the head of the pew, mother at the foot, 
 with the four children judiciously arranged between. 
 
 Such a regime was not felt by us as severe. We 
 knew nothing different and imagined nothing different. 
 It is better to be brought up than to come up. We 
 never questioned but that it was right that we should 
 be under authority; that father’s word should be law 
 and that disobedience should be punished. That pol- 
 
EARLY DAYS 
 
 9 
 
 icy, continued year after year, wrought in us a robust¬ 
 ness of moral fiber that never could be gotten out of our 
 system. His love for us was intense but not demonstra¬ 
 tive, and his whole life was offered on the altar of 
 devotion to wife and children. 
 
 But while father was Mount Sinai, mother was Cal¬ 
 vary, and between the two we secured the entire thing, 
 the Law and the Gospel. He furnished basis for her 
 gentleness and she softened the edges of his asperity. 
 
 My mother also was from New England and as 
 feminine as father was masculine. She believed it to 
 be a woman’s duty to marry, to have children, and to 
 take care of them herself instead of farming them out 
 to a nurse. She did all her own work, ran a dairy, and 
 when time hung heavily on her hands taught school in 
 the summer. There was nothing apologetic about New 
 England women of that date. Listlessness was a mis¬ 
 demeanor and incompetency a crime. 
 
 Mother sharply discriminated between the sexes and 
 scorned effeminate men and mannish women. In her 
 estimate, it belonged to men to take care of outside 
 things and to women to take care of inside ones. For 
 a woman to ride a horse astride she would have re¬ 
 garded as vulgar immodesty. She would nearly as soon 
 have appeared in a state of nature as wear a pair of 
 feminine pantaloons—what the young women of pres¬ 
 ent date euphemistically designate as knickerbockers. 
 To have been caught smoking would have cost her even 
 her devoted husband’s contempt. As for “women’s 
 rights,” she gloried in the rights she had and felt no 
 hankering for those that did not belong to her. If I 
 
10 MY FORTY YEARS IN NEW YORK 
 
 had not had such a mother, I should be able to con¬ 
 template with more consideration the average women 
 of the period. I do not want to put her upon too high 
 a pedestal. There were times when I did not like her, 
 but they were just the times when I think she did not 
 exactly like me. She labored for my moral betterment 
 with maternal solicitude and with moderate success, but 
 matters never reached such a point that she felt justified 
 in calling me her “angel child.” She lived for her chil¬ 
 dren, and very precious and sweet is their memory of 
 her. 
 
 Such was the home in which I lived till I was twenty, 
 and any boy must have been dull beyond the reach of 
 illumination and depraved beyond the reach of redemp¬ 
 tion not to have derived from such influence some 
 germinal impulses of intelligence and some incipient 
 impulses toward nobility of life. 
 
 Before taking up matters distinct from the interior 
 quality of my home, I want to call more pointed atten¬ 
 tion to the relations between my father and mother in 
 the matter of sex, and to the normal distribution be¬ 
 tween them of domestic functions—normal at any rate 
 according to the standard of Scripture, and normal 
 according to the usages that until comparatively re¬ 
 cently have been in vogue in the better class of Amer¬ 
 ican families. 
 
 Father was the head of the house, the master, the 
 court of last resort. Mother was always cooperant 
 with him in her own sphere, where full authority was 
 allowed her, and the spheres of operation were appor¬ 
 tioned on the basis of sex. The line between masculine 
 
EARLY DAYS 
 
 11 
 
 and feminine was recognized and definitely drawn; and 
 from neither side was there any disposition to overstep 
 that line. 
 
 This leads naturally to the statement that society is 
 threatened by the diminished attention shown to sex 
 distinction. In any man who is normal his masculine 
 quality extends through his entire system. In any 
 woman who is normal her feminine quality extends 
 through her entire system. Her womanhood does not 
 consist simply in being constituted for the production 
 and rearing of children, but she is woman in all the 
 component elements of her being; in the delicacy of her 
 physical constitution, in the character of her thought, in 
 the quality of her emotions, in the scope of her pur¬ 
 poses and ambitions. If she is thoroughly woman she 
 is woman in all that she is and does. 
 
 Members of the two sexes respectively being distinct 
 by nature, normal development will operate to increase 
 that distinction, so that instead of tending to make them 
 more and more alike it will make them increasingly 
 different, less and less fitted for the same kind of ex¬ 
 perience, the same order of conduct, the same sphere of 
 action. A mannish woman is neither man nor woman, 
 but a freak. Instead of adding to her charm she blem¬ 
 ishes it. Instead of broadening her influence she con¬ 
 tracts it. 
 
 The region of my birth was pure nature and devoted 
 only to agriculture. My earlier life was that of the 
 ordinary farmer’s boy. A single family living half a 
 mile distant made for us our only society. One of its 
 boys was my chum. We quarrelled frequently but 
 
12 MY FORTY YEARS IN NEW YORK 
 
 without weakening the bonds of friendship. If we 
 came to blows it was only because we were a pair of 
 young animals and adopted that means of becoming 
 better acquainted. 
 
 The three older of us children obtained most of our 
 fun from sports of our own. “Three old cat” was our 
 favorite amusement. No baseball nine ever derived 
 more enjoyment from their game than we did from 
 ours. In winter we “slid downhill.” It was not much 
 of a hill nor much of a slide, but fulfilled our desires as 
 perfectly as do winter sports content pleasure-seekers 
 in Lake Placid, Montreal or St. Moritz. 
 
 In passing I want to say that in the corner of the lot 
 where we did our coasting was a garden, at the edge of 
 which was a big tree, behind which, in the immaturity 
 of my theological conceptions, I located Adam and Eve 
 when attempting to conceal themselves from the Lord. 
 I did as an individual child what the childhood of the 
 race did when it undertook to pictorialize man’s apos¬ 
 tasy. In both cases the representation was dignified but 
 more or less infantile. 
 
 On the Fourth of July I celebrated the anniversary 
 of American Independence by burning one bunch of 
 fire-crackers and all my fingers. It was a pyrotechnical 
 display in miniature but fully satisfied my patriotic 
 ambition and contributed in its measure to the glory 
 of George Washington and the other revolutionary 
 
 fathers. my early education 
 
 The circumstances of my upbringing were favorable. 
 To my years on the farm I am deeply indebted. The 
 
EARLY DAYS 
 
 13 
 
 country itself was an education both for the body and 
 the soul. It is one thing to stand in constant relation 
 with things that date from ages past, and something 
 quite different to be in continuous contact with only 
 that which was manufactured yesterday or the day be¬ 
 fore. The atmosphere that the city boy breathes is un¬ 
 filtered; his sunshine is spotted and blurred; his star¬ 
 light is dulled by dust and smoke which enter his eyes, 
 his brain, and his thinking. Even the rain, which be¬ 
 comes a thing of soft and liquid beauty when viewed 
 over an expanse of pasture and woodland, becomes 
 something repulsive when it comes slopping down over 
 the roof of our neighbor’s house across the street. 
 
 As for myself, I saw the river, the woods and the 
 clouds just as God made them. Human interference 
 with nature spoils it, considered as a revelation from 
 God, just as human commentaries vitiate the Bible. 
 After one has become adult it is possible to be sub¬ 
 jected to the artificialities of the city without serious 
 detriment, but they make poor soil for the nurture of 
 the young roots of human life. It is for that reason 
 that the city would perish of anemia if it had not the 
 rural population to draw upon. 
 
 People themselves grow to be artificial by prolonged 
 companionship with what is not natural. They acquire 
 a quality of demeanor that camouflages their original 
 self. I would rather have a boy uncouth than to have 
 him affected. I am grateful that I began life where I 
 could be myself without incurring censure, and that I 
 lived there long enough to have unaffectedness become 
 a fixed element of my constitution. 
 
14 MY FORTY YEARS IN NEW YORK 
 
 It was also to my advantage that my early years were 
 punctuated by no thrills. One day was the same as the 
 day before, and one year for the most part the repeti¬ 
 tion of the year previous. It was monotonous, but I 
 never realized it as monotony. I was healthy, and it 
 was a pleasure simply to live. He is an unfortunate 
 boy with whom early years are other than a season of 
 vegetating. 
 
 There were no excitements, therefore I did not learn 
 to crave excitement. Existence was itself a novelty, 
 for, so far as I knew, I had never existed before. I 
 fell asleep as soon as my head touched the pillow and 
 awoke with a laugh. It was glorious because it was 
 natural. It was very animal, but it fitted my quality, 
 for I was myself very animal. The evenness of the 
 flow made it the normal introduction to life. The most 
 wholesome appetite is that which finds satisfaction in 
 unseasoned food. The grown tree may need the wind 
 and the storm for its perfection, but while it is a little 
 thing it is the study of its. protector to maintain it in 
 unmolested quietude. One thrill every twenty-four 
 hours is the least that will satisfy the contemporary 
 child, a policy of treatment which is fitted to mar the 
 even tenor of life and which will bear fruit in queru¬ 
 lousness and discontent. 
 
 Such education as I acquired in my first years was 
 more a matter of absorption than of infusion. I was 
 dealt with by my father and mother upon the principle 
 that it is as natural to the normal mind to want to know 
 as for the stomach to want to be fed. I do not remem¬ 
 ber that as a boy the learning of any lesson was imposed 
 
EARLY DAYS 
 
 15 
 
 upon me. The aptitude for knowledge, natural to the 
 mind, was relied upon as sufficient impulse. 
 
 I was not sent to public school till I was twelve, and 
 was thus saved the fundamental disadvantage of having 
 cultivated in me a distaste for knowledge. I think that 
 if I had been, from the time I was six years old, sub¬ 
 jected to the educational system in vogue, where the 
 pupil is adapted to the curriculum instead of the cur¬ 
 riculum to the pupil, I should have graduated into some 
 form of industry upon completing the sixth grade. 
 
 My parents, both of whom were possessed of trained 
 intelligence, not only realized that no one could under¬ 
 stand the nature of their own child as well as they could 
 themselves, but took the ground that the initial steps 
 of a child’s education were so determinative of future 
 mental tendency and ultimate results, that those steps 
 should be taken on home ground and directed by the 
 parents themselves. For, as has been already indicated, 
 they were very clear and decided in their judgment that 
 parents existed not only for the purpose of bringing 
 children into the world but also for the supplementary 
 purpose of taking care of them after their arrival. 
 Home, therefore, was my first school-room, and my 
 brothers and sister my schoolmates. 
 
 The atmosphere which I respired at home was one 
 of thoughtfulness. How large a factor that was in my 
 upbringing I could not realize till later. Undertaking 
 to breathe in an intellectual vacuum is as devastating to 
 the mind as respiring an impoverished atmosphere is 
 deadening to the body; and there are indications that in 
 the home life of a considerable proportion of our young 
 
16 MY FORTY YEARS IN NEW YORK 
 
 people at present, vacuity is what they are nourished 
 upon. 
 
 Our evenings, especially our winter evenings, we 
 spent together as a family. That was our club. There 
 were no theaters within fifty miles and no moving pic¬ 
 tures anywhere. Father and mother both were too fine 
 to indulge in small talk, or to gossip about our neigh¬ 
 bors, all of whom w T ere distinguished by New England 
 respectability. There was thus created in our minds a 
 taste for what was real as opposed to what was ficti¬ 
 tious and silly, and an impulse begotten in us to exer¬ 
 cise our thoughts along elevated lines. 
 
 Father’s mind had a decidedly philosophical and the¬ 
 ological bent, but he was so clear and direct in his think¬ 
 ing and speaking that we were quite early able to “catch 
 on’’ to his ideas and to think small theologies of our 
 own. Whether the youthful “fundamentalism” that 
 we acquired from him made us better children or not 
 I do not know, but it gave a start to our intellectual 
 machinery, and with such influence exerted upon us 
 we could not pass from the age of eight or ten to that 
 of sixteen without having our mental faculties wrought 
 into a condition of pronounced activity. 
 
 All of this laid a firm foundation for later and more 
 methodical training. It introduced me to my own in¬ 
 telligence, which is something with which the average 
 child never becomes thoroughly acquainted which is 
 due to no fault of his own. Of course any boy or girl 
 can pick up ideas; can repeat what others have said; 
 
 can memorize Sir Isaac Newton, or even Aristotle. So 
 * ' 
 
 can a phonograph; but actually to think, to put the mind 
 
EARLY DAYS 
 
 17 
 
 on a track of original thought is distinct from memo¬ 
 rizing. Learning one’s lesson may mean something or 
 it may mean nothing. An idea may be in my mind 
 without being my idea, just as a dollar may be in my 
 pocket without being my dollar. 
 
 So then I began my education at the hearthstone. 
 My mind may not have been very much of a mind but 
 it early began in a small and pretty distinct way to go 
 alone. Nor must I omit to mention that we children 
 were regularly taken to church. We were expected to 
 listen to the preacher and to be prepared to talk in a 
 sensible way about what he said. I have at this moment 
 a vivid impression of the effect produced upon me by 
 a sermon I listened to when I was about ten years old 
 upon the text “The hairs of your head are all num¬ 
 bered.” A great deal of early New England intellec¬ 
 tual sturdiness was the product of New England 
 preaching. We had a two hours’ service in the morn¬ 
 ing; a Sunday school session, and then an afternoon 
 preaching service. The child of today is physically 
 unequal to so great a strain and mentally incapable of 
 being intellectually benefited by it. 
 
 But the fact is that intellectual stamina requires to be 
 earned and childhood is the ordained time to begin to 
 earn it, and the hearthstone and the sanctuary are the 
 places where the earning process is appointed of God 
 to begin. All of which means that I was “brought up” 
 and did not “come up.” It is no credit to me. The 
 praise is all due to God and to my father and mother. 
 
 If before I was born I had had an opportunity to 
 state my preference as to birthplace and parentage, I 
 
18 MY FORTY YEARS IN NEW YORK 
 
 should—had I my present understanding of condi¬ 
 tions—have asked to be born somewhere in the Eastern 
 States and in a farmer’s family. Under such condi¬ 
 tions there is very little opportunity for any kind of 
 foolishness and no likelihood of disqualifying and de¬ 
 bilitating luxury. It is not an elegant life, but a rigid 
 one that calls for hard work and straight thinking. 
 Superficiality is inflexibly ruled out. It is prosaic 
 rather than poetic. It gives thorough schooling in 
 reality. It steadily accustoms the mind to the disci¬ 
 pline of hard facts. I have for five years preached 
 to that kind of congregation and I know its quality. 
 Farmers do not think fast but they think straight. 
 They are rather apt to be orthodox, for they have a dis¬ 
 taste for camouflage. Their constant contact is with 
 nature’s forces, which can be neither resisted nor bribed. 
 It might be to public advantage if more of the responsi¬ 
 bility borne by Congress could be carried by members 
 of their class even at the expense of retaining at home 
 a corresponding number of capitalists and members of 
 the legal profession. A straight thought, like a straight 
 line, measures the shortest distance between any two 
 points. 
 
 I have remarked that all the study that I did at home 
 was done voluntarily. I can go further and say that it 
 was done not as work but as play. The intellectual and 
 the emotional cooperate. There is involved in this a 
 psychological principle which few parents and hardly 
 any school teachers appreciate as my parents appreci¬ 
 ated it. Feeling is thought’s lubricator. The mechanic 
 oils the drill with which he bores into metal. A lesson 
 
EARLY DAYS 
 
 19 
 
 which, reluctantly learned, will give a boy a headache, 
 learned enjoy ably will be as much a diversion as a game 
 of marbles. Hearts are given us not for ornament but 
 for service. A few days ago I met on the street a 
 bright-looking lad with a big pack of books under his 
 arm, evidently on his way from school. I stopped him 
 and said, “Do you go to school?” “Yes, sir,” was his 
 polite reply. “Do you like going to school?” said I. 
 “No, sir, I hate it,” he answered. There was a boy 
 who, as was evident from his countenance, was very 
 liberally possessed of intellectual possibilities, but who 
 was having those possibilities systematically wrecked at 
 public expense. 
 
 In my home, study was so conducted as to be one of 
 my amusements. My mother, while looking after the 
 household and running a dairy, arranged for me a set 
 of cards for the acquirement of the multiplication table; 
 and to run through those cards from 2x2 to 12 x 12, 
 forward and backward, was one of my games. That 
 is simply a sample of the way in which I got started in 
 my education. Reading and spelling were dealt with in 
 a way that was similarly entertaining. My father gave 
 me an equal treat in teaching me English grammar. 
 We spent together an hour a day for two months 
 “parsing” passages in Pollock’s “Course of Time.” 
 That was all the English grammar I ever studied. 
 Those two months are today, after seventy years, a 
 delightful memory. There is a pleasant way of doing 
 things and an exasperating way of not doing them. 
 Committing to memory lessons in grammatical analysis 
 is an example of the latter. Hearing good English 
 
20 MY FORTY YEARS IN NEW YORK 
 
 spoken and seeing good English written and printed is 
 an example of the former, and to give pupils a liberal 
 opportunity to hear and see is one of the teacher’s 
 responsibilities. 
 
 OUTLOOK ON THE FUTURE 
 
 Having been born a farmer’s son, I should naturally 
 have followed the same employment. But, however 
 appealing the pursuit of agriculture may be under cer¬ 
 tain conditions there is nothing stimulating in cultivat¬ 
 ing such ground as composes most of the farming area 
 of New England, where in order to drop a kernel of 
 corn one must first unearth a stone or blast out a rock 
 to make a place for it. Brought up in the atmosphere 
 that I was, it would have been against nature that I 
 should turn to the soil as a sphere of life-interest, how¬ 
 ever appreciative of the obligation pressing upon our 
 country to see that its agricultural interests are well 
 served. For agriculture is the physical basis of all 
 civilization. It stands to civilization as the body stands 
 to the soul. The body is not the most aristocratic ele¬ 
 ment of our human composition and we cannot forget 
 that agriculture derives its dividends from dirt. At 
 the same time working the soil is the great original 
 art. Human progress is conditional upon the faithful 
 cultivation of that art, and it devolves upon govern¬ 
 ment to give considerate attention and encouragement 
 to the farming interest; to treat that interest with the 
 respect due to the critical relation it sustains to the 
 national weal; to do all that can constitutionally and 
 discreetly be done to attract young men from the city 
 
EARLY DAYS 
 
 21 
 
 and back to the soil; to place upon uncultivated por¬ 
 tions of our country newly arrived immigrants coming 
 from agricultural districts abroad; and furthermore to 
 foster in remoter parts of our country the maintenance 
 of those educational opportunities, which shall afford 
 to the children, growing up there, means of culture as 
 nearly as possible on a grade with those supplied in 
 the cities and large towns. 
 
 When I was about twelve years the question of my 
 being a farmer was abruptly settled by my father’s 
 disposing of his property, moving his family elsewhere 
 and taking a position more compatible with his temper¬ 
 ament and tastes. The next four years I was allowed 
 to go to school one term out of every three, which was 
 sufficient to keep me abreast of my classmates, not be¬ 
 cause I was any brighter than they, but because from 
 having attended school ever since they were infants 
 their powers of acquisition had become enfeebled and 
 their appetite for knowledge surfeited. 
 
 One of my teachers was a Mrs. Carpenter. She was 
 certainly an artist in her line. She demonstrated with 
 a woman, whom God constructed with a view to mak¬ 
 ing a teacher of her, can do in the way of developing 
 latent possibilities, possibilities even of the dullest. She 
 could make the blind see and the dumb speak. Those 
 who instruct in grammar schools and high schools 
 sometimes complain that such instruction is not recog¬ 
 nized as a profession, like law, medicine and theology. 
 The dignity will doubtless be accorded as fast as it is 
 deserved. There is one particularly pleasant act of 
 Mrs. Carpenter’s that I have remembered of her all 
 
22 MY FORTY YEARS IN NEW YORK 
 
 these years, which shows the delicacy of her tact and 
 her ability to hurt without bruising. I had a composi¬ 
 tion to write. Upon showing it to her she said,—“That 
 is a very well written composition, Charlie, only I 
 would begin each line with a small letter instead of 
 with a capital.’’ It stung me, but I pulled out the sting 
 before it had time to produce inflammation: but I have 
 never written a line of blank verse or of poetry since. 
 That was about the year 1856. 
 
 When I was nearly sixteen my father put me into 
 a grocery store to sell sugar, molasses and codfish, an 
 experience that was distasteful but to which I recon¬ 
 ciled myself by the consideration that it was a part of 
 my education, that there is nothing which a man can 
 know that will not sometime stand him in good stead; 
 and by the fact that Henry Clay, when a boy, was put 
 upon the same job by his stepfather. 
 
 The author of “The Americanization of Edward 
 Bok” emphasizes the fact, and was himself an illustra¬ 
 tion of the fact,—that any respectable work to which 
 a man faithfully applies himself puts him in the line of 
 promotion: and I had not been selling groceries more 
 than two months before I was given a place in a dry 
 goods store. Selling groceries to men was not as try¬ 
 ing to the disposition as selling dry goods to women, 
 not half of whom knew what they wanted even when 
 I pointed it out to them. Shopping betrays certain ten¬ 
 dencies of the female mind not likely to be displayed 
 otherwise, and the patience of the man behind the 
 counter will be developed if his inward equipment is 
 adequate to the situation. The principal gain resulting 
 
EARLY DAYS 
 
 23 
 
 from the two years that I spent as salesman was a small 
 addition to the family exchequer and time for the de¬ 
 liberate shaping of plans for the future, for I would no 
 more be a merchant than I would be a farmer. 
 
 Important decisions cannot be made. They are a 
 growth and require to ripen; and that means time. In 
 critical matters impulsive conclusions are usually fatal 
 and have to be repented of. To a young man ques¬ 
 tioning what shall be his future and what shall he make 
 of himself, I always say,—bring together all the ele¬ 
 ments that can have any bearing upon the question and 
 leave them to fight it out among themselves. If mud¬ 
 died water be allowed to stand awhile the impure in¬ 
 gredients will settle to the bottom and leave clear water. 
 Having followed that prescription in my own case I 
 felt free to recommend it to others. If one has a se¬ 
 rious desire to become what he was intended to become, 
 he may expect to arrive at his destination, if he will 
 follow the drift of events and not interfere too much 
 with the way that drift is conveying him. This is 
 sound doctrine whether it be designated as fatalism or 
 Divine Sovereignty. 
 
 A long time ago, so long that I cannot tell when it 
 was, there fell into my hands a little book entitled 
 “Trench on the Study of Words.” It was not much of 
 a book and made no pretensions to being scientific, but 
 it made clear to me what Emerson meant when, in one 
 of his essays, he said that “language is fossil poetry.” 
 At that impulse I had taken up Latin in the high school 
 and resumed my study of it after I had been a month 
 or two in the dry goods store. But my employer was 
 
24 MY FORTY YEARS IN NEW YORK 
 
 so jealous of any interest I showed in what was not 
 immediately connected with dry goods that I had to 
 proceed clandestinely and give my Latin a chance either 
 while he was absent at dinner or before he arrived in 
 the morning, while I was opening the store, attending 
 to the fires and sweeping out. By watching one’s 
 chance one can sometimes carry along what he wants 
 to do at the same time that he is faithfully carrying 
 along what he has to do. 
 
 There was a little niche in the wall where I seques¬ 
 tered my “Andrew’s and Stoddard’s Latin Grammar,” 
 a textbook now quite out of use, upon which Herbert 
 Spencer discharged the vials of his wrath, as my em¬ 
 ployer would have done had he realized the situation. 
 Nevertheless, by watching my chance I learned that 
 book from cover to cover, declensions and conjuga¬ 
 tions, verbs regular and irregular, rules and exceptions, 
 syntax, prosody, everything, and if the plates from 
 which the book was printed should have been de¬ 
 stroyed I could nearly have reproduced it. That was 
 a rather definite step taken in the direction of my unsus¬ 
 pected destiny, a movement forward of the drift that 
 was carrying me to the desire and then to the purpose 
 of taking a college course. 
 
 I was not settling any remote questions but simply 
 keeping in the middle of the river and letting the river 
 convoy me. What a college education would lead on to, 
 my parents did not know. I did not know. What might 
 be beyond college graduation was not my problem. 
 
 I simply concentrated on a good college fit. It was to 
 my advantage that my plans extended no farther. Too 
 
EARLY DAYS 
 
 25 
 
 much plan may embarrass a man’s future Some one 
 speaking in Mr. Beecher’s presence said that “A young 
 fellow who has reached the age of seventeen without 
 knowing what he is going to make of his life is a 
 ruined man already.” To which Mr. Beecher re¬ 
 torted,—“A man who is not more than seventeen but 
 who has decided what his life’s work is to be, is a 
 ruined man already.” 
 
 The majority of failures are due to lack of deliberate 
 preparation. There is only one time during the erec¬ 
 tion of a building when the foundation can be laid, and 
 that is before the superstructure has been put on. Ac¬ 
 cording to ordinary calculation our Lord lived thirty- 
 three years and all the work that he did was accom¬ 
 plished in the last three, with ten times that number 
 spent in preparation; and of what was achieved in the 
 last three no one criticises either the quantity or the 
 quality. The grammar school teacher to whom I have 
 already referred, told me that if she had a problem to 
 solve and her life depended upon its solution within 
 five minutes, she would devote half of the allowed time 
 to deciding upon the most speedy method of procedure. 
 It cannot be forgotten that there are conditions under 
 which prolonged preparation for life’s work may be 
 impossible. Financial limitations may be prohibitive; 
 but, with no similar obstacle to be confronted, the man 
 who hurries to occupy his chosen sphere of activity, 
 when by reasonable delay he might enter it substantially 
 qualified, does himself irreparable injustice and pre¬ 
 pares the way for unnecessary failure or at least for 
 no more than an apologetic success. 
 
26 MY FORTY YEARS IN NEW YORK 
 
 PREPARATION FOR COLLEGE 
 
 My preparation for college was undertaken by a little 
 man who conducted an institute in a town so near my 
 home as to be easily accessible. Because of being an 
 Amherst graduate he was regarded with favor by my 
 father, who was a firm believer in Amherst. 
 
 I call him a little man because diminutiveness was 
 his general characteristic both outwardly and inwardly. 
 Learning was not becoming to him. He was one of 
 that considerable class that are cheapened by cultiva¬ 
 tion. He knew a great deal and could tell me a great 
 many things that I did not know, but so can a cyclo¬ 
 pedia. There was about him a touch of effeminacy 
 which he camouflaged by an assumption of dignity that 
 was not natural to him. He was a pedagogue rather 
 than an instructor. He did not teach me, he simply 
 heard me recite my lessons; and as I generally knew 
 them, and as after I had told him what I knew he added 
 nothing of what he knew, I went home as wise as I 
 came; all of which was at the expense of three hours 
 of time, six miles of travel (on foot) and tuition fee. 
 
 His sense of responsibility extended no further than 
 to delivering me up at the end of two years in a condi¬ 
 tion to pass the college examination; to the storing 
 away in me of a quantum sufficit of mathematical and 
 linguistic information. As to the influence to be 
 exerted upon life by what I acquired from him he had 
 nothing to say. Life meant no more to me after I had 
 been with him two years than it meant before. I was 
 no more of a man when I left him than when I came 
 
EARLY DAYS 
 
 27 
 
 to him. His institute had no effect in loading the future 
 with a richer significance. He fostered in me no ambi¬ 
 tion to live, grow up and make my mark in the world. 
 It was with him a matter only of more or less Greek, 
 Latin and Mathematics. 
 
 Having myself taught in a “fitting” school, I under¬ 
 stand now the narrow groove in which the teacher in 
 such an institution is liable to confine himself. He is 
 hired and paid for getting his boys past the board of 
 college examiners. Even that is considerable of an 
 undertaking, and leaves him with only a limited amount 
 of surplus energy to be expended otherwise. The situ¬ 
 ation in a fitting school does not differ materially from 
 what one encounters in any system of graded common 
 schools, where the teacher,—under the conditions 
 which at present exist,—is almost compelled to feel her 
 entire obligation fulfilled by being able to advance the 
 members of her class into the next grade at the end 
 of the year. Considered as a scheme for developing 
 manhood and womanhood such an educational system 
 is a great way removed from the ideal, for while it 
 may discipline intellectually it affords little impulse to 
 character. 
 
 My stay at the institute terminated in 1862. The 
 Civil War was then in progress, but exemption from 
 military service on account of nearsightedness, left me 
 free to enter upon my college course and I repaired to 
 Amherst for my entrance examination. 
 
CHAPTER II 
 
 AMHERST COLLEGE 
 
 Amherst was representative of the old New England 
 traditions; in that respect like Williams and Dartmouth. 
 It was satisfied to be simply a college quite untouched 
 by university aspirations. It tried only to fit a man 
 for life with no subsidiary ambitions to fit him for any 
 special aspect of life. Naturally therefore it presented 
 to the student a fixed curriculum unseasoned by op¬ 
 tional, it being considered that mature instructors were 
 better qualified than raw boys to determine what course 
 of instruction was best qualified to develop solid and 
 symmetrical culture. 
 
 It was at that time a working institution. No stu¬ 
 dent was afraid of being known as a “dig.” To stand 
 low in one’s class was felt as a disgrace. Reputation 
 was also on the side of manly and gentlemanly be¬ 
 havior. We were not all saints, but disreputable con¬ 
 duct was not sufficiently frequent to vary the monotony. 
 
 The only spots that the faculty regarded with sus¬ 
 picion and disfavor were “Polly’s” and Northampton. 
 Smith College at Northampton had not then been 
 founded. Its life commenced about the time I gradu¬ 
 ated, which was in ’66. It is now a sort of annex to 
 the college at Amherst, with which it is connected by 
 trolley and steam-car facilities. Mount Holyoke Fe- 
 
 28 
 
AMHERST COLLEGE 
 
 29 
 
 male Seminary, which has since become a college and 
 was then known as the Ministers Rib-factory, was not 
 particularly seductive to the students; although they all 
 knew that the route to that resort led through the 
 “Notch,” which was occasionally traversed by a fresh¬ 
 man who felt the loneliness of being separated from 
 home and consoled himself by spending Saturday after¬ 
 noon with his sister. 
 
 Amherst at that time had no athletics; at least none 
 to speak of. We had a gymnasium in which we were 
 required to spend half an hour five days in the week 
 under the training of the professor of physical culture. 
 It was considered that a college like Amherst existed 
 for the purpose of developing mentality, and that 
 physical discipline was an intrusion except so far as it 
 contributed to that development. We were therefore 
 spared that invasion upon the scholarly repose of col¬ 
 lege life incident to intercollegiate games which neces¬ 
 sarily reduce the community to a condition of impas¬ 
 sioned upset. 
 
 If we had less athletics than is the present vogue we 
 had more religion than is now cultivated in some of our 
 colleges both male and female. Until comparatively 
 recently the President of Amherst has, without excep¬ 
 tion I believe, been a clergyman. That in itself may 
 not signify very much, and yet it is a kind of confession 
 of faith. It stamps the college as an institution existing 
 and maintained under Christian auspices. It is a way 
 that it has of showing its colors. It is a confession of 
 loyalty to the past and to the religious spirit at whose 
 impulses the college was originally founded. Amherst 
 
30 MY FORTY YEARS IN NEW YORK 
 
 College, for example, was established with a special 
 view to educating young men for the ministry. It in¬ 
 volved the recognition of the fact that the perfection 
 of manhood is not a matter of intellectuality alone but 
 a happy combination of intellectual, moral and religious 
 ingredients. The more complete a man’s unaccom¬ 
 panied intellectual development, the greater his capacity 
 for mischief as well as for benefit. Hallowed intelli¬ 
 gence is what Amherst during the long past of its his¬ 
 tory has been laboring for. 
 
 The religious influence exerted upon students has 
 this also to be said to its credit, that it tends to counter¬ 
 act the withering, desiccating effect of prolonged intel¬ 
 lectual effort. This was subsequently brought home 
 to me in a very practical way as will be noted further 
 on. The ordinary college curriculum neglects the emo¬ 
 tional nature. To learn lessons and to recite them three 
 times a day for four years is very unlikely to have as 
 its effect the quickening of emotive impulses. Scrip¬ 
 ture says that it is out of the heart that are the issues 
 of life. The phrase is not only good Scripture; it is 
 also good psychology. The culture of the mind will 
 make us masters of truth and furnish us with the means 
 of intellectual achievement, but is powerless to foster 
 the impulses constraining to the practical and efficient 
 use of those means. Knowledge is power; knowledge 
 is fuel; but waits for its enkindling before it becomes 
 productive enginery. An educated man may be a very 
 dead man so far as concerns substantial effects, while 
 small learning suffused with passion may go a very 
 long way. 
 
AMHERST COLLEGE 
 
 31 
 
 It is not easy to see how a college course can supply 
 this element of efficiency, but it is perfectly easy to see 
 that it is an element that has entered into the accom¬ 
 plishment of all the best work that has ever lain along 
 any exalted line of achievement. For we know that all 
 the best thoughts in the world, into however frosty a 
 form they may since have become chilled, were moulded 
 from metal that was once molten. Geology claims that 
 the world began hot. So every thought that has had 
 a history began as a passion. What is true of thought 
 is equally true of art. Art is enthusiasm taken shape. 
 The grand cathedrals are old pulse-beats. The master- 
 paintings,—and they are all religious,—are holy, me¬ 
 dieval passion thrown upon canvas. The same prin¬ 
 ciple holds when we skip from art to ethics. Morality 
 to be safe must be impassioned. No man can be con¬ 
 fidently counted upon to do right till he does it at the 
 impulse of a warm motive working from within. The 
 principle holds also in original theology. We cannot 
 read one of St. Paul’s Epistles without realizing that 
 it was struck out at a white heat. His sentences are 
 passionate. His grammar in some cases breaks down 
 under the weight of what he tried to load upon it. The 
 links in the chain of his argument are melted asunder 
 by the fervor of the temperature under which he under¬ 
 takes to weld them. That is the way that theology was 
 made 1800 years ago. Only it was not thought of as 
 theology. We never begin to call religious truth the¬ 
 ology till the warm blood that was in it has commenced 
 to cool and to coagulate, just as we never think of 
 anatomy till it is a dead body we are handling. The- 
 
32 MY FORTY YEARS IN NEW YORK 
 
 ology is a precipitate from an old, intense religious 
 experience. All the theology that is in the Church 
 today is in the Epistles, but it is not there as theology. 
 So all the bone-dust that is in the graveyards today was 
 once in society but it was not there as bone-dust. 
 
 Mechanics is not art. Patching is not creating. Doc¬ 
 toring is not regenerating. Intellect is not vision. Cal¬ 
 culation is not inspiration. History is not administered 
 by experts. It is heart that composes the basis of 
 civilization and of Christianity. “God so loved the 
 world.” The moving energy in the world’s history 
 is not a philosophy but a Cross. And the consummat¬ 
 ing act by which Christ fitted the Church for its work 
 was not the founding of a university but the baptism 
 of the church with the spirit and with fire. 
 
 While collegiate training is being strenuously pushed 
 along intellectual lines, there are indications that, in 
 some of our colleges, the moral and religious features 
 are having laid upon them a diminished emphasis. As 
 those who are chieftains of events and the shapers of 
 our history, are largely college graduates, and as our 
 civilization, in order to permanence, depends upon the 
 prevalence of a high standard of character, there is 
 evident need of the maintenance in our colleges of a 
 quality which is not guaranteed by pure intellectualism. 
 To discipline a student in Latin*, Greek, Mathematics, 
 Psychology, etc., will furnish him with mental caliber, 
 but caliber is an efficiency that can be used either con¬ 
 structively or destructively. It may enable a man to 
 become an effective patriot or an effective traitor. It 
 may be an instrument in the hands of an Alexander 
 
AMHERST COLLEGE 
 
 33 
 
 Hamilton or a weapon in the hands of a Trotsky or a 
 Lenin. Fire may serve a beneficent purpose by warm¬ 
 ing the hearthstone, or the same fire may burn down 
 the house. It is a great mistake to suppose that our 
 system of American schools and colleges ensures the 
 perpetuity of our institutions. When therefore there 
 are afforded some indications that our advanced insti¬ 
 tutions of learning are crowding brain culture to the 
 disadvantage of the schooling of the soul and the con¬ 
 science, there is some occasion for solicitude. 
 
 It was during my college course that the student 
 body had an outbreak of cerebro-spinal meningitis. It 
 attacked only a limited number at the outset, but after 
 the attendant physician had recommended the liberal 
 use of whiskey as an antidotal expedient, it spread 
 rapidly through the entire college till the number in¬ 
 fected included so large a proportion of the students 
 that the faculty decided to omit the usual term ex¬ 
 aminations. As soon after this decision was reached 
 as seemed expedient, the tide of invalidism commenced 
 to ebb, and by the end of the term we were all so thor¬ 
 oughly recovered as to be able to go home for our 
 vacation without any likelihood of relapse. 
 
 Nothing out of the ordinary occurred during my 
 four years at Amherst. Of whatever irregularities I 
 may have been guilty I was only once called before the 
 President who,—the gentleman that he was,—at once 
 excused me after I had told him how deeply impressed 
 I had been by some pertinent remarks he had recently 
 made before the student body in chapel. I learned all 
 my lessons, for I was what is technically known as a 
 
34 MY FORTY YEARS IN NEW YORK 
 
 “dig,” and stood well in my class at the end of the 
 course. I had absented myself from college two half- 
 terms in order to teach some little fledglings their letters 
 in primary school, some of whom were marvellously 
 alert in the absorption of knowledge and a larger 
 number showing an equal genius for the resistance of 
 knowledge. 
 
 I graduated at the age of twenty-four. That was 
 later than the average age of graduation; but none too 
 late,—better late than earlier for there are certain 
 branches of study which are certain to be taken up near 
 the close of the course, which are of such character 
 as to fail of being appreciated by any student who 
 has not attained to a considerable degree of mental 
 maturity. 
 
 The fact that I had not even a rudimentary plan of 
 life-work did not distress me, for there seemed a prob¬ 
 ability of my living a goodly number of years, and half 
 a dozen more or less of watchful waiting would make 
 no great difference in the end, provided I was usefully 
 occupied in the meantime. In senior year I had offered 
 me a productive scholarship provided I would enroll 
 myself as candidate for the ministry. I should have 
 prized the scholarship but not on the appended condi¬ 
 tion, for while I might be drifting toward the ministry 
 I had not drifted to it. 
 
 That word “drift” stands for a doctrine which fills 
 a large place in my system of philosophy and theology. 
 It means to me that if we keep in the middle of the 
 current and are not the slaves of our own willfulness 
 and perversity, we shall proceed with a wisdom which 
 
AMHERST COLLEGE 
 
 35 
 
 is not of our own wisdom or consciousness and be 
 borne along uncalculatingly in the direction of our des¬ 
 tiny. It is a Christian doctrine and an exceedingly 
 comfortable one, and means the possibility of working 
 more wisely than we know. 
 
 What I have called drift is identical with what in 
 the operations of nature we call instinct. For ex¬ 
 ample, certain birds when the migratory season arrives, 
 fly South. There is a reason for their flying but it is 
 not their reason. They act with an intelligence which 
 is not their own intelligence. So the honey-bee in the 
 cunning shaping of its cell. To call it instinct explains 
 nothing. The word simply states that the bee, which 
 is not a geometrician, behaves just as it would, were it 
 a geometrician. 
 
 We can extend the application of this principle by 
 saying that if there is such a thing as the science of 
 history and if history can be said to develop at all along 
 rational lines, it is because the makers of history while 
 incapable of appreciating their individual relations to 
 the final outcome of events, shape their conduct with a 
 foresight of which they are personally insensible. 
 
 Cherishing such a view of the world of natural and 
 human event it cannot be thought strange that I went 
 on living with no disturbing anxiety as to what I was 
 for, if for anything, how long it would be before I 
 should discover, or the steps still to be taken that would 
 conduct to that discovery. 
 
36 MY FORTY YEARS IN NEW YORK 
 
 MY EXPERIENCE AS SCHOOL TEACHER 
 
 Shortly after graduation I took charge of the Am¬ 
 herst High School. As the position was thrown in my 
 way, and nothing else offered, I reasoned that it was the 
 proper thing to accept it. Preferment comes to those 
 who are already occupied, not to such as decline what 
 is given them because it does not accord with their 
 taste and ambition. I took the place expecting it to 
 be a means of educating myself while purposing to do 
 what I could in the way of educating the members of 
 my charge. 
 
 What makes any position of instruction in the public 
 schools irksome is that the teacher is obliged to work 
 under rigidly prescribed methods. Originality is for¬ 
 bidden. The teacher is told not only what he must 
 teach but how he must teach it and how much and 
 exactly what kind of results he must secure. Young 
 minds, even of the same age, differ from each other in 
 development and in facility of development, but require 
 to be dealt with as though they had all been cast in the 
 same mould. 
 
 I had a class in Latin and ventured to instruct it in a 
 way that was somewhat my own. One day while I 
 had the class on the floor the school was visited by a 
 commissioner of education, who called on a spying ex¬ 
 cursion. He disapproved of my method. Knowing 
 that there was no likelihood of his repeating his visit 
 I continued the error of my ways, for the class fell in 
 heartily with the way I took to interest them and I 
 was able by means of it to smuggle into their minds a 
 
AMHERST COLLEGE 
 
 37 
 
 little classic information that they would have resented 
 if presented in the traditional method. If any one has 
 a device for making Latin interesting to beginners he 
 ought to be encouraged to employ it. 
 
 The second year was the first year over again, the 
 only change being the substitution of a new class. It 
 is that element of routine that makes teaching in public 
 schools monotonous. It is like walking in a treadmill, 
 always going but never arriving. It produces in time 
 what we know as the pedagogical manner and the 
 pedagogical face. It is a continual draft on life’s juices 
 with no device discovered for keeping the soul fresh 
 and the mind renewed by a running system of re¬ 
 plenishment. 
 
 The class in Latin just mentioned contained one 
 phenomenon, as shown by his genius for resisting 
 knowledge. He was not an idiot. He could not even 
 be called feeble-minded, as was proved by later devel¬ 
 opments. He was like a sound harpstring that some 
 kind of adhesion prevented from vibrating. He came 
 of good stock. His father was president of a New 
 England college. 
 
 At the close of the term there would be a public 
 examination at which this candidate for scholastic 
 honors would be required to exhibit his familiarity 
 with classic literature, and in the presence probably of 
 his distinguished father; for a teacher has to deal not 
 only with his pupils but with their parents and with 
 the Secretary of the State Board of Education. As 
 soon as I discovered the lad’s condition of mind I put 
 him upon one of zEsop’s Fables, and held him to that 
 
38 MY FORTY YEARS IN NEW YORK 
 
 fable every recitation till examination day, on which 
 occasion he did himself proud. He translated it as 
 freely as though he were reading his native English, 
 and the answers to my questions upon the text rolled 
 from his lips with spontaneous volubility. A parrot 
 could not have done better. I did the boy no injustice. 
 I saved him from unnecessary embarrassment, and fa¬ 
 miliarized him with one fable that I am sure he will 
 not forget to his dying day. 
 
 There are too many instances of men and women, 
 distinguished for exceptional ability in after life, who 
 were equally leisurely in their early development, for 
 it to be prudent, under any circumstances, to estimate 
 a child as feeble-minded. 
 
 Charles Darwin says of himself in his autobiogra¬ 
 phy:—“When I left school I believe that I was consid¬ 
 ered by all my mates and by my father, as a very 
 ordinary boy, rather below the common standard in 
 intellect.” 
 
 William H. Seward’s teacher once reported to his 
 father that he was “too stupid to learn. ,, 
 
 In the published life of Sir Isaac Newton he says 
 that “at the age of twelve he stood very low in the 
 schools. So little ability did he show at the age of 
 fifteen he was taken out of school and set to work 
 on the farm.” 
 
 It is related of Samuel Johnson that it was only by 
 means of hard whipping that anything could be gotten 
 out of him. 
 
 In Bruhns’ “Life of Alexander von Humboldt,” that 
 brilliant scientist is quoted as saying that in the first 
 
AMHERST COLLEGE 
 
 39 
 
 years of his childhood his tutors were doubtful whether 
 even ordinary powers of intelligence would ever be 
 developed in him. 
 
 Two years in the Amherst High School were fol¬ 
 lowed, after an interval spent in European study and 
 travel, by three years of instruction in Greek and Latin 
 in Williston Seminary, Easthampton, Mass. This was 
 more congenial than high school work for I had to do 
 only with boys that were fitting for college, and most 
 of them were there for a definite purpose. There were 
 of course some cases of delayed development. Those 
 are to be found everywhere, but I had rather be slow 
 in developing than to be a prodigy. More can be ex¬ 
 pected of one in the long run. 
 
 Opportunity was afforded me of carrying forward 
 my own studies and I availed of it to prepare a little 
 treatise on the Latin verb and its conjugation as illus¬ 
 trated by the forms of the Sanscrit. This I did at 
 the impulse of a slowly maturing notion that my life 
 was going to occupy itself with the science of compara¬ 
 tive philology, the initial impulse to which was given 
 me by that Trench’s little book on “The Study of 
 Words” already referred to. In preparing this treatise 
 I was aided by suggestions and criticisms received from 
 Professor Greenough of Harvard University. I never 
 learned that my effort created any flutter in the world 
 of linguistic scholarship, and it is many years since I 
 received any remittance from the publishers. 
 
 The time spent was not lost upon myself, however. 
 I was taught to realize that a word is a live thing and 
 must not be touched with irreverent hands; that in its 
 
40 MY FORTY YEARS IN NEW YORK 
 
 very form it carries in itself a history; that it may in¬ 
 clude a concealed poem, or sermon or philosophy; that 
 to rob a word of a letter because it has become a silent 
 letter may be a piece of linguistic atrocity; that English 
 is an admirable language, but not nearly so admirable 
 as some other languages have been; that by the loss of 
 inflectional changes it has sacrificed its ability to ex¬ 
 press the finest shades of thought (for example its loss 
 of the subjunctive mood) ; that it is not to be expected 
 that English will become a universal language, except 
 perhaps for commercial purposes, and that its univer¬ 
 sality would be a misfortune. A calculation in dollars 
 and cents of the value of the time spent in learning to 
 spell English words does not impress me seriously. 
 Far back in history when language consisted mostly in 
 signs the ability to communicate was attended by no 
 expense at all. That there is deeply implanted a popu¬ 
 lar sense antagonistic to the vivisection of words is 
 evidenced by the fact that with all the literature that has 
 been devoted to the simplification of spelling and with 
 all the resolutions that learned societies have adopted to 
 the same end, we continue to spell as we have been in 
 the habit of spelling with the occasional dropping of 
 an inoffensive “e” or an historically unimportant “gh.” 
 
 Reverting to Williston Seminary the Principal did 
 not believe in boys, although it was a boys’ school,— 
 but regarded them as a necessary evil, fitted to be the 
 objects of suspicion and penal infliction. The class of 
 students that patronized the institution at that time con¬ 
 tained a liberal sprinkling of the lawless sort, so that 
 school government became a frequent subject of dis- 
 
AMHERST COLLEGE 
 
 41 
 
 cussion and dispute between the principal and his 
 teachers. If he was ever a real boy himself it was so 
 long ago that he had forgotten what boyhood means, 
 which was not the case with us, the younger members 
 of the teaching staff. When he scored the boys in 
 Chapel, as he frequently did after completing morning 
 devotions, we of course were obliged to look as though 
 we regarded their exuberant conduct as the very acme 
 of depravity, and sat in solemn state with our features 
 knotted into an expression of surprised distress. He 
 could not appreciate boy-nature nor reflect that it is 
 only the young colt with ginger enough in him to break 
 through a five-barred fence or clear the top, that gives 
 presumptive evidence of being enough of a colt to be 
 worth breeding. 
 
 The boys of marked ability were usually the most 
 irrepressible. There was young Dawes of Pittsfield, 
 Mass., son of the late Senator Dawes, who was so 
 bright that it made him uncomfortable, resulting in 
 efforts at self-relief perplexing to the ingenuity of his 
 special teacher, who happened to be myself. Then 
 there was Crane of Dalton, Mass., a name that subse¬ 
 quently became familiar throughout Massachusetts and 
 beyond. He was not bad, but his divergencies from 
 normal decorum were so unique as to afford the 
 younger teachers suppressed delight, while they cost 
 the principal painful solicitude. 
 
 Young depravity differs in its very genius from 
 adult depravity. A boy’s misbehavior cannot be judged 
 by the same standard as his father’s. Morality is some¬ 
 thing that has to be learned: just as much so as intelli- 
 
42 MY FORTY YEARS IN NEW YORK 
 
 gence has to be learned. We are not born either moral 
 or immoral but unmoral. It is apparently mroe difficult 
 to arrive at the possession of a clear moral sense than 
 to achieve a distinct intellectual sense. The younger 
 teachers at Easthampton understood this better than 
 the aged principal. Therefore the most disturbing 
 irregularities practiced by the boys were regarded by 
 us as something to be curbed rather than as occasion 
 for chastisement. From which it follows that a pun¬ 
 ished child regards the infliction as retributive malice 
 rather than as retributive justice; administered for the 
 satisfaction of the parent rather than for the good of 
 the child. I was oijce a child and speak from the child’s 
 standpoint. 
 
 It is doubtless due in part to some recognition of this 
 fact that the coarser forms of discipline are more hesi¬ 
 tatingly resorted to than formerly, and that there is 
 more effort to reach the child through the heart than 
 through that part of the body which a school-teacher 
 once told me was constructed with a particular view 
 to punitive manipulation. Principals of the old time 
 English schools were past masters in the art of flagella¬ 
 tion and it is reported that seven boys studying at Eton 
 were sent one day by a submaster to the house of the 
 principal, who upon receiving them immediately re¬ 
 moved his coat and seizing a lash which hung conven¬ 
 iently near, commenced laying it over the back of one 
 of the seven supposed culprits. He had already exer¬ 
 cised himself upon five of them when the sixth, lifting 
 a trembling voice said, “But please, sir, we were sent 
 
AMHERST COLLEGE 
 
 43 
 
 over here with a view to entering the confirmation 
 class.” 
 
 Nothing else of my Williston Seminary experience 
 do I care to record except to say that on the 23rd of 
 November, 1870, I married Miss Nellie Bodman, 
 daughter of Luther Bodman of Northampton, Mass. 
 She had been a pupil of mine in the Amherst High 
 School. No language that might not seem to strangers 
 extravagant, would serve to express my appreciation of 
 Mrs. Parkhurst’s faithful and unremitting cooperation. 
 Both at Lenox where her zealous devotion to the in¬ 
 terests of our little church,—which cost her an illness 
 from which she was three years in effecting a complete 
 recovery,—and later in New York where she gave her¬ 
 self to the Madison Square Church people, with as 
 much unreserve as though she had been herself called 
 to the pastorate, her cooperation possessed a value that 
 cannot be adequately expressed. 
 
 Shortly after coming to the city, and as soon as her 
 health permitted, she gradually introduced herself to 
 the women’s work of the church, and in a little time, 
 by a cautious and affectionate assertion of herself, 
 found herself, to her surprise, exerting a leading in¬ 
 fluence in that department of church activities. She 
 led and the others followed and were glad to follow, 
 and incontestable evidence of their loyalty to her has 
 continued to be shown, as well since our retirement 
 from the church as before. 
 
 She also entered with similar consecration into the 
 support of the Gospel work organized by Dr. McAll of 
 Paris, and became president of the National McAll 
 
44 MY FORTY YEARS IN NEW YORK 
 
 Association, a position which she continued to hold till 
 her recently impaired health necessitated her resignation. 
 She put so much of herself into that service, that it 
 would hardly be an exaggeration to say that some of the 
 life with which that association still survives is mo¬ 
 mentum wrought by the vitality that she originally 
 communicated to it. On the 23rd of November, 1920, 
 we celebrated our Golden Wedding and the cordiality 
 of the occasion indicated that the love that had in pre¬ 
 vious years been manifested toward us by our old 
 friends of the Madison Square Church was more than 
 an ephemeral affection. 
 
 On the 28th of the following May, after many 
 months of weary suffering, she passed to her eternal 
 rest. 
 
CHAPTER III 
 
 MY FIRST PASTORATE 
 
 After three years spent at Williston Seminary, and 
 following a vacation spent in Germany for purposes 
 of study and travel, I had reached the year 1874, at 
 which time I was thirty-two years old, with nothing 
 settled as to a profession. I had no sense of age and 
 never have had, but 32 is only one year short of what is 
 reckoned as a generation, and it occurred to me that if 
 Providence had neglected me, I ought to do something 
 on my own account, and that whatever move I should 
 volunteer to make might be what Providence was wait¬ 
 ing for and the method through which with infinite 
 wisdom it was purposing to operate. Free agency and 
 Divine Sovereignty so fold into each other that it is 
 difficult deciding where one leaves off and the other 
 begins or whether they work contemporaneously. I 
 decided to go to Amherst and consult Professor Seelye, 
 who had been a good friend and a wise counsellor. I 
 knew from what had previously passed between us that 
 his theory of Providence was very much like my own, 
 which led me to put implicit confidence in his theory,— 
 which is about what our usual confidence in other 
 people’s judgment amounts to. 
 
 What transpired in my interview with him has al¬ 
 ready been referred to. In brief summary it was this: 
 
 45 
 
46 MY FORTY YEARS IN NEW YORK 
 
 “Parkhurst, you have been on an intellectual strain for 
 fourteen years. You have neglected the development 
 of your emotional nature and are thus left in a one¬ 
 sided condition. I think that a couple of years of 
 preaching would contribute to establish an equipoise. 
 In other words your personality has become desiccated, 
 and I think that a combination of pulpit and pastoral 
 work will conspire to produce the necessary satura¬ 
 tion.” That was certainly direct, quite as much so as 
 the phrenological examination to which I had once been 
 subjected by Fowler of “Fowler and Wells.” 
 
 I had already received from the ministerial associa¬ 
 tion of Hampshire County a license to preach, a step 
 that I was moved to by an instinctive rather than a 
 rational impulse. I had never studied theology and 
 have not done so since. The association convened in 
 Goshen, a little hill-town in Northern Massachusetts. 
 I went up from Northampton the afternoon before and 
 spent the evening cursorily examining some theological 
 treatise that I took up with me. I had a friend at court 
 in the person of the pastor of the church in which my 
 wife was a member. He acted effectively and his in¬ 
 fluence swayed the association. His name was Hall, 
 the same as that of the minister that subsequently was 
 of incalculable assistance to me when I came before 
 the New York Presbytery. Whatever theory we may 
 entertain in regard to the matter of “pull,” it does mar¬ 
 vellously lubricate the machinery of life. Some com¬ 
 ments on theological preparation for the ministry I 
 shall make further on. 
 
 Recurring to Professor Seelye’s advice, it involved 
 
MY FIRST PASTORATE 
 
 47 
 
 no expectation or even intimation that a couple of years 
 in the ministry would be of any advantage to my par¬ 
 ishioners but only to myself. It was to be missionary 
 work but I was to be the heathen as well as the mis¬ 
 sionary. The Professor said that he knew of a vacant 
 pulpit and was acquainted with some members of the 
 congregation to which the late occupant of that pulpit 
 had ministered. He considerately omitted to mention 
 that the late occupant had committed suicide. I con¬ 
 sented to the Professor’s communicating with the ap¬ 
 propriate party belonging to the Lenox Congregational 
 Church. 
 
 I presently received from that Church an invitation 
 to supply its pulpit one Sabbath. Now this was in 
 December, a cold month almost anywhere in the North 
 and particularly so in central Berkshire which is a 
 thousand feet above sea level. The village was lying 
 under a couple of feet of snow; the wind, which in 
 that locality rarely rests, even on the Sabbath, was 
 blowing a gale and the mercury was playing around 
 zero. At the close of the evening service the church 
 treasurer came forward and laying a bill on the desk 
 said, “There’s your money.” In the morning I rode 
 two miles to the railway station, wondering if this was 
 a fair specimen of what Professor Seelye promised me 
 in the way of “saturation.” 
 
 The outward condition of congelation, it presently 
 appeared, did not extend to the hearts of the people. 
 On request I visited them again and presently received 
 a call which I accepted. The church was prepared to 
 take me at my face value but preferred to conform to 
 
48 MY FORTY YEARS IN NEW YORK 
 
 usage and to seek the advice of a council, a council 
 made up of clerical and lay members of the churches 
 of South Berkshire. In other words it violated to that 
 extent the Congregational principle, which is that of 
 autonomy, and thought to secure to itself an adven¬ 
 titious dignity by taking a leaf out of the book of Pres¬ 
 byterianism; for Congregationalism, as authoritatively 
 defined, is “the recognition of a church of that order 
 as a self-governing body capable of choosing its own 
 officers, expressing its creed in such forms as seem best 
 to it, determining the conditions for the admission of 
 its members and ordering its public worship as it deems 
 most fitting.” English Congregationalism keeps closer 
 to that ideal than American, which latter betrays a 
 coquettish leaning toward the Presbyterial system. 
 
 Accordingly an “advisory council” was summoned 
 which held its sessions in “the little white church on 
 the hill.” The purpose of that council was not, I as¬ 
 sume, to determine whether I was a Christian, but 
 whether I had reduced religious truth to a philosophic 
 system to which all my pulpit utterances would be 
 squared, as a tailor lays a paper pattern upon the goods 
 from which he cuts his garment. It very soon became 
 evident that the members were present for that purpose 
 and were prepared to make the most of the opportunity. 
 
 Interrogation had not proceeded far before I felt 
 thoroughly acquainted with the theological attitude of 
 South Berkshire, and began to stake my hopes of a 
 favorable result on the assistance of the same clergy¬ 
 man who had helped me through at Goshen, and on 
 my father-in-law, who was a lay member of the council. 
 
M Y FIRST PASTORATE 
 
 49 
 
 There was a long afternoon session at the close of 
 which the members retired for rest and refreshments, 
 to convene again in the evening in secret session. I 
 never knew how the vote stood in the final action—only 
 that I was allowed to be ordained. It was symptomatic 
 of the prevailing sentiment that, at the close of the 
 ordination services Dr. Gale of Lee, the moderator of 
 the council, pronounced the benediction, a part which 
 is uniformly assigned to the new pastor. I wondered 
 how much experience of this kind was going to be 
 necessary in order to fulfill Professor Seelye’s desire 
 to have achieved in me a proper balance between my 
 intellectual and emotional nature. 
 
 Councils called for the settlement of a minister are 
 always popular occasions for all except the candidate, 
 for each inquisitor remembers the experience which he 
 had himself had on a similar occasion and can put what¬ 
 ever question he pleases and stir any problem that 
 happens to occur to him without thereby exposing any 
 latent heresies of his own or imperilling his reputation 
 for orthodoxy. It affords to the members of the 
 council the congenial opportunity to see the wounded 
 bird flutter under the difficult interrogations shot at 
 him. It affords them the entertainment which less 
 reverend people secure by less dignified means and has 
 all the charm but none of the indecency of a cockfight. 
 The council was generous, however, and threw the 
 doors open to all the members of the Lenox Church 
 congregation, securing thus a thorough advertisement 
 of the candidate’s moral, religious and dogmatic quality 
 for good or for bad. 
 
50 MY FORTY YEARS IN NEW YORK 
 
 I have related this story with some detail not simply 
 because it was an important incident in my life but 
 because we can see in it part explanation of the meager 
 number of earnest and independent thinkers that make 
 choice of the ministry. They are the very ones,— 
 other things being equal,—that the ministry most needs 
 because sufficiently virile in their mentality to think for 
 themselves and to reluctate against theological techni¬ 
 calities that are of mere human devising. And yet they 
 are the very ones that will be most likely to be turned 
 down when they apply for holy orders, especially if 
 they encounter the sort of council that I was pitted 
 against in South Berkshire. 
 
 It is of interest that even St. Paul, who could hardly 
 be charged with heterodoxy, took care to keep out of 
 the way of the “pillars of the church.” It is difficult 
 for people who do some thinking on their own account 
 to satisfy those who have in such way committed them¬ 
 selves to a formula as to be more enamoured of the 
 formula than of that which the formula vainly attempts 
 perfectly to express. That was why the late Professor 
 Briggs was turned out of the Presbyterian Church for 
 heresy. His accusers could not understand how a man 
 who expressed himself in terms different from those 
 which they employed could have as firm a grasp upon 
 biblical truth as they did themselves, even if not a con¬ 
 siderably firmer grasp. 
 
 In reading the narrative of Christ’s dealings with 
 the people he moved among, it is noticeable what a 
 variety of notes he struck in order to hit the music that 
 was in each ear. The sick believed in him because 
 
MY FIRST PASTORATE 
 
 51 
 
 he healed them; the blind because he gave them new 
 eyes; the hungry because he procured them bread; the 
 thirsty because he made them wine; the discouraged 
 because he brought them a new hope; the wicked be¬ 
 cause he forgave them. He conducted men to God, 
 but was all kinds of open door for them to go through 
 and a separate door for each particular one. 
 
 So that if the sick man that was healed had gone 
 out to preach Christ he would have preached him as 
 the healer; the blind man that had sight given him 
 would have preached him as the light of the world; 
 the hungry man that had been fed would proclaim 
 Christ as the bread of life. They would each have 
 taken their text not from the catechism but from Christ 
 as he had become especially revealed to them through 
 their own specialized experience of him. Other aspects 
 of Christ’s character and ministration they might each 
 of them be unable to say much about, and would so far 
 forth have passed a very unsatisfactory examination, 
 and yet by declaring that which they knew and by testi¬ 
 fying to that which they had seen, would have been able 
 to speak to the edification even of some who were dis¬ 
 tressed by the fragmentary character of the preacher’s 
 theology. 
 
 During this long digression the members of my 
 council scattered back into South Berkshire. I had 
 only kindly feeling for them individually and collec¬ 
 tively. I knew they cherished only a generous senti¬ 
 ment toward me personally, even though discounting 
 me in my character as a prospective South Berkshire 
 Associate. Although I was geographically included 
 
52 MY FORTY YEARS IN NEW YORK 
 
 within the South Berkshire Association of ministers no 
 one of its members showed any disposition to frater¬ 
 nize with me and I of course, although with the kindest 
 of feelings, held myself aloof from them. For an 
 entire year I was left alone with my congregation 
 whose members seemed contented and happy, all the 
 more so perhaps because of having been momentarily 
 anxious lest they should lose me. 
 
 My people belonged to the farming class except such 
 of them as were city guests, of whom there were very 
 few as far back as 1874 and those few made but a 
 brief stay. 
 
 Being myself possessed by birth and by early life of 
 rustic tastes and aptitudes I had no difficulty in ad¬ 
 justing myself to my flock. I had no urban airs that 
 could offend them and their rusticity did not offend 
 me. A country-bred minister is better adapted to a 
 country congregation, and a city-bred to a city congre¬ 
 gation. It is not easy to escape the limitations wrought 
 in one by early environment. 
 
 My parishioners were none of them exquisites but 
 they were genuine. There was no discrepancy between 
 inside and out. There was no finish that camouflaged 
 the substance. That simplified the process of acquain¬ 
 tanceship. Very few had an education that went be¬ 
 yond the grammar or high school. The recent transfer 
 of the county seat from Lenox to Pittsfield had carried 
 with it most of the college-educated. There was no 
 lack of intelligence, however, nor of heart. There was 
 plenty of downright thinking which is an essential to 
 agricultural success. It is a mistaken notion to suppose 
 
MY FIRST PASTORATE 
 
 53 
 
 that lack of education makes a man easy to preach to. 
 A common everyday farmer may not be equal to the 
 finenesses of intricate ratiocination but he is any man’s 
 equal on ground that has to do with fundamental prin¬ 
 ciples. His daily occupation works in him construc¬ 
 tively in a way that a university knows nothing about. 
 
 The people that I had to deal with were exceedingly 
 individual. That is the New England type. My con¬ 
 gregation was not a continent but an archipelago. Each 
 man left off before the next man began. I never mis¬ 
 took one man by thinking he was some one else. Of 
 course therefore they did not readily coalesce. They 
 were not naturally adapted to team-work. One man 
 would do better work by himself than two would do 
 the same work cooperatively. My mind therefore is 
 very definitely impressed with the distinctive person¬ 
 ality of the members of my congregation, although it 
 is nearly fifty years since I first came to them. 
 
 I liked them all and love their memory. They were 
 very kind but sometimes they perplexed me. The 
 angularity of their judgment and the unsymmetry of 
 their character were a frequent puzzle. They were 
 sometimes so intense in their conscientiousness as to 
 be pitilessly harsh in their judgments. 
 
 I had two deacons (the New England deacon has a 
 reputation all his own) whom we will call A and B. A 
 called upon me one day, and speaking of B said, “He 
 dishonors his profession and is not fit to be a deacon.” 
 It happened that the very next day B called and the 
 conversation turning on A, he said, “He is a fit subject 
 for Church discipline.” Now both of those men are in 
 
54 MY FORTY YEARS IN NEW YORK 
 
 heaven and have a worthy place there. Each had too 
 clear an eye for certain things and not eye enough for 
 other things. 
 
 The system of theology prevailing among the mem¬ 
 bers of the church was of a decidedly conservative 
 type, in some cases almost severely so; as in the case of 
 a dear Scotchman who had a lovely wife and family, 
 most genial and kindly in bearing and address, appar¬ 
 ently most mellow in all their subjective experiences, 
 but when the oldest child of the family, a son grown 
 to be fifteen years old, expressed a desire to unite with 
 the church and I questioned him upon his religious 
 experience and views and asked him what he thought 
 was the first step to be taken in becoming a Christian his 
 reply, spoken hesitantly and sadly was, “I suppose that 
 the first step that I have to take is to repent of the sins 
 of my ancestors.” What at present is known as a 
 Fundamentalist could not go further. 
 
 My people, many of them, had heavy burdens to 
 bear and very little that varied the monotony of their 
 experience. There was among them little social life. 
 That made for me the opportunity to be much with 
 them in their homes, where I was always warmly wel¬ 
 comed. I watched with their sick and although none 
 of those to whom I rendered that service eventually 
 recovered, I am pleased to attribute their decease to 
 something beside my attentions. 
 
 Such intimacy of relations, less possible in the city 
 than in the country, is a distinct element of a pastor’s 
 power. It enables him to illustrate in common life 
 what he preaches in the pulpit and tells with a direct- 
 
MY FIRST PASTORATE 
 
 55 
 
 ness and a continuity of effect rarely achieved by pulpit 
 deliverances. That closeness of contact with the diver¬ 
 sified experiences of one’s parishioners works also to 
 the advantage of the preacher, provided he is pastor as 
 well as preacher, by suggesting lines of practical and 
 appreciable thought that he can weave into his dis¬ 
 courses. A sermon ought to be made up in about equal 
 parts of Bible, and everyday life. 
 
 While no sermon that I ever preached is such that 
 I can regard it with entire satisfaction, yet the sort of 
 homiletics that I played off upon my Lenox people in 
 the first months of my stay with them I continue to 
 recall with an emotion of horror. No specimens of my 
 sermonic experimentation survive. To destroy them 
 was my only means of comforting myself. I could no 
 more preach than I could sing. President Seelye’s 
 “saturation” was a word that had no reality attaching 
 to it. I brought absolutely no heart to the work. I 
 was in Lenox purely as an ad interim expedient. 
 
 I was rather strong on the logical side and assumed 
 that the unconverted members of my flock, of whom 
 there were presumably several, and whose conversion 
 I supposed I was there to compass, could be readily 
 syllogized into the kingdom of heaven; major premise; 
 minor premise; conclusion. There was a flaw some¬ 
 where ; the conclusion halted. What I gave them were 
 lectures rather than sermons, to which I imparted a 
 homiletic flavor by appending a concluding paragraph 
 or two of a hortatory type, such as would seem to ease 
 the way toward an appropriate and effective “Amen.” 
 There was no revolt on the part of the congregation. 
 
56 MY FORTY YEARS IN NEW YORK 
 
 Whether its placidity was due to spiritual inertia or to 
 a love that suffereth long and is kind, I could not tell. 
 
 Such a condition of things could not continue in¬ 
 definitely. It was forbidden by the seriousness both of 
 the pulpit and the pew. The progress of events must 
 bring its own correction. This correction came as 
 result of the closer and closer personal relation into 
 which I came with the individual members and families 
 of my flock, with the consequent understanding of the 
 burdens, sorrows and temptations to which they were 
 subjected, and which required the relief of that Gospel 
 of comfort and strength of which as pastor and teacher, 
 I had been put in charge. How evident it became to 
 me that the man in the pulpit must also be the man 
 in the home. Professor Seelye’s theory had begun to 
 justify itself. Pulpit lectures on the beauty of Berk¬ 
 shire scenery and the glory of the constellations were 
 replaced by appeals addressed to the inner experiences 
 of those who looked up to me from the pews. 
 
 The tender immediacy thus involved in the relation 
 between the man in the pulpit and the man in the pew 
 has led me to wonder whether I did not make a mistake 
 in not disciplining myself to preach without notes. It 
 is unfortunate that we cannot know without having to 
 learn, or that we cannot live twice and in the second 
 life correct the mistakes that we made in the first. A 
 manuscript does to a certain extent intervene and in¬ 
 evitably intervene as a barrier between the pulpit and 
 the pew, and so far forth carry with it a sacrifice of 
 power. Dr. William M. Taylor of the Broadway 
 
MY FIRST PASTORATE 
 
 57 
 
 Tabernacle was a prince of preachers and he regularly 
 read what he had written. Dr. R. S. Storrs commenced 
 in the same way but adopted the extemporaneous 
 method later on, and he was a king of preachers. He 
 once said to me,—“Every horse must take its own 
 pace.” My belief after forty-five years in the pulpit is 
 that, if one is equal to it, the unwritten sermon goes 
 furthest and deepest, although it may sometimes be 
 paid for by failure and by faultiness and inelegance of 
 phraseology. 
 
 The two years for which Professor Seelye had in¬ 
 dentured me to the Lenox congregation passed more 
 and more rapidly after the first six months and I moved 
 from the second year to the third with no thought of 
 anything but being the shepherd of my flock. I do not 
 remember that I had any particular thought about it 
 but if I did it was to the effect that I was doing the 
 kind of work that I was intended for. The problem 
 had solved itself in the only way in which large prob¬ 
 lems can be solved. I was no longer looking for a 
 professorship in comparative philology, nor was I lay¬ 
 ing the wires with a view to getting out of my present 
 field into a larger. I did not consider Lenox as a step¬ 
 ping-stone to a higher field of service. Any field is 
 sufficiently extended to engage all the energies that any 
 man is capable of exercising. A young minister who 
 keeps one eye on the church that he is in and one on the 
 church that he would like to be in, is hardly fitted to be 
 in either; and when the time after five years came for 
 a break, it cost me pain in which I know that my dear 
 
58 MY FORTY YEARS IN NEW YORK 
 
 parishioners were participant. If a man sincerely loves 
 his first wife he may nevertheless love his second, but 
 it will not be in quite the same way, and that means 
 no lack of sincere affection for the second and no im¬ 
 plication of the second’s unworthiness. 
 
CHAPTER IV 
 
 MY SECOND PASTORATE 
 
 In December of ’74 I received an invitation to preach 
 at the morning service of the Presbyterian church that 
 was then worshipping in this city at the corner of 
 Madison Avenue and Thirty-fifth Street, under the 
 pastoral charge of the late Dr. Marvin R. Vincent. 
 The invitation had been covertly arranged for. Dur¬ 
 ing the previous summer I had had in my Lenox con¬ 
 gregation a gentleman and his family from New York 
 (Mr. D. Willis James), who had been for a long time 
 deeply interested in the Madison Square Church. Since 
 he was, while in Lenox, a constant attendant at my 
 church I naturally met him and a pleasant acquaintance¬ 
 ship developed between us, resulting in his request, on 
 leaving Lenox for the city, that when I wanted a little 
 respite in the middle of the winter, I should pay him 
 and his family a week’s visit. I interpreted his invita¬ 
 tion as being simply a pleasant way of expressing his 
 kindly feeling for me and forgot all about it till I was 
 reminded of it by an invitation of the kind he had 
 prospectively tendered me six months before,—an in¬ 
 vitation which he now amplified by saying that Mrs. 
 James desired that I should slip a sermon into my 
 suit case. 
 
 I did as he requested, and on arriving at his resi- 
 
 59 
 
60 MY FORTY YEARS IN NEW YORK 
 
 dence on a Saturday afternoon was called upon by Dr. 
 Vincent and invited by him to preach for him the fol¬ 
 lowing morning. Of course if I had been longer in 
 ministerial life and more familiar with the way in 
 which things are done I should have suspected some¬ 
 thing and should have detected how neatly three or 
 four things, each of which meant nothing by itself, 
 fitted into each other to form an exceedingly shapely 
 whole. As it was, no lamb ever went to the slaughter 
 more cheerfully and unsuspectingly than I went and 
 preached to Dr. Vincent’s congregation. Three days 
 later I received an informal invitation to the pastorate 
 of the Madison Square Church. The steps by which 
 it was compassed were exceedingly clever and had the 
 advantage of acquitting me of ambitious designs and 
 the other advantage of enabling me to preach for Dr. 
 Vincent in a manner of entire freedom and unrestraint. 
 I have told the story with some detail for it was so 
 serious an event in my history that I could hardly leave 
 it out of my autobiography. 
 
 The invitation tendered me was in due time accepted. 
 The break-up at Lenox was a trying one on both sides. 
 We had learned to believe in each other. There were 
 some who felt that I ought not to leave them, while 
 others, particularly the male members of the church, 
 considered that if I was ever going to leave them now 
 was the time. 
 
 My first sermon in the Madison Square Church was 
 preached on the 29th of February, 1880. The occasion 
 was observed with quiet dignity, such as was always 
 characteristic of the Madison Square Church people. I 
 
MY SECOND PASTORATE 
 
 61 
 
 was led into the auditorium by a long procession of 
 church officers,—elders and deacons,—marshalled by 
 the Rev. Dr. Adams, who introduced me to the con¬ 
 gregation as “Our Pastor” in terms of affectionate 
 delicacy, which seemed then and there to establish a 
 bond between me and my new people. To use an ex¬ 
 pression that I once heard employed by the late Dr. 
 Roswell D. Hitchcock, all the members of that pro¬ 
 cession have in the meantime with a single exception 
 “moved from the aisles into the arches.” 
 
 The Madison Square Church had moved that I be¬ 
 come its pastor, but Presbytery had not seconded the 
 motion, and all which that signified I had still to learn. 
 This was in 1880, and prior therefore to Presbytery’s 
 change of heart. I was known to be nothing but a 
 Congregationalist, born such and ordained by an asso¬ 
 ciation of Congregational ministers. All of which was 
 against me. I was a denominational foreigner with 
 naturalization papers subject to Presbyterian discount. 
 It was also against me that when asked if I believed in 
 the Presbyterian polity of government I replied that I 
 knew very little about the Presbyterian polity. It was 
 the only honest reply I could make, but I could feel 
 that it bruised a sensitive nerve in the hearts of the 
 Presbyters, and preparations were made to set the stage 
 for an application of the “third degree.” I began to 
 realize that New York Presbyterianism might prove a 
 harder fence to break through than South Berkshire 
 Congregationalism. 
 
 At this critical juncture something happened which 
 has always seemed to me to have been a direct inter- 
 
62 MY FORTY YEARS IN NEW YORK 
 
 position of Providence, without which,—the condition 
 of the Presbyterian mind at that time being taken into 
 the account,—it is very doubtful if I should ever have 
 become pastor of the Madison Square Church; and 
 singular as it may appear, the instrument which Provi¬ 
 dence employed for its purpose was the late Dr. John 
 Hall, as unflinchingly conservative a dogmatic as was 
 to be found on the floor of Presbytery. It appears that 
 there was a family in Lenox with which Dr. Hall had 
 been brought into rather close relations. It was a 
 family of which I was myself particularly fond, and 
 my sentiments toward which were thoroughly recipro¬ 
 cated. Through that relation I had become something 
 other than a mere stranger to Dr. Hall and opportunity 
 had been afforded him of discovering that even if I 
 were only a Congregationalist and as ignorant as a 
 young Fiji of Presbyterian polity, I was yet not alto¬ 
 gether bad and under Presbyterial influence might 
 become something worth while. When therefore ar¬ 
 rangements were being made for my impeachment the 
 Doctor arose and spoke substantially as follows,—“Our 
 young brother has come to us from the Congregational 
 Church. He has come properly accredited by the 
 authorized representatives of that body. That body is 
 recognized by us and affiliated with us, and it would 
 be an expression of disrespect to it, if we were to sub¬ 
 ject this brother to a formal examination.” This 
 effected a stay of proceedings and I was formally 
 adopted into the Presbyterian fold. In the words of 
 our old Presbyterian hymn, “O Lord, on what a slender 
 thread, etc.” 
 
MY SECOND PASTORATE 
 
 63 
 
 No pastor could ask for a nobler company of men 
 and women than that which composed the congregation 
 that it was my privilege to serve for thirty-eight years. 
 It was high-minded, fine-spirited and graciously consid¬ 
 erate of the shortcomings of the young importation 
 from the country. If there were individual disaffec- 
 tions I never knew it. In fact the current of our church 
 ran so smoothly and was so free from startling or sen¬ 
 sational event that it is impossible to compose a history 
 of it that would be of interest to any but those who 
 were immediately connected with the congregation. 
 There was, I think, the realization on the part of my 
 people that whatever the imperfections of my ministry, 
 whether as preacher or as pastor, I was doing the best 
 I knew how. I was rarely out of my pulpit on the 
 Sabbath and commenced at once to make myself per¬ 
 sonally acquainted with the individual members of the 
 congregation. I did not follow the advice of one mem¬ 
 ber who said,—“We do not expect you to call upon 
 all the members of the congregation but there are a 
 few of us that hope you will see us quite frequently.” 
 I felt that the same democratic spirit ought to govern 
 my conduct in the city as had governed it in the 
 country. 
 
 In my Congregational pastorate all matters of secular 
 import were of course subject to the will of the entire 
 congregation, and all matters concerning the spirituali¬ 
 ties were under the control of the entire membership of 
 the church. As I told the Presbytery, I had no knowl¬ 
 edge of the fact that under Presbyterian principles it 
 was only to a small board of trustees that were com- 
 
64 MY FORTY YEARS IN NEW YORK 
 
 mitted the material interests and to a small board of 
 elders responsibility for spiritual interests. It was a 
 great relief to me to find that the New England system 
 of open town meeting where those who knew least had 
 the most to say, did not obtain in Presbyterial ecclesi- 
 asticism and that only those whom the congregation 
 considered most capable of bearing responsibility had 
 responsibility laid upon them. It is with very great 
 pleasure that I look back to the meetings of our Ses¬ 
 sion where matters of great spiritual moment came up 
 for consideration. We must have had between one and 
 two hundred such gatherings and only once was there 
 the slightest suggestion of friction and that had to do 
 with the matter of music, a subject concerning which 
 the two that were principally concerned in debate had 
 only elementary information. Some disquiet regarding 
 the same matter subsequently developed itself and even 
 extended itself through the congregation. It was a 
 disturbed condition of mind that was entirely explica¬ 
 ble, but the progress of events soon changed conditions 
 in a way to the satisfaction of all concerned. As music 
 is the concord of sweet sounds it is strange that it 
 should be so disharmonizing in its effects and that it 
 should be the special occasion of anxiety to a pastor. 
 
 There may have been some criticism on the active 
 interest which for two years I took in matters of local 
 politics, although, if there was, I was not knowing to it. 
 Entrance into such conflict was not premeditated, but, 
 once in, it was hardly possible or honorable to draw 
 out. The final issue must have tended, at least, to 
 diminish any displeasure which may have been excited 
 
MY SECOND PASTORATE 
 
 65 
 
 by my actions. On general principles however it is 
 unwise and unjust to the interests of a church that so 
 large an amount of time and effort, due to the church, 
 should be withheld from it and applied elsewhere; a 
 proposition which at the same time, does not antag¬ 
 onize this other principle that the world is put in charge 
 of the church and that what is bad in the world is there 
 for the reason that the church has not yet compassed 
 all the ground that by divine right belongs to it. 
 
 One problem which I had to face, notice of which 
 was given to me at my first entrance upon the scene, 
 was the rival claim which was made upon a number of 
 members of the Madison Square Church by religious 
 efforts which were being prosecuted outside of the 
 church and outside of any church. I would not have 
 moved any man from an outside position which he was 
 occupying efficiently and have solicited his transferring 
 his active allegiance to his own church; at the same 
 time if all the activity expended elsewhere had been 
 centered at Madison Square it would have added tre¬ 
 mendously to the efficiency of the church and would 
 possibly have extended its tenure of life. It must be 
 remembered in this connection that the church with its 
 sacraments, is the determining center of Christian 
 power, and that any Gospel work carried forward out¬ 
 side has to lean back upon the church for its per¬ 
 manency and efficiency. 
 
 It is pleasant to mention just here the splendid out¬ 
 side work that for thirty-six years has been carried on 
 in vital connection with the Madison Square Church, 
 managed by a committee from the church, and which 
 
66 MY FORTY YEARS IN NEW YORK 
 
 i 
 
 has been for twenty-nine years under the efficient chair¬ 
 manship of Mr. Henry N. Tifft. By virtue of its 
 direct connection with the church it strengthened the 
 church even as the church strengthened it. 
 
 Of the cooperation of the women of the church I 
 cannot speak in too earnest terms of appreciation. On 
 the basis of prior organization they soon passed under 
 the guidance and inspiration of Mrs. Parkhurst and 
 materially strengthened the church by wise, devoted 
 and unremitting service and by the hold which they 
 gained and retained upon such members of the con¬ 
 gregation as were not enlisted in direct church enter¬ 
 prise. 
 
 As our choir acquired a city-wide reputation it is 
 proper that mention should be made of it. When I 
 came to the church its music was its one weak point. 
 I early inferred that from the fact that at my service 
 of installation music was excluded. On ordinary 
 occasions the music was rendered by a quartet backed 
 by an antiquated “whistle-chest.” The soprano and 
 contralto were antipathetic. The bass was Teutonic 
 and his life had been lived prior to the passage of the 
 Eighteenth Amendment. His vocal output expended 
 upon the rendition of the songs of Zion varied in 
 volume according to the degree in which at the moment 
 he was under the influence of the spirit. His service 
 culminated in an unfortunate loss of self-control ter¬ 
 minating in an unseemly disaster. 
 
 During the latter part of my pastorate my chorus 
 choir, under the direction of Howard E. Parkhurst, 
 my brother, was my particular joy. Its members were 
 
MY SECOND PASTORATE 
 
 67 
 
 warmly in sympathy with the service. They reenforced 
 the minister. They sang appreciatively the Gospel that 
 he preached. There was no attempt at display. I 
 rarely listen to a choir which does not in my judgment 
 suffer by comparison. I still miss it although it is three 
 years since I listened to it. 
 
 MOVE TOWARD AMALGAMATION 
 
 When I came to the church in 1880 the entire region 
 was solidly residential. Perhaps no one at that time 
 dreamed that it would ever be otherwise; nor was there 
 any marked drift of population till after the erection 
 of the new church. But when the change came it broke 
 upon us with a suddenness that was disconcerting and 
 disheartening. When we finally succumbed to destiny 
 the center of gravity of my congregation was between 
 Fortieth and Fiftieth streets. 
 
 To abandon a consecrated edifice at the impulse of 
 changeable human conditions seems almost like a divine 
 defeat and under all circumstances is regrettable, espe¬ 
 cially because of the interpretation likely to be put upon 
 it by those who have no personal interest in consecrated 
 places. I remember the dismantling of a church at 
 Twentieth Street many years ago, and the effect, both 
 depressing and comical, that was produced by the un¬ 
 covering to the public eye of a text of Scripture that 
 had been painted upon the inner wall, “I was glad when 
 they said unto me, let us go into the house of the Lord.” 
 
 At the same time, so far as we cannot create condi¬ 
 tions, it is a matter of good Christian sense to adjust 
 ourselves to those that force themselves upon us. Out 
 
68 MY FORTY YEARS IN NEW YORK 
 
 of the situation which thus confronted us developed the 
 scheme of amalgamation, by which the three churches, 
 Madison Square, Old First, and University Place, be¬ 
 came combined in a single ecclesiastical body. The 
 three congregations entered into the arrangement with 
 varying degrees of cordiality, the three pastors in¬ 
 teresting themselves in promoting the plan with their 
 respective congregations; it being considered that by 
 combining the three congregations and pooling their 
 respective assets (of which Madison Square furnished 
 nearly one million) there would be established an in¬ 
 stitution so securely planted as to be proof against the 
 effect of shifting populations and all other adverse in¬ 
 fluences that might assert themselves for generations 
 to come, becoming thus a monument of Presbyterian¬ 
 ism as Old Trinity has been monumental of Episco- 
 palianism. 
 
 At this point it is fitting that I make a few extracts 
 from the sermon which I delivered on the morning of 
 May 26th, 1918, the last which I preached to my dear 
 people, as follows: “The sacrifice of our local identity 
 as a church, because of the merger now consummated, 
 must be viewed under that aspect. The sacrifice costs 
 almost inexpressible pain, but instead of its working 
 our extinction or diminution we enter only more largely 
 into the totality of church life. The State of New York 
 is made more of a State by being part of the American 
 Union than it would have been by being thrown out 
 into midocean and left to work out its own national 
 destiny. In its present relations it becomes sharer in 
 
MY SECOND PASTORATE 
 
 69 
 
 the nation’s collective life, participant in its larger bene¬ 
 fits, in its more affluent resources. 
 
 “The finer any kind of organization the more it suf¬ 
 fers by being lived in a small way. Where its real 
 value is largely dependent upon action and reaction 
 maintained between its members—as is the case in a 
 church—its quantitative reduction involves its qualita¬ 
 tive reduction. So that, maintained under proper con¬ 
 dition, the life of the Amalgamated Church will do 
 more for its members than would be done for them 
 while living in a three-fold state of isolation. 
 
 “All of this will result if the enterprise is entered 
 into as an opportunity, not as a cold necessity. A con¬ 
 tinent promises more to its inhabitants than an archi¬ 
 pelago. All of this follows with the recognition of the 
 clear truth that a local church is at its best but a mere 
 fragment; and the more it is expanded—other things 
 being equal—the more adequate becomes its experience 
 of church reality and church efficiency. 
 
 “That is why denominational distinctions are bad; 
 they frame the universal church of God into compart¬ 
 ments—some of them air-tight—which prevent both the 
 introduction of fresh air and also its expulsion. The 
 church is as large as the sky and wants to be as open, 
 with no custom house port of entry to tax spiritual 
 commodities that are in transitu. In a word, we want 
 to get together. We need the world. We are citizens 
 in the kingdom of heaven, and that is a large situation 
 and full of souls that have each some secret of theirs 
 that they can tell us; and we can tell them something, 
 too. To be narrow, to be closed in, boxed up, walled 
 
70 MY FORTY YEARS IN NEW YORK 
 
 off, is unchristian, unchurchly. Each of all the churches 
 in the city would be richer in experience and in power 
 if they all felt that they were leaning some of the weight 
 on each other. If a Presbyterian bishop would accom¬ 
 plish that for the Presbyterian churches, or help to, I 
 would vote for a bishop. The Catholics have a Pope, 
 and their part of the church universal is the most per¬ 
 fect of any for unity, organization and efficiency. Cath¬ 
 olic territory is not disfigured by fences. It is a great 
 open lot, and in that respect is closer to the original 
 church ideal than any other denomination or sect. Amal¬ 
 gamation stands for something, therefore; something 
 precious, something near the heart of Christ; for it 
 means looking upon holy matters and relations in a 
 larger way, moving from a spot—a very dear and 
 beautiful spot—but moving from a spot into an area; 
 putting the emphasis on limitations that are less lim¬ 
 ited, drawing into a wider and more richly peopled 
 Christian environment.” 
 
 THREE PERSONAL REFERENCES 
 
 Madison Square Church people justly believed that 
 they were a little different from other people and seem 
 still to cherish something of that same feeling. While 
 they do not recognize each other by any occult sign as 
 do members of a secret fraternity, yet there is some¬ 
 thing in them by which they still recognize each other. 
 As I still conceive them, there is something of Madison 
 Square about them. 
 
 It would be pleasant but impolitic to make particu¬ 
 larized mention of individual members. Hardly, how- 
 
MY SECOND PASTORATE 
 
 71 
 
 ever, would any one criticise my making exceptional 
 reference to three who sustained such a relation to the 
 church and to myself personally, as to put them in a 
 class by themselves. 
 
 The first of these is Rev. William Adams, D.D., the 
 first pastor of the church. He had not only been its 
 pastor but also its parent, and had brought it up and 
 suffused it with his rich and genial spirit. It had or¬ 
 ganized itself around him, and was therefore naturally 
 distinguished by those same qualities of grace, refine¬ 
 ment and culture. The church was in that way a 
 homogeneous body, even as the members of a family 
 become in some degree duplicates of one another 
 through community of birth and training. There was 
 therefore no sharp variety of personal characteristics 
 to which his successor had to adjust himself. 
 
 In addition to that was the beneficent fact that he 
 at once adopted me into his favor. By thus creating 
 a tide in my behalf he drew the congregation after him, 
 and, so far as I know, neither then nor at any subse¬ 
 quent time, was there a reluctant or disaffected faction. 
 Although the good Doctor lived only six months after 
 I became pastor, that half year afforded all the time 
 that was required to secure for me a pleasant and a 
 pretty sure place in the regards of my people. 
 
 The second member of my flock to whom it is pleas¬ 
 ant and proper to devote a few words of grateful and 
 affectionate recognition is George W. Lane. He too 
 was suddenly taken from us after I had been in the 
 pastorate but a few years; but during those years and 
 following upon the six months during which I had had 
 
72 MY FORTY YEARS IN NEW YORK 
 
 the encouragement of Dr. Adams, Mr. Lane, I might 
 say, was the entire thing. He was elder and trustee. 
 And whatever he said carried. The congregation 
 moved after him as the flock follows the shepherd. He 
 idolized Madison Square Church. It was to him a big 
 piece of the kingdom of heaven dropped down and 
 planted at the corner of Madison Avenue and 24th 
 Street. There are but few still living that remember 
 him, but those who do, recall the large warm place 
 which at that time he filled in the life and administra¬ 
 tion of the church. I have met few men who were as 
 competent as he so to harmonize in one and the same 
 personality, obstinacy and grace. He was stubborn, 
 but his stubbornness was so camouflaged with Christ- 
 like benignity that to an undiscriminating observer he 
 would have passed as the very acme of docility. To 
 such an extent had he come to dominate my life and to 
 shape my judgment that when there arose a question 
 in regard to some point about which I had some doubt 
 but that I wanted to introduce into the funeral address 
 memorial of him that I was preparing, it occurred to 
 me that I should have to go over to 8 West 29th 
 Street and ask Mr. Lane. I love his very name. 
 
 The third member of the three that it would have 
 been felt by all the members of the old congregation I 
 ought to particularize and whom therefore I can name 
 without fear of criticism is Mr. D. Willis James. 
 
 He had formerly been a member of the Madison 
 Square Church, and returned to it not a great while 
 after I had become its pastor. It was he who seems 
 to have been the one who laid the wires that conducted 
 
MY SECOND PASTORATE 
 
 73 
 
 me to Madison Square, although I believe that Bishop 
 Potter laid claim to a share in the responsibility. 
 
 I have already stated in a detailed way how it was 
 that he first came into my life, and when he came into 
 my life he came there to stay. After the death of 
 Mr. Lane I was guided by him more than by any other. 
 There was in him a certain prevision or power of rapid 
 reasoning, which we call intuition, that enabled him to 
 see more distinctly what others saw, but also to see 
 beyond what others saw. What he foresaw came to 
 pass. And he was rich emotionally as well as keen 
 intellectually. He could therefore love voluminously 
 but he could detest terrifically. In whatever direction 
 his thought or feeling moved he let his entire self loose 
 in that direction. That constituted his power, as he 
 acted wholly and not fractionally. He loved Madison 
 Square Church. He counselled for it, he prayed for 
 it, and in a royal way contributed to its material needs. 
 He was built on a large scale and turned all his dimen¬ 
 sions to account. 
 
 There are many, very many more, whose names are 
 scored deep on the roll of memory, each of whom con¬ 
 tributed in his or her way to the beauty and joy of 
 the position in which for thirty-eight pleasant years I 
 exercised my Madison Square Church pastorate. 
 
 MY SERMON BEFORE THE AMALGAMATED 
 CONGREGATION 
 
 My relation to the amalgation of the three churches 
 was such that the story of my connection even with 
 Madison Square would not be quite complete unless I 
 
74 MY FORTY YEARS IN NEW YORK 
 
 appended a few extracts from the sermon which I de¬ 
 livered on the first Sunday of November, 1918, on the 
 occasion of the first united service (held in the Old 
 First Church) of the Madison Square, Old First and 
 University Place churches, as follows: “So unique are 
 the circumstances under which we are assembled this 
 morning that I am sure the event will constitute a mem¬ 
 orable paragraph in the history of the ecclesiastical life 
 of this city. 
 
 “The service is impressed with a double seriousness, 
 the seriousness of abandoning so much that has been 
 dear; the seriousness of committing ourselves to so 
 much that is unknown. 
 
 “In the confluence of three congregations, expressed 
 by our present assemblage, the Madison Square con¬ 
 tingent naturally cherishes a Madison Square conscious¬ 
 ness, the Old First contingent an Old First conscious¬ 
 ness, and the University Place a University Place con¬ 
 sciousness. Not labelled externally, internally we are 
 labelled. The impression of our history is upon us, and 
 to obliterate that impression is part of the price we 
 have to pay in order to secure a successful consolida¬ 
 tion. It involves a sharp break with the past. It is not 
 simply a matter of cutting off the stalk, but of pluck¬ 
 ing up the root. It is a great deal to pay, but we can¬ 
 not purchase great things with small money. 
 
 “We have been accustomed to use the terms amalga¬ 
 mation and consolidation. I raise the question, not out 
 of academic interest, but with a view to practical re¬ 
 sults, whether that mode of phrasing does not leave 
 
MY SECOND PASTORATE 
 
 75 
 
 unstated one aspect of our present situation that it is 
 
 essential to have emphasized. 
 
 “If from each of three buildings I borrow material 
 to be incorporated in a fourth, that fourth structure is 
 not the continuation of one or all of the three ante¬ 
 cedent ones. It is a distinct architectural entity with 
 its several ingredients organized under the constraint 
 of a definite scheme and purpose of its own. If it is 
 architecture it is a unit and not a composition. The 
 three antecedent buildings have given up their life in 
 contributing to the erection of a distinct architectural 
 entity, which is not an amalgam and is as exclusively 
 itself as though no other building had ever existed. 
 
 “A more apt setting forth of the case is afforded by 
 St. Paul's illustration when he said, ‘That which thou 
 sowest is not quickened except it die; and that which 
 thou sowest thou sowest not that body that shall be/ 
 Which denotes, as we very well understand, that the 
 seed which is planted dies in giving origin to the new 
 growth. My aim in this is that we should exclude 
 from this church the idea of plurality. We are as 
 much one as though it were the first church that ever 
 existed. 
 
 “Madison Square Church is dead. The Old First 
 Church is dead. The University Place Church is dead. 
 There were three parents in this case and they all died 
 in giving birth to this child, this child that is one all 
 the way through, and with no more duality or triplicity 
 attaching to it than attaches to your boy, because it 
 required not only the father to beget him, but also a 
 mother to bear him. You may say that that is an idea. 
 
76 MY FORTY YEARS IN NEW YORK 
 
 Yes, it is an idea, and ideas are serious things when 
 they are as true as this and warmly and sacredly cher¬ 
 ished. And by such cherishing we shall be individually 
 making a large contribution to the success of this in¬ 
 stitution. 
 
 “It is proper and necessary to expect that a result 
 which has been purchased at the tremendous expense 
 of blotting out three churches, of a long and distin¬ 
 guished history, will be prolific in magnificent fruitage, 
 otherwise it would prove an investment the like of 
 which, if practiced upon the street, would be charge¬ 
 able with the grossest and most pathetic miscalcula¬ 
 tion. That remark proceeds from the desire that hav¬ 
 ing paid our reverent and loving respects to the past, 
 we should now look with a clear and confident eye 
 toward the future; that we should at this moment foster 
 in our hearts large expectations; that we should enter 
 into coming days and years with the assurance that if 
 all conditions are properly fulfilled there is room for 
 larger and better things in times to come than there 
 has been in times past; and that assurance is not merely 
 a bit of impulsive optimism but in strict accord with 
 the economy of God, who arranges matters along the 
 line of blade, ear and full corn in the ear. The un¬ 
 known future is extending to this church a beckoning 
 hand. 
 
 “The church does not count for all that it ought to 
 in critical affairs of this present life. The church and 
 the world are two vast oceans whose waters too rarely 
 commingle. There are problems whose proper han¬ 
 dling bears quite as certainly upon the ennoblement of 
 
MY SECOND PASTORATE 
 
 77 
 
 mankind as would the conversion of a tribe of wild 
 men in Borneo or Mongolia. We cannot unify church 
 and state, neither can we disentangle them. 
 
 “This desire can be expressed by saying that what 
 is needed is something that serves the purpose that a 
 sounding-board plays in a musical instrument, which 
 throws the music out into the air, diffuses it, uni¬ 
 versalizes it. Any idea or purpose, wherever it orig¬ 
 inates, whether in General Assembly or in Congress, 
 that makes for betterment, that deals with the essential 
 necessities of the times, that makes for fundamental 
 uplift, that adds another pure sweet note to the music 
 that the world is singing, there is work for the Church, 
 work for this Church. 
 
 “O God, make this Church a mighty instrument in 
 Thy hands for the achievement of Thy holy purposes, 
 and the full coming in of Thy kingdom. Amen.” 
 
CHAPTER V 
 
 MOUNTAINEERING 
 
 PRELIMINARY OBSERVATIONS 
 
 I have during the entire period of my ministry been 
 much favored by my people in the matter of vacations. 
 I know of no other congregation in the city that has 
 been so generous in its allotment of seasons of rest as 
 to allow an annual respite of four months. The ex¬ 
 pressed expectation of getting it all back in the shape 
 of improved service during the remaining eight months 
 may or may not have been disappointed. This, how¬ 
 ever, is beyond question that I feel the result of those 
 intermitted periods of irresponsibility in my present 
 condition of health and strength. 
 
 When circumstances allow there is evident advan¬ 
 tage in having a portion of the year detached from the 
 twelve months and devoted to a distinct class of inter¬ 
 ests and activities. Our fathers knew nothing of such 
 an arrangement and were the consequent but uncon¬ 
 scious sufferers. People, like clocks, stand in need of 
 periodic winding. Change is inherently recreative. 
 This change is suggested by the alternation of day and 
 night. To the Hebrews some kind of periodic break 
 had given it a religious sanction and was made a fea¬ 
 ture of the Decalogue. The farmer’s need is in some 
 measure met by the alternation of seasons, each bring- 
 
 78 
 
MOUNTAINEERING 
 
 79 
 
 ing with it its own peculiar class of activities. What 
 is required is not so much inaction as diversity of 
 effort, for there is a species of rest that is enervating, 
 which not only does not fit for renewal of work, but 
 unfits it, and carries the vital forces down to sub¬ 
 normal. 
 
 As a means of recreation, golf is good, as is boating, 
 especially the former, for it gives opportunity for the 
 play of feeling even up to the point of enthusiasm; yet 
 there can be no mental or moral uplift in chasing a 
 “pill” over level ground. This latter element, however, 
 I have found in mountain work, the essential benefits 
 of which I appreciate even after years of abstinence. 
 
 Mountain climbing is fine sport if indulged in tem¬ 
 perately, and is practically free from danger if con¬ 
 ducted in the intelligent observance of certain estab¬ 
 lished rules and principles. While nature in all her 
 severer aspects requires to be treated with respect and 
 even with reverence, yet with that condition fulfilled 
 she shows herself not only tractable but kindly. I need 
 not say that those adventurous ascents which profes¬ 
 sional experts make, principally for the reason that they 
 are venturesome, I did not undertake, but kept close to 
 the dividing line between safety and hazard. 
 
 When asked, as I often am, what is to be gained by 
 toiling up the rough and strenuous side of a mountain 
 that cannot equally well be secured by viewing through 
 a telescope, comfortably seated on the verandah, it is 
 difficult to reply. Nothing but the mountaineer’s own 
 experience will furnish the answer, and that each one 
 has to gain for himself. If it is reasonable to ascend 
 
80 MY FORTY YEARS IN NEW YORK 
 
 a little way in order to gain a more expanded view, it 
 is by the law of proportion many times more reason¬ 
 able to ascend ten or twenty times that distance to gain 
 a prospect of a hundred or a thousand times the com¬ 
 pass. It all turns on the keenness of one’s sense of 
 natural beauty. There are some people with whom it 
 is impossible to exchange views on certain questions. 
 People who think in a different vernacular cannot talk 
 together. 
 
 Personally I find mountain work intoxicating. It 
 results in sleeplessness. It gives to my nature a kind 
 of thrust that keeps me a-going after my legs stop 
 functioning. There are memory pictures in my mind 
 that are as distinct at this moment as when painted there 
 twenty-five or thirty years ago. Such pictures are 
 worth infinitely more to me than any that can be framed 
 and hung upon the walls of one’s room. At this in¬ 
 stant I am surveying a panorama that includes not only 
 Switzerland, but considerable portions of France, Ger¬ 
 many, Austria and Italy, as far down as the Italian 
 Lakes. There is education in such experience; mental 
 and moral uplift. It has been said that the undevout 
 astronomer is mad. So I would say that the undevout 
 mountaineer is mad. The great things of the world 
 are the only ones that can match the possibilities of the 
 soul. There are mountains in the moon, and I hope 
 that the celestial world is not a weary stretch of monot¬ 
 onous level. I do not believe there could be a prettier 
 or a sublimer heaven than this present world offers if 
 only sin and suffering were eliminated. 
 
MOUNTAINEERING 
 
 81 
 
 PREPARATORY TRAINING 
 
 While the bulk of my mountain exercise was taken 
 in Switzerland, I had previously done enough in this 
 country to be assured that I was physically equal to 
 any ordinary strain of that kind and that it was pleas¬ 
 urably remunerative. In the White Mountains I had 
 climbed Lafayette, Chocorua, and twice ascended Mt. 
 Washington, once by the Crawford bridal path and 
 once by the mountain railway over the Jacob’s Ladder. 
 The latter trip was taken under adverse conditions. It 
 was late in the season. The mountain trains had been 
 taken off. There was no one at the summit but the 
 officer in charge of the weather bureau, who furnished 
 me such entertainment as he had in store; and the fog 
 was so heavy at the top as to afford me no view. On 
 the whole, it was not, I suppose, an altogether prudent 
 excursion. It was experience, however, and that is 
 always an asset. 
 
 My first appetizing taste of snow work was while 
 Mrs. Parkhurst and myself were stopping at a hotel 
 on the Nordfiord in Norway. I heard two tourists 
 planning a simple trip up the Folge Fond which could 
 be made in a few hours, and joining myself to them 
 we made up a little party, employed a guide and made 
 an excursion involving no difficulty but revealing the 
 fascination that distinguishes that kind of dissipation. 
 The day was bright and not too cold. The snow was 
 in fine condition, hard enough to bear us up on the 
 ascent, soft enough later in the day to admit of our 
 coasting on the descent. One of our company, a tall 
 
82 MY FORTY YEARS IN NEW YORK 
 
 young Englishman, clad in a dress suit and silk hat, 
 made an interesting demonstration of himself coasting 
 down, for he seemed to lack the knack of regulating 
 himself; his feet went faster than the rest of him, his 
 legs were where his head and body should have been 
 and his top hat was everywhere. Fortunately he was 
 able to gather most of himself together before reach¬ 
 ing a precipitous point which might have made of him 
 a perpetual wreck. I remember that at the summit 
 there was not a breath stirring. We lay out upon the 
 snow in the warm sunshine and regaled ourselves upon 
 the charm and the novelty of a Scandinavian land¬ 
 scape. 
 
 Norwegian scenery is in a class by itself, distin¬ 
 guished from that in Switzerland and the United 
 States. Its peculiar features are the deep inlets along 
 the coast, which, by admitting the warm water of the 
 Gulf Stream, save the country from the barrenness that 
 marks the west coast of the Atlantic at the same lati¬ 
 tude. It is rather strange that the tide of travel sets 
 so feebly toward Norway. We spent a part of two 
 summers there, finding that the inconveniences of 
 modes of conveyance and the imperfection of hotel 
 accommodations were more than balanced by the pe¬ 
 culiar attractions of the country, especially as one 
 travelled further and further toward the North Cape. 
 The people are not brilliant, but they are honest, more 
 and more so according to the distance at which they 
 live from the civilization of Bergen, Christiania and 
 Trondhjem, 
 
MOUNTAINEERING 
 
 83 
 
 ON MY WAY TO THE SWISS ALPS 
 
 My point of departure was Vevey, a little Swiss 
 village on the north shore of Lake Geneva, a dozen 
 miles east of Lausanne. The beauty of the surround¬ 
 ing country held me till the summer season was so far 
 advanced as to be uncomfortably warm. The lake 
 with its environment is some of the Creator’s best work. 
 It can hardly lay claim to grandeur, but I have been 
 in few places that can vie with it in elegant comeliness. 
 It is so much in the nature of a picture that one almost 
 forgets that it is land and water. 
 
 The silence of its waters on still days and nights is 
 almost audible, matched only by the awfulness of the 
 storms which rage upon it when nature has allowed 
 her feelings to be moved and her temper to be aroused. 
 With the exception of what I once experienced in Gla¬ 
 cier Park, in the shape of a rainless downpour of elec¬ 
 tric discharges, an incessant rattling of celestial artil¬ 
 lery, which wrought me into a state of absolute terror, 
 I have seen nothing to rival the effect produced on Lake 
 Geneva when a storm gathered from the lower end 
 collides with another developed from the upper end 
 and the two fight it out together to their mutual 
 exasperation. 
 
 Geneva, Fernex, Vevey, Montreux; who can have 
 lived and breathed among them and not have carried 
 away in his heart some of their sweetness? It is not 
 surprising to learn that as long ago as the early days 
 of Rome its wealthy aristocrats established their coun¬ 
 try homes along the lake border. 
 
84 MY FORTY YEARS IN NEW YORK 
 
 Before going on up into the mountains I want to 
 hold the attention of my reader for a moment to the 
 little village of Fernex just mentioned. It is only a 
 short and attractive bicycle run from Geneva. Its in¬ 
 terest is due to the fact of its having been for a con¬ 
 siderable time the home of Voltaire and to his erection 
 there of a church still standing and bearing upon its 
 face the inscription “Erected to God.” 
 
 Voltaire was cursed by his French contemporaries 
 for being an atheist, and their cry has been taken up 
 by a class of believers who find an inexplicable but 
 diabolic pleasure in forestalling divine judgment by 
 inflicting an anticipatory damnation of their own. 
 Building churches to God is certainly a rather peculiar 
 style of atheistic activity. Voltaire was no atheist, but 
 was classed as such because of his expressed hostility 
 to the passionate bigotry of French Christianity, and 
 was rewarded for his orthodoxy by having his body 
 stolen by night from the church where it had been for 
 many years entombed, carted out to the suburbs of 
 Paris, thrown into a hole that had been previously dug 
 for it, and buried like a dog. France would today be 
 quite another country from what it is but for the way 
 in which by ostracism and assassination it has despoiled 
 itself of the best blood, industrial, mental and spiritual. 
 
 With the increase of summer heat there came a grow¬ 
 ing desire to quit the region of the lake for higher and 
 cooler ground. Taking the Rhone Valley train we 
 found ourselves the same afternoon at Zermatt, five 
 thousand feet above sea, a small, dirty village, totally 
 without attraction, save as it gave access to the most 
 
MOUNTAINEERING 
 
 85 
 
 distinguished heights of the Valaisian Alps, among them 
 the Matterhorn, Weisshorn and Monte Rosa. Ninety- 
 five per cent of those who visit Zermatt are satisfied to 
 take the mountain railway to Gorner Gratt, five thou¬ 
 sand feet higher, a point of magnificent outlook and 
 not at all to be despised because it can be reached with¬ 
 out effort. But riding is not climbing and lacks the 
 stimulus and dignity of climbing, and men who have 
 climbed make no record of what they have done by rail. 
 
 On first arriving I had no mountaineering aspira¬ 
 tions, although made more susceptible to temptation 
 probably by my slight experience in New Hampshire. 
 So that when a guide proposed to me an easy experi¬ 
 mental excursion, I tumbled to his suggestion, with 
 the result, easy to be anticipated, that I walked with 
 him five successive seasons. 
 
 The widely circulated stories of mountain tragedies 
 naturally make one hesitate to submit one’s self to 
 mountaineering exposures. But upon making a rather 
 careful study of such accidents I reached the conclu¬ 
 sion that most of them were avoidable, and that with 
 reasonable attention to a few simple conditions it is 
 about as safe to climb the slope of a mountain as to 
 walk on level ground, a great deal more so than to 
 travel the streets of a city like New York. 
 
 I would like to encourage among young men the 
 mountain habit, both because it is healthy and exhil¬ 
 arating; and therefore state here, very briefly and for 
 their benefit, some of the conditions that need to be 
 fulfilled as a guarantee of safety. 
 
 One should not undertake heavy work till legs, lungs 
 
86 MY FORTY YEARS IN NEW YORK 
 
 and heart have been subjected to a climbing strain of 
 moderation. A young American thinks himself equal 
 to whatever anyone else has done. It shows a spirit 
 which if held under restriction is full of achievement, 
 but otherwise is capable of mischief, as in the instance 
 of an intimate friend who carried his Americanism to 
 the point of audacity, subjected himself without prep¬ 
 aration to a moderately long and difficult pull and suf¬ 
 fered for six months in consequence. For such under¬ 
 takings something more is necessary than ordinary 
 sound health. For the ascent sound heart and good 
 lungs are of course indispensable; also good knees, 
 which take the strain on the descent. In rough work 
 the descent is more trying than the ascent. 
 
 The next essential is a guide of established character 
 and prolonged experience. In Switzerland that de¬ 
 partment of service is under government supervision. 
 No one can act as first guide without a license. For¬ 
 merly such license was not required, but government 
 stepped in when it was discovered that tourists were 
 being lost by incompetent guides and that climbers 
 were being deliberately murdered on the route and their 
 pockets rifled. 
 
 Each guide has in his possession a book issued by 
 government, in which is contained the record of his 
 license, and also statements, inscribed by previous tour¬ 
 ists, of their opinion of the particular guide in question 
 as to character, ability and fidelity. All of which 
 affords the intending tourist a satisfactory basis upon 
 which to act. Once only did I come near getting into 
 trouble by engaging a guide who was not in a reliable 
 
MOUNTAINEERING 
 
 87 
 
 condition, a condition due to too much wedding recep¬ 
 tion. Much depends also on the amateur’s disposition 
 to renounce his own sense of sufficiency and to put 
 himself absolutely at the disposal of his leader and to 
 do his bidding without asking why. 
 
 Yet with all these precautions observed, accidents 
 do sometimes occur and even professionals occasionally 
 come to grief. My own guide, who served me for 
 five years and had previously travelled the mountains 
 for more than that length of time, lost his life on Dent 
 Blanche, in a tragedy which was almost the exact 
 duplicate of the Whymper disaster which occurred on 
 the Matterhorn many years ago. Three guides, includ¬ 
 ing my own, and one tourist lost their lives owing to 
 the breaking of a rope. I always refused to be at¬ 
 tached to the same rope as another amateur. Only 
 once in all my experience on the mountains did I feel 
 myself to be in danger. 
 
 MOUNTAIN ASCENTS 
 
 Arriving at Zermatt, I was at the lower edge of a 
 wonderful world, ringed about by mountainous masses 
 varying in height from ten to fifteen thousand feet. 
 Mountains usually grow in clusters. Zermatt was at 
 the center of one such cluster. It was placed on low 
 central ground, with a valley extending all the way 
 down to the Rhone—an arrangement which we might 
 think was contrived in the interest of mountaineers, 
 and incidentally for the convenience of a secondary 
 class of people who find a reposeful enjoyment in mag¬ 
 nificence but who are contented to gain only so much 
 
88 MY FORTY YEARS IN NEW YORK 
 
 of it as is obtainable without becoming physically stren¬ 
 uous—the hotel verandah mountaineers. 
 
 MONTE ROSA 
 
 Mountaineering is a good deal of a gamble, however 
 careful the thought expended in arranging for it. 
 Weather among the mountains is fickle and disap¬ 
 points the most studied prognostications and most care¬ 
 ful consultation of wind, temperature and barometer. 
 
 One of the climbs from which I had expected the 
 most, and which cost me as much effort as any I have 
 made, was the one up Monte Rosa, and it is the one 
 that was more disappointing than any other. It took 
 me from my bed at midnight and brought me back to 
 my starting place late in the afternoon. At twelve 
 o’clock the sky was clear and bright and full of stars, 
 made brilliant by the thinness of the atmosphere, for 
 we were then seven thousand feet above the sea, two 
 thousand above Zermatt. 
 
 Our first move was upon a descending path of several 
 hundred feet which took us down to the Gorner Gla¬ 
 cier, which had to be crossed in order to bring us to 
 where we could make straight work up to our objective 
 point, which was Dafour Spitze, the supreme pinnacle 
 of Rosa. The Glacier here is about a mile broad, bear¬ 
 ing upon its surface, halfway across, a big medial 
 moraine, made up of rocks which the glacier had picked 
 up on its way down from the snow-fields. Moraines, 
 whether medial, terminal or lateral, are the climber’s 
 bete noire. The accumulations, collected from years 
 
MOUNTAINEERING 
 
 89 
 
 and centuries of deposit, sometimes become enormous 
 and are a coarse offense to the tourist. 
 
 Once on the other side of the glacier we were in 
 position for a straight climb of 8000 feet. After the 
 first quarter of that distance had been made the sky 
 was beginning to become overcast, a sorry omen. A 
 wind with increasing force was blowing from Italy. 
 As we ascended into higher and colder air a few snow¬ 
 flakes commenced to fall, but in that dilatory way that 
 implied a force still held in reserve. By the time we 
 had accomplished seven out of our eight thousand feet 
 it had become bitterly cold and the air was so dense 
 with snow-flakes that objects twenty feet away were 
 only indistinctly visible. 
 
 At that point we stopped for a moment to consider. 
 The outlook was unpropitious. In fact there was no 
 outlook. It was so cold that the color of my guide’s 
 face was a yellowish green. It interested me, for I 
 had never before seen a person that looked so much as 
 though he were nearly frozen to death. He told me 
 that my face looked just as his did. I wished that I 
 had a glass so that I could see myself. He told me that 
 the last thousand feet was the stiffest of the entire 
 ascent. I believed him for from Gorner Gratt I had 
 studied that section with a glass. I told him that if I 
 was going to run any risk by going to the top I would 
 not attempt it, but that otherwise I was going to go on. 
 
 Having disencumbered ourselves of every bit of our 
 baggage that we could dispense with, his bottle of wine 
 and my bottle of tea (which Mrs. Parkhurst had 
 brewed for me and which contained just enough of 
 
90 MY FORTY YEARS IN NEW YORK 
 
 prohibition kick to add a little tension to my nerves), 
 we continued our ascent to the summit. It was not 
 pretty but it was glorious. We were in the midst of a 
 big white world, the wind from the south blowing at 
 a rate of not less than sixty to seventy miles an hour 
 and the snow falling in drifts. I said that the trip was 
 disappointing. In one sense it was. It was disappoint¬ 
 ing in the sense that we stood at a point from which, 
 in clear weather, there is a view second in grandeur to 
 scarcely anything else in Switzerland, and with such 
 weather as we were in we could not see a thing. But 
 it was immensely satisfying in this way, that I had a 
 strange sense of what was invisible. I felt the grand 
 presence of what I could not see. Physically it was 
 not there, but spiritually it was there, and even what 
 was distant was felt by me to be close to. It was a 
 unique experience. There is nothing like it in New 
 York. Descending I picked up my bottle of tea, which 
 was frozen solid—“Iced tea.” 
 
 A little way back I had occasion to refer to Gorner 
 Glacier. Glacier peculiarities are interesting, and any 
 of my readers unacquainted with them may like to have 
 a few particulars stated. Glaciers might be called 
 frozen rivers, and in many respects they preserve the 
 character of rivers. They derive their supply from the 
 elevated snow fields as rivers derive their contents 
 from the uplands. They move as rivers move, al¬ 
 though with a movement so slow as not to be imme¬ 
 diately perceptible. They resemble a river in this re¬ 
 spect, also, that their movement is more rapid—if the 
 word “rapid” be admissible—at the middle than at the 
 
MOUNTAINEERING 
 
 91 
 
 sides. That is the reason why when Mark Twain 
 wanted to come down from Riffle Alp to Zermatt he 
 had his baggage moved out to the middle of the glacier. 
 That such is the case is proved in this way: if a stake 
 is driven into the ground at each of the two sides of 
 the glacier, and stakes be driven into the ice of the 
 glacier itself at intervals of ten or fifteen feet, but in 
 such a way that those at the sides and those on the ice 
 form a straight line, it will be found after twenty-four 
 hours that the stakes no longer form a straight line 
 but a curve, with the ones nearer the center having ad¬ 
 vanced further than those toward the sides. Even the 
 one at the center will not have moved more than from 
 two to six inches, so that Mark Twain’s baggage would 
 have required many years to arrive at Zermatt. 
 
 Reference to glacier movement brings to mind an 
 interesting incident, although one of a rather ghastly 
 character, which was widely reported in Switzerland 
 but which may not have reached the United States. 
 About seventy years ago three Englishmen were walk¬ 
 ing up the Glacier des Boissons, in the neighborhood of 
 Chamounix. One of them, while standing at the edge 
 of a crevasse, slipped and fell in. Its depth was so 
 great as to render recovery impossible. Of course, he 
 was soon frozen to death, even if the fall itself had 
 not killed him. He became necessarily an ice-preserved 
 integral part of the ice-river, borne along down by its 
 flow as a log is carried by a stream of water. Some 
 calculation was made as to the number of years that 
 would elapse before the body would emerge at the foot 
 of the glacier. I do not remember how exact the calcu- 
 
92 MY FORTY YEARS IN NEW YORK 
 
 lation was, but at any rate the body appeared after 
 about fifty years with the freshness of early life still 
 upon it. For it had simply been kept in cold storage. 
 
 One of the three that had walked the glacier together 
 half a century before was still living and at his home 
 in England. Upon receiving a telegram he came down 
 and attended at Chamounix the funeral of his old tour¬ 
 ist companion. Objects other than this of the human 
 body have emerged in the same way after a great lapse 
 of years. An umbrella that I accidentally dropped into 
 a crevasse while going over the Alphubel Joch must 
 by this time be well on its way to the Sass Valley. It 
 would be an interesting object when it reappears. I 
 would reward the finder liberally if I could receive it 
 from him as a trophy of my mountaineering. 
 
 I have myself been far enough down on the inside 
 of a crevasse to test its frigidity and appreciate its 
 sublimity. While descending a glacier on my way down 
 to the Rhone Valley I gained a closer acquaintance with 
 one of these objects than is usual to the amateur tourist. 
 The air was so thick with snow that we could see but a 
 little way in front of us, and could keep our direction 
 only by turning around and consulting the foot-tracks 
 we had just left behind us, when we suddenly came 
 upon the brink of one of these yawning chasms. 
 
 How deep it was we were of course unable to con¬ 
 jecture, for they sometimes extend down for hundreds 
 of feet. It was too broad to jump, and to flank it 
 would involve a disagreeable amount of extra travel. 
 The plan adopted would have seemed to me unduly 
 
MOUNTAINEERING 
 
 93 
 
 hazardous except when executed by a guide as careful 
 and experienced as my own. 
 
 A crevasse is shaped like a V, more or less broad 
 at the top, but with the sides gradually approaching 
 each other as the cleavage extends down into the mas¬ 
 sive body of the ice. From that it follows that by 
 descending into the crevasse one comes closer and closer 
 to the point where the approaching sides would be only 
 a moderate distance apart. That will be intelligible to 
 the reader if he keeps in mind the shape of the letter V. 
 It was in view of that condition of things that my 
 leading guide (I had two) acted. He commenced to 
 cut steps one below another on the hither, nearly per¬ 
 pendicular, side of the crevasse, I following as he ad¬ 
 vanced downward, the rear guide with the rope (to 
 which the forward guide and myself were attached) 
 holding us in check as safeguard in case of a slip. 
 At this moment I cannot imagine how he would have 
 been able to save us if either of us had made a false 
 step. But under such circumstances one is not sup¬ 
 posed to make a false step. It is good schooling in the 
 art of “minding your steps.” 
 
 I do not know how far down we went. I was too 
 intent on my steps to take account of distance and too 
 considerate of the abyss of unknown depth beneath to 
 allow my eye to attempt to fathom that depth. It was 
 all very interesting, but not pretty. It was a big relief 
 when the guide, who was doing the cutting, said, “Now 
 I guess we can safely step across. Remain carefully 
 where you are and I will commence a stairway up on 
 the opposite face.” After advancing far enough with 
 
94 MY FORTY YEARS IN NEW YORK 
 
 ascending stair-cutting to make a clear way for me, I 
 crossed over and followed him step by step till we 
 emerged once more at the surface. As he often said 
 to me, “There is no danger in doing these things if a 
 deliberate amount of time is given to them.” 
 
 THE WEISSHORN" 
 
 The Dom is one of the giants of the region, the 
 highest mountain in Switzerland proper (Mont Blanc 
 is not in Switzerland, but partly in France and partly 
 in Italy), but its ascent is void of interest. It is all 
 snow-work, but affords unlimited opportunity for ski¬ 
 ing. We encountered a burning sun at the summit. It 
 was the only climb in which I had an experience of 
 hemorrhage, which was only slight. 
 
 The Weisshorn is another matter. I admire it for 
 its beauty and treasure my memory of its difficulty. It 
 is a conspicuous figure as seen from the Riffle and 
 from Gorner Gratt. It is a rock, snow and ice pile, 
 triangular in shape, culminating in a definitely marked 
 apex. It is in the main beautifully white, and when 
 seen glistening in the sunshine and tipped with a cloud- 
 banner, is an object of surpassing splendor; and when 
 the evening light and the evening stillness begin to 
 gather about it, it challenges our reverence. The quar¬ 
 ter hour I once passed in contemplating it from Gorner 
 Gratt under those conditions is one of my most treas¬ 
 ured experiences of Switzerland. But it cannot be 
 read; it must be felt in order to be known. 
 
 Our first attempt to make the Weisshorn was a fail¬ 
 ure. When about three thousand feet short of the 
 
MOUNTAINEERING 
 
 95 
 
 summit ominous weather signs discouraged our prog¬ 
 ress, and snow, which had been falling in an irresolute 
 kind of way, assumed a more determined spirit and 
 imposed upon us a veto to which our guides, of which 
 we had three, including the carrier, did not dare show 
 disrespect. Snow in itself considered is not a fatal ob¬ 
 struction, as is evidenced by our successful capture of 
 Monte Rosa. But in that case the way was plain. That 
 is to say, there were no points that were perilously 
 tricky. For that ascent, notwithstanding its excep¬ 
 tional height, I required only one guide. On the Weiss- 
 horn, per contra, there were a number of funny spots, 
 exceedingly interesting ones, but such as did not need to 
 have their interest augmented by the introduction of 
 avoidable difficulties. 
 
 The second attempt was made under more favorable 
 conditions, in the finest of weather, under a clear sky 
 and with moderate temperature. It is not a height that 
 one can assail in a playful mood. After two or three 
 miles’ walk down the valley, and as much more through 
 the lower slopes—where it was somewhat toilsome, but 
 perfectly plain work—from that point on it was busi¬ 
 ness all the way up and especially all the way down. 
 
 Having accomplished all that preceded the strenuous 
 portion of our problem, we camped for the night, or 
 at least till past midnight. The night at that stage of 
 the journey was cold. There had been a tourist’s hut 
 at that point, but the front had fallen down, the ends 
 had fallen in, the roof naturally enough had collapsed, 
 and nearly all that was left was the floor and a big 
 boulder against which the hut had originally been built. 
 
96 MY FORTY YEARS IN NEW YORK 
 
 I remember the thrilling quietness of that night. The 
 world seemed big and lonely. It was awfully still, with 
 a stillness that was only occasionally broken by the 
 rolling down from the heights above us of a stone that 
 had dislodged itself from the ice. As day began 
 to dawn we made a fire, cooked coffee, snatched a 
 hasty breakfast and moved on. Between our camping- 
 ground and the summit there were two passages at 
 which the interest of the climb centered. The rest of 
 the way it was a steady matter of finding our way up 
 over an ungraded roadway where there was no road 
 and one rock served as stepping-stone to the one above 
 it. It was not easy nor was there any danger. 
 
 A little further on we struck an arete, which it took 
 an hour to traverse. It lay nearly horizontal, but it 
 was a ridge of only about two feet in breadth which 
 formed the juncture of two slopes, each of which ex¬ 
 tended down without any considerable break for not 
 less than two thousand feet. One can easily picture 
 the situation. A person inclined to dizziness would 
 have stood no chance. 
 
 What enhanced the precariousness of our path was 
 the fact that it was slippery. Two or three inches of 
 snow had lain upon it which the sun had so softened 
 as to render it unreliable. The rope was kept taut 
 between us, and when the path narrowed down to only 
 a little more than a foot in width the two guides re¬ 
 mained stationary, while one paid out the rope and the 
 other paid it in. It was tedious but it was experience, 
 and was accomplished without a fault by any of the 
 party. Danger was practically eliminated by the pa- 
 
MOUNTAINEERING 
 
 97 
 
 tience and confident caution of all the parties involved. 
 After so many years I could make a picture of that 
 arete and of the three mountaineers that would be 
 very true to the original. Such pictures contain too 
 much to admit of being put upon canvas. 
 
 Between the ridge just described and the summit was 
 another passage more critical, and unquestionably dan¬ 
 gerous, which I would on no account repeat. It was 
 an ice-field, lying at about the angle just stated and 
 extending down to as great a distance as the slopes I 
 have mentioned. The ice was as solid as either nature 
 or art could produce. Each step was cut with an axe. 
 There was upon it no surface that had been softened 
 by the sun and which, had such a surface existed, would 
 have helped to prevent our slipping. If either of us 
 had stumbled there was nothing we could have caught 
 hold of that would have sustained us; and the ice was 
 so glassy that, if one had slipped, hob-nailed shoes 
 would not have saved us, for the strain upon the other 
 two would have been so great as to be irresistible and 
 we should all three of us have slidden down into eternity 
 together. 
 
 Such is the simple prose representation of the situa¬ 
 tion. I partially realized it during the half hour we 
 spent in going up and another half hour in coming 
 down, but I realize it perfectly now and on no account 
 would I repeat it. Mountains are not playthings. Even 
 in their more genial moods they exact from us respect, 
 and in their savage aspects they command our homage. 
 I am glad though that I did it. It is delightful to 
 bask in nature’s smiles, and a God of love could hardly 
 
98 MY FORTY YEARS IN NEW YORK 
 
 have made a world that did not exhibit some features 
 of grace and tenderness. It is likewise wholesome to 
 face nature’s frowns; and a God whom Scripture rep¬ 
 resents as “mighty and terrible” could hardly have 
 made a world in which those attributes also did not 
 find their imposing expression. 
 
CHAPTER VI 
 
 THE ASCENT OF THE MATTERHORN 
 
 The village of Zermatt is situated about twenty miles 
 from the Rhone Valley and connected with it by rail. 
 It is a dirty, squalid little town with narrow, crooked 
 streets paved with cobble-stones and housing a very 
 small population, but containing three large hotels for 
 the accommodation of tourists. Strangers arriving in 
 bad weather and unacquainted with points of interest 
 that the place gives access to, are apt to return to the 
 Rhone Valley at once, considering a single glimpse of 
 the place quite sufficient. 
 
 The practical interest of the town to the tourist lies 
 in the fact that it not only gives easy approach by rail 
 to Gorner Gratt, a superb point of observation ten 
 thousand feet above sea level, and environed by a group 
 of notable mountains (for big mountains, like big men, 
 usually grow in clusters), but affords the gateway of 
 access to those mountains and the path to their ascent— 
 distinguished among which is the Matterhorn. 
 
 Among Swiss mountains the Matterhorn has a dis¬ 
 tinction that is all its own. It has been so often pic¬ 
 tured that its form is familiar even to those who have 
 never visited Switzerland. 
 
 It wears an aspect so grim as to render it forbidding 
 and presents such an attitude of challenge as to provoke 
 
 99 
 
100 MY FORTY YEARS IN NEW YORK 
 
 the beholder to assault. It is the mountain of tragedy, 
 and the fruits of its savagery are to be found far and 
 near, notably in the little cemetery at Zermatt. The 
 story of Whymper and of the four who, on the break¬ 
 ing of the rope that held them together, went flying 
 through space and whose bodies, all but one, were re¬ 
 covered from the snows far down on the northern 
 slope (and that one may eventually emerge at the foot 
 of the glacier), has been told so many times as to call 
 for no repetition here. 
 
 Although I have described the mountain as being 
 grim in its aspect, yet there are times when it is made 
 sublime by being partially invested with fog, and even 
 beautiful if its summit is tufted with a cloud-banner. 
 To know the mountain one should view it under its 
 various aspects, but, in order to be really familiarly 
 acquainted with it, one should climb it. 
 
 The world-wide reputation of the mountain and the 
 numerous disasters suffered by those that were at¬ 
 tempting to scale it made me naturally hesitant to ex¬ 
 pose myself to what purported to be its perils. Peril, 
 however is largely a matter of personal disqualification 
 for encountering the peril. Almost any expedition is 
 dangerous unless undertaken with an equipment ad¬ 
 justed to existing conditions. By mountain work in 
 Switzerland and elsewhere I had had experience of 
 the essentials of such equipment, and had come to 
 realize that as a rule peril was not massed at a single 
 point but was graciously distributed along the entire 
 line of ascent, so that if I was continuously circum¬ 
 spect I stood good chance of success. Moreover from 
 
ASCENT OF THE MATTERHORN 101 
 
 Gorner Gratt I had had frequent opportunities to in¬ 
 spect the monster and roughly to trace the path (which 
 was not always much of a path) that extended from 
 base to summit: all of which tended to induce on my 
 part a kindly sentiment toward the object of my en¬ 
 deavor. 
 
 There was also the fact that although the summit 
 was 14,000 feet above sea level, Zermatt, the point at 
 which ascent commenced, had already an altitude of 
 5000 feet, which left a remainder of only 9000; from 
 which latter figure there was a further subtraction to 
 be made of 3000 feet, the distance in altitude from 
 Zermatt to an upper hotel which was reached over 
 open comfortable ground rather steep in places, but 
 easily and safely traversed without a guide and with 
 no suggestion of strain or peril; so that there remained 
 only about a mile and a quarter of actual perpendicular 
 ascent,—quite unimportant when considered arithme¬ 
 tically but sufficiently significant when experienced 
 pedestrianly. 
 
 The Matterhorn is massive rock, as solid as on the 
 day when by some mysterious convulsion of nature 
 it was thrust up among the clouds. The scaling of it 
 was slightly facilitated by the fact that in places the 
 stratification is tilted at such an angle as to furnish 
 something like steps, which give to the foot a conven¬ 
 ient and substantial point of support. Such geologi¬ 
 cal condition was the exception fof the storms and 
 tempests of uncounted ages have plowed into and 
 wrecked what must have been the original formation 
 and left little of original structure remaining, for even 
 
102 MY FORTY YEARS IN NEW YORK 
 
 the mountains decay, and century by century subside 
 toward a level with the valley. 
 
 In the afternoon of the day on which I commenced 
 my ascent I leisurely traversed the three thousand feet 
 of altitude already noted, to a mountain hotel which 
 afforded all the conveniences naturally required by 
 guests seeking entertainment at that elevation. Here 
 I joined the two guides with whom I had previously 
 arranged. After we had dined and they had laid in a 
 supply of bread, coffee, chocolate and wine,—wine suf¬ 
 ficient to take us up and back, with a sufficient over¬ 
 plus to keep them in good spirits after we had gotten 
 back,—we made a quiet start. 
 
 I am particular to say a quiet start, for there is much 
 involved in commencing a high climb easily, in adjust¬ 
 ing one’s pace to the grade, and one’s respiration to 
 the thinness of the atmosphere; for at that altitude 
 atmospheric pressure was already considerably reduced 
 and it would become more and more so as we ascended. 
 When put to an unusual task the body should be treated 
 with great consideration. I mention these particulars, 
 for some one who reads this account may be contem¬ 
 plating mountaineering and be aided by these practical 
 suggestions. 
 
 The entire ascent may be briefly described as being 
 a continued process of overcoming what at first sight 
 appear to be insuperable difficulties. In course of time 
 one becomes in a measure accustomed to them, but even 
 so to an amateur they never altogether part with their 
 originality. The guides of course were never fazed 
 by them, for to them any angle less than seventy de- 
 
ASCENT OF THE MATTERHORN 103 
 
 grees means practically level ground. Obstacles they 
 always find some means of circumventing. That con¬ 
 stitutes a large part of the art of mountaineering. Even 
 to the inexperienced it gradually becomes less difficult 
 than it looks, and I was not obliged to depend upon 
 my guides to such a humiliating extent as to forfeit 
 their respect. Ropes, that at especially difficult points 
 were attached for the support of the climber, I was 
 advised not to touch, as exposure to weather makes 
 them unreliable. 
 
 There was one momentous wall of rock before which 
 I stood simply flabbergasted. It was at what is known 
 as the “Shoulder.” It is about three-quarters of the 
 way up and is so noticeable a feature that any one will 
 detect it in any sizable picture or photograph of the 
 Matterhorn. It was at this point that the Whymper 
 disaster occurred. As I stood there in meditative mood, 
 questioning whether I was cut out for a mountaineer, 
 I could look down at my right and see the slope over 
 which the bodies of Whymper’s four associates rolled 
 to their cold death. The spot is fast fixed in my mem¬ 
 ory: frozen there. 
 
 This point of difficulty was slowly passed and by 
 careful progress we compassed the remaining distance 
 to the summit, which we reached about noon,—the final 
 section from the “Shoulder” up being on all accounts 
 the most trying of all. 
 
 During the ascent and at its finish there were three 
 points which afforded specially memorable views, each 
 of which more than compensated me for all my expen¬ 
 diture of effort. 
 
104 MY FORTY YEARS IN NEW YORK 
 
 The first was reached after evening had darkened 
 into night, when, seen through the thin and clarified 
 atmosphere, the earth and the firmament seemed to 
 close in upon each other and we to be walking through 
 the midst of the stars. It was moreover the season of 
 the August meteors which made fantastic sport in the 
 heavens and drew long swift lines of fiery light across 
 the sky. It was another moment of bewildering mag¬ 
 nificence when, in the early morning the sky began to 
 be tinted and then to be flushed with the light of the 
 rising sun. The entire valley below was a motionless 
 sea of fog. For hundreds and hundreds of miles on 
 every side mountain-peaks pricked their way up through 
 the fog, and,—as the sun gradually cleared the hori¬ 
 zon,—showed themselves as rose-tinted islands, a vast 
 sun-lit archipelago. The entire scene was a soul-en¬ 
 trancing commentary on the solemn transaction of the 
 world's birthday, when God said, “Let there be light.” 
 
 The third feature of special interest I can introduce 
 by saying that one of the fascinations of high moun¬ 
 tain work is the gradually expanding view attendant 
 upon every added upward step taken by the climber. 
 One feels the world to be gradually growing around 
 him. His horizon continues retreating further and 
 further into the distance. One’s expectation is kept 
 sharpened by the curiosity to see what the next step 
 will bring forth. A sense of weariness is extinguished 
 by the steadily broadening panorama. 
 
 The final stretch of four or five hundred feet was, 
 however, so sharp as to confine my attention to the 
 difficulties of the path; but as at last I stepped out into 
 
ASCENT OF THE MATTERHORN 105 
 
 the clear, at the altitude of 14,000 feet, with the entire 
 mass of the Matterhorn beneath our feet, my experi¬ 
 ence was so intense and bewildering as not to admit 
 of being put into words. 
 
 It seemed as though I were everywhere all at once. 
 It seemed as though the whole world, or a large part 
 of it lay spread out around me. Mountain range rose 
 behind mountain range like so many concentric waves 
 in the boundless ocean of distance. The map of South¬ 
 eastern Europe was unrolled around me and beneath 
 me, Switzerland, France, Germany, Italy down to the 
 Mediterranean, as though, like the Lord himself, we 
 were about to see all the kingdoms of the world and 
 the glory of them. There are experiences known only 
 to the mountaineer, and pictures cherished in his mem¬ 
 ory that reduce to insignificance all the products of 
 human art. 
 
CHAPTER VII 
 
 SUCCESSFUL ASSAULT UPON THE TAMMANY INTEREST, 
 CONDUCTED UNDER THE AUSPICES OF THE 
 SOCIETY FOR THE PREVENTION OF 
 
 CRIME IN 1892-1894 
 
 I am devoting considerable space to this matter for 
 three reasons: first, because I was myself so involved in 
 it that my autobiography would be incomplete without 
 it; second, because there has been expressed to me 
 the desire that the public should have given to it a 
 simplified narrative of the campaign; third, because 
 there were lessons taught then that should be impressed 
 upon the minds of those who were children at that 
 time but who are now sprung up into years that entail 
 active civic obligations. 
 
 Tammany’s defeat in ’94 was achieved by the So¬ 
 ciety for the Prevention of Crime, an organization 
 dating from October, 1878, and reckoning among its 
 incorporators such men as Peter Cooper, Howard 
 Crosby, Frederick A. Booth and D. B. St. John Roosa: 
 Howard Crosby being its first president. I became 
 connected with the Society in November, 1890, by 
 invitation of Dr. Crosby, he being moved thereto by 
 a published report of a sermon which I had preached 
 shortly prior to the November election. 
 
 Dr. Crosby died soon after, and I was elected to fill 
 
 106 
 
ASSAULT UPON TAMMANY INTEREST 107 
 
 his place April 30th, 1891. The Society was at that 
 time limiting itself to quiet work with no purpose of 
 achieving radical results. I accepted the presidency on 
 the condition that we cease occupying ourselves with 
 cutting off the tops and apply ourselves to plucking 
 up the roots. 
 
 As a country boy I had always looked upon New 
 York as a kind of Jerusalem, a sort of holy city, a 
 monumental exhibit of the finest product of modern 
 civilization. Coming here in ’80 I had no immediate 
 means of learning anything to the contrary, for my 
 attention was confined to the members of my congre¬ 
 gation, who only confirmed me in my optimistic esti¬ 
 mate. My congregation contained a large element of 
 young men whose brightness and alertness arrested my 
 attention and aroused my deep interest. 
 
 As a result of closer acquaintance with them, and in 
 consequence of what I learned from trusted members 
 of the legal and medical professions, I became ac¬ 
 quainted with facts that considerably chilled my opti¬ 
 mism, and led me to believe that my young parishioners 
 would more easily grow up into manliness of life if 
 they were less exposed to certain exacting temptations. 
 
 We had but a small force in our office, but such as 
 we had I set in motion along the lines of the gambling 
 and the social evils, only to learn to my innocent sur¬ 
 prise that it was the Police that constituted the out¬ 
 works of the fortification that I was undertaking to 
 besiege, and that it was the city which I had so greatly 
 admired from a distance, which, in one of its most 
 prominent Departments, stood between me and the 
 
108 MY FORTY YEARS IN NEW YORK 
 
 young men whose interests it was my duty and privi¬ 
 lege to safeguard. It dawned upon me that crime was 
 the policeman’s stock in trade, his capital, which of 
 course it was to his interest to encourage in order to 
 the enhancement of his personal revenues. That was 
 the situation which I confronted and which I stated to 
 the directors of my Society—the S. P. C.—with the 
 insistence that they drop all minor matters and deal 
 directly with the Police Department, making no alliance 
 with it and giving it no quarter. The proposition was 
 accepted with prompt and unanimous cordiality. That 
 established a policy. The working out of details was 
 another and more difficult problem, which was left to 
 the Executive Committee consisting of Frank Moss, 
 Thaddeus D. Kenneson and myself. To my colleagues 
 I yield unstinted praise and unbounded honor. Our 
 motto was, ‘‘Down with the Police.” 
 
 What has been already related led up to what might 
 be called “the first gun of the campaign,” viz., the ser¬ 
 mon which I preached in Madison Square Church 
 Sabbath morning, February 14th, 1892, from the text, 
 “Ye are the salt of the earth.” No notice was given 
 of its delivery, and it did not occur to the preacher 
 that it would excite particular interest or create any 
 marked impression. Viewed on general principles it 
 was a most indiscreet performance, but it is probable 
 that if I had said only what it was discreet to say, 
 nothing would have come of it and it would have 
 proved a blank cartridge. I am going to make ex¬ 
 tended extracts from that sermon for otherwise what 
 occurred later would be inexplicable. 
 
ASSAULT UPON TAMMANY INTEREST 109 
 
 FIRST SERMON 
 
 “ ‘Ye are the salt of the earth.’ This, then, is a cor¬ 
 rupt world, and Christianity is the antiseptic that is to 
 be rubbed into it in order to arrest the process of 
 decay: an illustration taken from common things, but 
 which states at a stroke the entire story. The reason 
 for selecting the above Scripture, and the burden that 
 is upon my mind this morning is this; that current 
 Christianity seems not in any notable or conspicuous 
 way to be fulfilling the destiny which the Lord here 
 appoints for it. It lacks distinct purpose, and it lacks 
 virility. We are living in a wicked world, and we are 
 fallen upon bad times. And the question that has been 
 pressing upon my heart these days and weeks past has 
 been, What can I do? 
 
 “We are not thinking just now so much of the 
 world at large as we are of the particular part of the 
 world that it is our doubtful privilege to live in. We 
 are not saying that the times are any worse than they 
 have been; but the evil that is in them is giving most 
 uncommonly distinct tokens of its presence and vitality, 
 and it is making a good many earnest people serious. 
 They are asking, What is to be done? What is there 
 that I can do? In its municipal life our city is thor¬ 
 oughly rotten. Here is an immense city reaching out 
 arms of evangelization to every quarter of the globe; 
 and yet every step that we take looking to the moral 
 betterment of this city has to be taken directly in the 
 teeth of the damnable pack of administrative blood- 
 
110 MY FORTY YEARS IN NEW YORK 
 
 hounds that are fattening themselves on the ethical 
 flesh and blood of our citizenship. 
 
 “We have a right to demand that the Mayor and 
 those associated with him in administering the affairs 
 of this municipality should not put obstructions in the 
 path of our ameliorating endeavors; and they do. 
 There is not a form under which the devil disguises 
 himself that so perplexes us in our efforts, or so be¬ 
 wilders us in the devising of our schemes as the polluted 
 harpies that, under the pretence of governing this city, 
 are feeding day and night on its quivering vitals. They 
 are a lying, perjured, rum-soaked, and libidinous lot. 
 If we try to close up a house of prostitution or of 
 assignation, we, in the guilelessness of our innocent 
 imaginations, might have supposed that the arm of the 
 city government that takes official cognizance of such 
 matters, would like nothing so well as to watch day¬ 
 times and sit up nights for the purpose of bringing these 
 dirty malefactors to their deserts. On the contrary, 
 the arm of the city government that takes official cog¬ 
 nizance of such matters evinces but a languid interest, 
 shows no genius in ferreting out crime, prosecutes only 
 when it has to, and has a mind so keenly judicial that 
 almost no amount of evidence that can be heaped up 
 is accepted as sufficient to warrant indictment. 
 
 “We do not say that the proposition to raid noted 
 houses of assignation touches our city government at 
 a sensitive spot. We do not say that they frequent 
 them; nor do we say that it is money in their pockets 
 to have them maintained. We only say (we think a 
 good deal more, but we only say) that so far as relates 
 
ASSAULT UPON TAMMANY INTEREST 111 
 
 to the blotting out of such houses the strength of the 
 municipal administration is practically leagued with 
 them rather than arrayed against them. 
 
 “The same holds true of other institutions of an 
 allied character. Gambling-houses flourish on all these 
 streets almost as thick as roses in Sharon. They are 
 open to the initiated at any hour of day or night. They 
 are eating into the character of some of what we are 
 accustomed to think of as our best and most promising 
 young men. They are a sly and constant menace to 
 all that is choicest and most vigorous in a moral way 
 in the generation that is now moving on to the field 
 of action. If we try to close up a gambling-house, we, 
 in the guilelessness of our imagination, might have 
 
 supposed that the arm of the city government that 
 
 * 
 
 takes cognizance of such matters would find no ser¬ 
 vice so congenial as that of combining with well-inten¬ 
 tioned citizens in turning up the light on these nefarious 
 dens and giving to the public certified lists of the names 
 of their frequenters. But if you convict a man for 
 keeping a gambling-hell in this town, you have to do 
 it in spite of the authorities and not by their aid. 
 
 “It may be said that this method of stating the case 
 is injudicious; that it is unwise too sharply to antago¬ 
 nize the powers that be; that convictions will not be 
 obtainable if we make enemies of the men who exer¬ 
 cise police and judicial functions. On the contrary, 
 there are only two kinds of argument that exercise the 
 slightest logical urgency on the mind of that stripe of 
 bandit,—one is money and the other is fear. We shall 
 gain nothing by disguising the facts. To call things 
 
112 MY FORTY YEARS IN NEW YORK 
 
 by their right names is always a direct contribution to 
 wholesome effects. A steamer can only make half¬ 
 time in a fog. The first necessity of battle is to have 
 the combatants clearly and easily distinguishable by 
 the diversity of their uniform. We want to know 
 what is what. 
 
 “Every solid statement of fact is argument. Every 
 time you deal with things as they are, and name them 
 in honest ringing Saxon, you have done something. 
 
 It has always been a trump-card in the devil’s game to 
 keep things mixed. He mixed them in Paradise, and 
 he has been trying to keep them mixed ever since. If 
 the powers that are managing this town are supremely 
 and concertedly bent on encouraging iniquity in order 
 to the strengthening of their own position, and the 
 enlargement of their own capital, what in Heaven’s 
 name is the use of disguising the fact and wrapping it 
 up in ambiguous euphemisms? 
 
 “But after all that has been said the great fact re¬ 
 mains untouched and uninvalidated, that every effort 
 that is made to improve character in this city, every 
 effort to make men respectable, honest, temperate and 
 sexually clean is a direct blow between the eyes of the 
 Mayor and his whole gang of drunken and lecherous 
 subordinates, in this sense that while we fight iniquity 
 they shield and patronize it; while we try to convert 
 criminals they manufacture them; and they have a 
 hundred dollars invested in manufacturing machinery 
 to our one invested in converting machinery. 
 
 “We speak of these things because it is our business 
 
 as the pastor of a Christian church to speak of them. 
 
ASSAULT UPON TAMMANY INTEREST 113 
 
 We are not slow to insist upon keenness of spiritual 
 discernment, or upon the reticent vigor of a life hid 
 with Christ in God. Piety is the genius of the entire 
 matter; but piety, when it fronts sin, has got to become 
 grit. Salt is a concrete commodity, and requires to 
 be rubbed into the very pores of decay. I scarcely 
 ever move into the midst of the busier parts of this 
 town without feeling in a pained way how little of 
 actual touch there is between the life of the church and 
 the life of the times. 
 
 “We have no criticism to pass on the effort to im¬ 
 prove the quality of the civilization in Central Africa, 
 but it would count more in the moral life of the world 
 to have this city, where the heart of the country beats, 
 dominated in its life and government by the ethical 
 principles insisted on by the Gospel, than to have a 
 belt of evangelical light a hundred miles broad thrown 
 clear across the Dark Continent. And the men and 
 women that live here are the ones to do it. It is 
 achievable. What Christianity has done Christianity 
 can do. And when it is done it is going to be done by 
 the men and women who stand up and make a business 
 of the thing, and quit playing with it: quit imagining 
 that somehow we are going, by some indescribable 
 means, to drift into a better state of thing. 
 
 “Say all you please about the might of the Holy 
 Ghost, every step in the history of an ameliorated civili¬ 
 zation has cost just so much personal push. You and 
 I have something to do about it. If we have a brain, 
 or a heart or a purse, and sit still and let things take 
 their course, making no sign, uttering no protest, fling- 
 
114 MY FORTY YEARS IN NEW YORK 
 
 ing ourselves into no endeavor, the times will eventually 
 sit in judgment upon us, and they will damn us. Chris¬ 
 tianity is here for an object. The salt is here for a 
 purpose. If your Christianity is not vigorous enough 
 to help save this country and this city, it is not vigorous 
 enough to do anything toward saving you. Reality 
 is not worn out. The truth is not knock-kneed. The 
 incisive edge of bare-bladed righteousness will still cut. 
 Only it has got to be righteousness that is not afraid 
 to stand up, move in the midst of iniquity and shake 
 itself. The humanly incarnated principles of this Gos¬ 
 pel were able in three centuries to change the moral 
 complexion of the whole Roman Empire; and there 
 is nothing the matter with the Christianity here except 
 that the incarnations of it are lazy and cowardly, and 
 think more of their personal comfort than they do of 
 municipal decency, and more of their dollars than they 
 do of a city that is governed by men who are tricky 
 and beastly. 
 
 “But you ask me perhaps, what is the use of all 
 this asseveration and vituperation; what is the good 
 of protesting? Do you know what the word Protestant 
 means? Do you know that a Protestant is nothing 
 but a protestant? A man who protests? And did not 
 the men who protested in the Sixteenth Century do a 
 good deal? Didn’t they start a volcano beneath the 
 crust of the whole of European civilization? Wherever 
 you have a Luther, a grand stick of human timber, all 
 afire with holy indignation, a man of God, who is 
 not too lymphatic to get off his knees, or too cowardly 
 to come out of his closet, confront iniquity, look it 
 
ASSAULT UPON TAMMANY INTEREST 115 
 
 in the eye, plaster it with its baptismal name, such a 
 man can start a reformation and a revolution every 
 day in the year if there are enough of them to go 
 around. Why, it makes no difference how thick the 
 darkness is, a ray of light will cut it if it is healthy and 
 spry. 
 
 “Do you know that the newspapers had not been 
 solidlv at work for more than about four weeks be- 
 
 m/ 
 
 fore the dives began to close up? Why, the truth 
 will frighten even a policeman, if you will lodge it 
 where David did when he fired at Goliath. Truth, with 
 explosive enough behind it, would scare even the cap¬ 
 tain of a precinct, and chase the blushes from the 
 callow face of a District Attorney. 
 
 “You see that these things do not go by arithmetic, 
 nor by a show of hands. A man who is held in the 
 grip of the everlasting truth and is not afraid is a 
 young army in himself. That is exactly what the Bible 
 means when it says that one man shall chase a thou¬ 
 sand. That is the way history has always gone. That 
 is what the Bible story of Sodom means and the assur¬ 
 ance that ten men would have sufficed to save it. Not 
 ten that were scared, but ten that so had the courage 
 of their convictions, and that so appreciated the priest- 
 liness of the office to which they had been called that 
 the multitudinousness of the dirty crowd they stood 
 up among neither dashed their confidence nor quenched 
 their testimony. 
 
 “This is not bringing politics into the pulpit, poli¬ 
 tics as such. The particular political stripe of a munici¬ 
 pal administration is no matter of our interest, and 
 
116 MY FORTY YEARS IN NEW YORK 
 
 none of our business; but to strike at iniquity is a part 
 of the business of the church, indeed, it is the business 
 of the church. It is primarily what the church is for, 
 no matter in what connection sin may find itself 
 associated and intermixed. If it fall properly within 
 the jurisdiction of this church to try to convert Third 
 Avenue drunkards from their alcoholism, then cer¬ 
 tainly it is germane to the functions of this church to 
 strike the sturdiest blows it is capable of at a municipal 
 administration whose supreme mission it is to protect, 
 foster, and propagate alcoholism. If it is proper for 
 us to go around cleaning up after the devil, it is proper 
 for us to fight the devil. If it is right to cure, it is 
 right to prevent, and a thousand times more economical 
 and sagacious. If we are not, as a church, transcend¬ 
 ing our jurisdiction by attempting to convert Third 
 Avenue prostitutes from their harlotry, then surely we 
 are within the pale of our authority as a church when 
 we antagonize and bear prophetic testimony against an 
 administration the one necessary outcome of whose 
 policy it is to breed prostitutes. 
 
 “The only object of my appeal this morning has 
 been to sound a distinct note, and to quicken our Chris¬ 
 tian sense of the obligatory relation in which we stand 
 toward the official and administrative criminality that 
 is filthifying our entire municipal life, making New 
 York a very hotbed of knavery, debauchery and bes¬ 
 tiality, in the atmosphere of which, and at the corro¬ 
 sive touch of which, there is not a young man so noble, 
 nor a young girl so pure, as not to be in a degree in¬ 
 fected by the fetid contamination. There is no malice 
 
ASSAULT UPON TAMMANY INTEREST 117 
 
 in this, any more than there would be if we were talk¬ 
 ing about cannibalism in the South Sea Islands; only 
 that having to live in the midst of it, and having to 
 pay taxes to help support it, and having nine-tenths of 
 our Christian effort neutralized and paralyzed by the 
 damnable pressure of it, naturally our thoughts are 
 strained to a little snugger tension. 
 
 “I have meant to be unprejudiced in my position, 
 and conservative in my demands, but, Christian friends, 
 we have got to have a better world, and we have got 
 to have a better city than this is; and men who feel 
 iniquity keenly and who are not afraid to stand up 
 and hammer it unflinchingly and remorselessly, and 
 never get tired of hammering it, are the instruments 
 God has always used to the defeat of Satan and to 
 the bringing in of a better day: with a confidence so 
 intense that we shall not be afraid; loving righteous¬ 
 ness with a loyalty so impassioned that we shall feel 
 the might of it and trust it, and our lives become this 
 day enlisted in the maintenance of the right, and thus 
 show that Almighty God is mightier than all the ranks 
 of Satan that challenge His claims and dispute His 
 blessed progress.” 
 
 i 
 
 From innumerable newspaper comments passed upon 
 the sermon, I introduce only two, as follows: “We 
 hope that every good citizen of New York will read 
 the admirable report of the Rev. Dr. Charles H. Park- 
 hurst’s rousing sermon yesterday morning at the Madi¬ 
 son Square Presbyterian Church. It was the severest 
 indictment of this Tammany-debauched municipal gov- 
 
118 MY FORTY YEARS IN NEW YORK 
 
 ernment that has been made. It is a good sign when 
 the ministers of this city find time and tongue to de¬ 
 nounce our monstrous misgovernment.” 
 
 “The Rev. Dr. Parkhurst ‘took on dreadful’ last 
 Sunday. With well feigned virtuous indignation he 
 rhetorically assaulted the whole municipal outfit, plainly 
 stating that the officials, from Mayor Grant down to 
 the last Dago appointment in Tom Brennan’s street¬ 
 cleaning force, were the silent partners of all the enter¬ 
 prising criminals in town. Dr. Parkhurst would be 
 entitled to all the way from five to five hundred years’ 
 penal servitude for such an assertion, if it were to be 
 levelled at specific individuals.” 
 
 The charges that I made from my pulpit on the 14th 
 of February were founded exclusively on rumor. It 
 was on that account that I was grilled by the officials of 
 the city, all of whom realized the truth of my charges, 
 and knew that if I had gone considerably further the 
 truth would still have been on my side; that fact, 
 however, did not relieve the Society for the Prevention 
 of Crime from the perplexed situation in which my 
 unsubstantiated accusations had placed it. 
 
 On the morning following the delivery of the dis¬ 
 course I visited the District Attorney at his office 
 accompanied by my counsel Mr. Frank Moss, and 
 presented to him for his action half a dozen excise 
 cases which had been worked up with a good deal of 
 care, and which had to do with offenders of a stripe 
 that the Attorney might not care to inconvenience. I 
 
ASSAULT UPON TAMMANY INTEREST 119 
 
 told him that the report had of late frequently emanated 
 from his office that he found it difficult to obtain evi¬ 
 dence sufficient to convict violators of excise and that 
 the Society for the Prevention of Crime would be only 
 too glad to render him assistance. In reply the Attor¬ 
 ney said: “Dr. Parkhurst, I refuse to have any official 
 communication with you till you have withdrawn the 
 falsehoods that you have spoken against me from your 
 pulpit.” “That being the case,” said I, “I will ask 
 our counsel, Mr. Moss, to confer with you in my 
 stead.” 
 
 Now just at that point was the District Attorney’s 
 opportunity. His passion got the better of his dis¬ 
 cretion. If he hadn’t lost his self-control he would 
 have replied to me in something this way,—“Notwith¬ 
 standing the fact that you have lied about me yesterday 
 and referred to me in a way that was calculated to 
 make me ridiculous, I am nevertheless just as anxious 
 as you are to have any existing evils corrected, and 
 will cordially appreciate any assistance which you or 
 your society may render.” Now if he had said that, 
 every breath of wind would have gone out of my 
 sails. Tammany’s defeat in ’94 hinged on that mo¬ 
 ment. The demand was openly made that I must either 
 substantiate my charges or be sued for libel. In pros¬ 
 pect of a libel suit, as competent legal talent as the 
 city could offer was immediately put at my gratuitous 
 service. 
 
 It followed almost as matter of course that a subpoena 
 was issued for my attendance before the grand jury. 
 I found the atmosphere of the jury-room distinctly 
 
120 MY FORTY YEARS IN NEW YORK 
 
 uncongenial. What occurred there was more to the 
 satisfaction of the District Attorney and the Jurors 
 than to myself. I was in a hole deeper than that into 
 which Joseph was thrown and without even a Midian- 
 ite to extricate me. I could not swear that the At¬ 
 torney lived an irregular life, that police officers were 
 blackmailers, that the Tammany bench was tainted or 
 that the entire Fourteenth Street organization was not 
 a disguised branch of the Prohibition party. The exer¬ 
 cises closed with a foreman’s polite indication that 
 further attendance on my part would not be required. 
 
 I retired, cheerful but worsted. 
 
 A few days later the grand jury issued a present¬ 
 ment. My name was not stated in the document, but 
 it bore on its face the indication that it was against me 
 personally that the presentment was framed. Two 
 paragraphs of the jury’s finding were the following: 
 “We find the author of the charges had no evidence 
 upon which to base them, except alleged newspaper 
 reports, which in the form published had no founda¬ 
 tion in fact. We desire further to express our dis¬ 
 approval and condemnation of unfounded charges of 
 this character, which, whatever may be the motive in 
 uttering them, can only serve to create a feeling of 
 unwarranted distrust in the minds of the community 
 with regard to the integrity of public officials, and 
 tends only to hinder the prompt administration of 
 justice.” 
 
 After the grand jury’s presentment Judge Martine, 
 who had the jury in charge, addressed it at some length. 
 
 After congratulating it upon the thoroughness of its 
 
ASSAULT UPON TAMMANY INTEREST 121 
 
 investigation of my attack, he said in part: “It is 
 gratifying indeed to find that your body has seen fit 
 to make some investigation of the attack, such as was 
 made in the public press by a certain gentleman in 
 this community. After the first inquiry,—after the 
 first suggestion of official inquiry,—the people came 
 to comprehend that there was no foundation for the 
 accusation, and it is indeed gratifying to find that after 
 your investigation there was nothing but rumor, nothing 
 but hearsay to base any accusation upon.” 
 
 The foregoing from the grand jury and the bench 
 was designed as a quietus and was understood to be 
 such by city officials, by Tammany and by the public 
 journals published in Tammany’s interests. 
 
 At this juncture the situation was such that only 
 two alternative courses were open to me: one was to 
 drop the matter and acknowledge myself defeated; the 
 other was to make myself able to say “I know.” The 
 latter would involve making a city-wide tour of per¬ 
 sonal inspection, a policy that would expose me to the 
 gibes of the enemy and to the criticism of some of 
 my friends. In arriving at a decision I consulted only 
 the other two members of the executive committee of 
 the S. P. C. and Mr. David J. Whitney, who was a 
 fighter from away back and well versed in the wiles 
 of our adversary. He appreciated the advantage that 
 would accrue to me from being able to speak from 
 personal knowledge but warned me in emphatic terms 
 of the barbed arrows that would be shot at me if I 
 adopted a policy so contradictory to the average senti¬ 
 ment of polite society. 
 
 The idea was put forth that instead of doing the 
 
122 MY FORTY YEARS IN NEW YORK 
 
 work myself the same results could be secured by the 
 employment of paid detectives. Such a notion could 
 be entertained only by people ignorant of the hesitant 
 respect that is shown to the testimony of hired detec¬ 
 tives. It has also been claimed that as a tour of 
 personal investigation involved contact with what is 
 disgusting I ought to have hired some one to do it for 
 me. When the Editor of the Times of that date printed 
 that idea I went to his office and asked him if he had 
 so little respect for me as to suppose that I would pay 
 some one else for doing what was so repulsive that I 
 was unwilling to do it myself. He was frank enough 
 to acknowledge that that view of the case had some¬ 
 thing to commend it. 
 
 I was obliged to use as guide a man who was fa¬ 
 miliar with the underworld. I also availed of the 
 attendance of a member of my congregation who 
 volunteered his services. I do not know whether he 
 suspected all that was in my mind or how necessary 
 to the success of my enterprise was the presence with 
 me of a man whose known character and position in 
 society would, under all circumstances, entitle his word 
 and testimony to confidence. If in connection with 
 this entire warfare there have been spoken words of 
 invective and insinuation too dastardly to be forgiven 
 either in this world or elsewhere, they were words that 
 were spoken of my noble companion, Langdon Erving. 
 Langdon had been for twenty years associated in busi¬ 
 ness with the late James A. Scrymser of the Mexican 
 Telegraph Co., who in a volume of his own authorship, 
 says of Langdon,—“He consulted with me very fully 
 
ASSAULT UPON TAMMANY INTEREST 123 
 
 before offering his services to Dr. Parkhurst. Of 
 course we both foresaw something of the tremendous 
 sacrifice and the abhorrent notoriety which would re¬ 
 sult, but on the other hand, we realized the vital neces¬ 
 sity for a man of the type of Mr. Erving, if Dr. 
 Parkhurst were to accomplish the upheaval at which 
 he aimed. The testimony of a man of unimpeachable 
 integrity and character was invaluable; a lifelong New 
 Yorker, a New Yorker for generations back, a man 
 of refinement and a gentleman, such a man was Mr. 
 Erving and his testimony was bound to succeed in the 
 end, where the testimony of some paid detective would 
 have had little, if any, effect upon the court and jury.” 
 
 Some conception of the “tremendous sacrifice” to 
 which Mr. Scrymser makes reference, can be inferred 
 from the fact that in one of the court trials in which, 
 later on, Langdon was a witness, the counsel for the 
 defense, out of malignant desire to put him to the 
 torture, subjected him to such a mortifying grilling 
 that he fainted away on the witness stand. 
 
 I certainly have no purpose of reproducing here the 
 details of those three weeks, which, in the company 
 of Erving, and under the guidance of my detective, I 
 spent in traversing the avenues of our municipal hell. 
 The details have been given to the public through the 
 press and by no journal more prolifically or with more 
 zest than by the one that has affected the deepest an¬ 
 guish at the vast number of pure minds that have been 
 sullied by the repulsive disclosures. I can only say 
 that having once determined upon a policy of personal 
 inspection I consistently determined to acquaint myself 
 
124 MY FORTY YEARS IN NEW YORK 
 
 with the worst thing that was to be known and seen. 
 If it was to be done it was to be done thoroughly, or, 
 to use the phrase employed by Judge Noah Davis a 
 few weeks later, “If I was going to enter hell I would 
 seek out its most hellish spot.” 
 
 The attempt was made, especially by Dana’s paper, 
 to prejudice me in the public mind by charging me 
 with persecuting the unfortunate inmates of houses 
 of evil resort, and the police chimed in with Dana to 
 the same purpose. Whether in spoken address or in 
 published communications I made continuous endeavor 
 to make it understood by the public that I was not 
 fighting the social evil, and that my exclusive warfare 
 was against the commercial relations which existed 
 between the police and the keepers of those resorts, 
 whereby the keepers by paying to the police a certain 
 sum when they opened a house and so much per 
 month after it was opened, could enjoy immunity from 
 arrest. 
 
 The following incident will set the situation in clear 
 light. One cold winter’s night, with the ground deeply 
 covered with snow, the police raided a lot of houses 
 on 31st Street, and the girls, lightly clad, were thrown 
 out into the snow, the police explaining their action to 
 the girls by saying that they were proceeding accord¬ 
 ing to orders received from “Old Parkhurst.” Nothing 
 could have more effectively embittered them toward 
 me or have produced a more unfavorable impression 
 upon the public. About forty of them trooped down 
 to my house on 35th Street, all of them howling mad. 
 They made a unanimous and clamorous charge of 
 
ASSAULT UPON TAMMANY INTEREST 125 
 
 cruelty, which Mrs. Parkhurst and myself listened to 
 quietly till they had become exhausted and then having 
 invited them to seat themselves, I expressed my sym¬ 
 pathetic regret at the exposure to which they had been 
 subjected; that I had known nothing about the affair 
 till that moment; that Mrs. Parkhurst would presently 
 supply them with something that would feed them if 
 they were hungry and warm them if they were cold, 
 and that then we would have a frank and kindly talk 
 with them about the situation. I need not rehearse 
 what passed between us in the way of question and 
 answer, after they had satisfied themselves with tea 
 and toast. It is enough to say that they went away 
 from 35th Street loving Mrs. Parkhurst and myself 
 as sincerely as they hated the police and the city gov¬ 
 ernment. 
 
 In contrast with the Sun , the New York World was 
 a very helpful auxiliary. Its editor asked me to his 
 office and said: “I am now beginning to understand 
 what it is exactly you are aiming to accomplish; that 
 it is not the social evil that you are combating, but the 
 collusion between the police (along with the powers 
 higher up) and the criminal classes (gamblers and 
 keepers of houses of prostitution). I will send a re¬ 
 porter to your house and he can fill an entire page of 
 the World with details of your work and exposition 
 of your object and aim.” The reporter’s work was 
 appreciatively done and was of great service. 
 
126 MY FORTY YEARS IN NEW YORK 
 
 SECOND SERMON 
 
 Intimation had been given that on the morning of 
 March 13th the discourse preached in Madison Square 
 Church would be devoted to a reply to the Grand Jury’s 
 Presentment and to Judge Martine’s congratulations to 
 the jury upon its faithful and successful investigation 
 of my charges. On that occasion the place on the 
 pulpit usually occupied by Bible and hymn-book was 
 filled by a bulky package of affidavits. Preaching 
 from the text, “The wicked walk on every side when 
 the vilest men are exalted,” I spoke in part as fol¬ 
 lows:— 
 
 “It will be well for us to come to a frank under¬ 
 standing with one another at the commencement of our 
 discussion, as to the scope of our campaign. What 
 was spoken from this pulpit four weeks ago was 
 spoken with a distinct intent, from which we have not 
 in the meantime swerved, whatever the obstruction 
 and intimidation, official or otherwise, that has been 
 launched against us, for the exclusive aim of the move¬ 
 ment is to lay bare the iniquity that municipally neu¬ 
 tralizes the efforts which a Christian pulpit puts forth 
 to make righteousness the law of human life individ¬ 
 ually and socially. So that I apprehend that my func¬ 
 tion as a preacher of righteousness gives me no option 
 in the matter. 
 
 “It is important to recognize the purely moral inten¬ 
 tion of the crusade as security against its becoming 
 complicated with considerations that stand aloof from 
 the main point. A great many civic efforts have been 
 
ASSAULT UPON TAMMANY INTEREST 127 
 
 made here that have resulted in nothing, for the suffi¬ 
 cient reason that they have been side-tracked and mort¬ 
 gaged to some competitive interest. Let me say then 
 that I do not speak as a Republican or a Democrat, 
 as a Protestant or a Catholic, as an advocate of prohi¬ 
 bition or as an advocate of license. I am moved by 
 the respect which I have for the Ten Commandments, 
 and by my anxiety as a preacher of Jesus Christ, to 
 have the law of God regnant in individual and social 
 life; so that I antagonize our existing municipal admin¬ 
 istration because I believe that administration to be 
 essentially corrupt and to stand in diametric resistance 
 to all that Christ and a loyally Christian pulpit repre¬ 
 sent in the world. 
 
 “Tammany Hall is not a political party but purely a 
 business enterprise, as much so as Standard Oil or the 
 Western Union Telegraph, and superior to any other 
 company of which I have knowledge, in respect to the 
 perfection of its organization. The material in which 
 it deals and from which it draws prolific dividends, is 
 crime and vice, such as flourish in gambling resorts, 
 disorderly houses and corner groceries. The more 
 material it can handle the larger its profits and there¬ 
 fore the policy which it steadfastly pursues is to foster 
 crime and exercise guardianship over the criminals. 
 
 “And not only does the organization stand as the 
 organization of crime but it embodies the tyranny of 
 crime. There are citizens in this town abominating 
 the whole existing system that do not dare to stand up 
 and be counted. The most striking feature of the im¬ 
 mense number of letters of encouragement that I have 
 
128 MY FORTY YEARS IN NEW YORK 
 
 received during the last four weeks is the large percen¬ 
 tage written by people who did not dare to append their 
 signatures, afraid to put into black and white over their 
 own names, views of a government whose duty it is 
 to foster virtue, not drive it into hiding. Let me say 
 that it is an excellent time to speak out, an admirable 
 opportunity for moral heroism to come to the front 
 and assert itself. Nothing is so easily frightened as 
 vice. ‘The wicked flee when no man pursueth,’ and 
 they make still better time when somebody is after 
 them. 
 
 “Men of tainted reputation cannot occupy positions 
 of high municipal authority without that fact operat¬ 
 ing to the discouragement of virtue and the lowering 
 of moral standards. It is a trying condition of affairs 
 for such as are attempting to improve the moral state 
 of our young men, to have men exalted to positions of 
 distinguished authority against whom the most damn¬ 
 ing charge that can be made is to publish their history. 
 A while ago the treasurer of a bank downtown, who 
 was not even suspected of being dishonest, but whose 
 name, through no fault of his own, had become asso¬ 
 ciated with a disreputable firm, was thrown out of his 
 position. The reason stated by the directors was that, 
 though unanimously recognizing the integrity of the 
 treasurer, they could not afford to jeopardize the inter¬ 
 ests of the bank by having associated with them a man 
 that was tainted even to the slightest degree of being 
 mentioned in connection with dishonest dealing. 
 
 “Now, that is the way you run a bank. That is the 
 style of condition that you impose upon candidates for 
 
ASSAULT UPON TAMMANY INTEREST 129 
 
 positions of financial trust. But when you come to run 
 a city, with a million and a half of people, with interests 
 that are a great deal more than pecuniary, and a city, 
 too, that is putting the stamp of its character or of its 
 infamy upon every city the country through, then you 
 can see put into positions of civic trust, men that are 
 ex-dive-keepers and crooks and ex-convicts and men 
 whose detailed written history would draw tremblingly 
 near to the verge of obscene literature. 
 
 “Last Sunday while we were quietly discussing City 
 Missions here in the church, I had a force of five de¬ 
 tectives scattered through the town studying up City 
 Missions. I have here on the pulpit the results of their 
 day’s work, neatly typewritten, sworn to, corroborated 
 and subject to the call of the District Attorney. I 
 have first the list of parties that last Sunday violated 
 the ordinance of Sunday closing. One of these covers 
 the East Side, and the other the West Side of town. 
 These names are interesting, some of them particu¬ 
 larly so; in some instances on account of their official 
 position, in other instances because of their family con¬ 
 nection with the powers that be. 
 
 “These lists include violations in 22 precincts. I have 
 also here the list of places, with addresses and the 
 number of people present in each. Then comes John 
 Jones’ sworn corroboration of John Smith’s affidavit. 
 In other words ‘Legal Evidence,’ which is what I un¬ 
 derstand our municipal administration is anxious to 
 have this pulpit furnish to it. Of course I am not going 
 to take up your time by reading the names. Only a 
 little in the way of recapitulation, for illustration’s sake. 
 
130 MY FORTY YEARS IN NEW YORK 
 
 Second Precinct, 7 saloons open, 55 people present; 
 Fourth Precinct, 10 saloons open, 45 people present; 
 Fourteenth Precinct, 15 saloons, 167 people present; 
 Nineteenth Precinct (that is ours), 18 saloons open, 
 205 people present. In all (I do not mean all the 
 saloons that were open, but all the open ones that our 
 detectives happened to strike), in all, 254 saloons, 2,438 
 people present. They don’t want ‘generalities/ they 
 want particularities. Well, there are 254 of them, not 
 pulpit grandiloquence, nor ministerial exuberance, but 
 hard cold affidavits. If the concerned guardians of 
 the public peace and the anxious conservators of mu¬ 
 nicipal laws want facts we will guarantee to grind them 
 out a fresh grist every blessed week. Now, let them 
 take vigorous hold of the material furnished above, or 
 quit their hypocritical clamoring after specific charges. 
 
 “We have interested ourselves also in gambling- 
 houses, of which I mention two because of the youth¬ 
 ful character of their patrons; one near 40th Street in 
 which were counted forty young men and another three 
 blocks above this church where were forty-eight. More 
 young men in either of these places than are ever seen 
 in our church. 
 
 “Leaving the gambling-houses for the present, I must 
 report to you what was discovered in a region of in¬ 
 iquity that in this presence will have to be dealt with 
 with as much caution and delicacy as the nature of the 
 subject will allow. I have here a list of thirty houses, 
 names and addresses, all specified, that are simply 
 houses of prostitution, all of them in this precinct. 
 These thirty places were all of them visited by my 
 
ASSAULT UPON TAMMANY INTEREST 131 
 
 friend, or my detective, on the 10th and also on the 
 11th of March, and solicitations received on both dates. 
 I spent an hour in one of these places myself, and I 
 know perfectly well what it all means, and with what 
 entire facility such houses can be gotten into. That 
 house is three blocks only from the spot where I am 
 now standing. All of this has been neatly typewritten, 
 sworn to, corroborated, and is subject to the call of 
 the District Attorney. 
 
 “And now, fathers and mothers, I am trying to help 
 your sons. From the very commencement of my min¬ 
 istry here I confess that to be of some encouragement 
 and assistance to young men has been my great ambi¬ 
 tion. Appeal after appeal has come to me these last 
 four weeks, signed ‘A Father’ or ‘A Mother/ beg¬ 
 ging me to try to do something for their dear boys. 
 But as things are, I do declare there is not much that 
 I can do for them. I never knew till within three 
 weeks how almost impossible it is for a young man 
 to be in the midst of the swim of New York City life, 
 under present conditions, and still be temperate and 
 clean. I had supposed that the coarse, bestial vices 
 were fenced off from youthful contact with some show 
 at least of police restriction. So far as I have been able 
 to read the symptoms of the case, I don’t discover the 
 restrictions. There is little advantage in preaching the 
 Gospel to a young fellow on Sunday if he is going to 
 be sitting on the edge of a Tammany-maintained hell 
 the rest of the week. 
 
 “Don’t tell me I don’t know what I am talking about. 
 Many a long, dismal, heart-sickening night, in the com- 
 
132 MY FORTY YEARS IN NEW YORK 
 
 pany of two trusty friends, have I spent since I spoke 
 on this matter before, going down into the disgusting 
 depths of this Tammany-debauched town; and it is 
 rotten with a rottenness that is unspeakable and in¬ 
 describable, and a rottenness that would be absolutely 
 impossible except by the connivance, not to say the 
 purchased sympathy of the men whose one obligation 
 before God, men, and their own conscience is to shield 
 virtue and make vice difficult. Now that I stand by, 
 because before Almighty God, I know it, and I will 
 stand by it though buried beneath presentments as thick 
 as autumn leaves in Vallombrosa, or snowflakes in a 
 March blizzard. 
 
 “Excuse the personal reference to myself in all this, 
 but I cannot help it. I never dreamed that any force 
 of circumstances would ever draw me into contacts 
 so coarse, so beastly, so consummately filthy as those 
 where I have repeatedly found myself in the midst of 
 these last days. I feel as though I wanted to go out 
 of town for a month to bleach the memory of it out 
 of my mind and the vision of it out of my eyes. 
 
 “I am not ignorant of the colossal spasms of indig¬ 
 nation into which the trustees of Tammany ethics have 
 been thrown by the blunt and inelegant characteriza¬ 
 tion of a month ago, and I have a clear, as well as a 
 serene anticipation of what I have to expect from the 
 same sources for having deliberately sought out and 
 entered into the very presence of iniquity in its vilest 
 shape. But the grim and desolate part of it all is that 
 these things are all open and perfectly easily accessible. 
 The young men, your boys, probably know that they 
 
ASSAULT UPON TAMMANY INTEREST 133 
 
 are. The door will be open to them and the blue-coated 
 guardian of civic virtue will not molest them. I spent 
 an hour in such a place yesterday morning, and when 
 we came down the steps I almost tumbled over a police¬ 
 man who appeared to be doing picket duty on the 
 curbstone. 
 
 “To say that the police do not know what is going 
 on and where it is going on, with all the brilliant symp¬ 
 toms of the character of the place distinctly in view 
 is rot. I do not ask any one to excuse or to apologize 
 for my language. You have got to fit your words to 
 your theme. We do not handle charcoal with a silver 
 ladle nor carry city garbage out to the dumping ground 
 in a steam-yacht. Anyone who, with all the easily 
 ascertainable facts in view, denies that drunkenness, 
 gambling and licentiousness in this town are munici¬ 
 pally protected, is either a knave or an idiot. Here 
 is one of the rules and regulations of the Police De¬ 
 partment: ‘It is the duty of the Superintendent to 
 enforce in the city of New York all the laws of the 
 State and ordinances of the city of New York and 
 ordinances of the Board of Health, and the rules and 
 regulations of the Board of Police; to abate all gam¬ 
 ing houses, rooms, and premises and places kept or 
 used for lewd or obscene purposes, and places kept or 
 used for the sale of lottery tickets or policies.’ With 
 the backing then of such facts legally certified to as 
 have been presented this morning, we insist in behalf 
 of an insulted and outraged public, that the Police 
 Department from its top down, shall without further 
 shift or evasion, proceed with an iron hand to close 
 
134 MY FORTY YEARS IN NEW YORK 
 
 up gambling-houses, houses of prostitution, and whis¬ 
 key-shops open in illegal hours. If this is what they 
 cannot do, let them concede the point, and give place 
 to some one who can. If this is what they will not do, 
 let them stand squarely on the issue and be impeached 
 according to the provisions of the Code. 
 
 “In a closing word, voicing the righteous indignation 
 of the pure and honest citizenship of this tyrannized 
 municipality, let me in a representative way say to 
 Tammany: For four weeks you have been wincing 
 under the sting of a general indictment, and have been 
 calling for particulars. This morning I have given 
 you particulars, two hundred and eighty-four of them. 
 Now, what are you going to do with them?” 
 
 Tammany Hall blackguarded me for preaching my 
 sermon of February 14th because I indulged in gen¬ 
 eralities and spoke from hearsay, but that was not a 
 circumstance to the way they blackguarded me for my 
 sermon of March 13th because I gave them particulars 
 and spoke from personal knowledge. There is dif¬ 
 ficulty in proceeding against criminals in a way that 
 will conform to their convenience. Being of a legal 
 mind it had seemed to me that the District Attorney 
 would be gratified by the particularity of my legally 
 sustained charges, but I received no intimation from 
 him to that effect. The only comment that I heard 
 of Police Commissioner Markine passing upon the dis¬ 
 course was to express regret at the effect that must 
 have been produced upon the pure-hearted attendants 
 at my church that morning; which indicates that all 
 the threats, official and unofficial, that were flung at 
 
ASSAULT UPON TAMMANY INTEREST 135 
 
 me on the occasion of my first sermon were simply 
 parts of one stupendous game of bluff played in order 
 to deter me and every one else from anything more of 
 the same kind. 
 
 The March grand jury under Henry M. Tabor, 
 as its foreman, in session shortly after the delivery of 
 the sermon from which I have just quoted, adopted 
 the following resolution: “Resolved, that the District 
 Attorney be, and hereby is requested to produce all 
 evidence before this grand jury regarding the cases 
 referred to by Dr. Parkhurst and his associates and 
 society’s agents and request Dr. Parkhurst and his 
 agents to appear before this jury at the earliest prac¬ 
 ticable moment.” 
 
 I took the liberty of intimating to the grand jury 
 that I had no interest in their securing indictments 
 against the particular houses upon which my testimony 
 bore, and that my purpose reached further than that, 
 viz., to the Police Department by which those houses 
 were protected. Whether the jury was influenced by 
 my request I cannot say but the presentment which 
 was issued against the Police Department, extracts 
 from which I subjoin, was exactly what I wanted, as 
 follows: 
 
 “A large amount of testimony has been presented 
 showing the existence and violation of law in large 
 numbers of these places. The grand jury has indicted 
 the proprietors of some of these places, and they have 
 been arrested under such indictments and have pleaded. 
 In these very cases further testimony has been pre¬ 
 sented showing that there was no abatement in these 
 
136 MY FORTY YEARS IN NEW YORK 
 
 premises of the same disorderly practices, and that 
 there was no appearance of police interference. 
 
 “With the facts before us that these places do exist 
 in large numbers, that they are well known to the police, 
 that their locations and special lines of business are 
 recorded by the Department, and that very particular 
 and express duties are imposed by law upon the police 
 to inspect and repress these places (Section 282) and 
 that extraordinary powers of breaking into houses with¬ 
 out previous application for judicial warrants are al¬ 
 lowed to the police in order that they may perform 
 such duties (Section 285) and with the fact that has 
 plainly appeared to us that the police seldom use these 
 powers, or even apply to magistrates for warrants to 
 carry out their legal duties, there are presented to us 
 the best reasons for condemning the inaction of the 
 Police Department in these matters. They are either 
 incompetent to do what is frequently done by private 
 individuals with imperfect facilities for such work, or 
 else there exist reasons and motives for such inaction 
 which are illegal and corrupt. The general efficiency 
 of the Department is so great that it is our belief that 
 the latter suggestion is the explanation of the peculiar 
 inactivity. 
 
 “Indeed the publicity with which the law is violated 
 and the immunity from arrest enjoyed by the law¬ 
 breaker is inconsistent with any other theory. It is 
 obvious that when a confession by a lawbreaker of 
 payment for protection would subject him to penalties 
 not only for his acknowledged crime but also for bribe¬ 
 giving, it is extremely difficult to collect trustworthy 
 
ASSAULT UPON TAMMANY INTEREST 137 
 
 evidence in direct proof of such charges. It has been 
 thought best at the present time to go no further than 
 to make this general presentment, so that the courts 
 and the residents of our city may be properly informed 
 and warned against the dangerous evil that is in the 
 midst of us. 
 
 “The foregoing was unanimously adopted. 
 
 Henry M. Tabor, Foreman, 
 Grand Jury Room, March 31st, 1892.” 
 
 Public sentiment was very considerably affected by 
 the grand jury’s condemnation of the Police Depart¬ 
 ment, as was manifested, for instance, by an invitation 
 to speak in Washington which was signed by the pas¬ 
 tor of the Church of the Covenant in that city, Justice 
 William Strong, Honorable H. L. Dawes, John Wana- 
 maker and S. B. Elkins. I began to feel that I was 
 becoming respectable. President Rankin of Howard 
 University presided on the occasion, and in the course 
 of his introductory remarks said: “What Dr. Park- 
 hurst has done for New York he has not done for New 
 York alone. He has done it for Washington and 
 Chicago and every other great city on this continent. 
 If there is any shame in the act, we Christian citizens 
 of this capital city of the nation wish by our presence 
 here to participate in that shame. When a thing ought 
 to be done, it must be done in the only manner in 
 which it can be done. There is no inconsistency be¬ 
 tween the scourge of small cords for the back of the 
 tempter, and the tender words, ‘Neither do I condemn 
 thee’ for the ear of the broken-hearted penitent. The 
 
138 MY FORTY YEARS IN NEW YORK 
 
 Lion of the tribe of Judah is the Lamb of God that 
 takes away the sin of the world.” 
 
 Mention should be made of the mass meeting held 
 in Cooper Union Hall in June, ’92. It rather marked 
 the turning of the tide and was the first popular ex¬ 
 pression of sympathy. I must include an extract from 
 the address given by ex-Judge Noah Davis. The 
 judge, whose participation in the breaking of the Tweed 
 Ring made his interest in the present cause so natural 
 and so gratifying, was enthusiastically greeted. He 
 said in part: “You have come here to answer the 
 question whether or not your boys shall be brought up 
 in the midst of officially protected crime. If you say 
 that that shall not be done, you can only say it just 
 now by your applause, but later, by your hearty devo¬ 
 tion to those who have courage to pluck aside the cur¬ 
 tain and show just where we live, and what we are, 
 and what is around us. Most men tell us that the 
 President of this Society should never have done what 
 he has done; that a minister of the Gospel should spend 
 his whole life persuading mankind to make some atone¬ 
 ment for the sin of Adam; that he should let all mod¬ 
 ern Adams alone; that he should preach upon the old 
 line, ‘In Adam’s fall we sinned all.’ I make no pre¬ 
 tensions to fighting Adam myself, but if I had been 
 brought face to face with the situation that confronted 
 Dr. Parkhurst, if my charges had been denied, if a 
 district attorney had laughed at me, if a grand jury 
 had pointed the finger of scorn at me, I would have 
 dived to the bottom of hell, if need be, to prove that 
 I had spoken the truth. If there be clergymen in this 
 
ASSAULT UPON TAMMANY INTEREST 139 
 
 country or this city or anywhere, who say they could 
 not have gone through such a thing, all I have to say 
 is that they know more about themselves than I know. 
 By that I mean only just what you think I mean/’ 
 
 The Cooper Union meeting was suggested and ar¬ 
 ranged for by Mr. James A. Scrymser, who threw 
 himself into the cause at an opportune moment. I can¬ 
 not speak too highly of his wise and effective coopera¬ 
 tion. His influence with the leaders of the press was 
 the means of securing the support of the Mail and 
 Express, the Post and Herald , and also the City Club. 
 
 In connection with him I should pay my grateful 
 respects to the memory of Charles Stewart Smith. We 
 came into very close relations with each other. Before 
 I had known of his particular interest in the movement 
 he called upon me one morning and said,—“Doctor, 
 I am going to take off my coat and enter into the fight, 
 even if it takes five years off of my life.” The asso¬ 
 ciation with such men as I am mentioning,—and there 
 was a host of them,—was one bright feature in my 
 two years of otherwise disagreeable experience. 
 
 Until the movement was well under way the churchly 
 element of the population showed a distinctly retiring 
 disposition, with a distinguished exception in the per¬ 
 son of Bishop Potter, who was with me from the first 
 and declared his sympathy in so public a way as to 
 leave no uncertainty as to his attitude. When the New 
 York Presbytery had a session to discuss the question 
 as to what that body should think of me, Henry Van 
 Dyke rose and said,—“I do not think the real ques- 
 
140 MY FORTY YEARS IN NEW YORK 
 
 tion is what we think of the Doctor, but what the 
 Doctor is going to think of us?” 
 
 It is useless to undertake any detailed account of 
 the activities of the months following. Whether we 
 won our cases in court or lost them, the matter was 
 kept constantly in the air. I addressed grilling letters 
 to Byrnes, Superintendent of Police, and he grilled me 
 in return. The newspapers were kept well supplied 
 with material, and they used it faithfully. When 
 
 Judge - charged me with keeping a detective on 
 
 Byrnes I replied that, if I chose, I should keep a 
 detective on the Judge himself; that that is what detec¬ 
 tives are for. All such matter kept the fire burning. 
 And so I hasten to the determinative part taken by the 
 Chamber of Commerce. 
 
 The action taken by the Chamber of Commerce was 
 in part due to our failure to secure the conviction of 
 Captain Devery. Devery was about as thoroughly 
 developed a product of the Tammany system as we 
 ran against in all our encounters and in consequence 
 he received from us an exceptional amount of atten¬ 
 tion. He was not lacking in a certain kind of genius 
 but it all ran on depraved lines. His precinct was an 
 open advertisement of his character and we made an 
 analytic study of it to use in dealing with him. We 
 succeeded in having the grand jury indict him, but 
 the trial jury that he was brought before was of a 
 complexion favorable to Devery’s interests and we were 
 defeated. 
 
 The defeat, however, as had frequently happened 
 before, worked to our advantage, for his own dis- 
 
ASSAULT UPON TAMMANY INTEREST 141 
 
 reputable character and that of his precinct had been 
 so widely published that the public felt itself outraged 
 by the acquittal and realized that no reliance could 
 be put upon the courts for the purification of the 
 Police Department. Among other results was action 
 on the part of the Chamber of Commerce. 
 
 At the meeting of the Chamber January 25th, 1894, 
 Mr. Augustus H. Schwab presented three resolutions 
 of which the third was adopted; which read: “Re¬ 
 solved, That in the opinion of this Chamber there should 
 be a thorough legislative investigation of the Police 
 Department before any radical change is made in its 
 administration.” 
 
 In response to this action of the Chamber and in 
 compliance with the earnest sentiment prevailing in this 
 city a resolution authorizing such investigation was 
 introduced into the Senate by Senator Clarence Lexow. 
 
 This resolution was adopted and a committee of 
 seven members appointed to carry it into effect. Of 
 this committee Clarence Lexow was chairman. 
 
 It should be stated at this point that the Society for 
 the Prevention of Crime was not altogether sympa¬ 
 thetic with this movement. Nor,—as will appear later 
 on,—was its hesitancy altogether without justification. 
 When we put a matter into the hands of politicians we 
 do not know exactly where it is or whether we shall 
 ever see it again. The total result of most investiga¬ 
 tion is the pecuniary indemnification of the investi¬ 
 gators for their fruitless waste of time. 
 
 The following telegram was received here almost 
 immediately after the names of the Investigating 
 
142 MY FORTY YEARS IN NEW YORK 
 
 Committee were announced, indicating their readiness 
 to undertake their work, or at least their curiosity to 
 come down and inspect our work:—‘‘Senate Committee 
 to Investigate Police Department of New York will 
 meet at the Hotel Metropole, Friday evening at four 
 o’clock. Like to have you present, and ready to sug¬ 
 gest names of counsel to conduct the investigation, 
 from which the Committee may make its selection. We 
 will be ready to hear testimony Saturday at ten a.m.— 
 Clarence Lexow, Chairman” 
 
 The Committee made their first appearance in town 
 on the evening of February 2nd, and convened in the 
 parlor of the Hotel Metropole, a number of gentlemen 
 interested in the investigation,—among others Messrs. 
 Charles Stewart Smith, Darwin R. James, Gustav 
 Schwab, and myself,—being admitted to the confer¬ 
 ence. Probably none of us ever attended a gathering 
 so critical in its character that was so absolutely unin¬ 
 teresting and hopeless. After the Committee had dis¬ 
 posed themselves and been called to order by Mr. 
 Lexow, the Chairman stated that they were a Sena¬ 
 torial Committee of Investigation and that they were 
 now present in their judicial capacity and called upon 
 Mr. Smith as representative of the Chamber which had 
 requested the investigation to state his case. Mr. 
 Smith courteously replied that he had no case, but sup¬ 
 posed the Committee had come down to make one. 
 The Senators gave quiet token of a sense of rebuff and 
 of having their feelings crumpled. “Then certainly 
 Dr. Parkhurst has a case?” said Chairman Lexow. 
 With possibly less urbanity than had been exhibited by 
 
ASSAULT UPON TAMMANY INTEREST 143 
 
 Mr. Smith I replied not only that I had no case, but 
 that I had serious misgivings as to the wisdom of their 
 coming down to New York anyway. 
 
 Up to that time the Senators had had not the slightest 
 inkling or suspicion of what they had come down for. 
 They had heard a good deal about the fault that some 
 of us had been finding with the police force, and they 
 imagined that all they had to do was to put in two days 
 a week for the next three weeks (or till the 20th of 
 February) sizing up the researches of the Society for 
 the Prevention of Crime. In other words, they had 
 come down not to investigate the Police Department, 
 but to investigate our investigation of it. At a late 
 hour the Committee adjourned in a distinctly interrog¬ 
 ative frame of mind. 
 
 The session held the day following was of the same 
 general complexion only rather more so. Clear inti¬ 
 mations of distrust were expressed by some of us, and 
 the Committee was politely reminded that there had 
 been a previous committee sent down from Albany on 
 a similar errand and that when the inquisition began 
 to grow interesting, the committee was “called off.” 
 We ventured to suggest whether there was any danger 
 of history repeating itself. We none of us wanted to 
 show any disrespect to our visiting statesmen, but 
 we had scruples against so far committing ourselves 
 to the senatorial wave as to run the risk of being 
 swamped if the tide should happen to go out to sea. 
 We knew we had been working two years in accom¬ 
 plishing what little we had, and that it would take these 
 seven Senators, many of them from a remote part of 
 
144 MY FORTY YEARS IN NEW YORK 
 
 the State, and as ignorant of the details of the situation 
 as though they had been born on the Pacific Slope, a 
 good deal more than the eighteen days within which 
 time by the terms of the Senate’s resolution, they were 
 to be prepared to make their report. We also seriously 
 questioned whether any representatives from an Albany 
 legislature could be trusted to bring in a report adverse 
 to Tammany. 
 
 Then there was the critical question as to who should 
 serve the Lexow Committee as counsel. The Com¬ 
 mittee had up their sleeve as counsel a man from West¬ 
 ern New York who knew no more about the case than 
 the Committee did, and he was actually set to work. 
 We had our own man for the position, John W. Goff, 
 and it was only as result of severe pressure upon him 
 that we succeeded in inducing him to take the place and 
 only by some adroit work on our part that we got him 
 established in the position in place of the adviser de¬ 
 sired by the Committee. We knew the man, and knew 
 also that once he secured his grip upon the investiga¬ 
 tion there would be no shaking him off and that the 
 results aimed at by us (not by the Lexow Committee) 
 would be achieved and they were, to the distinguished 
 credit of Mr. Goff and to the triumph of our cause. 
 
 The details of the investigation, which continued for 
 a year, and which fill several volumes, I have no inten¬ 
 tion even to recapitulate. It is sufficient to say that 
 it was Mr. Goff and his associates, working under the 
 auspices of the Lexow Committee (which in time be¬ 
 came disciplined to a receptive attitude of mind) that 
 put the cap-sheaf to the efforts of the two previous 
 
ASSAULT UPON TAMMANY INTEREST 145 
 
 years, triumphantly demonstrated the truth of all and 
 more than all the charges which I had urged against 
 the Fourteenth Street organization, and so deeply im¬ 
 pressed the popular mind that minor considerations 
 passed out of view, and the intelligent conscience of an 
 aroused municipality accomplished the nomination and 
 election of a Mayor who owed no fealty to Tammany 
 Hall and was free to achieve the best interests of the 
 municipality. 
 
Part II 
 
 REFLECTIONS 
 
REFLECTIONS 
 
 It is an education in itself to come in contact, as I 
 have for sixty years, with the events of thoughtful and 
 stirring times, and with men of all classes who were 
 involved in those events, or at any rate more or less 
 interestedly concerned in them. A few out of the many 
 reactions which such contact has effected in my own 
 mind seem properly to have a place in my auto¬ 
 biography. 
 
 Words do not admit of being more than a tentative 
 expression of idea; and the longer they are, especially 
 if they are of classic origin, the greater the variety of 
 idea which they may be employed to convey. That is 
 one of the difficulties which prosecutors encounter in 
 trials for heresy. Out of this ambiguity of language 
 has grown the following article entitled, 
 
 1 . 
 
 AM I A TRINITARIAN? 
 
 One reason for supposing that I am, is that I have 
 always called myself such. My father was, and as he 
 was a man of decided views and in whose views upon 
 all matters I had implicit confidence, I accepted his 
 theological opinions along with the rest; at any rate I 
 accepted the phrases in which he embodied his opinions 
 and this one of the Trinity along with others. 
 
 He considered that his position upon all matters of 
 religious conviction was the absolute truth, so that for 
 me to vary from them or from any one of them, would 
 
 149 
 
150 MY FORTY YEARS IN NEW YORK 
 
 have been to put myself in a relation of antagonism to 
 him, which would have created an unpleasant situation 
 both for him and for myself. I suppose that if with 
 the same conviction and determination of mind he had 
 been a Unitarian I should have been a Unitarian, and 
 if I had entered the ministry under those conditions 
 should have been pastor of a Unitarian church. I am 
 simply supposing the same outworking of influences 
 that we regularly discover in other cases. 
 
 When I became old enough to attend church I lis¬ 
 tened of course to Trinitarian doctrine, which was, 
 naturally enough, the same as my father’s doctrine and 
 therefore drove still further home the paternal inheri¬ 
 tance of which I was already in possession. Then when 
 I was still further advanced in powers of comprehen¬ 
 sion I was put upon the Westminster Assembly’s 
 Shorter Catechism, which was called “Shorter Cate¬ 
 chism” because there was another catechism emanating 
 from the same source that was even longer. 
 
 It is a wonderful document, and bound to be con¬ 
 sidered as such whatever may be the theological posi¬ 
 tion of the one contemplating it, and was impressively 
 confirmatory of what I had acquired from my father 
 and listened to from the pulpit. As was said to me by 
 one who took exception to some positions taken in it, 
 “It is nevertheless a good thing to have in the system.” 
 It is a masculine production. It handles doctrines, even 
 incomprehensible doctrines, with masterliness of intelli¬ 
 gence. I might say that that and the American Con¬ 
 stitution are the two greatest documents that have been 
 humanly produced. Although its authors were dealing 
 
REFLECTIONS 
 
 151 
 
 with many matters which of course they could not 
 understand, those matters were nevertheless handled 
 with a breadth of phraseology which disguised its 
 necessary incompetency. So that the reader and 
 student of the catechism, by familiarizing himself with 
 its contents, acquired an enlargement rather than a 
 contraction of views upon celestial and divine things. 
 
 If valid Trinitarianism however carries with it the 
 doctrine of three persons in the Godhead, I am not a 
 Trinitarian, for I am a rigid Monotheist and in no 
 sense a polytheist. One God, recognized as distinctly 
 and unqualifiedly one, is all that my theology will bear; 
 and that one God must be something essentially distinct 
 from a summary of three fractional Gods, one holding 
 one office, another another office and a third function¬ 
 ing in a way different from that of the other two. 
 The unity of his infinite personality must be in all that 
 he is and in all that he does. Otherwise his unity is a 
 compromise with polytheism, and compromise under 
 such conditions is fatal. I would surrender all claim 
 to being a Trinitarian if in order to be such I had 
 to accept a modified conception of God’s unqualified 
 and absolute personal oneness. Only upon such bed¬ 
 rock would I found my work as a preacher or my ex¬ 
 perience as a believer. 
 
 The strain of the situation is particularly felt when 
 we come to deal with the Christ. I never taught, nor 
 have I ever thought of teaching, that Christ was God. 
 “No man hath seen God at any time!” I accept that as 
 final. That is not saying that God was not in Christ. 
 Whether he was in him in a way different from that in 
 
152 MY FORTY YEARS IN NEW YORK 
 
 which he is in others, some others, I do not know. I 
 have not the means of knowing. I like to think that he 
 was. His life seems to imply as much, but not that he 
 was in him in a way that involved any divine duality or 
 twofold personality. 
 
 Of course I never preached that Christ was God. 
 I never went beyond saying that Christ interpreted God 
 to the human consciousness. My preaching for forty 
 years consisted to a considerable extent in what I said, 
 and to another considerable extent in what I did not 
 say. Webster said “I do not pretend to discuss the 
 arithmetic of God.” There are some matters that are 
 confused by the attempt to clarify them. In the 
 presence of infinity the intricacies and fine manipula¬ 
 tions of human thought are an intrusion. They are 
 presumptuous even in a school of theology, ridiculous 
 when indulged in before a congregation. Religion and 
 man’s philosophy of religion are only very distantly 
 related. A reality may be simple enough to the heart 
 even while remaining inexplicable to the mind. In the 
 presence of the entire world’s profundity of mind it 
 still remains true that “Out of the heart are the issues 
 of life.” God has in some way so humanized himself 
 in Christ that we are not put to the task of solving the 
 underlying problem of Deity. 
 
 Our Bible is one volume,—not two,—from Genesis 
 to Revelations. It is divided into two chapters of one 
 book. It is revelation coming from one source and in 
 its two portions adjusted to successive conditions of 
 the race and to two successive necessities in the indi- 
 
REFLECTIONS 
 
 153 
 
 vidual man. The fact that the Gospel is of consid¬ 
 erably later date has led to the unfortunate 
 
 2 . 
 
 UNDERVALUATION OF THE OLD TESTAMENT 
 
 The Bible is one, given us in two parts, which follow 
 in the order of time and in the course of human devel¬ 
 opment ; essentially a unit however, and to be practically 
 treated as such, if the combined whole is to accomplish 
 for the individual and for society the purpose for which 
 it was intended. Each of the two sections stands by 
 itself, but at the same time receives reenforcement 
 from the other and conveys reenforcement to the other. 
 
 The fundamental note of the older Scripture is man’s 
 obligation to the One God. It is a volume of law, the 
 proclamation of divine will. There are in it scanty 
 references to love, whether God’s love or man’s love,™ 
 matter which is in the main deferred to a more ap¬ 
 propriate season. This portion of the Bible may not 
 be fitted to produce character of so delicate and 
 gracious a type as is afforded under influences that are 
 less strenuous, although there are exceptional person¬ 
 ages, with biographical details recorded in the early 
 pages of Scripture, who seem to have lived beyond 
 their own time and to have anticipated some aspects of 
 truth whose full realization came later. 
 
 Those who yielded themselves to the discipline of the 
 Hebrew Scriptures learned the lesson of subjection to 
 guaranteed authority. It is a hard lesson, but is as 
 fundamental as it is hard. Deep establishment is the 
 first step in every line of construction. Foundation is 
 
154 MY FORTY YEARS IN NEW YORK 
 
 expensive and it is not winsome. In house-building it 
 is placed out of sight and the heavier the superstructure 
 that it is to carry the lower the foundation requires to 
 be laid. 
 
 There is an analogy between the building of a house 
 and the building of a man, which speaks with effect 
 to those that will listen. The substructure gives sta¬ 
 bility and nerve to the entire superstructure and even 
 to the architectural delicacies which the superstructure 
 comprises. Even beauty must repose upon a basis of 
 solidity or it fails of being beautiful. 
 
 All bodies lying upon the surface of the ground are 
 held fast by the grip of gravity. They are safe where 
 they are because they are captives. Captivity is the 
 normal condition of things and it is the normal condi¬ 
 tion of man. Adam’s first recorded act was to break 
 with God. He had not lived long enough to realize 
 that independence is not the genius of liberty, and that 
 liberty at its best is guaranteed only by subordination. 
 That doctrine is luminously conveyed to us by observ¬ 
 ing the systematized activity of the starry heavens, the 
 great original Bible; and the same doctrine is the 
 burden of the Hebrew Scriptures. 
 
 Against that doctrine, and the authority which it 
 represents, man’s nature is in constitutional revolt. A 
 man is as reluctant to obey God as a child is reluctant 
 to obey its father. So long as that condition continues 
 we cannot cease printing the Old Testament, nor dis¬ 
 continue fashioning our character into conformity with 
 its obligations. 
 
 This is in part the reason for the Old Testa- 
 
REFLECTIONS 
 
 155 
 
 merit’s unpopularity. It would prove a wonderfully 
 interesting and fascinating volume did it not so con¬ 
 stantly trespass upon the domains of individual 
 autonomy. We are jealous of God because his pre¬ 
 possession of Godhood compels us to kneel instead of 
 allowing us to be enthroned. We are chafed by what 
 we are pleased to consider the contractedness of our 
 situation. We are irked by the indisputable fact that 
 there is room in the universe for only One Supreme. 
 Like wild animals we pluck at the bars of our cage. 
 All of which is our various way of expressing our 
 natural aversion to being controlled by any will but our 
 own,—a situation that is made more trying by the fact 
 that the will is among the most conspicuous elements 
 of our nature and the one in which our ingrained mili¬ 
 tancy is particularly concentrated. It has to be allowed 
 that the condition in which we find ourselves is not an 
 easy one. The Lord knows it is not. We are possessed 
 of a simply magnificent will-power but are severely 
 restricted in our use of it. The possession of will en¬ 
 dows us with a kind of magistracy, but a magistracy 
 which, like the judgeship of an inferior court, can exer¬ 
 cise itself only within a restricted range. 
 
 Law precedes Gospel in the education of the race, 
 and as naturally in the education of the individual. If 
 it is claimed that obedience will easily follow as the 
 fruit of affection while will remains obstinate unless 
 softened by affection, there is this immediate reply, 
 that law has its own independent claims quite apart 
 from every other consideration. Obedience is the great 
 basal feature of character and is not to be relegated 
 
156 MY FORTY YEARS IN NEW YORK 
 
 to a second place by being brought in in the wake of 
 some other feature. Obedience is an original premise, 
 not the conclusion derived from a syllogism. A system 
 of law constitutes the framework along whose perpen¬ 
 dicular and horizontal lines the entire fabric of ma¬ 
 terial and immaterial things is constructed. Disregard 
 of that fact is the secret of all the confusion and con¬ 
 flict that compose the history of the world and of every 
 individual in it. It is the sum and substance of every¬ 
 thing that we call sin. 
 
 Were every law obeyed, were every prayer, that 
 God’s will may be done, respected even by those who 
 offer the prayer, a very considerable amount of the 
 world’s friction would be already eliminated. Failure 
 to accept a Will other than our own and above our 
 own, is what prevents the machinery of the human 
 world from running with the frictionless harmony of 
 the stellar world. There are no collisions in the sky 
 because every star does what it was divinely intended 
 to do and describes the orbit that was from eternity 
 appointed for it. 
 
 Obedience as emphasized and celebrated in the Old 
 Testament needs to stand out as marking a personal 
 attitude distinct from all other relations that enter into 
 the bearing of the individual. Until it is viewed in 
 its own distinctive character, and appreciated in its 
 own immense import, combining it with other features 
 of personality, however excellent in themselves, will 
 have the same confused effect as would the attempt to 
 carry along at the same time the laying of the founda¬ 
 tion of a building and the construction of what is to 
 
REFLECTIONS 
 
 157 
 
 be placed upon it. That was made more distinct to the 
 young people fifty years ago than it is now. In dealing 
 with them the entire matter was made to hinge upon 
 the narrow but vital question as to whether they were 
 going to be God’s man or their own man, whether they 
 were going to give their heart to God or to keep it. 
 In other words it was a distinct question of surrender. 
 No person of any maturity whether young or old fails 
 to appreciate the sharpness of the distinction between 
 the two alternatives, and that sharpness of distinction 
 becomes most clear when held most apart from every 
 side consideration of either love or penalty. 
 
 I had a young man in my first parish that I felt 
 would make a great Christian if he could be brought to 
 the point of self-surrender. He was such sort of per¬ 
 son that many who have never dealt with themselves 
 analytically would have said that he was quite well as 
 he was. I asked him to call upon me with reference 
 to uniting with the church. He replied that he had no 
 interest in the church. Nevertheless I prevailed upon 
 him to call. I talked with him frankly and gently 
 pressed upon him the obligation to put himself in 
 obedient relations to God. He granted the propriety 
 of such an act but said: “I cannot bend. I never have 
 and I cannot do so now.” I suggested that we kneel 
 together and seek God’s aid. “That would be bending 
 and I am not going to bend.” I said nothing about 
 the love of God and nothing about the peril of going 
 through life impenitent. I wanted that his thought 
 should continue to rest just where I knew it was rest¬ 
 ing, on the single point that his relation to God carried 
 
158 MY FORTY YEARS IN NEW YORK 
 
 in it an inevitable obligation; that he belonged to God 
 whether he acknowledged it or not, that laws existed 
 for the purpose of being obeyed, and that if he disre¬ 
 garded such laws he was an outlaw. These matters 
 are so serious that they need to be presented with ut¬ 
 most clarity, and the inevitableness of moral obligation 
 placed on its own grounds unmixed with considerations 
 that lie off from the main point. It is pleasant to be 
 able to add that within two weeks he yielded uncon¬ 
 ditionally. 
 
 Standing in an external relation to God’s universal 
 kingdom and then coming from that to an internal 
 relation, is as definite and practical a movement as 
 changing one’s citizenship from Italy to the United 
 States or, which is a better illustration, withdrawing 
 from the fellowship of the criminal classes and becom¬ 
 ing a faithful subject of government. There is nothing 
 peculiarly mysterious about it. It waits on the delib¬ 
 erate action of human mind and will. It is simply a 
 question to decide. No special play of emotion is called 
 for. Tears only complicate the situation, for they 
 saturate the mechanism of thought, which runs more 
 accurately when dry. Undisciplined passion is nor¬ 
 mally attended by a reactionary chill, and what such 
 passion will produce, such chill can be expected to 
 consume. 
 
 God, considered as sovereign in his kingdom, with a 
 will that imposes itself upon everything within the 
 compass of that kingdom, is expressed, but less def¬ 
 initely, in the New Testament. Christ is the revelation 
 of God’s love, but one will never bring away from the 
 
REFLECTIONS 
 
 159 
 
 Gospel such sense of God in the kingliness of his char¬ 
 acter, in the limitless breadth of his realm, in the 
 awfulness of his sovereignty and in the solemn direct¬ 
 ness with which that sovereignty touches down upon 
 every object material or human within the scope of 
 that kingdom, as discloses itself in the Old Bible of 
 the Hebrews. 
 
 It is the lack of an overmastering sense of the abso¬ 
 lute Deity, considered as an immediate reality, that in 
 part, at any rate, explains the decrepitude and the in¬ 
 validism of much of what passes as current religion. 
 It accounts for the reign of the spirit of worldliness 
 that distinguishes hosts of people who will periodically 
 celebrate the sacrament of God’s love, but who, between 
 two successive celebrations, are undistinguishable from 
 the general mass of those who are victims of “the lust 
 of the flesh, the lust of the eye and the pride of life.” 
 
 The foregoing paragraph is in no wise intended as 
 preachment. It is only adduced in justification of my 
 proposition, that it requires Old Testament as well as 
 New to constitute our Bible, and that the New, taken 
 apart from the Old, gives us but a part of God, and is 
 an instance of superstructure reared without regard 
 to preliminary substructure. The exception which is 
 taken to the sterner and more serious aspect of Bible 
 truth is a confession of willingness to take up with an 
 imperfect religion if it can be had at less personal 
 expense. 
 
 The serious purpose which the pulpit is assumed to 
 subserve renders important a clear and just under¬ 
 standing of what constitutes 
 
160 MY FORTY YEARS IN NEW YORK 
 
 3. 
 
 FITNESS FOR THE MINISTRY 
 
 As the church is the organized body of Christian be¬ 
 lievers, and the ministry the recognized representative 
 of the church, it becomes a question of widely practical 
 concern under what form of discipline the ministry 
 can best become equipped for service. It is unneces¬ 
 sary to say that, as in all the professions, equipment is 
 to be determined by function. Now the function of the 
 ministry is prophecy, understanding by prophecy tak¬ 
 ing of the things of God and showing them to men. 
 There is involved therefore the possession by the min¬ 
 ister of a twofold knowledge, the knowledge of God 
 for whom he speaks, and the understanding of men to 
 whom he speaks. So far the matter with which I have 
 now to deal is clear. 
 
 Agnostic tendencies evidently bar a man from the 
 ministry. He is also barred whose only knowledge of 
 God is borrowed knowledge, which, accurately speak¬ 
 ing, cannot be designated as knowledge at all. Merely 
 to proclaim some one’s else religious opinion is not the 
 office of a prophet and will not accomplish prophetic 
 results. Ahab feared Elijah because he felt that he 
 had ground for believing that Elijah was in the Lord’s 
 confidence. To stand in the pulpit and to be experi¬ 
 mentally qualified to say “Thus saith the Lord” is one 
 thing. To stand there and be able to go no further 
 than to quote some one’s else prophetic announcement 
 is a distinct thing, and between the two there is no 
 vital connection. 
 
REFLECTIONS 
 
 161 
 
 Peter was constituted a prophet by being able to 
 say,—‘‘We were eye-witnesses of his majesty. His 
 voice which came from heaven we heard when we were 
 with him in the holy mount.” Judging from Scripture 
 such words as suppose, conclude, suspect, imagine, in¬ 
 fer, were not comprised in Apostolic vocabulary. The 
 word “know” was there and it was there emphatically, 
 and is thickly scattered through the entire New Testa¬ 
 ment narrative. The Bible is the record of Hebrew 
 experience of God. Another Bible, or a second edition 
 of the New Testament, might now be issued that should 
 also contain a history of Gentile experience of God. 
 And its issue would be attended with this advantage, 
 that certain questioning souls would be persuaded that 
 Christianity as it is set forth in our present Bible is 
 something more than a relic. 
 
 Unless we are prepared to sacrifice the profoundest 
 significance of both the Old and New Testaments, we 
 have to concede that while in all the history therein 
 recorded there may have been only one scene of exactly 
 the character of the one referred to in the previous 
 paragraph, yet the instances run into the high figures 
 of celestial disclosures where, in one form or another, 
 men have consciously walked upon ground made bright 
 by a heavenly illumination and have consciously experi¬ 
 enced the impulse conveyed by the entrance into them 
 of suggestions borne in from divine sources. And it 
 is that that has constituted the definiteness of their pur¬ 
 pose and the stability of their assurances. 
 
 We walk by faith, but not by an unsupported faith. 
 In no range of life’s experience do we take anything 
 
162 MY FORTY YEARS IN NEW YORK 
 
 absolutely on trust. Faith is a producing factor only 
 according to the amount of knowledge that underlies 
 it. We cannot reasonably believe except so far as we 
 have grounds for our belief. Timothy wrote “Y know 
 whom I have believed.” And so Christ says,—“We 
 speak that we do know and testify that we have seen.” 
 And only by that token was he able to maintain a career 
 in which there was no misgiving, no fluctuations of 
 feeling or thought; or able so to impress himself upon 
 those with whom he dealt as to lay the foundations of 
 a Christian history. 
 
 With very special pertinency does this apply to a 
 prophetic ministry. Moses could maintain himself in 
 steadiness of demeanor and of action in the midst of 
 all the antagonisms and embarrassments of his cap¬ 
 taincy of the Hebrew people, and he could maintain 
 himself there for forty years, because for forty days,— 
 one day for each year,—he had tarried with God in 
 the heights. Stability cannot be extemporized, but re¬ 
 quires to have something beneath it to make it stable. 
 Elisha in the troublous times of King Ahab, could ad¬ 
 dress that vicious old monarch with a clarion note of 
 prophetic denunciation because he could say to Ahab, 
 “As the Lord God of Israel liveth, before whom I 
 stand ” consciously charged with the secrets of the 
 divine mind and purpose; consciously commissioned to 
 an authoritative vicegerency. 
 
 So of John the Baptist. So of this same Peter, un¬ 
 stable by nature, but wrought into ruggedness by what 
 had dropped into his soul from above, his eyes still 
 bright with the light that years before had glorified 
 
REFLECTIONS 
 
 163 
 
 the holy mount, and, as he tells us, with the divine voice 
 still sounding in his ears, the voice that he had himself 
 heard, and whose persuasion was with him irrefutable 
 argument clear out to the day of his martyrdom. St. 
 Paul also tells us that he had seen a great light while 
 on his way to Damascus, and also that on another 
 occasion he was caught up into the third heaven and 
 listened to words that were possible to be heard but 
 impossible for him to utter. Still more significant, 
 and more pertinent to our immediate interest is his 
 statement that it was by personal revelation from God 
 that was conveyed to him the truth which he was com¬ 
 missioned to publish to the Gentile world. 
 
 As no man’s preaching ever did so much for the 
 world as Paul’s preaching and as the material of his 
 preaching was direct quotation from the mind of God, 
 there is something in these two facts taken in conjunc¬ 
 tion that ought to lie heavily upon the minds of those 
 everywhere that are occupied in preparing men for the 
 ministry; that is to say in furnishing the church with 
 prophets that shall take of the things of God and show 
 them to men. 
 
 There is no suggestion of hearsay in what Paul says. 
 He never has to quote. If he touches upon the realities 
 of the world invisible we feel, in reading him, that at 
 the very moment when he was writing, his eye was 
 wide open to the realities of that world, and sensitively 
 filled with them. It never occurs to us that he was do¬ 
 ing into words of his own some report of unseen reali¬ 
 ties that another had loaned to him or otherwise made 
 over to him. His own impassioned thought touches the 
 
164 MY FORTY YEARS IN NEW YORK 
 
 object it describes, the truths it relates. There is no 
 suggestion of inference in what he declares. He does 
 not say ‘This is true-major premise,—and that is true- 
 minor premise ,—therefore something else is true.” 
 There are with him no therefores. Realities stand out 
 to his eye in their own light in the light of God. 
 
 Paul tells the Galatians that the Gospel that he 
 preaches to them is not something that he learned at 
 school, and went onto the platform with it or into the 
 pulpit with it. 
 
 Now whether there is all in this that the facts as 
 stated by Paul would seem to indicate, others can judge 
 as well as I. But Paul was a tremendous preacher. 
 The effect of what he spoke or wrote has lasted to this 
 day. And what he spoke or wrote he says he obtained 
 first-hand from God, and also that he kept away from 
 the pillars of the church. If he labored under an 
 hallucination as to the source of his doctrines, that 
 hallucination so far forth compromises his doctrines. 
 If there was no hallucination then the divine mind is 
 definitely and openly accessible; and in a purely prac¬ 
 tical point of view the one from whom Paul acquired 
 his knowledge of truth, and by whom Moses and Peter 
 and the rest were made able to take of the things of 
 God and show them to man, is still the predominant 
 means of successfully equipping for the exercises of 
 the prophetic function. 
 
 It would seem that Seminary professors believe that 
 God is not as willing to disclose his mind to intending 
 prophets now as in the old days; that the only way in 
 which they can be produced now is by replacing divine 
 
REFLECTIONS 
 
 165 
 
 inspiration by advanced scholarship, and that intense 
 human thinking, if sufficiently intense, will take the 
 place of God’s revelation, it being understood however 
 that the classroom process is conducted in a spiritual¬ 
 ized atmosphere. 
 
 As already stated, the prophet in order to the exer¬ 
 cise of his office, must be possessed of a two-fold 
 knowledge, knowledge of God whom he speaks for and 
 understanding of men whom he speaks to. I question 
 if advanced scholarship contributes to either of those 
 two results. I am sure that protracted study tends to 
 alienate the student from people and to discourage 
 sympathy with them, rather than to draw him into close 
 and effective relations with them. And I also believe 
 that protracted study pursued with a view to the accu¬ 
 mulation of knowledge along the line of whatever 
 science, secular or religious, does not induce that re¬ 
 lation on the part of the student to either God or man 
 that fosters a love for ministerial service. Some years 
 ago, I was set ruminating upon this matter by what was 
 told me by an officer,—not a professor,—of one of 
 our representative theological seminaries. He went 
 with me over the list of seminary graduates to whom 
 by virtue of their exceptional scholarly attainments, 
 had been accorded the privilege of two years of gra¬ 
 tuitous study abroad. Although they had entered the 
 seminary with the intention of becoming preachers, 
 only a very limited percentage of them entered upon 
 ministerial service upon their return. 
 
 Now I perfectly understand from my own experi¬ 
 ence the psychology of the fact thus stated. I know 
 
166 MY FORTY YEARS IN NEW YORK 
 
 that President Seelye of Amherst, as related on another 
 page, simply thrust me into the ministry for the pur¬ 
 pose of undoing the drying and unsocializing effects 
 of study that was being prolonged with a view to ag¬ 
 grandizing my intellectual possessions. The passion for 
 knowledge grows with the accumulation of knowledge, 
 just as the money passion grows with the accumulation 
 of money; and one passion equally with the other, can 
 separate a man from God and from one’s own fellows 
 with both of whom one needs to stand in the very 
 closest sympathetic relation in order to be a prophet. 
 
 I write this although knowing that many seminaries 
 are giving extended courses with a view to granting 
 the Ph.D., but I also know that a great many of our 
 brightest University and Seminary graduates are not 
 in our pulpits. We know that Paul sat at the feet of 
 Gamaliel, but that was prior to his call to the ministry. 
 
 The idea expressed by the word “Theology” should 
 never be contemplated with a critical spirit, any more 
 than what is denoted by such terms as Astronomy and 
 Geology. Theology is a science and like all science is 
 worthy of intellectual respect. The proper application 
 of the word I have tried to indicate in what I here say 
 about 
 
 4. 
 
 THE STUDY OF THEOLOGY 
 
 I studied very little theology before I commenced 
 preaching, and what I have since acquired has come 
 less from consulting prescribed text-books than from 
 my study of the Bible and from my attempt to match 
 
REFLECTIONS 
 
 167 
 
 Bibl^truth to human necessities. St. Paul set an ex¬ 
 ample in that matter and the large place which he has 
 filled in ecclesiastical life and activity seemed to render 
 his example one that it would be prudent to follow. 
 I think I have been able to do better work by preaching 
 truth as I personally experienced it than by preaching 
 it as I have learned that some one else has experienced 
 it. Preaching should be colored by the personality of 
 the preacher. That was the case with all the thinking 
 and speaking that is recorded in Scripture. 
 
 The unsystematized character of what I venture to 
 call my theology has sometimes placed me in an awk¬ 
 ward position, when on three occasions I have been 
 subjected to the ordeal of a theological examination. 
 Otherwise I have gotten along quite comfortably and 
 with a measure of success. I inherited a strain of 
 conservatism from my father and that inheritance has 
 stood me in good stead in preventing my deviation from 
 lines of orthodoxy and from becoming offensively 
 heretical. 
 
 So long as I was in the Congregational Church it was 
 plain sailing, for in that body each church is a law to 
 itself: so that if I was in doctrinal peace with my own 
 people (which was not difficult) there was nothing to 
 be feared from any other source. In so Presbyterial 
 a place as New York City a preacher encounters a 
 somewhat different atmosphere although the church 
 which I served there was so infected (to use the term 
 sometimes applied to us) with Congregationalism that 
 my pulpit was as free as my previous one. 
 
 In the meantime there has been, I should say, re- 
 
168 MY FORTY YEARS IN NEW YORK 
 
 laxation from dogmatic strenuousness that has brought 
 Presbyterianism pretty nearly to a level with Congre¬ 
 gationalism, except in the matter of church govern¬ 
 ment. Which is to claim that the Presbyterian pulpit 
 in New York City has become more religious and less 
 dogmatic. 
 
 It needs to be understood that a man’s theology is 
 no criterion of his piety. Theology is religion reduced 
 to a form of thought. It is the science of divine things 
 and no more brings a man to God than the science of 
 astronomy carries a man to the stars. It is significant 
 that there are many students who have entered a theo¬ 
 logical seminary with a view to becoming preachers 
 of the Gospel but who, upon graduating, have adopted 
 another line of service. 
 
 Too much, however, cannot be said in behalf of 
 theological study considered as means of intellectual 
 gymnastics. A thorough course of Westminster As¬ 
 sembly’s Shorter Catechism is worth more than so much 
 Greek or Calculus considered as mental training. We 
 are told that Rufus Choate employed it in the discipline 
 of his law students. I remember the time when I could 
 ask and answer, without a book, its hundred and more 
 questions. It engages the mind with immense problems. 
 It puts tremendous strain upon the faculty of thought 
 and reason. But it does not constitute piety. It is no 
 synonym with religious experience. There is nothing 
 to indicate that it made Choate’s law students more 
 godly or that he used the catechism with them for that 
 purpose. 
 
 While theology does not produce godliness, godli- 
 
REFLECTIONS 
 
 169 
 
 ness produces the best kind of theology. The text for 
 that is, “The secret of the Lord is with them that fear 
 Him”; the knowledge of God the product of holy loy¬ 
 alty. The late Horace Bushnell was a good man, but 
 he had in his congregation a man a good deal holier 
 than he in the shape of an old cobbler, to whom he 
 resorted for the solution of puzzling biblical problems. 
 The proverb is a familiar one that “to have prayed well 
 is to have studied well.” The proverb cannot be re¬ 
 versed so as to read, “to have studied well is to have 
 prayed well.” I have seen students that I knew studied 
 well but in all likelihood never prayed at all. 
 
 Why do we reduce our theological estimates to the 
 form of a written creed? Principally, I think, because 
 we hold them with so loose a tenure—many of them— 
 that we require some objective expression of them to 
 keep them from getting away from us. That they 
 require such reenforcement is unpleasantly suggestive. 
 If they mean so little to us that we need some system 
 of mnemonics to keep them in mind they certainly do 
 not mean enough to us to exert upon our character and 
 life that influence which alone possesses a doctrine with 
 practical value. We never make our home or our 
 father or mother subject of credal statement. What 
 we think of them is so intimately an element of our 
 experience that no auxiliary reminder is required. 
 
 It appears to me, also, that the habitual introduction 
 into a devotional service of a concerted repetition of a 
 written creed approaches very near to the comical. An 
 approximate parallel to which would be, for four little 
 children to compose the ideas they entertain of their 
 
170 MY FORTY YEARS IN NEW YORK 
 
 father and mother and by the weekly or monthly con¬ 
 certed recitation of those ideas in the parental presence 
 to testify to their filial devotion. If my connection had 
 been with churches where the ritualistic features of 
 worship had been in vogue I might be differently im¬ 
 pressed, or if upon my occasional attendance upon such 
 services the ritualistic features had not been rendered 
 in a way more suggestive of the habitual than of the 
 devotional. Perhaps it is all explained by my not hav¬ 
 ing had cultivated in me a ritualistic appreciation. 
 
 One point more. The soundness of one’s creed can¬ 
 not be taken as measure of the soundness of one’s piety. 
 We have it intimated in Scripture that even the devils 
 are sound believers. The value of any article of one’s 
 faith is proportioned only to the weight of practical 
 influence exerted by that article. If, for example, I 
 say I believe in the immortality of the soul, and yet live 
 as though the life here were the only life, I thereby 
 convict myself of being an unbeliever in the doctrine, 
 even though it be written in my scheme of faith and 
 I every day repeat the Apostles’ Creed in which that 
 doctrine is stated. Much of the emphasis laid upon 
 creed should be shifted and laid upon experience. The 
 man himself is his only title to a place among the saints. 
 One defect in universal need of being corrected is that 
 of estimating character by fictitious criteria. 
 
 When we return to the original simplicity of the 
 Church, we shall in several respects modify existing 
 forms and methods. For example, we shall then lay 
 more stress upon truth and less upon the forms of 
 
REFLECTIONS 
 
 171 
 
 truth. We shall feel our immediate relation to every 
 one bearing the name of Christ, whoever and wherever 
 he may be, as is already the case inside of the Roman 
 Catholic Church; thus producing a sense of Christian 
 unity quite impossible so long as we adhere to the un- 
 apostolic feature of 
 
 5. 
 
 DENOMINATIONALISM 
 
 If the Church is to accomplish its divinely appointed 
 task of securing the refinement and general uplift of 
 society and the State—in other words, achieving the 
 control of the world and of human history—it will re¬ 
 quire to substitute affirmation for negation, to put 
 spirituality before intellectuality, to throw off every 
 obstruction and burden that tends to embarrass its 
 activity, and when it does the latter it will proceed to 
 rid itself of denominationalism. 
 
 Denominationalism is a divisive emphasis laid upon 
 matters that are alien to the genius of the Church. By 
 burdening the Church it retards its progress, compli¬ 
 cating it with interests that are foreign to churchly 
 nature and purposes. It is going into battle—for the 
 Church is the Lord’s army—with each soldier carrying 
 in his pack—already pretty heavy—some article that 
 has no relation to the transactions of the battle-field. 
 
 Denominationalism has been for so long a time an 
 established feature of church existence that it has come 
 to be regarded as a necessary element, although it is 
 always accepted as special evidence of the working of 
 God’s spirit when two churches, differing denomina- 
 
172 MY FORTY YEARS IN NEW YORK 
 
 tionally, merge themselves in a single body; and al¬ 
 though a denomination which is reluctant so to merge 
 itself with other denominations may be quite ready 
 and deeply concerned to have other denominations 
 merge themselves with it. All of which is a sly indica¬ 
 tion that in matters as serious as the one we are now 
 considering we can commend and advertise one princi¬ 
 ple while living by another. 
 
 As early as the lifetime of St. Paul the Christians 
 were seized by a passion for divisive organization. 
 Organizing an idea tends to create a draft upon its 
 vitality and tends to the multiplication of machinery 
 at the expense of efficiency. Mechanics is wiser than 
 ecclesiasticism and proceeds upon the theory of a mini¬ 
 mum of machinery in order to a maximum of available 
 power. 
 
 It is related in a recent issue of one of our maga¬ 
 zines that a certain scheme having been devised that 
 promised to prove to the advantage of mankind, it was 
 laid before the devil with a view to obtaining his judg¬ 
 ment upon it. The devil appreciated its possibilities of 
 public advantage, and in evident disturbance of mind 
 inquired what was to be done with it; and was told that 
 it was to be organized. He smiled a sly devilish smile 
 and said, “Then I’ll not worry about it.” 
 
 What St. Paul writes to the church at Corinth indi¬ 
 cates that already cleavage lines were developing in 
 the compact body of the church and that already three 
 denominations were in process of organization, a con¬ 
 dition to which he administered a sharp rebuke, basing 
 it on the principle that the interpolation of an inter- 
 
REFLECTIONS 
 
 173 
 
 mediary between a body of Christians and their Lord 
 operates to obscure and enfeeble the directness of their 
 relation to their Lord. 
 
 That was good philosophy then and it is the same 
 now. And whether it be a human being that is thus 
 interpolated, as was the case then, or some human idea, 
 fancy or preference, the result is the same. And the 
 closer a man comes to Christ the less he cares for his 
 Presbyterianism, his Methodism or his Episcopacy. 
 
 Even the Baptist Church, which has been one of the 
 most conservative in that respect, shows symptoms of 
 the working of a broadening impulse. I recently ad¬ 
 ministered the communion service in a Baptist church 
 and received new members. And although that body 
 of believers is just now making a minority effort to 
 originate a new denomination, yet the attempt to do 
 what is distinctly an anachronism is exerting a liber¬ 
 alizing influence on the majority of that body and will 
 certainly quicken the undenominational tendency of 
 all the other Protestant sects. 
 
 The tendency away from sectarianism has as its com¬ 
 pelling motive two considerations. One is that Christ, 
 the undivided head of the church, logically implies and 
 demands the undivided body of the church. The other 
 is that to be a militant church—that is to say, the Lord’s 
 army—is inconsistent with the mutual isolation and 
 competition of its component elements. In a little town 
 or even in a sizable town, to have three or four 
 churches, each of which regards the other more or less 
 askance, is false to the army idea, prejudicial to all 
 militant results and more repellent than attractive to 
 
174 MY FORTY YEARS IN NEW YORK 
 
 the unchurched masses. That the Roman Catholic 
 Church is one church the world over is one of the con¬ 
 tributing elements of its attractiveness and power. 
 
 Only so fast as we free ourselves from all obstruc¬ 
 tions and return to the original simplicity of the Apos¬ 
 tolic church can we fully actualize the church in its 
 character of organized divine efficiency, confronting 
 the world with its holy challenge, created of God for 
 the spiritual conquest of the world, for the reduction, 
 to the obedience of God, of all human tendencies of 
 every kind, individual, social, national and interna¬ 
 tional. That is what the Church is for, the establish¬ 
 ment on earth of the kingdom of God; not merely the 
 rescue of a few individuals, but the sanctification of 
 the very framework of society and making holy all its 
 administrative machinery. 
 
 To treat one’s entrance into the visible Church as 
 though it were an ultimate achievement, a satisfactory 
 finality in the Christian life of the individual, is to pro¬ 
 ceed on the basis of a serious misconception, a mis¬ 
 conception rather generally entertained and on that ac¬ 
 count more harmful. Hence the following paragraphs 
 devoted to the matter of 
 
 6 . 
 
 THE CHURCH MILITANT 
 
 Considered in its militant character, the individual 
 church is first of all a recruiting station for gathering 
 in raw material and fitting and equipping it for the 
 ranks and for service in the ranks. 
 
REFLECTIONS 
 
 175 
 
 That is merely preliminary. We are annually treated 
 to a publication of the number of recruits that have 
 been brought into the church during the year, with the 
 intention that the figures shall be taken as exponent of 
 what the churches have respectively been worth as 
 church organizations. 
 
 That would be like using the number of recruits that 
 have been taken into the United States Army during 
 the year as measure of the army’s military achievements 
 during the year. It is an accommodation to the widely 
 prevalent idea that men are recruited to the church, that 
 is to say, converted, that they may become approved 
 candidates for the felicities of the world celestial, ter¬ 
 restrially remodeled in order to be celestially remuner¬ 
 ated ; like the child whose mother procures his obedience 
 by paying him for it. In both cases goodness becomes 
 simply a market commodity alongside of grain and 
 comestibles; and because of that conception the mili¬ 
 tant function of the church is shunted on to a side 
 track. These fresh converts, these recruits, are not 
 to be considered as converted that they may be ready 
 to die, but in order that they may be ready to live, to 
 enter the Lord’s army and help fight its battles. 
 
 The world has little or no respect for the church 
 considered as an institution organized for conflict with 
 the world power, and for the very good reason that 
 the church has little respect for itself in that capacity. 
 The world not only wants nothing from the church and, 
 more than that, it expects nothing, does not conceive 
 of it as a force set for the shaping of event; for the 
 determination of history, for the mastering of secular 
 
176 MY FORTY YEARS IN NEW YORK 
 
 purpose and activity; for the definite correction of 
 what is evil and the staying of influences that make 
 for social and political corruption. The world’s con¬ 
 ception of the church is that it exists for the sake of 
 building itself up, like an aimless boy that has no other 
 purpose for himself except to feed himself in order 
 that he may grow. 
 
 Quite different is the popular attitude of mind to¬ 
 ward our state militia and our federal army. In the 
 first place, they respect themselves in their capacity as 
 an army, and as organized not for purposes of self- 
 advertisement and self-felicitation, but as organized 
 for direct and practical conflict against revolt or in¬ 
 vasion. 
 
 When we observe them on parade we cherish for 
 them and for their officers a peculiar respect mount¬ 
 ing to reverence, begotten of the fact that they are not 
 a barren and aimless exhibit, an organization framed 
 with a nebulous design, a design so nebulous that not 
 one-tenth of the onlookers have any concrete idea of 
 what they are for, but understand that they maintain 
 the most direct relation to the non-military population, 
 and that it may at any time be said of them that they 
 hold the destiny of the country in their hands; and as 
 it was thought and said a few years ago, that they hold 
 modern civilization in their hands. In that way the 
 federal army wins a meaning that strikes the intelli¬ 
 gence of every civilian in a way that no one asks what 
 is the use of such an army as millions of people are 
 asking what is the use of that other army, the church. 
 And because they do not realize the use of it, and have 
 
REFLECTIONS 
 
 177 
 
 never received from the church itself an adequate ex¬ 
 planation of its use, stand off from it and deny its 
 proper relation to, or its warranted responsibility for, 
 the secular character and interests of the world. 
 
 There are two things which need to be understood 
 and emphasized. One is that the world needs to be 
 improved. The other is that it is not going to improve 
 itself. A man cannot pick himself out of a hole. And 
 world improvement is impossible except through the 
 exercise of an agency that is not viciously complicated 
 with the interests of the world. 
 
 Whether the church is itself altogether free from 
 such complication is not the question. If there is fault 
 in that particular it will have to be charged to the re¬ 
 cruiting agencies, to those who pass upon the compe¬ 
 tency of intending soldiery, who perhaps have been 
 constrained to enlist under the pressure of some pa¬ 
 thetic or sensational appeal, which makes it proper to 
 say that the work of professional evangelists should 
 be scrutinized and reviewed with exceeding care. 
 
 However that may be, if our civilization is to be 
 saved, the only organization in sight available for 
 divine use is the church, so that if any of us believe 
 ourselves to be in the legitimate exercise of church 
 membership there is no occasion for our maintaining a 
 hesitant attitude toward the world’s secular tendencies 
 so far as they are tainted tendencies; alert but always 
 discreet in the way in which we militantly move upon 
 those tendencies; treating such service not as an option 
 but discharging it as an obligation. Everything that 
 
178 MY FORTY YEARS IN NEW YORK 
 
 has been done in the way of reclaiming the world has 
 been done by inspired soldiery. 
 
 There are many propositions which lie before the 
 mind unproved, and which do not admit of absolute 
 demonstration, but which so definitely correspond to 
 an ineffaceable inner impulse that we accept their real¬ 
 ity even without proof. One of these is 
 
 7. 
 
 THE DOCTRINE OF IMMORTALITY 
 
 When God made man he did not finish him. In that 
 there is nothing inconsistent with general policy. It 
 pertains to the personal and the material world alike. 
 It is to that that nature owes one of her charms. An 
 acorn is an oak already, but an uncompleted one. A 
 little boy is a man already, but not yet finished. 
 
 It is not to be supposed that Adam and Eve began 
 in the shape in which we meet them in the garden. 
 The situation there is to be interpreted by the known 
 complexion of things in general; by what nature at 
 large has to say about it. In such matters it has to be 
 remembered that nature came from God as well as the 
 Bible. Indeed, nature is itself a Bible, and it is the 
 great original Bible. It has this advantage, that there 
 is nothing in it that God did not put into it, whereas 
 in our printed copy there may be a few things that 
 man put there. It is easy to assume the contrary but 
 impossible to prove it. 
 
 In the light of the general aspect of nature we may 
 assume, therefore, that what we call our first parents 
 were no exception to the rule; that Adam had lived a 
 
REFLECTIONS 
 
 179 
 
 considerable time before he became an agriculturist, 
 and that Eve had studied some, and had thought con¬ 
 siderable, before being able to discuss the morality or 
 immorality of doing what was forbidden. 
 
 This general incomplete condition of things creates 
 the theater in which growth has an opportunity to play, 
 which is quite a different thing from manufacture. This 
 is another world from what it would be if everything 
 were mineral and had no option but either to remain 
 as it is or to fall to pieces in decay. Manufacture puts 
 things together from the outside: growth is a release 
 from the inside. It is the unpacking of what had been 
 previously packed in; divinely packed in, we suppose. 
 And the longer things can go without repacking the 
 more wonderful it becomes as a manifestation of divine 
 wisdom and power: exactly as a clock that will go a 
 year without rewinding is more of a timepiece than one 
 that has to be wound every week. That is why I be¬ 
 lieve I honor God by believing and teaching the doc¬ 
 trine of evolution. 
 
 We are built for the future. We wind our clock 
 Sunday morning for the week. We wind it for the 
 future. And then the motion of its hands on the dial- 
 plate comes from the use of the force which we have 
 introduced into the clock. So are we wound for the 
 future. * We are equipped with a prospect. The past 
 we can turn to some account and had better not forget 
 it, at least not all of it, but had better not live on it. 
 We are in this respect like a boat, in that our build 
 shows in what direction we are intended to go. Life 
 viewed from the point where we stand at this moment 
 
180 MY FORTY YEARS IN NEW YORK 
 
 lies altogether in front of us. It is a big adventure, 
 bigger than the one that Columbus committed himself 
 to when he loosed from Palos. But he found a new 
 continent. 
 
 It is good for the soul to take counsel with the un¬ 
 known years, to stand so close to the unknown as to 
 feel it. We enlarge to the scope of the world we 
 contemplate. Artisans whose work requires the use 
 of a microscope become nearsighted. Ship captains 
 lengthen their vision by striving to resolve land-haze 
 into firm continent. Everything depends on the soul’s 
 attitude. No matter how old a man is, provided his 
 brain still functions and his heart still beats, he dis¬ 
 honors God and his unused possibilities if he fails to 
 continue ticking and striking every time the hour comes 
 around. We shall have as much eternity as we earn. 
 Anyhow, we are not finished, and forgetting the things 
 which are behind we will look forward unto the things 
 which are before, for “it doth not yet appear what 
 we shall be.” 
 
 Even if we cannot prove immortality, it is wise to 
 assume it. We cannot prove tomorrow; we only as¬ 
 sume it, and the assumption improves the use we make 
 of today. We can tell how old a tree is by the number 
 of its successive rings of deposit. So we ought to be 
 able to compute a man’s age less by consulting the 
 almanac and more by the measure of his acquisitions 
 and achievements. A man’s age when he dies is to be 
 determined by the number of years that he has lived, 
 not by the number that he has existed. 
 
 One’s confidence in immortality varies with the in- 
 
REFLECTIONS 
 
 181 
 
 dividual. It is a doctrine at which very many falter 
 even though they confess it on each repetition of the 
 Apostles’ Creed, and even though they assert their ac¬ 
 ceptance of the divine authority of the Scriptures in 
 which the doctrine is definitely affirmed. But believ¬ 
 ing the Bible in general is not quite the same as be¬ 
 lieving everything that there is in it. There is an in¬ 
 superable difficulty in believing something that we are 
 constitutionally incompetent to appreciate; in grasping 
 with an expectant thought something which outmeasures 
 the scope of our thought; just as we cannot embrace 
 with our arms anything that is longer than our arms. 
 Believing in immortality may in many instances mean 
 simply assenting to the doctrine, which would only de¬ 
 note an inclination toward it rather than a declination 
 from it. 
 
 What passes as belief in immortality generally 
 amounts probably to nothing more than to a belief that 
 death does not end all, that we personally survive the 
 grave, without being consciously committed to so broad 
 a doctrine as that we shall live eternally, and that there 
 will never be a period put to our existence. For we 
 can think as far as to the grave and perhaps to the time 
 that immediately follows; but consciously and intelli¬ 
 gently to stretch our thought to a point a thousand or 
 a million years further transcends our power and we 
 really do not attempt it. If we can pass the grave un¬ 
 scathed we surrender ourselves to the future with no 
 careful thought as to the extent of that future or as to 
 the extent of our perdurance in that future. 
 
 Much of our conviction that what we call death is 
 
182 MY FORTY YEARS IN NEW YORK 
 
 not fatal proceeds from our love of life. We in part 
 expect to continue living because we want to live. To 
 that extent the wish is parent to the thought. The 
 dearer life is to us and the more it means to us, by so 
 much stronger will be our belief in immortality. The 
 rational joy one finds in life proves how natural is our 
 adaptedness to life and easily creates the presumption 
 that an adaptedness which is so natural will be indef¬ 
 initely continued. 
 
 But that consideration is less convincing than the 
 apparently preparatory character of our present expe¬ 
 rience. To whatever extent our life here may be pro¬ 
 longed we feel that we are only begun, not finished. 
 The road we travel is too short to enable us to arrive. 
 In the matter of knowledge, whether scientific or spir¬ 
 itual, we have only commenced to know, and the more 
 we know the clearer our conception of the vast amount 
 still remaining to be known, could life but be suffi¬ 
 ciently prolonged. 
 
 The result is that we feel that if life is reduced to a 
 limited term it is more tantalizing than satisfying, and 
 would better have been withheld from us altogether. 
 Hardly does the conception of God that we are taught 
 by our religion to cherish of him permit us to suppose 
 that He would give us a momentary glimpse of a mag¬ 
 nificent prospect and then blind our eyes to the contem¬ 
 plation of it. If what we call God’s love allows our 
 life to issue in a final and eternal disappointment, can 
 we invest that love with those qualities of fatherliness 
 with which by the terms of the Gospel that love claims 
 to be endowed ? 
 
REFLECTIONS 
 
 183 
 
 A perfectly satisfying belief in immortality includes 
 not only the conviction that we are not yet finished, but 
 also that we never shall be. 
 
 We can receive no communications from without 
 which do not address themselves to what is already to 
 some degree instinctively present within us. We are 
 like a musical instrument which can render no tones 
 except those that already lie latently in the strings. It 
 is at the impulse of this thought that I have composed 
 the following article on 
 
 8 . 
 
 RELIGION 
 
 Religion has to do with God and man in their rela¬ 
 tion to each other. That relation becomes a reality 
 in human experience by virtue of an implanted instinct. 
 We should never have been able to reason except as 
 rationality had been lodged in us as an innate possibility. 
 In a similar way we are religious by nature. Religion 
 is so wonderful a thing, so tremendously broad and 
 high in its scope, that it would never have occurred to 
 us to come to it; we should never have been able to 
 come to it had not its beginning been started in us 
 along with our birth. Therefore if there are any 
 obligations attached to it, those obligations are as in¬ 
 evitable and as obligatory as is the power and oppor¬ 
 tunity of vision inevitable to an illuminated eye. So 
 that for any man, normally constructed, to ignore re¬ 
 ligion and to deny the existence in himself of religious 
 tendency and impulse is to play false with his own 
 constitution and with its Author. 
 
184 MY FORTY YEARS IN NEW YORK 
 
 That furnishes basis for the entire superstructure 
 of religious truth in all its details. If those who preach 
 would keep more constantly close to the grand funda¬ 
 mentals they would be better able to present and urge 
 with effect all those specifications which derive their 
 meaning and their authority from the one basal fact 
 that God is and that we stand to Him in personal moral 
 relation. Once let a child become thoroughly and pleas¬ 
 antly at home with that single basal idea and almost 
 anything that lies legitimately in the range of religious 
 truth can be brought to his unresisting regard. 
 
 Religion has been brought into the world in order 
 to save men to themselves and to redeem our civiliza¬ 
 tion. It is not a religion of retribution but of recon¬ 
 struction, such as should obviate all necessity for retri¬ 
 bution. Retribution has a place in the world, but it is 
 like the schoolmaster’s ferule, which may be a neces¬ 
 sary feature of schoolroom furniture but is most use¬ 
 ful when so kept under cover as to imply the hope and 
 expectation that there will be no occasion for its appli¬ 
 cation. Its application is the last resort of administra¬ 
 tion that is only semi-successful. 
 
 In making use of religion as a means of individual 
 and social redemption we ought never to be discon¬ 
 certed by man’s imperfect condition. A physician is 
 always expected to enter the sick room cheerily. One 
 who labors for the world’s betterment will be disap¬ 
 pointed in his achievements if his appreciation of hu¬ 
 man condition is framed in the minor key. Of all men 
 the one who desires to do good is the one who has most 
 need of a glad face. I am far from believing that Jesus 
 
REFLECTIONS 
 
 185 
 
 was the hypochondriac that art and current sentiment 
 conceive Him to have been. If His attitude and aspect 
 had shown symptoms of such depression as is attrib¬ 
 uted to Him, he could hardly have attracted to Him¬ 
 self so quickly so memorable a following. Men are 
 not drawn together under the attraction of that kind 
 of magnetism. Religion is a boon, not a catastrophe. 
 If one is in any kind of need or distress and I can 
 bring him relief, I do not approach him in tears or 
 clad in the habiliments of woe. 
 
 To develop a man’s religious impulses and to do it 
 by reminding him of his depravity, of which he is more 
 thoroughly aware than any one else can be, seems to 
 be a less effective way of dealing than by cultivating 
 in him a sense of his magnificent possibilities. 
 
 Overcoming the evil with the good is a principle that 
 Scripture commends, and is a more philosophic expe¬ 
 dient than to leave the good in the background and to 
 put the main emphasis on the evil and on the retribu¬ 
 tion to which the evil is liable. Man is by native en¬ 
 dowment so different from a dog that he ought not to 
 be treated as though he were a dog. 
 
 Moral beauty is not made attractive by methods of 
 enforcement against which the better elements of a 
 man’s nature instinctively revolt. The evil there is 
 in what is bad is not made visible by being shown in 
 its own light, for there is in it no light. In order to 
 realize that black is black it needs to be put in juxta¬ 
 position with what is white. The doctrine of relativity, 
 which has received scientific recognition, has its place 
 also in the sphere of morals. An example of this is 
 
186 MY FORTY YEARS IN NEW YORK 
 
 our Lord’s dealing with the morally abject Samaritan 
 woman. Instead of holding her to her past and making 
 her breathe the fetid atmosphere of her own depravity, 
 he called her off from herself and led her thoughts 
 along the most exalted lines of conception and spirit¬ 
 ual imagination of which human mind and heart are 
 capable. It was a divine compliment paid to her fine 
 religious susceptibilities. Moral chastisement would 
 probably have resulted in the continuance of her career 
 of concubinage. 
 
 Our view of the function of religion will depend in 
 part upon what we consider to be man’s quality when 
 first he comes under moral influence; or, let me say, 
 upon what we consider to have been the quality of 
 Adam—taken as representative of the race—when first 
 he came under moral influence. Adam did not fall in 
 the Garden of Eden. Instead of its being a fall it was 
 an early step taken in the history of his ascent. A 
 certain amount of elevation is necessary in order to 
 render fall possible. Adam was born innocent, as we 
 all are. But innocence is purely a negative quality. It 
 sustains the same relation to character that white paper 
 does to the writing that is put upon it. Adam was 
 neither moral nor immoral, but unmoral. In the char¬ 
 acter in which he first appears in the Genesis story he 
 was still a baby in point of moral appreciation: and 
 thrusting him out of Paradise and among the thorns 
 and thistles was the providential method of sending 
 him and Eve to primary school; for every kind of 
 progress has to be gained by some form of struggle: 
 
REFLECTIONS 
 
 187 
 
 and Paradise was too easy a place to live in to afford 
 any incentives to progress. 
 
 If we accept the theory scientifically adopted, that 
 the human race had already been for innumerable ages 
 under a progressive discipline, by which man primeval 
 had arrived at the state of being known as man his¬ 
 toric, then we shall have to regard the era at which 
 the Bible takes up the story of man as being a kind of 
 way-station where the training, by which he had been 
 developed into a perfect animal, was replaced by a 
 supplementary training whose function it would be— 
 through an equally protracted period, perhaps—to de¬ 
 velop him into a perfect man. The further investiga¬ 
 tion is pushed into the past the more evident it becomes 
 that time is a big element in divine achievement. 
 
 Whether this way of mapping the past will commend 
 itself to the evangelical mind, each reader will have to 
 decide for himself. This much will have to be con¬ 
 ceded, that the traditional system of biblical chronology 
 is liable to serious amendment. We are no longer sure 
 that God was occupied just one hundred and forty-four 
 hours in creating the world or that He created it four 
 thousand and four years before the birth of Christ. If 
 these amendments require to be made, what other 
 amendments of a more serious character will follow in 
 their wake no one is wise enough even to conjecture. 
 Of this, however, I am thoroughly confident, that what¬ 
 ever subsequent discoveries may be made—if justly in¬ 
 terpreted—they will reveal in only fuller light the won¬ 
 derfulness of the natural world, the dignity of man and 
 the glory of God. To be afraid of discoveries, and to 
 
188 MY FORTY YEARS IN NEW YORK 
 
 put a ban upon investigators, is a transparent confession 
 of unfaith. 
 
 Human reconstruction, however, is not complete un¬ 
 less along with the establishment of normal relations 
 between man and God the like result is achieved as 
 between man and man. The first does not carry the 
 second along with it. It might seem that it ought to, 
 but it does not. Being devout does not guarantee be¬ 
 ing fraternal. Hence to the inquiring Pharisee Jesus 
 gave not one commandment but two, that of love to 
 God and that of love to one’s neighbor. From failure 
 to recognize the duality of obligation society does not 
 become harmonious as fast as it becomes religious. The 
 number of churches in a community cannot be taken 
 as measure of communal tranquillity. Sometimes the 
 inharmony extends even to the relation between the 
 churches themselves. 
 
 There are men who pray to God on Sunday and 
 prey on their neighbors week days. Of two harp- 
 strings each may vibrate with a clear musical resonance, 
 but that does not insure against dissonance when the 
 two are set vibrating at the same time. This may be 
 called a religious world, but it is a very quarrelsome 
 one. All of the nations engaged in the recent most 
 ghastly war of all history worshipped God, except Ger¬ 
 many, which claimed to have a god of its own. 
 
 Society means not simply population, but all the ac¬ 
 tions and reactions that transpire between its members. 
 So that for Christ to save the world means not only 
 the redemption of individual inhabitants but the con¬ 
 version of all their reciprocal relations. That is ex- 
 
REFLECTIONS 
 
 189 
 
 pressed in St. John’s vision of the Holy City, which 
 carries with it the idea of a sanctity which pervades 
 the organization and not merely the individual citizens 
 comprised in the organization. 
 
 This principle constitutes the preacher’s warrant for 
 extending his interest to the social, civic and industrial 
 relations of people. On a recent public occasion when 
 there were being considered the interests of certain in¬ 
 stitutions maintained abroad by American money, in 
 which the representatives of a variety of nationalities 
 were brought together in fraternal and sympathetic 
 relations, one of the speakers defined civilization as 
 “the art of pleasantly living together.” The preacher 
 is therefore quite within his sphere whether he makes 
 war upon what separates man from God to the invalida¬ 
 tion of man’s divine sonship, or makes war upon what 
 separates man from man to the disintegration of society. 
 His sphere is as broad as the field of moral action and 
 relation. 
 
 There are words of great moment which, either from 
 too frequent use or from careless use, become in time 
 bereft of their proper force and significance. One can 
 render valuable service by taking such words and seek¬ 
 ing to reinvigorate them with the energy proper to them. 
 For that reason I have written as follows on the word 
 
 9. 
 
 FAITH 
 
 Faith is a great word, too great to be put to small 
 uses. Language as a whole, and its individual words, 
 
190 MY FORTY YEARS IN NEW YORK 
 
 shrink in consequence of being made to render menial 
 service. They mean as much as they are made to mean 
 by the one who employs them. Language is something 
 into which meaning has to be put as well as something 
 from which meaning has to be drawn out. It is in that 
 respect like a musical instrument that depends for ef¬ 
 fects upon the man who plays it. A diminutive man 
 cannot be an effective reader. He will bring Shake¬ 
 speare and even the Bible down to the level of the 
 ordinary. What might not the love chapter in the 
 Corinthian letter mean if repeated by St. Paul or the 
 Lord’s prayer if voiced by Jesus? 
 
 That, then, is what I mean by calling faith a great 
 word, a capacious word. It holds all the meaning that 
 the soul is capable of breathing into it. It differs from 
 belief: is more vital: has more of the dynamic property. 
 Belief is more passive; is rather a matter of assent, 
 which is easy, costs little. Even an idle and indifferent 
 soul can say “yes” and not feel the strain of it. 
 
 Faith denotes a condition under which one has a 
 sense of being laid hold upon and mastered. We hold 
 our beliefs, but our faith holds us. We are borne along 
 by that in which we have faith as among the high moun¬ 
 tains a boulder is carried by the glacier in whose clutch 
 the boulder has been seized. I never obtained a distinct 
 conception of faith or had it visualized till I first saw a 
 boulder picked up by a glacier and irresistibly borne 
 along by it. At once the boulder became sharer in the 
 glacier’s movement and participant in the glacier’s tre¬ 
 mendous momentum. 
 
 In like manner that in which I have faith determines 
 
REFLECTIONS 
 
 191 
 
 the direction in which I move and the force of my 
 movement. My faith may relate itself to a person, 
 human or divine. Instead of to a person it may connect 
 itself with an idea or a doctrine. And if it is a great 
 doctrine that I have to do with, or rather that has to do 
 with me, and if it has gained such a hold on me as I 
 saw physically exemplified on the mountain, then it is 
 evident how substantial will be its control over me. 
 
 Intelligence, even without the reenforcement of 
 faith, is a working factor in life, and money also makes 
 an amount of contribution toward the same end; yet 
 after all it is faith that constitutes the supreme enginery 
 to which are referable the achievements of a masterlv 
 
 a/ 
 
 life and of a productive history. It alone deepens the 
 throb of the individual and the general heart. The wind 
 may stir the surface of the sea, but only a loftier influ¬ 
 ence suffices to move and control the tides. 
 
 Only in this way can we understand why Abraham 
 became the father of three religions; Moses the uni¬ 
 versal lawgiver, Paul the creator of Christian theology, 
 Washington the father of his country, Lincoln the great 
 emancipator. 
 
 Faith is the universal recipe for human greatness of 
 character and therefore greatness of achievement. The 
 mere fact of being person is no guarantee of efficiency. 
 A man may be gifted by nature and have those gifts 
 supplemented by a liberal education and yet count for 
 nothing as a working factor, make no mark while he 
 lives, create no vacancy when he dies and spend his 
 years marking time. Results are disappointing, but 
 create no surprise any more than there is surprise that 
 
192 MY FORTY YEARS IN NEW YORK 
 
 a cannonball lying upon the ground does no execution. 
 Our man is ineffectual for the same reason as the can¬ 
 nonball, because he is the subject of no compelling force 
 such as exists in being controlled by some big idea, vast 
 truth, dominating purpose. Such trained impotencies 
 the world is full of. They may be sound; so is the 
 cannonball. They are probably weighted with solid 
 possibilities of effect; so is the cannonball. But in one 
 case as in the other, there is none of that vis a tergo 
 that converts possibility into actuality; no impulse gath¬ 
 ered from a point above the level of the ground which 
 can create the efficiency that insures large accomplish¬ 
 ment. 
 
 It is much easier to apprehend religious truth than it 
 is to comprehend it. In the first instance we seize upon 
 truths in their individuality, and in the second we seek 
 to grasp them in their several reactions upon each other. 
 Truths are fractional: truth is integral. It is at the 
 suggestion of this fact that I have written on 
 
 10 . 
 
 THE SHEEP AND THE GOATS 
 
 Under these two divisions the Lord classifies the 
 world’s population. A little later on in the chapter 
 (Matthew twenty-five) there is set forth the standard 
 dependent upon which the classification was made. 
 
 Sometimes, especially in my later years, it has been 
 a question with me whether there is not the disposition 
 on the part of some of the clergy to confine the king¬ 
 dom of heaven within frontiers somewhat narrower 
 than are required by the Lord’s own intention. 
 
REFLECTIONS 
 
 193 
 
 This is not written for the purpose of making the 
 kingdom mean less, but with the desire to have counted 
 as citizens of the kingdom all that by any possibility 
 belong there. There is always encouragement in num¬ 
 bers and we sincerely desire to have that encouragement 
 just so far as it is legitimate. 
 
 The division into sheep and goats seems a harsh 
 means of classification till we read further on and dis¬ 
 cover what meaning is determined for it by the Lord’s 
 method of application. 
 
 If we accept as valid the interpretation which is given 
 to the Gospel by a considerable element of Evangelical 
 preachers we shall have to conclude that citizenship in 
 the heavenly kingdom involves on the part of the indi¬ 
 vidual his conscious relation to Jesus Christ. A part 
 of the purpose of this particular section of Scripture 
 is to show to inquirers that such conscious relation to 
 Him is not necessarily involved. 
 
 When Christ welcomed men to citizenship—that is 
 to say, to a place among the sheep—because they had 
 given Him something to eat when He was hungry, and 
 to drink when thirsty, and entertainment when He was 
 a stranger, they replied that they did not know that it 
 was to Him that they had rendered any such service. 
 “But it was,” He answered. “Hungry people you have 
 fed; to thirsty people you have given drink: and those 
 needing hospitality you have taken care of. Doing it 
 to them I count the same thing as doing it to me. That 
 you were not thinking of me while doing it makes no 
 difference. I have so identified myself with man, with 
 all men, even the humblest, that being kind to them 
 
194 MY FORTY YEARS IN NEW YORK 
 
 counts as loyalty to me.” This identification of Him¬ 
 self with mankind, such that in touching any member 
 of the race we touch Him, is one of the thoughts that 
 give distinction to our Lord’s ministry. There is noth¬ 
 ing absolutely new in the principle, for it is as when a 
 mother takes offense at the wrong done her child or 
 is herself grateful when the child has kindness shown 
 to it. 
 
 But the point which we are just now anxious to 
 emphasize is that when one renders a loving service to 
 another Christ recognizes the act as an evidence of 
 loyalty to Himself even though He may not have been 
 at all in the doer’s mind or have come within the circle 
 of the doer’s acquaintance. Notwithstanding all that 
 this signifies, it is something which I never presented 
 in my own preaching and never heard any other 
 preacher present. 
 
 It seems to indicate that whenever and wherever 
 service is rendered to another out of the fullness of a 
 loving heart, that service has divine account taken of 
 it, and the doer has divine recognition extended to him. 
 The doer may not be the member of any church nor an 
 attendant upon any religious service. He may be ut¬ 
 terly ignorant of the catechism and the Bible, indeed 
 ignorant of the historic Christ Himself. It is quality 
 that counts, not the way in which the quality is secured. 
 It is results and not the machinery by which results are 
 obtained that need to interest us. 
 
 Taking this position in no way involves making light 
 of divine efficiency. If it is true, as is claimed in John’s 
 Gospel, that Christ is the light of every man that cometh 
 
REFLECTIONS 
 
 195 
 
 into the world, we can understand how the divinely 
 implanted seeds of affection could fructify in acts of 
 affectionate service. We can have no interest in ques¬ 
 tioning the operating influence of God’s Spirit in soft¬ 
 ening the hardness of the heart and mellowing it to a 
 condition of tender and beautiful fruitfulness. But 
 the value of such condition does not depend upon the 
 man’s knowing how it was produced nor by whom it 
 was produced, but that it was produced, that it existed, 
 and existed as an affectionate efficiency in practical 
 life. 
 
 When the Lord saw an act that was evidently mo¬ 
 tived by an affectionate impulse He estimated it at its 
 face value without subjecting it to theological tests. 
 Why does not the Church do the same thing? Why 
 ought not the Church to do the same thing and make 
 frank declaration to the world that membership in it 
 is open to every man, woman and child who acts in 
 pursuance of the principle that it is love that is the 
 fulfilling of the law? The pursuance of such a policy 
 would certainly do something toward creating in the 
 world at large a kindlier sentiment toward the Church 
 and bring within the fold many who now stand toward 
 it in a hesitant and unsympathetic relation. 
 
 The late General Armstrong, principal of Hampton 
 Institute, looked forward to entrance into the future 
 world with a very happy curiosity, having answered 
 with a quite confident negation the question 
 
196 MY FORTY YEARS IN NEW YORK 
 
 11 . 
 
 DOES THE HEAVENLY WORLD DIFFER FUNDAMENTALLY 
 
 FROM THE EARTHLY ONE? 
 
 I excuse myself for writing upon so difficult a theme 
 by this consideration, that it means more even to feel 
 of a great question than thoroughly to digest a diminu¬ 
 tive one. 
 
 In approaching our matter it will be pertinent to 
 consider the steadiness of policy that appears to prevail 
 throughout the entire material universe, thus establish¬ 
 ing the principle that the Divine Mind never works in 
 one part of its realm in such a way as to contradict 
 what it does in another part, or in such a way as to 
 ignore what it has done in another part. 
 
 Since it has been discovered that the most distant 
 heavenly bodies that have been brought within the reach 
 of our scientific estimate are in general subject to the 
 same laws as those that are more nearly neighbored 
 to us, we seem justified in assuming that bodies remoter 
 than any that we have yet been able to subject to our 
 investigation are amenable to the same laws, constituted 
 of similar material and propelled by the same impulses. 
 It is only on that assumption that astronomy can con¬ 
 tinue to be a subject of strictly scientific interest. If 
 gravity, for example, operated differently at those ce¬ 
 lestial altitudes with which we are unfamiliar than it 
 does in regions that we have been able to canvass, there 
 would be lacking any basis upon which scientific thought 
 could interestedly or profitably proceed. Matters, how¬ 
 ever, have progressed to such a point that Science does 
 not expect to encounter irreconcilable surprises. It 
 
REFLECTIONS 
 
 197 
 
 feels confident that it has caught the Lord’s thought and 
 that it will remain steadfast. 
 
 We can go further and claim that these forces, effec¬ 
 tive in nature, do not always confine themselves to the 
 material world, but spread across into the region of 
 thought and morals, to that extent breaking down the 
 wall of partition between the realm of things and the 
 realm of spirit, producing the two into one kingdom. 
 The doctrine of “natural laws in the spiritual world” 
 is not at all unfamiliar to thoughtful minds. It is on 
 that account that Jesus could freely quote from com¬ 
 mon things, especially from living things, in illustration 
 of moral and spiritual truths. It is only because there 
 is an interior sympathy and understanding between the 
 two that there could be any propriety in using one as 
 means of setting forth the other. 
 
 What I mean can be made plain by referring to the 
 germination of a buried acorn or other seed. The 
 nucleus of life that is in the shell bursts itself free and 
 comes out, comes up, rises from the dead. That is resur¬ 
 rection operative in the vegetable world; the same thing 
 in a small way and on material ground that transpired 
 that first Sunday morning at the Lord’s grave. St. Paul 
 appreciated the spiritual import of the revival of a seed 
 covered under the soil and therefore introduced it into 
 his wonderful resurrection chapter in his letter to the 
 Corinthians, which he would hardly have done had 
 there been only a casual and accidental resemblance be¬ 
 tween vegetable and personal resurrection. Illustration 
 to be genuine must be vitally related to the thing illus¬ 
 trated. 
 
198 MY FORTY YEARS IN NEW YORK 
 
 So, also, St. John in his Apocalyptic letter paints his 
 picture of the heavenly Jerusalem in colors taken from 
 an earthly palette; and his picture would be worthless 
 and misleading were the lines which he draws such that 
 the human mind, in contemplating them, would be led 
 astray by attaching to them a degree of practical sig¬ 
 nificance. A representation that is a complete falsifica¬ 
 tion is a great deal worse than no representation. We 
 may not be able to interpret John’s imagery in its en¬ 
 tirety, but we can depend upon it that our minds are 
 moving in the direction of the truth when we give to 
 that imagery its first and easiest meaning. 
 
 The issue to which the foregoing paragraphs point 
 with no uncertain finger is that there is but one world, 
 as is denoted bv our word universe, which means 
 “turned into one,” “combined into one whole,” and that 
 what we call the next world, or the future world, is at 
 most only another part, or a different aspect of the one 
 world that now is and always has been. 
 
 Anything that produces definiteness of impression 
 helps to create belief, for it gives to thought something 
 upon which it can poise itself. Such support no sincere 
 teacher will fabricate, but upon quite a slender branch 
 a bird can plume itself in preparation for a far flight. 
 An adult cannot, and still more a child cannot, believe 
 in what affords to the mind no resting-place. As we 
 have seen, slight but very suggestive intimations are 
 given of a region kindred to our present dwelling place, 
 and those intimations—and they are many—should be 
 faithfully utilized. If a child should ask me if in heaven 
 there would be toys that he could play with, I would 
 
REFLECTIONS 
 
 199 
 
 say, ‘‘Yes, or if not just such toys as you have now, 
 others that will satisfy you just as well.” All he wants 
 is to be sure that he will be satisfied. That gives him 
 something upon which his mind can rest. David’s mind 
 rested there when he wrote, “I shall be satisfied.” 
 
 Moreover, if we do not carry into the other world 
 the personality which we at present possess, then by 
 having the old personality (which is ourselves) replaced 
 by a new, we stop at the grave and “immortality” is a 
 misnomer. But if present personality does survive, then 
 there will survive also its present aptitudes and appre¬ 
 ciations, which will involve the continuance of an en¬ 
 vironment so far like the present as to be in adjustment 
 to those aptitudes and meet the requirements of those 
 appreciations. 
 
 It is worth a great deal to us if by consulting the 
 intimations afforded us of the relation between the 
 sphere we occupy now and the realm spiritual, we can 
 come to regard that realm with something the un¬ 
 strained and unstilted thought with which we contem¬ 
 plate the regions beyond the Pacific and the Atlantic 
 and the peoples occupying them. The late Mr. Glad¬ 
 stone was not a man chargeable with mental whimsi¬ 
 cality, and yet it was in just such way that he was wont 
 to contemplate the unseen land and the dear ones living 
 there. It appears that there was some one particular 
 friend who was especially close to his heart in the 
 prayer he was accustomed to offer and which was 
 recited with other prayers when his body was deposited 
 in Westminster Hall. In that prayer occur these 
 words, “Tell him, O gracious Lord, if it may be, how 
 
200 MY FORTY YEARS IN NEW YORK 
 
 much I love him and miss him and long to see him 
 again; and if there be ways in which he may come, 
 vouchsafe him to me as a guide and guard, and grant 
 me a sense of his nearness, in such degree as Thy laws 
 permit.” The closer and more sympathetic the two 
 realms are felt to be, and the more they are conceived 
 to have in common, the less unnatural Mr. Gladstone’s 
 prayer is realized to be, and the more possible that the 
 time may come, if it has not already come, when there 
 shall be interchange of communication between the two 
 continents. 
 
 Religion and Science have been pitted against each 
 other for centuries. Assuming that religion is a real¬ 
 ity, and assuming that science is a reality, there can 
 be no inconsistency between them, for realities can 
 never clash. This matter is handled in a pleasant and 
 intelligible way in chapter seven of John Fiske’s “Idea 
 of God.” 
 
 12 . 
 
 DARWINISM AND THE CHURCH 
 
 No matter how many times science has propounded 
 and substantiated a theory that contradicts the tradi¬ 
 tional interpretation of Scripture, nor how stiff a fight 
 the church has put up against the theory, some way 
 has always been found of reconciling theory and the¬ 
 ology. It is evidence of the firm hold which Scripture 
 has upon the public mind that the long series of these 
 readjustments, to which the church has been compelled, 
 has not seemed to impair the confidence which the pub- 
 
REFLECTIONS 
 
 201 
 
 lie has in the Bible’s essential truthfulness and value. 
 How long this series of readjustments has been, one 
 can easily discover by reading the late Andrew D. 
 White’s work entitled, “History of the Warfare of 
 Science and Theology.” Of course in each case it has 
 cost theology a degree of humiliation, but there is a 
 certain arrogance pertaining to it, as well as to science, 
 that makes it candidate for the discipline of defeat. 
 There is so much of value pertaining to sturdy convic¬ 
 tion that it seems a pity that it has so often to be 
 toned down. 
 
 The doctrine of evolution which is just now a kind 
 of storm center, has been of late years lying rather 
 quietly in the public mind and has only recently been 
 made a burning question by the fact that it is being 
 brought into our schools and colleges, to the perver¬ 
 sion of the young mind it is claimed, and to the under¬ 
 mining of its confidence in the Scriptures and in the 
 religion which is documented in those Scriptures. 
 
 If that claim can be substantiated it undoubtedly 
 produces a serious situation, but at the same time it 
 has to be said that there is nothing so true as the 
 truth. It is the truth, our Lord said, that shall make 
 us free, and not any perversion or falsification of the 
 truth. It is better that our young religionists should 
 know everything than that there should be fostered in 
 their inquisitive minds the suspicion that there are 
 certain truths being concealed from them which, had 
 they been known to them, would cut the ground from 
 under all religion, at least from under our own reli¬ 
 gion. There is nothing which a young person so de- 
 
202 MY FORTY YEARS IN NEW YORK 
 
 sires to know as the thing which he suspects is being 
 purposely kept from him. And it is probable that 
 already there is being made at the public library an 
 unusual call for Darwin’s “Descent of Man.” 
 
 While it is probably the case that the absolute truth 
 of Darwin’s derivation of man has not been absolutely 
 demonstrated, yet there is that in the doctrine which 
 appeals to me and with the spirit of which I warmly 
 sympathize, and I would very much like to have such 
 confirmatory evidence adduced as would put the mat¬ 
 ter beyond question. For my acceptance of the theory 
 has in no wise shaken my confidence in the essential 
 truthfulness of Scripture nor embarrassed me in my 
 preaching of the Gospel. 
 
 That man should have derived from a long series of 
 antecedent conditions, each a slight improvement upon 
 its predecessor, is in so close accord with what we every 
 day see occurring before our eyes, that for him to have 
 sprung to a condition of complete and finished human¬ 
 ness with no previous rehearsals for such humanness, 
 is to suppose that the Creator, whose entire economy 
 of action, as we are made familiar with it, is an economy 
 of rigid adherence to established methods, suddenly, 
 in a spirit of freakishness, abandoned that economy and 
 produced an object that was already ripe without al¬ 
 lowing it ripening opportunity. 
 
 What we learn from the observation of nature’s 
 methods is that in the sphere of living things the stage 
 at which an object arrives on the attainment of its 
 maturity stands at a greater or less remove from the 
 stage at which it commences to exist, the intervening 
 
REFLECTIONS 
 
 203 
 
 space being always covered by a process which we 
 know as growth. This is so universally and persis¬ 
 tently the fact that we have come to regard it as a 
 law of nature, that is to say, one of the fixed methods 
 by which God acts in the natural world. Of course 
 we are not authorized nor qualified to say that the 
 Creator and Sustainer of the universe never violates 
 one of his own laws, but any event that claims to be 
 such violation we regard with immense suspicion, and 
 always feel, and are bound to feel, that the case is not 
 all in, that the problem has elements that have not been 
 taken into the account, or that an untrained imagination, 
 or a leaning toward the picturesque, has usurped the 
 function belonging to a spirit of cool prosaic interpre¬ 
 tation. 
 
 A study of so much of the world as God has to do 
 with has developed in us great confidence in symmetry 
 and uniformity of process, and whenever anything oc¬ 
 curs within the domain of divine action that appears 
 on the face of it to be a violation of harmony, instead 
 of putting its face value upon it we treat it interroga¬ 
 tively and insist that if we had a larger understanding 
 of all that is involved we should discover that what 
 looks like exception is unexplained conformity. 
 
 An instance of this occurred in the seeming misbe¬ 
 havior of the planet Uranus, at that time the outermost 
 known planet of our solar system. The actions of the 
 planet did not conform to what was required of it by 
 the principles of planetary motion as determined by 
 prolonged years of detailed astronomic observation. 
 Now the astronomers, instead of saying that Uranus 
 
204 MY FORTY YEARS IN NEW YORK 
 
 had run wild or that astronomy was an unreliable sci¬ 
 ence or that God had allowed to the planet a little 
 fanciful playfulness of its own, assumed that it was 
 the same well behaved creature as all the other seven 
 planets, that God in his administration of it stood by 
 the inviolable system of his own establishment; and 
 they went about to discover what was the unknown 
 and disturbing element that had the appearance of 
 irregularity. Two astronomers in particular applied 
 themselves to the problem, and within a few hours of 
 each other discovered in a far-off corner of the sky 
 a hitherto unknown planet whose calculated influence 
 upon Uranus was just sufficient to account for its seem¬ 
 ing frolicsomeness. Of course no one is qualified, and 
 least of all myself, to say that what Scripture repre¬ 
 sents as being the first man and the first woman were 
 not produced in a manner that differed from the one 
 employed in the production, so far as history relates, 
 of billions of other men and women, but before publicly 
 making it a feature of my theology, I should want some 
 other authority for the glaring irregularity of their 
 birth than the unsupported testimony of an unknown 
 author writing at an unknown date. 
 
 If Adam and Eve were the first man and first woman 
 and were not produced in some such way as the Book 
 of Genesis describes, it looks very much as though 
 they must have come along in some such way as Mr. 
 Darwin describes, come up from humble beginnings 
 just as all other fine things come up; come up as the 
 oak comes up from an acorn buried in the dirt. A 
 blossom is none the less fine for having to trace its 
 
REFLECTIONS 
 
 205 
 
 history from a root buried in the ground. It is not 
 origin but destiny that interests me. If it is the case 
 that a troglodyte lies somewhere back in the long line 
 of my ancestry and I could get a picture of him I 
 would use it to embellish my autobiography; or any¬ 
 thing prior to him of a still less polite but perhaps more 
 picturesque order. 
 
 The weakness rather than the strength of the Bible 
 lies in its oddities,—such as the unnatural birth of two 
 humans, God’s conversation with a snake, the still¬ 
 standing of the sun without apparent rupture of the 
 balanced harmony of the celestial universe. These fea¬ 
 tures tend to avert from cordial acceptance of the Bible, 
 many who would naturally be its hearty advocates, and 
 will continue to do so as long as they are insisted upon 
 as essential features of a divine revelation. 
 
 That there are not more such recalcitrants is due to 
 the fact that these anomalies are considered as the 
 product of a primitive and imaginative age and not to 
 be made account of as against the appealing motive, 
 stately character and august demands of the grand 
 trend of Scripture. 
 
 The recent attempt of the Government to make 
 people good by statute has resulted in so much resist¬ 
 ance on the part not only of the lawless but also of 
 the law-abiding, as condemns the attempt as being 
 fraught not only with difficulty but also with appar¬ 
 ent impossibility. The resistance which at this writ¬ 
 ing is a steadily growing one, suggests that while 
 Government has its business to mind, the individual 
 
206 MY FORTY YEARS IN NEW YORK 
 
 has his own business to mind and is the only one that 
 can be wisely allowed to mind it. My feeling upon 
 the matter can best be expressed under the title 
 
 13. 
 
 COMPULSORY MORALITY 
 
 There are being devised so many schemes for mak¬ 
 ing people good by law, that the validity of that method 
 of reconstructing society is becoming a live and prac¬ 
 tical question. It is so much simpler than the current 
 method and so much swifter in its operation that if 
 it yields substantial results it will be the part of wisdom 
 and economy to accord to it earnest support and to seek 
 to have our legislative work done by men who are its 
 confessed advocates. So much of what used to be 
 accomplished by hard work is now done just as suc¬ 
 cessfully and much more expeditiously by some kind 
 of impersonal contrivance, that if the same principle 
 can be applied to the inculcation of morality and the 
 promotion of piety, nothing will be lost and very much 
 gained. 
 
 In dealing with the matter one point that should be 
 conscientiously guarded is that within the scope of 
 personality there is a larger or a smaller area which no 
 one but God is authorized to invade. It is so far forth 
 very much like the holy of holies of the old Hebrew 
 temple, into which only God entered and the high 
 priest once in the year. Of our personal holy of holies 
 we are individually our own high priest. We are not 
 undertaking to say how inclusive or exclusive that area, 
 —secured only to God and self,—may be, only it is 
 
REFLECTIONS 
 
 207 
 
 there. There is that within us that cannot be made 
 common property and is beyond the reach of all human 
 intrusion. This does not solve our problem, but it is 
 a fact that is to be kept definitely in mind, as indicating 
 that there is a personal frontier which, whoever under¬ 
 takes to cross, thereby attests himself a thief and a 
 robber. The acceptance of that doctrine is one strong 
 feature of Americanism, and Americanism, so far as 
 capable of being reduced to overt form is the supreme 
 judicatory of our land. 
 
 For the sake of an illustration, and to show how 
 alien to the American idea a man can be, especially 
 if he has become enthusiastically inflamed with the 
 conception that he is God’s vicegerent for the moral 
 reconstruction of society, such an one having asked my 
 opinion upon a certain matter made the ominous retort 
 that if I did not alter my mind it might be bad for 
 me. That is un-American and an un-American is the 
 last person in the world to be qualified to save Amer¬ 
 ica. He was a house-breaker. He tried to break into 
 the sacred domicile of my exclusive personality. My 
 thoughts are my own, and the attempt to force them 
 was the attempt of a vandal, and a sacrilegious effort 
 to trample with unsanctified feet upon what was 
 sacredly my own and no one’s else, except God’s. To 
 have an opinion and to express an opinion, however, 
 are two things. An expressed opinion is sure to drift 
 across the frontier. As Homer said, “words are 
 winged” and we cannot tell how far they may fly or 
 upon what injudicious branch they may light; although 
 it comes pretty close to Americanism, if you have an 
 
208 MY FORTY YEARS IN NEW YORK 
 
 opinion, to speak it, for it is spoken opinions that do 
 a great deal of the world’s work. 
 
 We must not, however, accord to our own inner 
 sanctuary so broad an area as to have it intersect the 
 rights and interests of others. St. Paul carefully 
 guards this point when in speaking of meat that had 
 been previously offered to idols, he says: “If by eat¬ 
 ing such meat I shall bruise the consciences of others, 
 I will eat none of it so long as the world stands.” The 
 Apostle therein confesses that he is responsible not 
 only for himself but to some degree for others. At 
 the same time he does not let the opportunity slip of 
 indicating that it is distinctly righteous to eat such 
 meat himself; he does not complicate matters by admit¬ 
 ting it to be on general principles a moral question 
 when he knows it is not. He had the confidence of 
 his convictions. He lets it be understood that he was, 
 for other’s sake, allowing an invasion of his own sacred 
 preserves. 
 
 There is in that a quality of action worth noting. It 
 is altogether possible, not to say probable, that he did 
 eat of such meat himself. He did not say that he 
 would not. He did not mean to have it understood 
 that he would not. He did not make a conscience 
 matter of what he knew was not a conscience matter 
 to any man who had a conscience that was intelligent 
 and healthy. If he had simply encouraged those Ro¬ 
 man Christians to act according to the dictates of their 
 consciences and left the matter there, he would have 
 omitted a fine opportunity for cultivating in them a 
 conscience that was more rational. He would have left 
 
REFLECTIONS 
 
 209 
 
 them to believe that something was wrong which he, 
 with his more enlightened moral sense, knew was not 
 wrong. 
 
 For we have to remember that conscience is not an 
 infallible guide. It is like a clock in that it requires 
 from time to time to be reset and made to conform to 
 a more perfect standard. And therefore he said to 
 them,—“There is nothing inherently wrong in doing 
 what your mistaken conscience causes you to believe is 
 wrong.” If he had belonged to the class of timid 
 moralists he would have told them to observe the dic¬ 
 tates of conscience and would have stopped there. Con¬ 
 science stands as much in need of education as the 
 intellect does, and theirs was uneducated and he told 
 them so. 
 
 When I entitled this article “Compulsory Morality” 
 I accommodated myself to current conception, but there 
 is no such thing as compulsory morality. An act that 
 we perform by compulsion is not a moral act so far 
 as our own moral sense is concerned, any more than 
 the movement of a man through the air can be called 
 flight when he has been shot from the mouth of a 
 cannon. Compulsory laws are necessary in order to 
 meet the demands of the lawless, but are in the nature 
 of an insult when made to apply to those who are dis¬ 
 posed to do what is proper without any law. Such 
 application may sometimes have to be made in the 
 interests of the lawless and in order to avoid discrim¬ 
 ination; but even so the ends of strict justice are im¬ 
 perfectly met, and to be obliged to refrain from doing 
 what on general principles you know you have a perfect 
 
210 MY FORTY YEARS IN NEW YORK 
 
 moral right to do, is galling and properly so; and when 
 you are censured for expressing yourself as uncom¬ 
 fortable under the infliction, your thoughts incline 
 toward profanity even if you do not allow yourself to 
 give it utterance. It produces a vast muttered chorus 
 of inarticulate dissent. 
 
 Paul in writing to Timothy says that 'flaw is not 
 made for righteous men but for the lawless.” But 
 when it is fastened on the law-abiding as well as on 
 the lawless it produces that kind of reaction that ought 
 to be expected from the self-respecting element of 
 community. To be fastened in a go-cart after one has 
 learned to walk is humiliating. 
 
 If this abridgment of natural prerogative is neces¬ 
 sary in the moral interest of others we will take that 
 fact into the account as Paul did but like him will insist 
 that in so doing we are yielding to what, from a moral 
 point of view, is a counterfeit obligation, from which 
 we expect in due time to be relieved; for we do not like 
 to suppose that the time will not come when our legis¬ 
 lators will be competent to enact laws that will put 
 necessary restraint upon the lawless without violating 
 the natural rights of the law-abiding. 
 
 The reason why some people acquire an education 
 and others do not is at bottom the fact that some real¬ 
 ize their opportunities and utilize them, while others 
 neither utilize nor see. A young man says, “I have no 
 money and therefore I cannot get an education.” Very 
 likely he cannot get a college education, but a college 
 education is not the only education and I would not 
 
REFLECTIONS 
 
 211 
 
 care to say that it is the best education, and so I say 
 that 
 
 14 . 
 
 AN EDUCATION IS NO ONE’S EXCLUSIVE PRIVILEGE 
 
 Any man under ordinary conditions who arrives at 
 the age of forty-five, without having become well edu¬ 
 cated, has himself to blame for it: it all depends on 
 ambition and grit, and by grit I mean determination 
 that is not blighted by adverse conditions. There is a 
 great plenty of college and university in the world, 
 even when Harvard, Yale and Princeton and a hun¬ 
 dred other similar but less pretentious institutions are 
 counted out. The world itself is a university, which 
 is certain to yield educatory reactions if its appeals 
 are respected and responded to. 
 
 There is something artificial in separating one’s self 
 for four years from the normal contacts and activities 
 of life and housing one’s self in an intellectual con¬ 
 servatory. The proof of it is seen in the fact that no 
 one knows exactly what to do with a fresh collegian 
 and what to set him about. His experience has edu¬ 
 cated him but in educating him into one condition has 
 educated him out of another and a natural condition. 
 Conservatory flowers gain something but they lose 
 something. Making a young fellow unnaturally intel¬ 
 ligent by the use of forced treatment, conservatory 
 treatment, has something the same effect upon him 
 intellectually that it would have upon him physically 
 if he were put under conditions of food and exercise 
 when he would have nothing to do but become more 
 
212 MY FORTY YEARS IN NEW YORK 
 
 and more of a corporeal phenomenon. It would add 
 to his weight but would correspondingly blunt his prac¬ 
 tical adaptations. We mean all of that when we say 
 of a boy that he is growing too fast. Rapid growth is 
 not the same as solid growth. 
 
 It may seem inconsistent in a college graduate to 
 criticise collegiate life. I am not exactly criticising 
 it, but only claiming that it has not the whole of the 
 argument, and that because a young man has not the 
 means of a regular college course is no reason for his 
 abandoning his purpose of becoming thoroughly edu¬ 
 cated, for after all that has been said and written upon 
 the matter it should be understood that what a man 
 gains by college training is not familiarity with the 
 topics studied there but the intellectual vigor that the 
 study of those topics develops in him. That has been 
 said so many times and said so emphatically that it 
 seems almost foolish to say it again. 
 
 A man may be deprived of a college training by the 
 necessity he is under of working for a living. But 
 that does not necessarily deprive him of the benefits of 
 such training, for work is educating or rather may be, 
 and whether it is or not depends on the man, depends 
 on whether he works mechanically or humanly, whether 
 he does it as a chore or engrosses himself in it, which 
 latter is the only kind that has the finest value, and is 
 the kind that always operates to produce enlightened 
 manhood in the worker. 
 
 I know all of this by experience and by observation. 
 It is one of the problems that I have brooded over for 
 sixty years, and I know that there is no body of men 
 
REFLECTIONS 
 
 213 
 
 that I can speak to with more assurance of effect than 
 a congregation of rational and industrious farmers. 
 It takes body, brain and heart to make good work, and, 
 those three ingredients present, the worker is bound 
 to be on the make. The reason why so many millions 
 of common workers remain common, is because they 
 consent to stand as substitutes for machines and be¬ 
 cause their employers for the sake of keeping their 
 wages down are interested to have them continue to 
 think of themselves as machines, and are anxious to 
 have their ranks kept full by being liberally replenished 
 by thoughtless and aimless immigrants. 
 
 Another point that I want to make is that there is 
 a certain magical influence attributed to college expe¬ 
 rience that does not belong to it and that very much 
 of what the college affords a student can be acquired 
 just as well out of college as in. As I look back over 
 our four years of college I realize that a very con¬ 
 siderable percentage of the service which our profes¬ 
 sors rendered us consisted in holding us to our work. 
 They buttressed our languid determination. By know¬ 
 ing that we had to be so thoroughly acquainted with 
 our lessons as to be able to recite them, and by know¬ 
 ing that a record of the quality of our recitations was 
 being kept day by day for future use, we were arti¬ 
 ficially strained to the point of respectable industry. 
 It was an arrangement designed to offset the human 
 disposition to be laggards. If I had had the disposition 
 all the mathematics which I acquired in college I could 
 have achieved without a professor as well as with. So 
 of all that I learned of history and biography. The 
 
214 MY FORTY YEARS IN NEW YORK 
 
 best work in Latin that I ever did I did while I was 
 a dry-goods clerk. 
 
 This does not mean that the acquisitions made in 
 college will not be better made in college than when 
 studying by one's self. It means that the average 
 human purpose is so lacking in stability that it requires 
 to be supplemented by external appliances, and that 
 each college professor discharges a large part of his 
 function in serving as just such an appliance, and sav¬ 
 ing the student from mediocrity and the blight that is 
 wrought by irresolution. 
 
 Even if a man is working eight hours a day as I 
 was when I was selling groceries and was clerk in a 
 dry-goods store, he will still find some means of doing 
 what he is tremendously determined on doing. Eight 
 hours out of twenty-four leaves sixteen hours for some¬ 
 thing else, and as a rule the less time a man has for 
 doing nothing in particular, the better off he is and 
 the less liable to arrest. 
 
 And all of this without underestimating the cultured 
 value of mind’s influence upon mind; for how many 
 are there of those who bewail, or think they bewail, 
 the meagerness of their opportunities, who realize that 
 through a system of free libraries are made accessible 
 to them the biggest minds, the best thoughts and the 
 finest sentiments, human and divine, with which history 
 has been enriched during its course of thirty-five cen¬ 
 turies. An open library is a published university, into 
 which any one can enter without matriculation, in 
 which he can continue to grow wise without an in¬ 
 structor, and from which he can graduate at only 
 
REFLECTIONS 
 
 215 
 
 nominal expense. As well might a man, standing out 
 in the midst of Western prairies, or on the back of 
 the Alps or the Andes, claim to be the victim of suf¬ 
 focation, as lament the absence of opportunity and 
 the poverty of privilege in the midst of a world as 
 full of splendid impulse as the sky is of sunshine. 
 Eyes have they but they see not. Minds, but they 
 think not; souls, but they breathe not. What can they 
 who have some vision, do more to open eyes that are 
 closed than to quicken aspirations that are unawakened? 
 
 Fundamental sympathy between nations will hardly 
 be secured by mere abstention from acts of hostility, 
 or by the adoption of an economic system that will 
 bear with only equal pressure upon all parties. Two 
 nations, like two individuals, may be sufficiently com¬ 
 panioned to render unlikely a resort to arms and yet 
 be far removed from relations of fraternity. 
 
 15. 
 
 THE FELLOWSHIP OF NATIONS 
 
 Although it may be a long time before the nations 
 of the world become an organized unity, yet we have 
 already come so far toward it and entered into so close 
 relations with one another, that no nation suffers with¬ 
 out its misfortune reflecting itself in the condition of 
 the remaining nations. There results, therefore, a kind 
 of enforced international brotherhood to this extent, 
 that if one member suffers all the remaining members 
 suffer with it. 
 
 We may not be proud of our relationship to certain 
 
216 MY FORTY YEARS IN NEW YORK 
 
 members of the international fraternity, but neverthe¬ 
 less we cannot escape being bound under their burdens 
 and suffering from their offenses. 
 
 It has been suggested that we engross ourselves with 
 the interests of the South American Republics, and 
 thus provide ourselves with all those commercial facili¬ 
 ties and opportunities that will obviate the necessity for 
 our existing eastern and transpacific connections: “Let 
 Europe and Asia take care of themselves and the two 
 Americas constitute a close-communion world all by 
 themselves.” 
 
 The bald statement of such a proposition is its own 
 refutation. If we could move out into some other 
 sphere like Mars or Jupiter,—Jupiter preferably on 
 account of its tremendous expanse of territory,—some 
 such scheme might be worth considering. But so long 
 as we have one sun and the same moon and only one 
 axis of diurnal revolution, we cannot ignore the divine 
 intention and shall have to stay by each other, nolens 
 volens. 
 
 Making up our minds to an uncomfortable situation 
 is the first step toward adjusting ourselves to it and 
 then to availing of the advantages that it may be pre¬ 
 pared to afford us. And certainly it would be great 
 living if all the kingdoms of this world could, to such 
 an extent, become one, that each individual realm 
 would be the means and end of all the rest. 
 
 Some such idea really lay in the back of the head 
 of all (or most) of those who have met in conference 
 at Versailles, Washington and Genoa, and still earlier 
 at the Hague. As animals are swayed by instinct, so 
 
REFLECTIONS 
 
 217 
 
 humans are very often controlled by impulses too pro¬ 
 found for them to be able altogether to appreciate. 
 History works itself out along invisible as well as 
 along visible lines. One cannot study history without 
 realizing how much wiser were some of its events than 
 were the human authors of those events. We are born 
 to be optimists, a disposition that is likely to be de¬ 
 feated only by some derangement of the physical sys¬ 
 tem. Pessimism is a mild form of dementia. 
 
 As such is bound to be the world’s destiny, one con¬ 
 tribution toward such an issue will be a more intimate 
 acquaintance with the world in its foreign and remote 
 parts, with its people, its life and interests and its his¬ 
 tory. By travel, commerce, electricity and radio the 
 distant is being made very close. 
 
 Our press is doing less than an intelligent and broad- 
 spirited press might and ought to be doing in the way 
 of making not only Europe, but South America, Asia 
 and Africa familiar to the minds and hearts of our 
 people. It ought to tell us not only what we are curi¬ 
 ous to know, but some things that we are indifferent 
 to, but which we ought in the interest of the world’s 
 progress, to be familiar with. 
 
 Some things that we are foolishly and abnormally 
 desirous of knowing would make the newspaper fuller 
 by being omitted and space be thereby afforded for 
 instructing the public in what the public needs to know 
 in order to the encouragement of a better civilization 
 here and everywhere. 
 
 Something would be achieved in the direction of 
 bringing about a closer relation between us and other 
 
218 MY FORTY YEARS IN NEW YORK 
 
 people if the press would tell us more about life and 
 how it is lived in foreign parts, disclosing not only the 
 outer features of human existence, but its more inti¬ 
 mate qualities, as recorded in social and domestic life, 
 so leading us to realize that our personal differences 
 are not to be estimated by our geographical distances. 
 With all of variation that there is from our own meth¬ 
 ods and manners there is still very much that is in 
 common with our own, and it is by fostering in us a 
 sense of community that the beginnings are made of 
 friendly acquaintanceship. 
 
 Still farther than that our people need to be pleas¬ 
 antly introduced to that underlying basis of foreign 
 life which is stealthily expressed in its philosophical and 
 religious ideas and aspirations. Foreign nations may 
 trade together but commerce is not a conciliatory bond. 
 Trade among people of the same country and some¬ 
 times even among those who call themselves Christians, 
 is a game in which each of the two parties engaged 
 tries to get the better of the other, or at any rate aims 
 not to be outdone by the other. We do not love our 
 grocer or our butcher. So that interchange of com¬ 
 modities cannot be relied upon as efficient preparation 
 for the cementing of substantial international friend¬ 
 ships. By such means there is secured only an external 
 approach, not internal access. 
 
 If there is to be true fellowship between dissimilar 
 peoples, it must be on the basis of that which is dear¬ 
 est to us; namely our philosophy and our religion. 
 There is not involved in that proposition the necessity 
 for accord in all the details of our respective systems 
 
REFLECTIONS 
 
 219 
 
 of thought and of piety, but accord so far as relates 
 to their fundamental element, which, upon searching 
 analysis, may be found to be identical in all. I sub¬ 
 join the following paragraph recently written by a 
 Chinaman:—“Confucianism, Buddhism and Christian¬ 
 ity, the last a beautiful product of Hellenism and 
 Hebraism, each in its own way appeals to what is 
 permanent in us, and, as far as I can see, there is 
 nothing in their naked simplicity which can give suf¬ 
 ficient cause for any irreconcilability. Personally I 
 have become convinced that a true Confucianist is, in 
 the bottom of his heart, also a true Buddhist and a 
 true Christian, and that the reverse is also true. But 
 if we are not prepared to go as far as that, there is 
 little doubt that they can at least be devoted com¬ 
 panions. It is here that we find the key to a genuine 
 internationalism.” 
 
 What I especially prize in the above quotation is the 
 writer’s thought that true international fellowship can 
 be secured only as it is based on that which is deepest 
 in the thought and experience of the combined peoples. 
 
 In the Scripture estimate of what is involved in wife¬ 
 hood and motherhood, there is far more included than 
 is contained in the modern exercise of those two rela¬ 
 tions ; and the conviction which I have that that reduced 
 estimate has an unfortunately close bearing upon the 
 tone of our civilization has induced the preparation of 
 the following article on 
 
220 MY FORTY YEARS IN NEW YORK 
 
 16. 
 
 MOTHER AND CHILD 
 
 There must be something large in life’s commence¬ 
 ment if it is to be large in the finish. In things that 
 live the end never gets altogether away from the be¬ 
 ginning. Dimensions will change with the progress 
 of time, but there is something about quality that is 
 continuous. Samuel, who was perhaps the finest speci¬ 
 men of humanity mentioned in Old Testament history, 
 and Jesus, who was the finest specimen of humanity in 
 all history, were already holy in the act of conception. 
 
 Hannah and Mary had a sanctified longing for off¬ 
 spring, an impulse unconsciously present already in 
 the two infants the instant they commenced to be. Un¬ 
 sanctified animal impulse cannot vouch for quality. In 
 the birth of neither of these two was there anything 
 accidental. Each was the fulfillment of a chastened 
 desire, a hallowed purpose. 
 
 In that there is something to be contemplated by 
 young wives in the prospect of a conjugal life. Other¬ 
 wise the bearing of children reduces very nearly to the 
 level of animal breeding. It is not going too far to 
 claim that mothers to whom maternity means all that 
 it meant to Hannah, can be regularly expected to have 
 children that are after the model of Hannah’s child. 
 Something of this, if wisely said, might be delicately 
 indicated in the prayer accompanying the marriage 
 service. It would give a meaning and add a dignity 
 to marriage such as it seems in these days to be sorely 
 in need of acquiring. I believe that the Catholic clergy 
 
REFLECTIONS 
 
 221 
 
 often assume a liberty in this matter such as is rarely 
 exercised by Protestant ministers. We are not cattle 
 and there is no place where that fact ought to be more 
 distinctly recognized than at the altar. 
 
 Judging from appearances the average parent is so 
 materially organized as to ignore life’s spiritual side, 
 even in life’s most distinguished crises; and yet with¬ 
 out it we are animals and ought to run with the herd. 
 As already said we cannot get away from beginnings. 
 The genius of the oak is the preserved genius that was 
 in the acorn. The last tone of the anthem is the echo 
 of its first note. 
 
 Maternity carries an infinite responsibility and that 
 responsibility dates back to the child’s initial moment, 
 and, as in the instance of Hannah, to a period even 
 prior to that moment. Women are evading maternity; 
 in part because children are regarded by them as an 
 incumbrance, and in part because they so imperfectly 
 interpret the import of their own constitution as to 
 fail of finding an obligation involved in that consti¬ 
 tution. Women may pride themselves upon their ca¬ 
 pacity for public activities, even though bringing into 
 the world with them no unmistakable indication of 
 such capacity; but they do bring into the world with 
 them unmistakable evidence that they were designed 
 to be mothers, and by exchanging the nursery for the 
 rostrum and the hustings evince a sensitiveness to the 
 call of their own ambition which they deny to the call 
 of nature, which is the voice of God; for every phys¬ 
 ical function is a divine mandate. 
 
 It is unfortunate for our civilization that this mis- 
 
222 MY FORTY YEARS IN NEW YORK 
 
 interpretation of God’s purpose in constituting woman 
 as he has, is practiced so widely among the superior 
 ranks of our population; but it is perhaps equally un¬ 
 fortunate that that purpose is so multitudinously exe¬ 
 cuted among the inferior ranks, thus rendering the 
 negligence of the other class only the more disastrous. 
 Much as we are damaged by the tremendous influx 
 of indiscriminate human material from abroad, the 
 worst feature of it may easily be the exceptional fecun¬ 
 dity of that material and the free scope that is given 
 to it; so that in proportion to its numbers it contributes 
 much more numerously to population than does the 
 element of cultivated native Americans; in that way 
 steadily operating to depress the tone of national life. 
 It is only a problem of arithmetic to determine what 
 the ultimate issue will be if present conditions are 
 indefinitely continued. 
 
 What I have designated as life’s commencement is 
 to be understood as extending considerably later than 
 the prenatal period and as embracing also that stadium 
 of life in which the foundations of character are laid, 
 and which constitute still a part of the territory sub¬ 
 ject only to maternal control. No one can administer 
 it as the mother’s substitute. Except in cases where 
 there are insurmountable obstacles, for a mother to 
 sublet her responsibility at this stage of the game is a 
 wicked and unnatural evasion. In order to realize 
 that it is against nature she need only inspect the cow- 
 pen and the sheepfold. There are lessons that we can 
 learn even from the conduct of dumb beasts. They live 
 close to nature and do not replace nature’s laws by con- 
 
REFLECTIONS 
 
 223 
 
 ceits suggested by convenience or by new inventions. It 
 is the mother-sheep that not only bears the lamb but 
 that takes care of the lamb after its birth. To do 
 otherwise would be to decline to be the lamb’s mother. 
 There are in these days very many motherless children 
 both of whose parents are still living. 
 
 It is in the period following on after birth that are 
 laid what I have called the foundations of character, 
 and during which only the mother is the competent 
 administrator. It is to the mother that the infant 
 instinctively clings and in her that every advantage of 
 influence inheres. To thrust the little dependent upon 
 a hired nurse is an act of unnatural disinheritance. 
 This unconscious clinging of the child contains in it 
 the rudiments of affection, an affection which in due 
 course generates the impulse of obedience; so that, by 
 the law of nature, out of the warmth of the maternal 
 atmosphere develops the twin experience of love and 
 law, the surrender of the heart and the surrender of 
 the will. Those two surrenders I call the foundations 
 of character. They are what, as they are duly devel¬ 
 oped, compose the framework of fine and robust man¬ 
 hood and womanhood. The later section of our Bible 
 devotes itself to one; the earlier section to the other. 
 And what I insist upon and what I know is, that no 
 one can initiate a child into the introductory chapters 
 of that lesson like a good mother. Upon that point 
 there is no room for contradiction. 
 
 In character building as in other forms of construc¬ 
 tion primary consideration has to be given to funda¬ 
 mentals. Foundation cannot be introduced after erec- 
 
224 MY FORTY YEARS IN NEW YORK 
 
 tion is already in progress. It is therefore never too 
 early to cultivate the love impulse in the child and to 
 inculcate the lesson of respect for authority. Such 
 lessons are never so well conveyed by verbal precept 
 as by personal influence making itself inwardly felt 
 without being articulate. Precepts that we force upon 
 the attention of a child usually rebound. We can have 
 no less ambition for a child than that it be possessed 
 of a loving disposition, and a yielding nature, so that 
 it will love because it is its impulse to love, and obey 
 because it possesses the genius of obedience. When 
 those two qualities become fundamental to the child’s 
 personal character, the child is safe and has become 
 an experimental fulfillment of the Gospel and the Law. 
 
 To no one but the mother does that become quite 
 capable of accomplishment. She is the only one that 
 can so put her influence at the very first stages of 
 young development, and so preoccupy capacities of af¬ 
 fection and loyalty as to secure mastery there before 
 opposite tendencies have had opportunity to invade the 
 moral domain. In that way by moulding the child’s 
 present she constructs the child’s future, and by fash¬ 
 ioning the little boy or girl makes the man and woman. 
 
 Any woman who is not prepared for that kind and 
 intensity of maternal development will do well to de¬ 
 cline the overtures of wifehood. She will serve the 
 world better by not placing herself in a position likely 
 to increase the irresponsible element of our population 
 and to add to the number of those who come up with¬ 
 out being brought up. I have no sympathy with the 
 hundreds and thousands of mothers that in these days 
 
REFLECTIONS 
 
 225 
 
 are claiming that they have no control over their chil¬ 
 dren. The thing needed is not control over their chil¬ 
 dren but the early establishment in the children of those 
 impulses of love and that gentle respect for authority 
 that will operate with the effect of an interior magis¬ 
 tracy. I believe that there is no kind of training that 
 comes so close to the world’s present needs as that 
 which will give to intending wives a delicate appre¬ 
 ciation of the entire problem of motherhood, its respon¬ 
 sibilities and its opportunities, and the relation of young 
 culture to the weal or woe of the world. 
 
 Life is a precious boon and that there are so many 
 at present that undervalue it and that even purposely 
 abbreviate it, is an unhappy symptom of the times. 
 Most of us, however, love life and are hoping to con¬ 
 tinue to a ripe age and after this life to go on living 
 forever. To what extent its continuance is subject to 
 our own determination is indicated in the following 
 article on yj 
 
 THE ART OF LONGEVITY 
 
 The above title must not be construed to indicate 
 that duration of life is subject to individual control 
 except within narrow limits. The basal fact upon 
 which we have to proceed is that the term of each man’s 
 life is predetermined by the constitution which he 
 brings with him into the world. Solomon seems to 
 have understood this when he asked,—“Why should 
 a man die before his time?” There is a point this 
 side of which it is not intended that a man should die 
 and beyond which it is not intended that he should live. 
 
226 MY FORTY YEARS IN NEW YORK 
 
 Human life is conditional in that particular very 
 much as is an ordinary time-piece. One clock is made 
 to run twenty-four hours. Another will not require 
 to be wound up oftener than once a week or perhaps 
 three weeks. It depends entirely on the way it is con¬ 
 structed. A seven-day clock cannot be constrained to 
 run three weeks, however liberally it may be lubricated; 
 and a one-day clock can be confidently depended upon 
 to run twenty-four hours, provided its works are not 
 meddled with and it is allowed to work out its consti¬ 
 tutional destiny. 
 
 (Since this article was originally written, Professor 
 Pearl of Johns Hopkins University has made similar 
 use of the clock in illustration of the same principle, 
 that the term of human life is already prescribed in 
 the physical constitution that a man brings with him 
 into the world.) 
 
 In the case of the clock destiny is determined by the 
 manufacturer. It is settled when it comes out of the 
 shop. As soon as it makes its first tick the question 
 is already decided how many more ticks it will make, 
 assuming of course that it is given the chance appro¬ 
 priate to its method of construction and that its inte¬ 
 rior mechanism is not interfered with. So that “the 
 art of longevity” does not consist in a scheme for 
 living longer than we are constructed to live but in 
 using the means by which we may live as long as we 
 were constructed to live. 
 
 In the case of the child heredity occupies the place 
 of the clock-maker. In that the child plays no part. 
 We cannot choose our parents. It is matter of fore- 
 
REFLECTIONS 
 
 227 
 
 ordination. We are entirely in the hands of God and 
 our ancestry up to the time when we come into the 
 exercise of free agency. And even when that period 
 of irresponsibility is passed the most that we can do 
 is to allow the mechanism of life unobstructed oppor¬ 
 tunity to work itself out according to the laws of its 
 own make. 
 
 In the same way that we can leave the clock un¬ 
 lubricated, can monkey with its mechanical adjust¬ 
 ments, expose it to dust that will encumber its bearings, 
 so in a considerable variety of ways we can embarrass 
 the natural processes of life, and thus defeat life's 
 constitutional intention; and it is only in refraining 
 from the infliction of such embarrassments that con¬ 
 sists the art of longevity. But with whatever punc¬ 
 tilious constancy we refrain from such infliction we 
 shall not thereby postpone the appointed hour of our 
 death. 
 
 Barring exceptions, brutes when left to themselves, 
 last as long as they are intended to last. They live the 
 natural life, unembarrassed by artificialities. They 
 exist in the sunshine and breathe nature’s uncorrupted 
 air. Their apparel furnished by nature offers no ob¬ 
 struction to the natural processes of life. Their food 
 is only that which is adapted to their physical demands, 
 untainted by unhygienic delicacies. They eat to live, 
 not live to eat. Their drink is only that which Adam 
 and Eve had prior to the fall. The space which they 
 occupy is sufficiently ample to avoid the necessity of 
 crowding. They build no cities but confine themselves 
 to the country. 
 
228 MY FORTY YEARS IN NEW YORK 
 
 While in a state of nature they allow themselves all 
 the sleep they require and although they have to earn 
 their living it costs them, as a rule, no more effort and 
 exercise than is conducive to health, and have sufficient 
 time remaining for rest and for the practice of such 
 antics as meet their animal demands. 
 
 They take no thought for the morrow and do not 
 burden themselves with the expectation of adverse con¬ 
 ditions that have not yet arrived and very probably 
 never will. In that and some other respects, they reap 
 the advantage of their stupidity. We pay for our 
 superiority to the brute by having some years cut off 
 at the end of life. The further we get away from 
 nature the shorter tends to be the distance between 
 our cradle and our grave. 
 
 There will always be progressives and conservatives. 
 Every complete harness contains both tugs and hold¬ 
 backs. The sky illustrates the balanced play of cen- 
 trifugence and centripetence. My own tendency of 
 thought is set forth in this article on 
 
 18. 
 
 INNOVATIONS 
 
 The presumption is always in favor of the old as 
 against the new. The new is untried, and is therefore 
 necessarily experimental. Every year that the old has 
 been in force is a separate argument for its validity. 
 It has the endorsement of the thousands, perhaps hun¬ 
 dreds of thousands that have accepted it and stood by 
 it. It requires colossal assurance to say of a hundred 
 
REFLECTIONS 
 
 229 
 
 thousand or a million people that they are cherishing 
 a wrong conception and are living at the impulse of it. 
 
 We do not have to plead for the old, it pleads for 
 itself. The new can in that particular show nothing 
 for itself and has to depend entirely upon the guar¬ 
 antee of its advocates. So that in the first instance 
 it is the advocates that require to be interrogated and 
 investigated. Like any other witnesses their testimony 
 will be worth only as much as they are themselves 
 worth. 
 
 The early advocates of a new idea, doctrine or phi¬ 
 losophy, will certainly come from the class of the light- 
 minded people of the same temper as the Athenians 
 that St. Paul described as interested only in hearing 
 and telling some new thing. The readiness with which 
 that class of mind espouses novelty is to be explained 
 by the fact that the mental feebleness with which they 
 have grasped previous conceptions makes them easy 
 candidates for the acceptance of almost anything that 
 is offered them in its place. An innovator is therefore 
 certain to gather about him a quick but a cheap follow¬ 
 ing, and to create so immediate and strong a draft as 
 to delude and bewitch certain more competent minds 
 that may nevertheless be sensitive to the argument of 
 numbers. 
 
 There are two classes of innovators, of which one is 
 composed of those who, by research or by accident, 
 bring to view a fact or principle that can be established 
 by objective demonstration, to which class belong such 
 men as Galileo and Sir Isaac Newton. 
 
 A much larger class is made up of those who work 
 
230 MY FORTY YEARS IN NEW YORK 
 
 in the realm of idea, rather than of concrete and tan¬ 
 gible fact. Truth, of course, is from everlasting and 
 has its existence in the being of God, while an idea is 
 only an attempt at truth and comes and goes with the 
 mind that develops it. That in every right-angled tri¬ 
 angle the square of the hypotenuse is equal to the 
 sum of the squares of the other two sides is a truth. 
 It was a truth before the world was made. A mathe¬ 
 matician discovered it. No mathematician could have 
 invented it. Even God did not make it. It inheres 
 in his nature. 
 
 Truth then is not what we dispute about but at¬ 
 tempts at truth that have their origin only in the human 
 mind. They may have a truth underlying them or 
 they may not. Or they may be half truth and half 
 human notion, quite unlike the mathematical proposi¬ 
 tion just mentioned. Our ideas are only an invention, 
 not a discovery and bear the complexion of the mind 
 that produces them. Tell me the character and quality 
 of a man and I will tell you the type of his philosophy 
 and theology. It is like plants which derive their nature 
 from the nature of the soil. 
 
 The only possible value of discussion,—and ordi¬ 
 narily it has no value at all,—is that it acquaints each 
 of the disputants with his opponent’s views and gives 
 him opportunity to appropriate them. That is not the 
 usual result of discussion, however, for it regularly 
 ends in making each man satisfied with his own opin¬ 
 ion and more antagonistic to the opinion which he 
 combats. 
 
 A large class of innovators is composed of what are 
 
REFLECTIONS 
 
 231 
 
 known as free-thinkers, by which term we may under¬ 
 stand those with whom absolute truth means so little 
 that one person is allowed to have the same right to 
 his opinion that the next man has to his, regardless 
 of the fact that no man has a right to an opinion that 
 is not a right opinion; and unrestrained by the con¬ 
 sideration that we are no more justified in circulating 
 questionable opinions than we are in passing suspicious 
 money. Ideas are mental currency and we cheat a 
 person to whom in the way of conversation or debate 
 we pass an opinion that has not been minted, and im¬ 
 pressed with the authorized stamp. Each man is free 
 to keep in his pocket, his mental pocket, any kind of 
 mental currency he pleases but not to employ it in 
 intellectual traffic. “Free thought” is not an expres¬ 
 sion to be tolerated among reasonable beings, for it is 
 equivalent to claiming that a man’s opinions stand to 
 truth in no relation of accountability. 
 
 Novel ideas are often propounded by people in re¬ 
 taliation upon some accepted opinion that crosses the 
 grain of their own prejudices; in the same spirit and 
 at the same impulse that impels a bad boy to disbe¬ 
 lieve in corporeal punishment or that constrains an idle 
 student to take exception to a strictly constructed cur¬ 
 riculum. Religious creeds are more indebted to preju¬ 
 dice and to preference than to Scripture. There is no 
 confidence to be placed in convictions, religious or 
 otherwise, except to the degree that their advocate has 
 been able to count himself out in the framing of them. 
 The boy does not believe in corporeal punishment be¬ 
 cause he has no taste for a whipping. The father does 
 
232 MY FORTY YEARS IN NEW YORK 
 
 believe in it because his days of being whipped are 
 over. 
 
 Perhaps it is because of the beauty of my own early 
 surroundings that I lay so heavy emphasis upon the 
 home. But at any rate it is the home, the family, not 
 the individual, that is the unit of society. The indi¬ 
 vidual is always a fraction. Anything or anybody that 
 is unattached is a fraction. So that it is justly to be 
 urged that 
 
 19. 
 
 NATIONAL CHARACTER IS DEPENDENT ON DOMESTIC 
 
 CHARACTER 
 
 It is the home, not the individual, that is the ultimate 
 unit in our civilization. Individuals can be counted 
 upon if the homes are taken care of. The home is the 
 one original institution and the basis of everything 
 that makes for a sound collective life, and is consti¬ 
 tuted in the conjugal union of one man and one woman. 
 That is the divine order of things; first, a healthy con¬ 
 jugal basis and second, concentrated attention devoted 
 to whatever in the shape of boy or girl develops from 
 that basis. This covers considerable ground but is sim¬ 
 ply stated and if accepted and practiced, guarantees a 
 normal and healthful social and political life. 
 
 We should be a happy and successful people if as 
 much care were expended in giving things a good start 
 as there is in correcting them after they have had a 
 bad start. One has only to consider what are the 
 humanitarian lines along which human power and 
 
REFLECTIONS 
 
 233 
 
 money power are being invested to realize how much 
 of it goes to the undoing of what has been done faultily. 
 The public is administering a kind of varied and uni¬ 
 versal hospital directed to a hundred species of curative 
 enterprises. Society spends its time getting well. It 
 takes but a moment to fall down and six months for 
 the bones to knit that were broken by falling down. 
 Repairs get in the way of construction. 
 
 As already indicated our fundamental concern is 
 with the conjugal basis,—one man and one woman 
 bound to each other in ties of holy matrimony. I am 
 particular to call it holy matrimony, for if of any 
 other kind, it makes no difference by what formalities 
 the nuptial tie is sealed. Marriages that are the product 
 of animal passions, or that are developed from finan¬ 
 cial or social considerations, are unholy, and made no 
 more holy by being countenanced by the rites of the 
 church. The town clerk’s license and clerical benedic¬ 
 tion do not render sound that which is inherently 
 unsound; and the increasing frequency with which 
 marriage serves as the necessary preliminary to di¬ 
 vorce, makes it evident that matrimony has been de¬ 
 spoiled of considerable of that sweet solemnity by 
 which it was characterized in days gone by. 
 
 Nor is the frequency of divorce, in itself considered, 
 the most ominous feature of the situation, for vastly 
 more marriages hold to the end of life than are officially 
 annulled in mid-life. What we have quite as much 
 to fear is the tendency, fostered by the frequency of 
 divorce, to regard all marriages, even marriage itself, 
 as a commonplace transaction, a social amusement, pos- 
 
234 MY FORTY YEARS IN NEW YORK 
 
 sessed of only the same degree of sacred dignity as 
 any other business arrangement. Under existing con¬ 
 ditions all of that, even though not confessed, can 
 easily find a hidden place in the minds of candidates 
 even when standing before the altar. I did once have 
 what amounted to such confession, made by a bride 
 who had just covenanted to be the lifelong helpmate 
 of her chosen spouse, and who said while that spouse 
 was settling with the officiating clergyman,—‘‘This is 
 making a good deal of fuss about a small matter, isn’t 
 it?” I would have divorced them on the spot if it 
 had lain within my province, for divorce was sure to 
 eventuate and it might have prevented possible children 
 from being nurtured by an unfit mother. 
 
 That by an easy transition leads to what I stated to 
 be the second part of our matter, namely, concentrated 
 attention devoted to whatever in the shape of boy or 
 girl develops from the conjugal basis, in other words 
 the maintenance and administration of a home. 
 
 The word home involves a sentiment which does not 
 find itself in the German word “haus.” We gain a 
 suspicion of what the sentiment is, from the fact that 
 we always say a “boarding house” never a “boarding 
 home” “Apartment house” not an apartment home, 
 for the true home is not a caravansary but a kind of 
 sanctuarv. 
 
 j 
 
 I speak from personal knowledge of what a true 
 home is, for I grew up in one. Home, as I knew it, 
 was a kind of nest, the place where I expected to be 
 unless something especial called and held me elsewhere. 
 My parents contributed to the interests and well-being 
 
REFLECTIONS 
 
 235 
 
 of the children but did so especially by making the 
 home itself pleasant, comfortable and healthful. They 
 treated home as the gardener treats his blooming little 
 responsibilities, in that he spends less effort on the 
 individual plants than he does on the soil they root in 
 and the atmosphere they respire. They could vouch 
 for the children if they could succeed in making home 
 dear to them, and so dear that after the parents are 
 gone hence, the affection of the children would still 
 return to the old homestead. 
 
 Mothers are saying that it is difficult to keep their 
 daughters from running the street. When I was a 
 boy I used to have to look after the cows and when 
 they had gotten the grass cropped close on father’s 
 land, they would jump the fence into our neighbor’s 
 lot. The cows were not to blame; the girls are not to 
 blame. It is due to scarcity of domestic forage. A 
 mother was recently asked in regard to her daughter. 
 She replied that really she knew very little about her, 
 she was herself so taxed by her social duties and her 
 public engagements that she had very little time to look 
 after her. That is one of the fruits of the enfran¬ 
 chisement of women! I think that in course of time 
 the public will realize that the recent so-called uplift 
 of woman involved rather the depression of her own 
 sex and the impaired advantage of society as a whole. 
 
 A little time ago while in the barber’s chair I fell 
 to talking with him about his family and how in these 
 difficult days he got along with his children. (By the 
 way, there is a good deal to be gathered from the 
 common sense of respectable people of the working 
 
236 MY FORTY YEARS IN NEW YORK 
 
 class. Their intelligence has not been spoiled by over¬ 
 refinement.) “We have no difficulty with our chil¬ 
 dren. We keep them off the streets by making them 
 contented and happy at home. The whole family often 
 go out together and by keeping parents and children 
 interested in each other and giving the younger mem¬ 
 bers pleasures suited to them without having to go 
 outside after them we are saved the troubles and anx¬ 
 ieties that so many parents are subject to.” 
 
 It is noticeable from this story that the father feels 
 that he and his wife are jointly responsible for the 
 children’s loyalty to their home. Fathers are apt to 
 shirk the responsibility and to claim exemption on the 
 ground that they meet the extent of their accounta¬ 
 bility by earning the money needed for meeting house¬ 
 hold expenses. Money is not a personal asset. It 
 cannot do personal work. Particularly as the children 
 grow the father’s personal touch is indispensable. A 
 girl and especially a boy who has not experienced 
 paternal ministration suffers a loss from which after 
 years of contact with the male sex will not perfectly 
 indemnify him. 
 
 Sprung as I am from the working classes, and hav¬ 
 ing spent my earliest years upon the farm, I have never 
 ceased to feel myself sympathetically identified with 
 
 20 . 
 
 THE MEN WHO LABOR 
 
 By this is understood the men who work with their 
 hands. While it is recognized that both the employing 
 
REFLECTIONS 
 
 237 
 
 classes and the laboring classes are essential to the best 
 administration of the public’s interests, it is to the 
 latter of the two that the place of secondary dignity is 
 accorded, notwithstanding the fact that if either of the 
 two had to be eliminated it is the laboring class that 
 could least easily be dispensed with. 
 
 Civilization begins at the ground. The body and 
 what the body can do is life’s primary essential. 
 
 “When Adam delved and Eve span 
 Where was then the gentleman?” 
 
 Everything rests on a physical basis. Disturb the 
 relation which the farming community sustains to the 
 life of the people and the whole fabric of society is 
 shaken. Let the railroad workers of the country go 
 out on strike and we experience a national paralysis. 
 
 While the importance of manual labor is recog¬ 
 nized,—has to be recognized,—the dignity of those 
 who render it is not recognized. They are valued not 
 for what they are, but for the amount of work they 
 will turn out. Neither intelligence nor personal char¬ 
 acter counts, except so far as it conditions the amount 
 and quality of their output. In that respect they stand 
 in public estimate at the same level with inanimate 
 machines. 
 
 It is well understood by them that they are employed 
 simply because no machine has yet been invented that 
 will do their work as well. So fast as such machines 
 have been devised they are thrown out of their jobs. 
 Of course that creates in them a mortifying conscious¬ 
 ness that they are rated simply as tools,—tools em¬ 
 ployed by capital in order to the increase of capital. A 
 
238 MY FORTY YEARS IN NEW YORK 
 
 new mechanical invention therefore is rated according 
 to the number of human workers it can displace. 
 
 Those are facts too evidently true to admit of ques¬ 
 tion. The market value of a manual laborer is calcu¬ 
 lated on the basis of how much he contributes to the 
 man who does not labor with his hands, perhaps does 
 not labor at all. The value inherent in the man himself 
 because of his intelligence or moral character does not 
 figure in the calculation. 
 
 When it is a question of how much a man is worth 
 it is instantly understood to be an enquiry as to the 
 amount of his holdings: not an enquiry as to the value 
 of the man himself, but only as to the value of what 
 he possesses. Weighed in the scales of intelligence and 
 character an employe may have double the worth of 
 his employer; but in industrialism that does not signify 
 except so far as it makes of the fellow a more profitable 
 implement, so that as between the two it is money that 
 is the determining asset, not manhood; and it can easily 
 be the case that the better of the two is the consciously 
 humiliated tool of the worse of the two. 
 
 Such a situation means unrest and means mischief: 
 fruitful in peril and in disaster, till the employer as 
 distinctly recognizes the value of his employe consid¬ 
 ered as a man, as he does his pecuniary value considered 
 as a human machine. The problem of industrialism is 
 not a matter of legislation nor one of wages, but of the 
 reciprocal respect cherished toward one another by the 
 cooperant parties. And the higher the moral and in¬ 
 tellectual grade of the employe the more essential is 
 such respect to the maintenance of pacific relations. 
 
REFLECTIONS 
 
 239 
 
 There seems to be another common feature of in¬ 
 equity in the relation between employer and employe 
 which consists in fixing the wage of the employe with¬ 
 out some reference to the amount of profits earned by 
 the company to which he renders service. If profits 
 are out of proportion to wages there is injustice done 
 either to employer or employe. If disproportion is in 
 favor of the laborer then his compensation involves 
 injustice to the corporation or employer. If the dis¬ 
 proportion works to the advantage of the employer 
 then the laborer is inadequately compensated; for he 
 does more for the corporation than the corporation 
 does for him, and a balance is still due him after his 
 stipulated wage has been paid. The fact that it is op¬ 
 tional with him to work or to get out if he wants to, 
 does not touch the ethics of the situation. The one 
 question to settle is whether he is paid all that he is 
 worth to his employer; if not he has a righteous griev¬ 
 ance ; and if he is housed only in straightened quarters 
 he contemplates with bitterness of spirit the palatial 
 mansion of the man he works for, who will venture to 
 say that his bitterness is not justified? 
 
 That there is nothing absurd in my contention seems 
 to be indicated by the action recently taken by Mr. 
 Henry A. Dix, as reported in the New York Times 
 issue of Thursday, December 28th, 1922, as follows: 
 
 “Mr. Dix at the age of seventy-two has turned over 
 his long-established million-dollar-a-year business to his 
 employes without getting a cent from them in exchange 
 for it.” He insists that he is not “giving” them any¬ 
 thing; “that he had prospered through the faith and 
 
240 MY FORTY YEARS IN NEW YORK 
 
 honesty and diligence of his workers so that in reality 
 what they were reaping now was simply a just reward.” 
 
 Such instances have hitherto been rare and been con¬ 
 sidered as not only remarkable but implying on the 
 part of the munificent capitalist a surrender to his em¬ 
 ployes that was unreasonable and almost freakish. It 
 does not appear however that such an act is anything 
 more than the rendering of a quid pro quo and seems 
 so clearly such that we ought to expect that it will be¬ 
 come more and more frequent as the relation between 
 employer and employe is more intelligently and justly 
 appreciated. 
 
 A man does not know how to live till his life has 
 been already lived, and then it is too late. Two of the 
 most difficult questions requiring to be solved confront 
 him before his experience is sufficient to qualify him for 
 their solution. One of them is the question of a wife; 
 the other 
 
 21 . 
 
 THE DETERMINATION OF HIS LIFE WORK 
 
 Waste of resources is the secret of poverty. If we 
 are poor it is less because of what we lack than because 
 we squander or misapply that which we possess. 
 
 This is true of the State as well as of the individual. 
 The State is a reckless squanderer. It squanders its 
 oil; it squanders its mines, its rivers and its forests. 
 Gifford Pinchot, an authority upon Forestry, asserts 
 that we are destroying our forests four times as fast as 
 we are reproducing them. Oil, coal, water and wood 
 
REFLECTIONS 
 
 241 
 
 are the four fundamental elements of our material ex¬ 
 istence as a nation. 
 
 What the nation is doing on a large scale, the indi¬ 
 vidual does in his smaller way, and one way of so do¬ 
 ing is to fail to devote himself to such pursuit as 
 will engage his entire outfit of personal resource, physi¬ 
 cal and mental, leaving no element unemployed and un¬ 
 utilized. This is a matter which bears directly upon 
 one’s success in life, but which never occurred to me 
 and was never brought to my attention till long after I 
 had fixed upon my life work. Nor do I believe that 
 it is often taken into account by those who are pros¬ 
 pectively shaping their career. 
 
 The practical significance of the principle here pro¬ 
 posed can be shown by a simple illustration. If a man 
 owns stock in six different companies but cuts off and 
 cashes the coupons attached to only one of the six 
 bonds, he is practically five bonds poorer than his actual 
 holdings permit him to be. Hardly would any one be 
 deliberately so indifferent to the practical value of his 
 material assets as to practice so expensive a neglect; 
 and yet there is a class of values where the commission 
 of a similar act of more expensive oversight is of com¬ 
 mon occurrence, almost constant occurrence. 
 
 We are severally made up of faculties, each of which 
 can be exercised, and when exercised produces some 
 result; and when two or more of them are made to 
 exercise in combination there will be produced a bigger 
 and a richer result; and the greater the number that 
 work cooperatively the larger and finer will be the out¬ 
 come. A man delivers an address. We will say that 
 
242 MY FORTY YEARS IN NEW YORK 
 
 he uses only his brain. The intellectual members of his 
 audience will very likely be satisfied, but a considerable 
 number of his hearers will give him only languid at¬ 
 tention. Another speaker, equally intelligent, has also 
 a heart which pulses in a way to give color and warmth 
 to his words and the sleepy members of the audience 
 begin to wake up. It is the same address as before but 
 there is more of the speaker in it. But it may be car¬ 
 ried still further to the point where even the body of 
 the speaker becomes involved, and the man instead of 
 standing like a dummy on a pedestal, becomes physi¬ 
 cally participant in the harangue, and we say of such a 
 speaker that he puts his entire self into it, brain, soul, 
 and physique; and all the auditors are now alert. 
 
 Those are simply illustrations of the principle that 
 was rudely exemplified in coupon-cutting. So that the 
 normal enquiry to be raised on planning for the future 
 is, What form of activity can I commit myself to that 
 will involve the investment of the largest number of 
 my potentialities and leave the smallest possible number 
 unengaged? It is because we fail at the outset to raise 
 and answer the question,— What is the service into 
 zuhich I can come most nearly to the patting of my en¬ 
 tire self that so large a percentage of actual efficiency 
 is wasted and utterly lost to the world. In consequence 
 of which we become disqualified for doing justice to 
 ourselves or to the public. We cut one coupon and 
 waste the five. 
 
 When we go to the tailor to have a coat made the 
 first thing he does is to take our measure. It is quite 
 a serious feature of coat manufacture. The coat will 
 
REFLECTIONS 
 
 243 
 
 prove a misfit unless all the eccentricities of bodily 
 contour are taken into the account. All who are par¬ 
 ticular to secure a good fit insist upon a garment that is 
 custom-made, not ready-made. The service with which 
 the average young man equips himself is ready-made, is 
 chosen and put on with no nice preliminary attention 
 being paid to the matter of adjustment, so that he sets 
 out in life with the attempt to do what is imperfectly 
 fitted to him and omits undertaking a work into which 
 he might have thrown himself with the bulk of his 
 powers cordially assenting, and guaranteeing a life of 
 large and bountiful success. 
 
 And just as it is always the case that a man in need 
 of a coat cannot take his own measure as well as the 
 tailor, so it is that others will often, and perhaps usu¬ 
 ally, fit us to our proper scheme of life more wisely 
 than we can ourselves. Something of an attempt has 
 already been made to handle this matter scientifically. 
 As long ago as 1908 at the impulse of Mr. Frank Par¬ 
 sons, all the boys of his acquaintance who were soon 
 to graduate from the elementary schools were called 
 together with a view to considering with them whether 
 they had any reasonable plan for the future. This was 
 a modest beginning but resulted in opening an office 
 in which all Boston boys and girls upon leaving school 
 had an opportunity to receive suggestions as to the 
 selection of a calling best adapted to their several apti¬ 
 tudes. The matter was enthusiastically, and with more 
 scientific exactitude, taken up by Hugo Munsterberg, 
 who was repeatedly consulted by those who had the 
 appointing power in different lines of Industry, and 
 
244 MY FORTY YEARS IN NEW YORK 
 
 who has written at length upon the subject in his work 
 entitled “Psychology and Industrial Efficiency.” 
 
 Practical results would certainly be accomplished if 
 some qualified person could be officially designated to 
 take up this question with those who are at the point 
 of graduating from our high schools and colleges. For 
 there are no people sunken in a deeper abysm of per¬ 
 plexity than some who have just been handed their 
 graduating diploma, and who by miscalculating their 
 adaptations and entering upon a course of service to 
 which they can contribute only a fraction of their 
 efficiency, do themselves an injustice and confer upon 
 the public only a portion of the benefit to which the 
 public is entitled. 
 
 We are all of us more or less bad, and the point at 
 which the badness becomes so extreme that one ought 
 to be shut up or hung for it is not easily determinable. 
 There is always, or almost always, so much humanity 
 mixed with our inhumanity that we cannot readily be 
 sorted into two distinct classes. 
 
 22 . 
 
 TREATING CRIMINALS AS MORAL INVALIDS 
 
 There are some ideas regarding criminals and the 
 way they should be dealt with, which are so consonant 
 with the criminal’s innate humanness that there is 
 reason to believe they will eventually be adopted into 
 practice. There is no immediate promise of their ac¬ 
 ceptance as a policy of action, but there has been, during 
 
REFLECTIONS 
 
 245 
 
 the past half century, so manifest a tendency toward a 
 liberalized attitude in matters relating to law-breakers, 
 that it affords ground for hoping and even expecting a 
 still broader latitude in a not too distant future. All 
 such widening of policy,—the cautious introduction of 
 indeterminate sentence, for example,—has proceeded 
 from the growing suspicion that criminality does not 
 withdraw a person from the category of the human. 
 We so often find ourselves wishing that we could break 
 the law ourselves, that we realize the fraternal tie that 
 unites us with the man who does break it. 
 
 My conception of the matter does not intend a 
 greater tolerance of crime, but rather a greater intol¬ 
 erance, and yet at the same time a sharper discrimina¬ 
 tion between a crime and the person who commits it. 
 The question lies between treating the criminal by a 
 policy that is predominantly retributive or by one that 
 is distinctly curative. 
 
 A criminal is a man, but a man who is morally ailing. 
 A man who is physically ailing is sent to the hospital, 
 not with a view to punishing him because he is sick, 
 but in the interest of his recovery, and with the general 
 understanding that he will remain there till he is con¬ 
 valescent or till he dies. 
 
 An experienced ex-warden states that in a recent 
 year nearly half a million prisoners were released and 
 that sixty per cent of them were subsequently sent back. 
 The effect of having, say two hundred and fifty 
 thousand criminals running loose between the close of 
 their first incarceration and the commencement of their 
 second is something fearful to contemplate. It is like 
 
246 MY FORTY YEARS IN NEW YORK 
 
 unchaining a plague and letting it run its course, or like 
 catching a rabid dog, giving him a severe thrashing 
 and then letting him loose. For in the case of the two 
 hundred and fifty thousand, just mentioned, each was 
 as much a criminal at heart, and very likely in conduct, 
 during the time of his release as during his in¬ 
 carceration. 
 
 When a patient is brought to the hospital and it is 
 indicated how long he will probably be obliged to re¬ 
 main, it is manifestly unjust to him to retain him till 
 that time if he has previously become sufficiently con¬ 
 valescent to be dismissed. Equally unjust is it not to 
 retain him beyond that time if he is not yet sufficiently 
 restored. Whatever in other respects may be the regu¬ 
 lations of the hospital and the rigor of their enforce¬ 
 ment, everything as to longer or shorter retention under 
 treatment depends upon the state of the patient. 
 
 Why should not that policy be applied in the treat¬ 
 ment of men who are morally ailing? At any rate ap¬ 
 plied in principle even if with some modifications? If, 
 as said, sixty per cent of released prisoners eventually 
 return to prison it indicates that confinement is an ex¬ 
 ceedingly feeble deterrent. The advantage of hospital 
 treatment of invalids is that it retains the patient till he 
 is cured if cure is possible. To release him prior to 
 such result is to undo the effects of treatment and to 
 put him as far back as he was originally, if not further. 
 And to retain him after he is cured is to do him a wrong 
 and to deprive the public of the use of his services. 
 
 I believe that imprisonment works deterioration un¬ 
 less the prisoner is treated as possessed of honorable 
 
REFLECTIONS 
 
 247 
 
 possibilities while he is incarcerated, and retained there 
 till the evil virus is eliminated; and no longer. He 
 should be kept at work and paid what his work is 
 worth, with proper discount for expense of food and 
 lodging. He should be promoted to more and more 
 profitable line of employment according as he shows 
 himself qualified. As in a hospital so in a prison, the 
 real character of the place should, as far as possible, be 
 disguised. He should have the opportunity and the 
 ameliorating influence of contact with such friends as 
 will exert upon him an elevating influence. 
 
 To decide when the criminal has become a changed 
 man is a weighty and delicate responsibility which 
 should be vested in men of keen discernment and ex¬ 
 alted dignity of character, neither too lenient nor too 
 exacting in their demands. And when they are agreed 
 that one is abundantly deserving of confidence he 
 should be treated as deserving of dismissal, with this 
 qualification, that for such length of time as may be 
 determined upon he should be classed as a probationer. 
 
 Such a scheme will considerably lengthen the average 
 term of confinement of the less desirable class of crim¬ 
 inals, and abbreviate the term of those who are less 
 objectionable. It will make imprisonment a means of 
 wholesome moral education and will go far toward 
 eliminating the retributive feature of current penology. 
 
 Our convicts should not be regarded as belonging to 
 a distinct genus. We need to remember that the dis¬ 
 tinction between recognized convicts and a very con¬ 
 siderable class that, in impulse at least, lie close to the 
 dividing line is not sufficiently broad to allow of a clear 
 
248 MY FORTY YEARS IN NEW YORK 
 
 and radical classification. There is a problematic cast 
 of character of which it might be said that it is on both 
 sides of the line. 
 
 One reason why the modification of prison methods 
 has proceeded so gradually is that prisoners are the 
 only class of our population in which the public at large 
 takes little or no interest. Once they pass behind bars 
 we count them out. So far as current general interest 
 in them and sympathy with them are concerned, to go 
 to jail is to be buried alive,—in sheer indifference to 
 the word of Scripture,—“Remember them that are in 
 bonds as bound with them.” 
 
 The idea regularly instilled into the mind of young 
 people is that concentration is the measure of success, 
 just as the greatest heat is secured by focussing a burn¬ 
 ing glass upon a minute point. My disbelief in that 
 doctrine and the reason for that disbelief I have under¬ 
 taken to express as follows:— 
 
 23. 
 
 A PRIMARY AND AN AUXILIARY LIFE’S PURPOSE 
 
 Man, like the bird, requires to be double-pinioned in 
 order to wing a successful flight. He needs, in order 
 to his life’s best results, to sustain himself upon the 
 support of a double interest, his primary purpose and 
 occupation being tempered by one that is secondary. 
 While there can, of course, be only one supreme pur¬ 
 pose, yet one can in such way enslave himself to that 
 
REFLECTIONS 
 
 249 
 
 purpose, as to be enfeebled by the very confinement 
 and intensity of his self-expenditure. 
 
 A secondary interest affords wholesome relaxation 
 from the strain of a primary interest. Without sus¬ 
 pending the mind’s activities it affords mental relief by 
 releasing those activities and letting them play for a 
 time in another field. Change in such case means re¬ 
 freshment. To use a very homely illustration, even a 
 horse will do more work with less weariness if instead 
 of being confined to a single trolley line, he is employed 
 here and there upon the open road. Monotony robs 
 even the noblest of service of some of its zest. When 
 one man saws wood and another splits, till they are 
 tired, they can change about and go on working without 
 knowing they are tired. The mind is exactly like the 
 body in that particular and can do double work by ex¬ 
 pending itself in double directions. Life is short and 
 we want to put as much into it as possible but not at the 
 expense of an overdrawn physical account. 
 
 The author of ‘‘The Americanization of Edward 
 Bok” relates that when a boy he was invited to break¬ 
 fast by Oliver Wendell Holmes. After breakfast the 
 Doctor took him into his carpenter shop. “This shop,” 
 he said, “is my medicine. I believe that every man 
 must have a hobby that is as different from his regular 
 work as it is possible to be. It is not good for a man 
 to work all the time at one thing. Don’t keep always 
 at your business. It makes no difference how much 
 you like it. The more you like it the more dangerous 
 it is. When you grow up you will understand what 
 I mean by an ‘outlet,’—a hobby, that is,—in your life 
 
250 MY FORTY YEARS IN NEW YORK 
 
 and it must be so different from your regular work 
 that it will take your thoughts into an entirely different 
 direction/’ 
 
 Every relation with the great outside world into 
 which our life work brings us, accomplishes two re¬ 
 sults. It opens the way by which we can put upon that 
 world the touch of our personal influence. That is 
 easily understood and need not be commented upon. 
 If however I can work upon the world through more 
 than one avenue of approach and can do it without 
 sacrificing the efficiency of my main ambition, then I 
 am doing two men’s work; and not only that, it will 
 enhance and dignify the influence that I shall exercise 
 while engaged in the prosecution of my primary 
 purpose. 
 
 For example, it is said of a person whose entire life 
 is undividedly devoted to gain, that he is nothing but a 
 money-maker. He may do an honest business and will 
 probably be successful in it if he gives his entire 
 thought to it and leaves all other interests aside. But 
 honest or not he will be classed simply as a fortune- 
 getter, a money machine. 
 
 Suppose, however, that in addition to qualifying 
 himself for mercantile pursuit he had prepared himself, 
 as a subordinate ambition, to adopt some collateral in¬ 
 terest that lay outside of the street and that was 
 definitely human in its scope. He would then never 
 be compromisingly regarded as a money-getter, what¬ 
 ever might be the amount of his gains in dollars and 
 cents. In writing that I have had definitely in mind 
 some prominent men of affairs in New York whose 
 
REFLECTIONS 
 
 251 
 
 character and place in public regard is accurately pic¬ 
 tured by that portrayal, men thoroughly devoted to 
 business but with an auxiliary regard for some depart¬ 
 ment of human interest. 
 
 Or suppose the case of a clergyman who knows 
 nothing and thinks of nothing but what is immediately 
 involved in his clerical profession. An outward atti¬ 
 tude of respect will be maintained toward him, but the 
 inward attitude, if told in frank English, would be: “He 
 is nothing but a minister. All he knows is the Bible 
 and the catechism and all he can do is to preach; too 
 ethereal to be made available for service on terrestrial 
 ground; so distanced from the practicalities of life as 
 to have no opinion regarding them that is worth con¬ 
 sulting.” 
 
 Then again we cannot have a valid knowledge of 
 one matter except as that knowledge is rectified by a 
 knowledge of some other matter, or some other mat¬ 
 ters, the more the better. A man of one idea can never 
 be trusted. All truths are relative to each other. This 
 is so perfectly true that it is necessary to understand 
 that one cannot know anything perfectly unless one 
 knows all things. That can be illustrated on a small 
 scale by saying that one requires to be acquainted with 
 a number of other sciences in order to be a geologist. 
 Matters link into each other. 
 
 Whatever interest one commits one’s self to, pro¬ 
 vided it be an interest of any moment, there is nothing 
 whatsoever that one can know that will not in some way 
 contribute to the successful prosecution of that interest. 
 One leg may be very sound, but we need two legs in 
 
252 MY FORTY YEARS IN NEW YORK 
 
 order to walk. A bird may have one healthy wing, but 
 it needs a second in order to be able to fly. Each work¬ 
 ing alone carries the bird to the right or left of its pur¬ 
 posed destination. Working together each rectifies the 
 inadequate effects of the other and the two operating in 
 combination bring the bird to its intended point. 
 
 Which is a simple way of presenting the matter but 
 illustrates the principle which ought to be respected by 
 all who are seeking to do a large work in the world, 
 that the only fit that will serve such a purpose is not 
 only an intense fit, but a wide and various fit composed 
 of a rich diversity of qualification. 
 
 It is necessary to draw a line between Meum and 
 Tuum, but the mistake comes when we draw too black 
 a line. When the people of Pittsfield, Mass., inaugu¬ 
 rated the system of village improvement they did well 
 to pull down the fences between adjacent lots, yet each 
 householder retained the deed of his own property. 
 To live mutually as well as individually; to live inter¬ 
 nationally as well as nationally, those are our problems. 
 
 24. 
 
 OUR INTERNATIONAL FUTURE 
 
 The progress of event, fostered by scientific dis¬ 
 covery, by commercial interchange and by condensation 
 of population, has brought the nations of the world into 
 directness of relation to each other which was never 
 deliberately planned, but from which, now that it has 
 come, can never be receded from. 
 
REFLECTIONS 
 
 253 
 
 The time is past when any people can live ex¬ 
 clusively its own life. So far as we are ourselves con¬ 
 cerned even the Atlantic and the Pacific do not qualify 
 us to live a detached existence. We have become a 
 family of nations, however ill adapted and incongruous 
 its members, and even though the domestic spirit is 
 more the product of external pressure than of internal 
 impulse. It is rather an artificial adjustment to in¬ 
 evitable conditions, for the world has only two hemi¬ 
 spheres and there is no globe short of the seven planets 
 into which we can either retreat ourselves or drive in¬ 
 compatible neighbors. It was a serious moment in the 
 world’s history when in 1492 the Orient commenced to 
 flow over into the Occident and the last refuge for 
 compressed populations began to be availed of. The 
 next thing beyond California is China. 
 
 Plagues used to serve the purpose of escape-valve 
 but science has interfered with nature and defeated its 
 malicious intentions. The wildness of Chinese rivers 
 does something every year to relieve the pressure of 
 the local population, but President Edmunds, who has 
 spent some years studying local conditions, tells us that 
 the science of engineering will be able to chain the 
 Yellow River and make it a means of furnishing sus¬ 
 tenance to the people instead of overwhelming them in 
 annual deluge. 
 
 And so we see what is in front of us. We cannot 
 escape each other. By normal process of death we shall 
 be individually eliminated, but others will come in our 
 place and more and more of them. We may be able 
 eventually to communicate with Mars, but what we 
 
254 MY FORTY YEARS IN NEW YORK 
 
 have already achieved in the way of elevated railways 
 contains no suggestion of a mode of construction that 
 is not more largely composed of substructure than of 
 superstructure. We may be able sometime to make 
 intelligible signs to the Martians but we shall never go 
 to see them, and shall never relieve the pressure at 
 home by colonizing alongside of their problematical 
 “canals.” 
 
 This globe is destined to be sometime the scene of 
 unspeakable tragedy. We have recently had four years 
 of it, due in part to the crowded condition of popula¬ 
 tion. One shrinks from considering too' intently the 
 distant years. But those years are coming. They are 
 certainly on the way. When the strain becomes over- 
 severe legislation may adopt the policy of Herod and 
 enact the slaughter of all male children from two years 
 old and upward, or make it a capital offense to live 
 above the age of forty. I am only trying to make the 
 reader realize the inevitable, and to have a lively sense 
 of one aspect of the social problem. 
 
 If we cannot avert tragedy we may be able to some 
 extent to postpone it. The world’s population will be 
 able to live together a great deal longer if we have an 
 abiding sense of each other than if we have only a sense 
 of ourselves; if we think socially than if we think only 
 individually. It is the fraternal sense that even now 
 keeps people from devouring each other. Under the 
 constraint of Christian impulse the thought of each man 
 of us covers also the next man, and with ever dimin¬ 
 ishing warmth and intensity broadens itself out over 
 our neighbor and state. We are able with some degree 
 
REFLECTIONS 
 
 255 
 
 of sympathy to think and feel nationally. That is as 
 far as we have gone yet, and not all have gone even 
 that far. We are not thinking internationally. Every¬ 
 thing outside of the United States is definitely foreign, 
 with the possible exception of Canada, for a Canadian 
 is almost one of ns. That is expressed by our unforti¬ 
 fied Northern frontier. 
 
 When we look from an object that is close by to one 
 that is remote the eye changes its focus. When we 
 transfer our thought from our own country to France, 
 for example, our thought changes its focus. That is 
 to say that we think of it nationally but not interna¬ 
 tionally. Our prime conception is of its distinction 
 from us, not of its identification with us. It is not part 
 of our world. Our interests do not absorb into them¬ 
 selves its interests. In order to think of France and 
 ourselves one thought does not suffice us, does not, ex¬ 
 cept so far as we have a sense of French interests with¬ 
 out an abated sense of our American interests, which is 
 what I understand by thinking internationally, think¬ 
 ing as a cosmopolitan, thinking as one whose funda¬ 
 mental relation is with the world rather than with one’s 
 own particular part of the world. It is simply an ex¬ 
 tension of the conception that a true American has that 
 his basal obligation is to the United States rather than 
 to any one single State. All the efforts which in a 
 rather tardy way we are making to improve conditions 
 abroad are in the nature of internationalism except so 
 far as they are put forth with a view to the reflex ad¬ 
 vantage that may thereby accrue to ourselves. Our 
 
256 MY FORTY YEARS IN NEW YORK 
 
 prime belonging is to the world and our belonging to 
 any particular portion of it secondary and incidental. 
 Our Lord was the only perfect exemplification of that 
 principle that history affords. 
 
 THE END 
 

 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 

 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
Date Due 
 
 
 
 
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 PAplH 
 
 
 
 
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 66 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
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 r. 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
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 PRINTED 
 
 IN U. S. A.