MAR 4 1975 BR 1700 .S63 1905 Speer, Robert E. 1867-1947. Young men who overcame YOUNG MEN WHO OVERCAME WORKS B young Men TB&ho O-Vercame. ismo, cloth, net, $1.00. Missions and Modern History. A Study of the Bearing on Christian Missions of Some Great Events of the Nineteenth Century. 2 vols. , 8vo, cloth, net, #4.00. A Memorial of Horace Tracy PitKin. i2mo, cloth, net, $1.00. A ^oung Man's Questions. i2mo, cloth, net, 80c. Missionary Principles and Practice. A Discussion of Christian Missions and Some Criticisms upon them. 8vo, cloth, net, $1.50. The Principles of Jesus in Some Applica- tions to Present Life. Long i6mo, net, 80c. Christ and Life. Papers on the Practice of the Christian Life. i2mo, cloth, gilt top, net, $1.00. Presbyterian Foreign Missions. An account of the Foreign Missions of the Presby- terian Church of the United States. iSmo, cloth, net, 50c. Studies of the Man Paul. Uniform with "The Man Christ Jesus." Long i6mo, cloth, 75c. Studies of " The Man Christ Jesus." 6th thousand. Long i6mo, cloth, 75c. "Remember Jesus Christ. And other Talks about Christ and the Christian Life. Long i6mo, cloth, 75c. Missions and Politics in Asia. i2mo, cloth, $1.00. Gambling and Helting. A Frank Talk. Paper, net, ioc. China. A Study. i2mo, paper, net, ioc. A Memorial of a True Life. A Biography of Hugh McAllister Beaver. With Portrait. i2tno, cloth, $1.00. Studies in the Gospel of Luke. Cloth, 20c; paper, ioc. Studies in the Hook, of Acts. Cloth, 40c; paper, 25c. YO U N G MEN WHO OVERCAME By ROBERT E. SPEER [* DEC 13 1909 * To him that overcometh will I grant to sit with me in my throne, even as I also overcame, and am set down with my Father in his throne. Rev. Ill, 21. New York Chicago Toronto Fleming H. Revell Company London and Edinburgh Copyright, 1905, by FLEMING H. REVELL COMPANY FOURTH EDITION New York: 158 Fifth Avenue Chicago : 8o Wabash Avenue Toronto: 27 Richmond Street, W. London : 21 Paternoster Square Edinburgh : 100 Princes Street PREFACE This little volume is made up of sketches of the lives of fifteen real men, men who loved the highest and who made duty the first thing in their lives. They were all of them lovers of Christ, and fit as any men on the earth ever are to join that company of whom we are told that they follow the Lamb whithersoever He goeth. " And in their mouth was found no lie and they are without blemish." Yet the unblemished per- fection is not claimed for them. In their whole- someness of nature they would have resented the suggestion with derision. They were of the Christian type which despises unreality and is acknowledged to represent the noblest ideal of a man. There are scores of living men as winning and fearless and pure and true, but only those who were all this and have passed on are eligible for use in such a little book as this, and I have ventured to use them as a challenge and contra- diction to those who think Christianity a weak 5 6 PREFACE and unmanly thing, or as a fine but impracti- cable thing, and as an appeal to the boys and young men who may read to rise up and follow such men as these, as they rose up and followed Christ. CONTENTS CHAPTER PAGE I. Hugh McA. Beaver 9 A Lover of Men II. "Manny" Holabird 20 A Modern Sir Galahad III. Horace W. Rose 31 A Winner of Souls IV. Horace Tracy Pitkin 42 A Yale Martyr V. Walter Lowrie 57 A Gentleman of Strength VI. Henry Ward Camp 81 "The Knightly Soldier" VII. Harry MacInnes 95 "Joyfully Beady" VIII. Marshall Newell 110 A Natural Christian 7 8 CONTENTS CHAPTER PAGE IX. Theodorick Bland Pryor 124 The Phenomenal Scholar X. George H. C. MacGregor 138 A Modem Mystic XI. Mirza Ibrahim 153 An Alien Brother of Fidelity XII. William Earl Dodge 166 A Christian of Privilege XIII. Hedley Vicars 181 One of Christ's Captains XIV. Cortlandt Van Rensselaer Hodge . ■-. . 190 A Princeton Martyr XV. Isaac Parker Coale 209 A Winner of His Own Victory HUGH McA. BEAVER A LOVER OF MEN THE truth that the Christian life is the happiest life, and that what a young man gives up in becoming a Christian is nothing in comparison with what Christianity brings to him, was well illustrated in the life of Hugh Beaver. He was born in Belief onte, Penn- sylvania, on March twenty -ninth, 1873. George Beaver, the grandfather of Hugh's great- grandfather, came to America in 1740, in the movement of the Huguenots away from France, whose folly in driving them out bears bitter fruit to this day. Soldiers, preachers, merchants, and lawyers constituted Hugh Beaver's ancestral line, and on both sides there was the strength of a substantial religious faith. Hugh was a happy, playful, active boy. He took an interest in everything, and grew up with 10 HUGH McA. BEAVER a genial freedom of nature that made him the friend of all. Like most boys, he was fond of the play of war. He became captain of a boys' company called the Belief onte Guards, which he drilled with the strictest care, and in which he established the most careful discipline. He was pitcher on the nine which the boys organized under the name of " The little potatoes, hard to peel." And he overflowed always with good na- ture and kindliness. " All through his life," said one of his boyhood friends, recalling these early days, " Hugh was always doing something for his friends. We all were jealous of each other's affection for him, but he seemed entirely unconscious of it and treated us all alike." He was not a very robust boy, but he went to work to make his body as strong and symmetrical as possible. He studied How to get Strong, and he worked hard in a gymnasium which he fitted up for himself. He had all sorts of boys' in- terests — taking photographs, stuffing birds, and keeping chickens, and he invented an incubator in which, by an arrangement of gum bands and knobs, he was able to turn the eggs. His great- est triumph as a photographer was a picture he A LOVER OF MEN 11 took of President Harrison and his party as they passed through Harrisburg, where Hugh was living, in 1890, his father being Governor of Pennsylvania at the time. He was full of pa- triotism, too. It revealed itself in his unswerv- ing loyalty to his own old home town, and in his love of his country. When Hugh was eighteen he went to the State College, in Center County. He entered into the life of the college with characteristic enthusiasm. He was not robust enough for rough athletics himself, but he took great delight in encouraging the team. He was inde- fatigable in working for the interests of the col- lege, and he was everybody's friend. As a fel- low-student said : " There certainly never was a man, in any capacity, who stood nearer to the hearts of the students here than did Hugh. He never met one but his hearty hand grasp and his cheery greeting went straight to the heart and warmed it." At the ame time, Hugh was just like the great majority of boys in hav- ing no deep and personal religious life as yet. He was young in years, and younger still in heart. He was tingling with social happiness, 12 HUGH McA. BEAVER and had a multitude of interests on the surface of life. The deep springs had not been un- sealed. In the summer of 1893, however, he went with his brother to the Lake Geneva, Wisconsin, Summer Bible Conference for College Students, and there he saw the vision of the great life, and heard the call of the great Master. He came back to the college with the consciousness of the issue between Christ and self in life, and he took up that struggle with a knowledge of what it involved, and a realization of the supreme importance of the spiritual things. In this new life all his jollity, his merriment, his light- headedness remained with him, only refined yet more, made more gentle, buoyant, and winsome by the new friendship for Christ he had con- ceived, and the power it was gaining in his life. In the summer vacation after his junior year the victory was won, and Hugh gave his life and time definitely to Jesus Christ as his Lord. He went back to college to serve Christ and to save men. What his classmates said of him shows how strong and respected he was in this Chris- tian service: A LOVER OF MEN 13 " We know that in all cases and at all times he sought to right errors, . . . always speaking a good word on the side of Christianity, and setting the example by the excellence of his own life." At the close of his senior year he accepted, after a struggle, the call to take up the student work for the Young Men's Christian Associa- tions of Pennsylvania. In his letter of accept- ance, he wrote: " I had other plans in view, but for about three years I have been calling for hymn No. 107 of Gospel Hymns No. 5, in about all the meetings I have attended — ' My Jesus, as Thou Wilt' — and it seemed that the spirit of the hymn should be a guide to me in this the first call that has cost me very much to obey. So you will find me next year, if God permits, doing what I can with His help, in our Pennsylvania colleges." For two years Hugh worked among the col- leges of his State. His work was successful from the beginning. He went straight at men's 14 HUGH McA. BEAVER wills and lives, and he did it with such loving- heartcdness that men simply could not resist. Busy as he was, he followed up the men who were interested, writing back to urge them to be true. This was one letter : " I pray you may make a bold stand for Christ, not a halfway acceptance, keeping it to yourself, but take Him to make you pure. Get your Bible and read Rom. x. 9-13, and with His help do it. Honestly, old man, it will give you great peace and joy after you have done it. It may be hard, but we are manly enough to acknowledge a friendship that means to us what this one should. If you neglect to make a stand now, it will be much harder the next time, should God speak to you, and to be frank, we are apt to become so hardened we do not hear His voice. We can never tell when our time of preparation will end. See James iv. 13-17. God help you to make a manly stand, both on account of what it will mean to you, and be- cause I am sure it will help others — may lead someone else to do likewise. " If you have time and inclination, I would A LOVER OF MEN 15 be glad to have you write me. Bellefonte, Pa., will reach me, but do not feel compelled to write, only if you feel like it. I can't tell you how happy it will make me if you can tell me you have proved yourself a man. I pray for you. " Sincerely your friend, " Hugh McA. Beaver." One subject about which Hugh soon perceived it would be necessary to speak plainly was per- sonal purity. On November twelfth, 1895, he signed the White Cross pledge card, which he carried in his Bible and which read: " My strength is as the strength of ten, Because my heart is pure." "I, Hugh McA. Beaver, promise, by the help of God: "1. To treat all women with respect and endeavor to protect them from wrong and degradation. "2. To endeavor to put down all indecent language and coarse jests. " 3. To maintain the law of purity as equally binding upon men and women. "4. To endeavor to spread these principles among my companions and to try to help my younger brothers. " 5. To use every possible means to fulfill the com- mand, ' Keep thyself pure.' " 16 HUGH McA. BEAVER And he wore a little White Cross pin, to show his convictions. As he went on with his work, his own life grew deeper and stronger. On November six- teenth, 1895, he felt drawn to still higher sendee, and he wrote on the back of his White Cross pledge card a " deed," as he called it in writing to his mother, which was as follows: " Kutztown, Pa., Nov. 16, '95. " 'Just as I am ! Thy love unknown Has broken every barrier down; Now to be Thine, yea, Thine alone, O Lamb of God, I come, I come.' " This 16th day of November, 1895, I, Hugh McA. Beaver, do, of my own free will, give my- self, all that I am and have, entirely, unre- servedly, and unqualifiedly, to Him, whom, not having seen, I love; on whom, though now I see Him not, I believe. Bought with a price, I give myself to Him who at the cost of His own blood purchased me. Now committing myself to Him, who is able to guard me from stumbling and to set me before the presence of His glory without blemish in exceeding joy, I trust myself to Him for all things, to be used as He shall see A LOVER OF MEN 17 fit, where He shall see fit. Sealed by the Holy Spirit, filled with the peace of God that passeth understanding, to Him be all glory, world with- out end. Amen. " Hugh McA. Beaver." In the summer he went to Northfield to the Students' Conference, and there so impressed Mr. Moody that the latter invited him to come to Mt. Hermon to teach the Bible ; but Hugh declined this modestly, feeling that his work still lay among the students of his own State and in personal effort to win them to Christ and the pure life. Toward the close of the college year, in the spring of 1897, however, a call came to him that he felt was the call of God, and he accepted it, agreeing to take up, in September, 1897, the work among students in New York city. But he never entered upon this work. He went to Northfield for the Students' Conference, and remained over unexpectedly to teach a Bible class at the Young Women's Conference which followed. That was to be his last work and his best work. What it accomplished for many is indicated in what one girl wrote that it had done for her: 18 HUGH McA. BEAVER " I went up to Nortlificld — a delegate from my college to the Young Women's Christian Association Conference — a girl whose sole ambi- tion in life was to become known to the world — ■ to become great herself and for her own glory. I had been a member of the Church since a child, and considered myself a Christian; but even my good works were bent to one end — self-glory. But there at Northfield it was all changed. There, as I sat in Mr. Beaver's class — a college man, as I am a college woman — who must have known the temptation of personal ambition — and heard him tell of his Christ and of the infinite love of the Father, who has for us gifts far above any that we could ask or plan for ourselve's — if we only let Him plan for us — I saw it all — the folly and selfishness of my life. As in a vision I saw your son's Christ, and He became mine. Now I live for Him, and oh, the sweetness and the beauty of this life! I have never known anything like it." But he gave his life in this last service. All the stored-up love of his heart for Christ and for men went out in this attempt to win these young A LOVER OF MEN 19 women to the beauty and holiness of Christ, and he went home weary and done. On August sec- ond, unable to rally from an attack of appendi- citis, he slipped away to the service of the King he had so passionately loved, and whom now he was to serve forever in the painless country. When he was gone, from every corner of the land came testimonials to the power of his influ- ence. It is wonderful how far a true life throws its light, and how good the faithful God is in making rich and glorious the fruitage of a sincere service ! Twenty-four short years had been long enough for Hugh Beaver to win scores of young men and women to the better life, and to grow himself into the very beauty of the Lord he served. Very faulty and valueless all other lives appear when contrasted with the true life of outspoken Christian service. And Hugh was perfectly happy and joyful in it all ! He lived in the gladness of God, and he knew that his work was the best work in the world. But every young man may have the same life, if he will. And surely he will, if only he pauses to look at Christ and to remember the eternities. II "MANNY" HOLABIRD A MODERN SIR GALAHAD WILLIAM HOLABIRD, Jr., was one of the boys who refute by their lives the despondency of people as to the character of the American boy, and the preju- dice against athletics on the ground that they interfere with true growth of character. He was the sort of boy in whom no flaw is found, and he was sunshine itself in all his ways, and dignity and self-respect in all his relations. " Manny," as he was best known, was born in Evanston, Illinois, April fourth, 1884, and died in his birthplace, August eighteenth, 1902, of typhoid fever. He had just completed his course at the Hill School, Pottstown, and was expecting to enter Yale in the fall. What sort of boy he was is well illustrated by the brief sketch which appeared in The Golfers' Maga- zine for September, 1902: 20 A MODERN SIR GALAHAD 21 " As a lad he attended the schools at Evans- ton, graduating with high honors, and going later to the Hill School, at Pottstown, Pennsyl- vania, to prepare for Yale, the examinations for which he had just passed without a single con- dition being imposed. While chiefly known to the public as a golfer, Manny was catcher on the school baseball team, half-back on the eleven, held the gold medal for the inter-class track meet, and, in fact, excelled in all athletic sports. As a scholar he always ranked high. He was devotion itself to his parents, his brothers and sisters, respectful to his elders, a leader among his associates, and beloved by all who knew him ; tall in stature and muscled like a Greek god, with clear-cut, delicate, refined, and manly fea- tures. On account of his manly qualities and an earnestness and steadfastness of purpose be- yond his years, his school friends had nicknamed him * Manny.' One remarkable feature of this noble lad's life was the wonderful influence that he exerted for good over his associates. Wel- comed and popular everywhere, his head was never in the least turned by success after suc- cess, taking his few defeats as became the per- 22 "MANNY" HOLABIRD feet gentleman that he was. With a rare combination of strength and gentleness accom- panied by a bearing and life well illustrating ' He was one of nature's noblemen,' he has left a memory which will be a lasting influence for good and the upbuilding of a high, manly char- acter among the youth of our country* Manny Holabird and his beautiful, pure life will be remembered long after Manny Holabird the golfer has been forgotten. Such a life, how- ever short, is an example for all." The Golfers' Magazine was interested in Manny because of the skill as a golf player which had given him a national reputation. Though only nineteen at the time of his death, he was the best player of the Glen View Club, and it was the hope of many golfers in the West that he would bring the national championship to his club in the contest of 1902. He was busy practicing for the contest when the sickness came from which he never recovered. He was runner-up to the winner a year or, two before in the contest for the Western Golf Champion- ship at the Onwentsia Club. At the national A MODERN SIR GALAHAD 23 tournament in Atlantic City in 1901 he was one of the most promising of the younger players. A reporter in the Chicago Evening Post, the day after his death, cited some of his other triumphs : " Among Holabird's notable achievements was the winning of the Chicago cup at Wheaton. On this big trophy, such well-known names of other winners as Findlay S. Douglas, C. B. Mac- donald, and Slason Thompson appear. Tro- phies almost without number were won by Hola- bird in three seasons of play in tourneys and club events. Last year, while practicing for the national event, he surprised the golfing critics by his defeat of Lawrence Auchterlonie, the well-known professional, in a friendly match, in which Holabird's medal score was seventy-one for eighteen holes. This record has never been excelled or equaled." But Manny Holabird was far more than a great golf player. He was a perfect gentle- man, for one thing. Nothing spoiled him. He was simple, sincere, modest, and gentle as a young knight. An old gentleman who had 24 "MANNY" HOLABIRD watched the boy and often played with him, experiencing always at the young man's hands the considerate and kindly treatment which was natural to Manny, wrote a grateful letter to the Chicago Times, in which he said: " In this day of often too careless life among the young men of social position it were not well to let go without some more or less public com- ment the sad event of the passing away of such a life as that of William Holabird, Jr. There does not occur to me any name of a boy yet in his teens more widely known, more honored for high, manly character, more loved for gentle, modest bearing. " Of course, his almost phenomenal achieve- ment in the most popular form of outdoor sports gave him a national reputation, but no one who ever saw him victorious on the links admired more his prowess than the modest way in which he bore his honors. His liberal, gentle- manly bearing toward his rivals bespoke more the veteran sportsman than the youthful strip- ling. The applause of the following ' gallery ' never turned his head. A MODERN SIR GALAHAD 25 " But, more important, he fully appreciated the difference between sport and work, between recreation and labor. He felt all the serious- ness of life, and how earnest must be the endeavor to make life most worth living. " In social life, his almost unique combination of strength and gentleness, accompanied by a bearing admirably illustrating the noblesse oblige, made him universally popular, and a more than welcome guest in every house. " He has left a memory which will be a lasting influence for good, for the building up of high, manly character among the young men who knew and honored him." Manny's influence for good was unfailing. He never did wrong things himself, and he had a way of making them seem unpleasant to others. One of the boys at the Hill School told, after his death, of an occasion when he had let slip a bad oath in a crowd of boys. The moment it was out, Manny had turned and looked at him. " My ! " the boy said, in telling it, " how that look of Manny's did cut! I didn't swear any more." There was no weakness in him. His 26 "MANNY" HOLABIRD nickname was no soft puerility. He got it because it fitted him. He was a boy, but he was a manly boy, and all other boys felt it and respected and loved him. When he died, the caddies at the Glen View Club put their pennies together and bought a wreath for his funeral. At the Hill School, even the serv- ants always loved Manny Holabird, and the housekeeper, who had her own point of view, had no words except words of grateful praise for him. His purity cost him something. As Profes- sor Meigs wrote: " I should do violence to the truth did I leave on the minds of those who for love of Manny may read these simple words, the impression that here was one born under a ' lucky star,' and ris- ing, therefore, to easy, unconscious, perhaps careless, skill in whatever engaged for the brief moments of strife his manly purpose. Not so, thank God, did he achieve character or empire of hearts and minds eager to own his sway. " His life was stainless . . . but not because, in the very glory and ardor of his A MODERN SIR GALAHAD 9Tt radiant and abounding life he knew not the subtlest temptation and victory, too, over pas- sion. His spirit was serene, not without the conquest of self and its insidious promptings to sacrifice peace and security for easier and baser attainments. His spiritual life was deep, of the very fiber of his whole nature, a thing of spirit rather than of speech, pervading all his human relations and transfusing into them the more abundant life which his Master came to give." One of the masters at the Hill School, Mr. Weed, wrote for The Golfers' Magazine a little sketch of Holabird's life at the Hill, which will help to reveal the real beauty and original grace of the high life : " William Holabird, Jr., or Manny, as we all knew him, was with us at the Hill School for a year and a half. While, of course, his great ability as a golfer was known to us all, still his popularity and leadership at the school were determined wholly by his own lovely character and noble, manly qualities. He was a fine scholar, doing always high-class work in his studies, and a splendid athlete, playing on all of 28 "MANNY" HOLABIRD our school teams. He was catcher on the nines both seasons, half-back on the eleven, on the golf team, etc. He was prominent, too, in the social life of the school and leader in the boys' Y. M. C. A. work. In fact, he was associated in every branch of the school life, and a leader in each. " Winning in manner, frank, sincere, warmly sympathetic in nature, and full of enthusiasm, standing always for what is right and best in life, he won the love, affection, and admiration of everybody who came in contact with him. With all his successes, he was ever modest, and never from him would one get an intimation of what he had done. " A splendid athlete, with a life without a spot or stain, he was a natural leader, and a model for all the fellows in the school. The younger boys followed and imitated him. No one can know or estimate the effect of his influence in forming the character of the fellows who have lived with him and been close to him. He hated everything false or unclean or vulgar. " To us all, men and boys alike, it was an inspiration to know him. In him we realized the possibilities that lie in a boy. God's ideal A MODERN SIR GALAHAD 29 of a boy may be higher, but Manny certainly realized the human ideal. It is no wonder that a Hill School boy said that Manny was his hero. Another boy — no, not one, but several, and boys, too, who have fallen short of Manny's qualities — told me last week, * We fellows are going to brace up and try to do all we can ; what Manny would have done in college. It's what he wants us to do ; and we owe him too much not to do it for him.' " He was the finest young man I have ever known. I never expect on earth to see his better." It is hard to understand the purpose of God in taking away from the earth boys like Manny Holabird and Hugh Beaver. They are just the sort most needed here. But perhaps they do not need any longer the discipline of this lower life, and, being perfected, are ready for the higher service above. A lady who knew Manny put this thought about him into these verses : "Oh, strange immutability of fate That this young life thus rudely should be torn ! The old earth needs such brave, courageous hearts, And sunset comes not to the rising morn. 30 "MANNY" IIOLABIRD " To go in the full strength of rosy May, With all life's honors waiting to be earned, With song unsung, and story all untold, Life's pleasures and life's lessons all unlearned! "Yet in the loving memory of all, With tears and smiles this dear name we enroll; What though the cup of brimming hopes be dashed, Triumphant is the bright, unsullied soul. " The sunny smile, the happy, loving heart, Translated only to a sphere more meet, Where every bud shall bear more perfect fruit, And life's gold circle shall round out complete." And even though we lose those we love best and who best deserve love, we are the better for having known them, and we arc better able to make others better. Ill HORACE W. ROSE A WINNER OF SOULS HORACE W. ROSE was bom in Rock- ford, Illinois, in 1874, and he took his preparatory school and collegiate courses at Beloit, Wisconsin, where he was grad- uated in 1896. During his college course he was active in all athletic sports, playing on the football eleven, catching on the nine, and belong- ing to the track team. He had his hands full of work, but he never shirked more, and he was resolved to gain and use for good all the influ- ence he could. " I bought my dress suit while I was in college," he told a friend afterwards, " though I was working my way mostly, and did not have much money to spare. I wanted to get onto the management of the Glee Club for certain reasons, and needed a dress suit. So I put in some extra work to earn money for it." " Did you not travel on Sundays when you 31 32 HORACE W. ROSE were off with the football team ? " he was asked one time. " No," he said, " our football games were always arranged so we would not have to travel on Sunday. I never travel on Sunday anyway." From his earliest childhood he had been a boy of religious faith and positive character. " I have always said," writes his mother, " that Horace preached his first sermon when he was three years old, during a lively agitation on the temperance question in the community. Stand- ing upon a chair, with a book in hand, he pro- claimed to an imaginary audience, ' Don't 'e dink any more fisky ; it dunks you ; it burns you so you can't see ; it deads you. Don't 'e do it ! For Christ's sake.' He had a very happy child- hood, always winning friends among school- mates and teachers. His first public address was made when he was nineteen years old, after a summer vacation spent in the Sunday-school work, when the churches of the town united to listen to him. He greatly prized the commenda- tion of the managers of the Sunday-school work at headquarters in Philadelphia for his unex- celled record in organizing schools." A WINNER OP SOULS 33 In college he was one of the most active Chris- tian workers, and during his senior year was president of the Young Men's Christian Associ- ation, his term of service culminating in a deep religious awakening. After graduation he be- came General Secretary of the Association of the State University of Iowa, and a year later went to the University of Michigan, where he remained two years as General Secretary, the membership of the Association doubling during his stay. He soon grew out from this into larger service, and in 1899 became one of the Student Secretaries of the International Com- mittee, having charge of the college work from Ohio to the Pacific Coast. " His ambition," says The Intercollegian, " was to leave a trail of light behind him, and he did it. In sixty of the eighty colleges visited, men were converted during his stay. During the year he was the means of winning personally more than four hundred students to Christ. He led about twenty-five men to give their lives to foreign missions, and a large number besides to enter other forms of Christian work. He led over six hundred men into Bible study as a 34. HORACE W. ROSE result of personal interviews. Every conversa- tion entered into and every letter he wrote was inbreathed with his longing for the spiritual uplifting of college men. The whole student movement felt the thrill of his triumphant faith and ceaseless activity." The impression that he constantly made on men is illustrated in the recollection of a Cali- fornia student: " It was my fortune to meet Mr. Rose upon his arrival at our university. I had never seen him previous to this. Before going to the depot I was a little anxious for fear I should miss him ; so I went to one of the boys who knew him, in order to get a description of the visitor. ' Well,' said my friend, * pick out the biggest man with the biggest smile.' I expressed myself as trusting I should find him. ' Yes, you'll have no trouble,' answered the man whom Rose had left his impression on, as he did on every man he met ; ' he'll know you, if you don't recognize him.' At the Pacific Grove Conference of May, 1900, he was the center of the jollity and the inspiration of the spiritual life. While at S A WINNER OF SOULS 35 University, Mr. Rose, in company with various men of the Association, visited, during his four days' stay, over four hundred men personally, in their rooms, in the laboratories, on the base- ball field, in the gymnasium, in the fraternity houses, and, in fact, every place where men were to be found. The beginning of the change of sentiment on the part of the student body, which before this time had been an avowed hostility toward the Association, is marked very distinctly by this visit. Men caught a glimpse of the kind of manhood the Young Men's Christian Association stands for, and it could not but appeal strongly to them." The two great features of Rose's work were his prayers and his eager personal work. Thus, he wrote to a friend who was in the same work: " I pray that through you he will burn a path of light in the eastern colleges. It is a great privi- lege to remember each other before God in prayer. If there is any one thing I covet from my friends, it is that they will make mention of my need before the heavenly Father." In a little notebook are recorded some prayer- 36 HORACE W. ROSE ful meditations of his, which reveal the deep inner life. At Northfield, 1899, at the begin- ning of the conference, he writes: " July 1. " Father — Thou hast led me into places of large privilege lately. I thank Thee that Thou hast counted me worthy of so much trust. But this morning, Father, I am conscious of the fact that under all this pressure which has been upon me, I have not found the quiet watchings with Thee. Give me a place in the company of those who know Thee very intimately." And eight days later, as the conference closed, he wrote again: "July 9. " The Northfield Conference is almost over. God has spoken here. I have been on the Mount of Vision, and I pledge God to be true to the vision. But perhaps two things more than others are stirring the very depths of my heart. I must win more souls. I must be instrumental in starting some revivals. With God's grace I will. The second is this : I have heard, as never before, the cry of the Indian student, of the students of Japan and China and Australia." A WINNER OF SOULS 37 But Rose was no ascetic or recluse. He was the most jovial, hearty of men, bent every way on winning men to his Master. Once, at a State Young Men's Christian Association convention held in a college town, he declined the provision made for his entertainment at one of the best hotels which had been thoughtfully arranged for, because he was to have a great deal to do, and would need some privacy, and he insisted instead upon accepting the invitation of some athletic men of unclean lives to come and stay with them. " When he entered the rooms to which he was invited, he found on the walls some pictures that offended his sense of propriety, and rebuked the fellows by saying that those would have to come down if he was going to stay there. They re- torted that ' he would have to take them down first.' At college Rose was a famous wrestler. He immediately accepted their challenge, and one at a time threw the four men in succession, although two of them were much larger men. After the wrestling bout, he saw a baseball on the table, and said, ' Do you men play ball? ' 38 HORACE W. ROSE And they replied, ' Yes, a little.' Rose said, * I used to do some of it myself. Come out in the yard and I will play burn with you.' And the old 'Varsity catcher used his strong arm for the glory of God, and soon retired the group with puffed hands. When they came back into the house Rose said, ' Now you can see that you are not the whole thing, what do you say about those pictures? ' Without any other words, the men took the offensive decorations down, and before the convention closed they were led into the Kingdom." In the fall of 1900 Rose was called to Cor- nell University, to be secretary of the Associa- tion there. The same wonderful success at- tended his work there, but in the winter he fell sick with typhoid fever, and the short, eager life went out at Ithaca, on January tenth, 1901. His body was laid to rest in Beloit, three days later, from the college chapel, where his first earnest efforts at winning men were made. He had never put off his service of Christ to some distant day, and so, when the all too sudden summons came, he went with no empty hands. A WINNER OF SOULS 39 " One day," says a Cornell student, " he said to me, * You fellows must be intending to do a mighty lot of personal work when you once get at it, you are putting it off so long,' for he knew that many of us who were holding con- spicuous places in the Cornell University Christian Association were not doing personal work, but were excusing ourselves from it on the ground that we were enjoying special advantages in the equipment for study available * at Cornell, and that by putting more time in our college work, we would be pre- paring ourselves for more effective Christian service later in our lives. I believe we all see now that we will never be in a place of more excep- tional opportunities for effective service than while in college." One of Horace Rose's associates in his work bears testimony, out of an intimate knowledge, to the sincerity and reality and joyousness of the man : " Had Rose lived at a time when a man's name was indicative of occupation or character, he would have been called ' Great Heart.' He 40 HORACE W. ROSE was the biggest-hearted man I ever knew. The first time I saw him he greeted me with that expansive smile which college men will always remember, and, shaking my hand vigorously, he said, ' Well, old fellow, I am glad to meet you ! ' The form of salutation was not unusual, but the spirit of it was. I knew he was glad. He was possessed in a large measure of that rare grace of the Spirit, a genuine love for souls. " He was the most consistent personal worker I have ever known. He did not suddenly become interested in a man's welfare when some special meeting was approaching, but he was always at it. It was a principle of his life. At the Uni- versity of Michigan he set aside the hours be- tween 1 and 6 p. m. for social intercourse, which, with him, always led up to direct personal work. I once stopped with him at a large summer hotel. The first night he put himself on speaking terms with the colored bell boys. The next day I saw him in a secluded corner with them, sing- ing a lively song and dancing a jig. After- wards he talked with each one of them regard- ing his relation to Christ, and, when he left, you should have seen Rose's face as each boy clam- A WINNER OF SOULS 41 bered on the platform of the train to bid him an affectionate farewell. " He was possessed of a true spirit of humil- ity. One summer he waited on the table at Lake Geneva. The next he was secretary in charge. In either case, he was servant of all. He was a joyous Christian. " Such a life is not measured by years. One thinks again of the words on the gravestone of D. L. Moody : ' He that doeth the will of God, abideth forever.' " IV HORACE TRACY PITKIN A YALE MARTYR OF all the terrible massacres of the sum- mer of 1900, in China, none cost the church more than the tragedy of Pao- tingfu, a city about a hundred miles southwest of Peking. When the Boxers swept up from Shan-tung, destroying the railroad and tele- graph lines as they came, they shut into the city, almost before the missionaries knew that the situation was perilous, the members of the Pres- byterian, Congregational, and China Inland Missions, who were at that time left in Pao- tingfu ; and, on June thirtieth and July first, put to death Dr. George Yardley Taylor, the Rev. and Mrs. F. E. Simcox, with their three little children, and Dr. and Mrs. Cortlandt V. R. Hodge, of the Presbyterian Mission ; Miss Gould, Miss Morrow, and the Rev. H. T. Pitkin, 42 A YALE MARTYR 43 of the Congregational Mission ; and Mr. Cooper, Mr. Bagnall, and his child, of the China In- land Mission. We have been mercifully spared the knowledge of how they died. It is enough for us that they gave up their lives for the cause and the Saviour they loved, and that no more precious lives could have been given. Horace Tracy Pitkin was born in Philadel- phia, Pennsylvania, at 1824 DeLancey Place, October twenty-eighth, 1869. His parentage was of New England stock, his mother being the daughter of the Rev. Cyrus Yale, and a lineal descendant of Elihu Yale, the founder of Yale University. His father was one of a long line of Pitkins, a branch of which had settled at an early day in Manchester, Connecticut. " From childhood," writes one who knew and loved him well, " Horace was gifted with rare graces, and without effort he won the love of all with whom he came in contact. As a boy. he respected himself, and seemed to know instinc- tively what was right to do, and, knowing that, he did it. I do not remember that in all of his boyhood days he ever did anything that gained 44 HORACE TRACY PITKIN for him serious rebuke. And yet he was a boy all over, just like thousands of others, full to overflowing with appreciation of fun and humor, which made him the pleasant companion he al- ways was. He hated meanness and everything that was underhanded, and could not understand how anyone else could be mean. He was apt to think that everybody was as open and true as he himself was. He was never what would be called an intense student. He did not love books for books' sake. He never applied himself to learning because it was a delight for him to do it ; but, both as boy and man, if there was anything that ought to be learned, or that he ought to learn, he set himself to work with dili- gence and mastered it. But he was glad when the task was done. He was a young man of strong convictions, but very gentle in urging them upon others, winning his way to the end he desired by quiet persistence. It was his am- bition to take up for his life-work the study of electricity and its application to the needs of the times. He might have made a great success in it, for he had an unusual aptitude in that direc- tion. But some words spoken to him by his A YALE MARTYR 45 uncle, the Rev. Elias R. Beadle, turned his thoughts toward the ministry as being the high- est calling to which any man could dare hope to be called in this life, and it flashed over him that it might be God's will that he should give up his ambition and take up this work in God's service. He gave the matter much thought, and after many questionings with himself and much prayer that he might be guided to do just ex- actly what God wanted of him in the matter, he came to the conclusion that he must enter the ministry. He at once turned away from what had been the ambition of his life, and began to prepare for preaching Christ." In his preparation for his life-work, he went, in 1884, to Phillips Academy, Exeter, and from the beginning he took his stand as a Christian boy. The pastor of the Phillips Church at Exe- ter recalls the eager face of the boy as he saw him for the first time at church. " A few Sundays later," says the pastor, " as I was leaving church, this boy leaned forward from the Students' Bible Class to speak to me. ' Would it be possible for him to unite with the 46 HORACE TRACY PITKIN church at a communion service that afternoon with those I had announced as about to confess their faith ? ' I replied, ' It was usual to have an examination beforehand by the church com- mittee.' A shadow passed over his face, and he looked down in silence. Drawing him apart into a pew by ourselves, I soon learned that he had set his heart on beginning his Exeter school life as an avowed Christian, a step which his vaca- tion absences from the home church had not allowed him to take." That same day he stood up, a lad of sixteen, between two old men, one of seventy-two and the other of seventy-eight years of age, and to- gether the three gave themselves to the faith and service of Christ and the church. When Horace Pitkin did this, he did it without reserve. His pastor goes on: " He was at once a revelation to me of how helpful a young Christian could be in a new place. The Christian Endeavor movement soon started in our church. He came into it at once as one of its charter members, and most heartily. It was a joy to see him enter one of its meetings ; A YALE MARTYR 47 not slipping into a back scat, but coming to the front with a nod and smile of greeting, and then making it his business to see that everyone had a hymn book and was well seated. He naturally became the first president." In the school he took the same position, and while he took his part in what athletics, he was fitted for, and was a leader of the social life of the school, he also was president of the Chris- tian Fraternity, and his influence worked out beyond the school. With that spirit and character, Pitkin went to Yale in the fall of 1888. An Andover stu- dent who entered with him recalled in an ad- dress at a memorial service at Yale something of the college life of his friend. " All who remember Pitkin in freshman year know with what enthusiasm he entered into the joys of Yale. His deep, true religious nature was at once evident. To be active in making others happier was not second nature; it was first nature to him. At the beginning of his course, he became a teacher in Bethany Sunday school, and was later superintendent. From 48 HORACE TRACY PITKIN the first he was interested and active in the work for men then being carried on by college stu- dents in the Grand Avenue Mission. He was one of the organizers of the Boys' Club, I believe, which in our freshman year reached a membership of a thousand, and which has since been handed down to the charge of each fresh- man class. He attended regularly our class prayer meetings, Wednesday evenings and Sun- day noon, and almost invariably said something helpful. At these meetings he was one of three who acted as organist in turn. He was surely no one-sided Christian. He had no thought of dying for Christ; he had every thought of liv- ing for Christ. And so he excelled in all, for it was all part of his religion. As a student, he was good, missing Phi Beta Kappa stand by but a small margin. He wrote frequently for the college periodicals, and was an editor of The Yale Couratit. In athletics, as a tennis player he excelled, and took an active interest in foot- ball and rowing. Like Paul, he kept himself in training. His musical ability was a great joy to himself and his friends. His room always contained a piano, and many a jolly song and A YALE MARTYR 49 good time did his friends have there. During part of his course he was a member of the Uni- versity Glee Club. For some reason Pitkin was not considered a very popular man in college, at least not in his earlier college days. Perhaps he cared too little for a certain kind of popularity. I know he was liked. The secre- tary of our class told me one day that every- body liked him. And everybody who knew him loved him. Most of the strongest and finest men in the class were among that number. And their number grew. They were his true friends. And little wonder, for, in addition to these other manly traits, a happy, buoyant spirit, a sunny face, and joyous disposition were always characteristic of him. So prover- bial was his success in overcoming difficulties that a phrase containing a very bad pun on his name, but many times found to be true, became current among his friends early in his course: ' If anybody kin, Pit kin.' He was usually called ' Pit ' by Iris classmates." Another classmate, who is now in China, writes : 50 HORACE TRACY PITKIN " From the very first entrance into college, he took a firm moral and Christian stand. He never drifted, nor followed the crowd, as many did, because it was the easiest or the most popu- lar thing to do. Conscience was a law to him ; he was ruled by principles within, rather than by outside forces. This was one of the reasons, perhaps the main reason, why he was not widely popular. He and the world were separate, and compromise of any form was a thing not to be thought of. This spirit revealed itself in many ways. For instance, it was the cus- tom for an outgoing board of editors of the col- lege papers to give a banquet to the incoming board of editors. At these and various other banquets wine was used. Not a few earnest men felt that it was sufficient to go and manifest their positions by turning their glasses down. But Pitkin could not look at it in this light, and so stayed away altogether. It cost him much to do this, as he was able to enter into the other fun, the speeches and the songs, with peculiar zest. But with him the cost of a thing was never considered in deter- mining what was right and wrong. But even A YALE MARTYR 51 if men did not always agree with him, and some- times even misunderstood him, they always re- spected and honored him for the earnestness of his convictions and the courage he had to stand by them. But he was popular with the few who knew him best, who saw his eagerness to help men, his desire to minister and not to be minis- tered unto." There was nothing gloomy or forbidding about him in this. " He was ever bursting into my room," writes one, " with a laugh or a jovial story, or dropping in for a quiet talk, and leav- ing behind him one of those benedictions which drift from a man's soul into a fellow-soul. I do not remember ever hearing him say an unkind word of anybody. I cannot recall any action of his which I felt that I would like to change. There was about him an atmosphere of religious manliness, of devoutness without sanctimonious- ness, and of piety without a suspicion of hypoc- risy or cant." It was at Northfield, in the summer at the end of his freshman year, that the missionary pur- pose settled into his will. He has himself stated 52 HORACE TRACY PITKIN his reasons for joining the Student Volunteer Movement : " On Round Top, at the Northfield Summer School of 1889, I signed the declaration. For two years a vague idea had possessed me that I might possibly become a missionary. I had learned much of the Volunteer Movement during the conference, but had not understood the card until that evening when, after hearing a care- ful explanation, I made the decision. Why did I make it? Simply because I could not see why I shouldn't. The question came, not why pur- pose to go, but why not purpose to go? The presumption is in favor of foreign missions. As I saw nothing that stood in the way of my accepting the challenge, I did accept it, believ- ing that God had used my reasoning powers to that end. I had just finished my freshman year at Yale. Of course, at the time I had no con- ception of the great advantages of an early de- cision which confront the student to-day. My decision meant to me that I had taken a stand and would go if sent, not that I intended to move forward to equip myself spiritually and in- tellectually, and to go unless the way should be A YALE MARTYR 53 finally blocked. Multiplying my life by aiding others to find the Lord's will in conclusive think- ing never entered my head. 3 ' It soon entered his head, however, and led by his purpose, he went, after graduation from Yale in 1892, to Union Seminary for two years, and then for one year he traveled about through the colleges and schools of the country, as one of the traveling secretaries of the Student Volunteer Movement for Foreign Missions, and then returned to the seminary. In 189^ he offered himself as a missionary to the American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions, was accepted with Miss Letitia Thomas, who was a graduate of Mt. Holyoke, and to whom he was married on October sixth, 1896, and on November eleventh, 1896, they sailed from New York for China. On the way out they visited the Holy Land, Egypt, and India, reaching Tientsin in May, 1897. They were settled in their own station of Paotingfu at the end of September. Pitkin had means of his own, but gave up the idea of being a self-supporting missionary in order to help create more interest at home by 54 HORACE TRACY PITKIN being the missionary representative of the Pil- grim Church of Cleveland. He paid to the work, however, what the church gave for his salary. He faithfully corresponded with the church, writing twenty-five letters to it be- tween September twenty-ninth, 1896, and May seventh, 1900. These and the other letters home would make a small volume. They are full of the first experiences of a new missionary's life, the language, the people, their novel customs, the new home in a strange land, then the return to America for a brief visit of Mrs. Pitkin and the baby boy. Then came the terrible summer of 1900. In a Round Robin letter to Yale friends in Asia, written April twenty-seventh, 1900, he described the situation: "We're getting the rumors of war here all right. You know these wretched * Boxer ' or 'Big Sword Society' troubles in Shan-tung have been making life miserable all Avinter. The society has a fixed purpose to root out foreign devils and exterminate their religion and con- verts. From plundering Christians, they ad- A YALE MARTYR 55 vanced to whole villages or even single rich heathen, demanding ransom or utter wiping out. Lately the movement has been spreading up into our province, until we are surrounded, and even districts north of Peking are infected. Now, only ten miles from here, the Boxers are assembling in great numbers, and, though watched by a handful of troops, are bound to sack a big Roman Catholic station near by, then another, and then Paotingfu. At present the city sends us fifteen soldiers at night for our guard. Warships are at Tientsin, but if any troops should be landed, it would be too hot for us here at once. Present status is probably best." In his last letter to the Pilgrim Church, dated May seventh, he spoke playfully of Mrs. Pit- kin's return, and of the effect meeting her again would have on the church: " And won't it make China seem near to you all! — and America to us! And here's only one objection to it — it will take away from our heads the halo that some of you have persisted in placing there, and you will be disappointed 56 HORACE TRACY PITKIN in finding us to be ' just like common folks.' i Huh ! nothing particularly like martyrdom in this foreign work ! ' you will say. And you're right! We have been trying to tell you that all along, and we are sending this said letter and postscript home direct, and not through some dead letter office, because we don't believe in martyrs either 1 " Alas ! in less than eight weeks he had won the martyr's crown. On July first, the Boxers, having already killed the China Inland and the Presbyterian missionaries, attacked the Congre- gational compound, and Mr. Pitkin fell defend- ing the two ladies of the mission, who were then taken into the temple Chi-sheng and slain. When, after the subsidence of the Boxer storm, his body was recovered for burial, the hands were found not bound, but uplifted as if in prayer. And one of his last messages was the word home to America about his little boy, praying that when he was grown he should come back to China to take his father's place. The fearless life ended fearlessly, as it had been fearlessly lived. Who follows in its train? V WALTER LOWRIE A GENTLEMAN OF STRENGTH WALTER LOWRIE inherited his name from his grandfather, the Hon. Wal- ter Lowrie, who represented the State of Pennsylvania in the United States Senate from 1818 to 1824, and who resigned the posi- tion of Secretary of the Senate of the United States in 1836, to accept the position of Secre- tary of the Presbyterian Board of Foreign Missions. The grandfather died in 1868, having for thirty-two years served as Secretary of the Board. Three of his sons went as foreign mis- sionaries- — Walter M. Lowrie, who was killed by pirates when crossing from Shanghai to Ningpo, in 1847; Reuben: Lowrie, who worked in China for six years, and whose widow and son are still missionaries at Paotingfu, and John C. Lowrie, whose health required him to return from India 57 58 WALTER LOWRIE in 1836, and who then became with his father a Secretary of the Board, dying in Orange in 1900, at the age of eighty-two. Another son, J. Roberts Lowrie, was the father of Wal- ter, of whom this sketch is written. Walter's mother was Miss Matilda Hamill Nassau, sister of Dr. Nassau and Miss Isabel Nassau, who have been missionaries in Africa for more than a generation. On both sides, accordingly, Walter Lowrie in- herited the deepest missionary spirit and the truest Christian character. His grandfather was one of the great men of the Church, trusted and beloved of all, a man of solid judgment, of far-seeing faith. His father was a lawyer whose health forbade active practice, but who took charge of the business of the firm of Lyon, Shorb & Co., at that time the largest iron manu- facturing firm in the United States. To be in the midst of his work he selected a beautiful spot at Warriorsmark, in Huntingdon County, and there spent his spare hours with books and plants. When once he visited the great German forests, he was delighted to find " that he had a greater number of varieties of trees planted A GENTLEMAN OF STRENGTH 59 under his direction in the grounds surrounding his own family mansion in Pennsylvania than could be found in any of these celebrated for- eign forests." His qualities of modesty, pa- tience, gentleness, energy, vivacity, flawless fidelity, and prayerfulness, and large and kindly interest in life, Walter inherited from his father. Born in Warriorsmark on December thirty- first, 1872, Walter grew up in the freedom and joy and purity of his father's ample country home and the open air. " He was always a keen lover of nature. In his boyhood days this was evident in his interest in animal life, especially birds. He read about them in Audubon and in other books, and be- came very familiar with the manners and habits of all the species indigenous to the Central Pennsylvania region. He and his two younger brothers made a very complete and interesting collection of the eggs of these native birds, and another one of butterflies. In later years this interest extended to plant life, especially to trees and plants in compositions which produce fine scenery. This was greatly increased by his trip abroad. In England he spent much of 60 WALTER LOWRIE his time in the country, where the large estates and the well-kept cottage yards were equally a source of continual pleasure." A letter of his to one of his brothers reveals his interest in birds : " Soon after you left for college I got our mutual friend the shotgun out, and commenced a series of experiments with a view to making its kicking proclivities less apparent. A con- sultation with the young Coxlet revealed the facts of the case, and, acting on his suggestions, I have loaded the shells myself in such a way as to make shooting a pleasure and not a kicking match. " Must tell you about a shooting excursion a month or so ago. I had been out in Hutchin- son's woods with the shotgun and had missed everything shot at, when, on returning through the larch lot, saw a fine flecker and a robin light on the wild cherry tree near the old pond. Although I hardly thought of hitting either of them, I let drive with one of those heavily loaded shells, and to my surprise saw the flecker fall toward the ground, but, recovering itself, zig- A GENTLEMAN OF STRENGTH 61 zagged off to a low larch limb, and although it had part of its beak knocked off and was shot clean through the breast, it stuck on to that tree until I hit it with the broad side of a flat stone, when it fell to the ground ; even then I had to pierce its brain twice with a knife blade, feeling all the time like a murderer, before it decided that life was no longer living. It was a fine, large, fat bird, and on reading up Audu- bon, found that fleckers are good to eat, and very hard to kill even when shot, which latter fact I was ready to believe. The flecker was such a handsome bird that I skinned it after a fashion, and dried it ; but owing to ignorance in the arts of taxidermy, did not succeed very well. I've since procured a book on Taxidermy, and as soon as my knee will permit, want to try a little experimenting. I wish that you were here now, that we might go hunting and collecting to- gether, for it's rare sport." No one knows when Walter became a Chris- tian. Probably he always was one. His first desire to confess Christ was expressed in the summer of 1885, a few months before his 62 WALTER LOWRIE father's death, and he united with the home church in Warriorsmark a few months after in 1886. But he had been and continued to be a Christian not made by revolution, but born by right. " He scarce had need to doff his pride or slough the dross of earth; E'en as he trod that day to God, so walked he from his birth, In simpleness and gentleness and honor and clean mirth." From his boyhood he had been bred to be a gentleman and a Christian. " One summer, years ago," writes one of his childhood friends, " several young people, some guests of the Warriorsmark family, and the Lowrie boys were waiting outside the Tyrone station for a train. A wretched-looking woman, with a little baby in her arms and carrying a traveling bag, came past, with another little child barely able to walk clinging to her skirts and following as best it could. One of us only half in earnest, probably yet thinking it was like Walter, said 'There's your chance,' and without hesitation he spoke to the woman, picked up the child, and carried it over to the branch train A GENTLEMAN OF STRENGTH 63 and into the car. It is always rather crowded round the station in the afternoon, and Walter came back looking a little foolish, not because he minded being seen by so many, but rather, I think, because we could not help showing that we thought it fine of him, and he had a horror of showing off." In 1889 Walter went to Lawrenceville for a year, and then entered Princeton in the fall of 1890, graduating with the class of 1894. He was a boy like other boys in his sportiveness and playful mirth. Thus he wrote home jokingly with reference to the purchase of a bicycle, and the errands he and his brothers had formerly tossed up to see who would run from their large place to the village or to Tyrone, some miles away: " I think that perhaps the greatest blessing that this wheel can give us is, that it will do away with that curse so prevalent among the younger members of the Lowrie family — with gambling. Ah, that so fair a name — a name that has stood for centuries, yea, for cycles, as a synonym for all that is pure and good and 64 WALTER LOWRIE true! Oh! that such a name should be defamed by such an evil as ' tossing up ' to see who has to take the sunny side of the tennis court. For it is held by some that this is a true syllogism. ' Tossing up ' involves principle of chance. Gambling involves principle of chance. There- fore, * tossing up ' is gambling. Now, if we had a bicycle to ride on for errands, etc., we all would be willing to go on the errand, and so we would not have to toss up to see who the un- lucky fellow was." And again he writes gratefully of a barrel of apples and sickle pears sent from home : " My thanks to you are double, inasmuch as the quan- tity is double what I expected. I will also pre- pare to give you my sickle-st thanks for your appearant mistake in sending in addition some pearfectly lovely pears, wherefore I feel it im- pearitive to peartake of a pearticularly large amount of said pears after their pcarilous journey." Eager and interested in all the concerns of college life, he was specially ready to share in its religious activity. In his junior year, there A GENTLEMAN OF STRENGTH 65 was some special awakening, and he threw him- self heartily into it. He sent home a list of names of men for whom he was specially anx- ious, men of promise in the class, whose en- trance upon a life of Christian faith and serv- ice would mean so much to themselves, and to the world. And he writes as the meetings were about to close: " The meetings during the last week have been very largely attended. Indeed, for the last three nights the audience room of Murray Hall would not hold the crowd, and many had to stand in the vestibule. Indeed religion was the thing talked of all over the campus, in the rooms and everywhere; it simply permeated the entire college. Everybody was talking about it and was set thinking, and if it had not been for these examinations which will be upon us so soon, the meetings would have been continued still longer, but the fellows have put off their studies so long now that they cannot afford to keep up the time and strain of these meetings just at present. Meetings will be held, however, every evening for about twenty minutes, from 6.40 to 7.00 p. at., simply prayer meetings for the fellows. Per- 66 WALTER LOWRIE haps, after examinations, some time in February, another attempt may be made to hold special services again ; Moody may be here at that time. " About thirty or thirty-five fellows have come out and taken a stand for Christ since the college opened, as a result of these special meetings. About a dozen fellows in our class alone ; so I think that '94 got the greatest blessing of all. There are lots of fellows who are seriously think- ing of changing who have not taken any open steps to show it. It seems a great pity to close the meetings now, when the interest is at its very highest, but the exams, demand it. We hope that the interest may still be sustained, and the work continue to go on in a quiet way through these next three weeks. The Christian fellows in college have been awakened, encouraged, and made friendly to each other in a wonderful way. One could not have believed that such a change in this college could ever happen last year, but it has happened in answer to about a million prayers, and the college is now turned inside out, right side foremost, right side up." Not content with working earnestly in college, A GENTLEMAN OF STRENGTH 67 he went off to Lambertville to carry the spirit of awakening there, and with two companions, the Rev. Charles E. Patton, now a missionary in China, and the Rev. C. R. Watson, now Secretary of the Board of Foreign Missions of the United Presbyterian Church, he carried on a little mission at Cedar Grove, three miles from Princeton. The Cedar Grove meetings closed with what he called " a whopping praise service." He did not neglect other interests, taking a prominent place in the oratorical contests. The fall after he left college he went to Al- legheny Institute, at Roanoke, Virginia, to teach. It was a small school for boys, and while the atmosphere and local ideals were strange to him, he fitted in as he did everywhere, and made himself helpful and liked. The novel experi- ence of receiving his first month's salary greatly pleased him. " I received the first payment of my salary on Saturday, and it was certainly a novel sensation to feel that I was making my own living, and also laying away some of my own earnings." He enjoyed immensely his work in the school, " but the tremendous amount 68 WALTER LOWRIE of work and energy he put into it was too much for him, and with his usual conscientiousness he gave up and came home, none too soon, for he narrowly escaped very serious illness that summer. His frail body was a great trial to his energetic and ambitious spirit, but he made it a matter of conscience to curb his ambitions and conserve his strength, and it was wonderful sometimes to see him give up the things he wanted and could have attained, because he knew his future usefulness would be impaired if he risked too great a strain upon his physical endurance." The calm wisdom of his ancestry ran in him, and he wanted to work long for men. The headmaster wished to retain him, relieving him of work so as to make his burden lighter, but he would not listen to such suggestion. " I told him that, while I appreciated his kindness, I would not consider it fair to the other teachers that I should be made an exception of, and granted so many privileges, when they had to work on as usual. That I could not endure being treated as an invalid, and, finally, that as A GENTLEMAN OF STRENGTH 69 long as I stayed here I would be sure to get mixed in some sort of work, and that the only thing for me to do was to resign. This is a conclusion that I have come to after mature de- liberation, and I think that it is the right one." He stayed, of course, however, until his suc- cessor was secured. Then he went home for a year to lay up strength for his future work, but he was busy, nevertheless, always about his Mas- ter's business. During this winter, a young man whom he had been trying to bring to a decision for Christ left the village, and his brother came in great distress to Walter, saying his brother had gone to a neighboring town to accept a posi- tion as barkeeper. Not a moment did Walter waste, though it was an unwelcome task, requir- ing great tact, but took the next train, found the young man, and won him to a right decision. Others were won to Christ during this year at home, and in a long letter to one of his brothers at college, Walter tells of the different ones who have been reached and need help, and asks him to write to several, encouraging them in their new life. 70 WALTER LOWRIE " There is no doubt," he writes, " that the Spirit of God has been working mightily in this neighborhood. I've been praying and working for old man this week ; in fact, a number of people are interested in him; he is a hard old stick, but is evidently troubled about himself more than he would like to admit to anybody. Have also spoken with young S . He has been interested, too, but keeps putting the ques- tion off. R is also interested. I've men- tioned these persons and events to you, because your prayers joining with the volume of prayer going up at this time can accomplish a lot. Charlie Patton wrote a letter to A congrat- ulating him on his becoming a Christian, the other day, and it seemed to help and please A so much that I determined to tell you about it, and, if you think best, drop A and J , too, a few lines. Human sympathy is just about the best and greatest thing in the world, and both A and J need all they can get at this time. Although you do not know either of them very well, yet you will now often see them in connection with our church when you are at home, and the sooner they feel that you are their A GENTLEMAN OF STRENGTH 71 friend, the more they will appreciate you later on. However, this is just a suggestion, and you can do what you think best." It was work like this that endeared him to many in his home town, though few others knew of it. His own family did not know of it until he was gone. He was ready to praise the work of others, but reticent about his own. As his sister writes : " One of the many ways in which this has been revealed to us was a little impromptu memorial service held in the Methodist Church at the hour of morning service on the Sabbath when his dear body was resting for the last time in his home across the street from the church. We did not know of it, as it was spon- taneous, no prearrangement, and none of us were there ; but one of the neighbors told us how one after another rose and testified to his in- fluence in their lives. Our own people loved to hear him preach, and some even measured the preaching of others by his, saying, ' That's the best sermon we've had — except Walter's.' " One of the traits that made Walter so lov- 72 WALTER LOWRIE able was his warm appreciation of the efforts of others, and his eagerness to express it, whether it was appreciation of a sermon just heard, or words of encouragement for the crude attempts of a beginner in golf whom he might be coaching. " Just as marked was his reluctance to speak of anything he ever did himself, so that not till he was gone did we realize how constant and faithful had been his efforts to uplift those about him, and not till then did we appreciate the un- conscious power of his life." In the fall of 1896 Walter entered Princeton Theological Seminary, and spent three years there. He liked it thoroughly, but, as always, he worked not for the present only. He wrote home: " I am only regretting that the days here are going by so very fast. Of course, I wouldn't want to stay here always, even if it were a paradise, for there isn't the field for work and usefulness in the preparatory stage that every man ought to look forward to in real life. But one will certainly mm the fine fellowship of A GENTLEMAN OF STRENGTH 73 kindred spirits, and particularly these special friendships, when he gets out into the world. I suppose that one ought to make the most of them when he can." One of his summer vacations he spent in the bituminous coal region of Pennsylvania, work- ing in the little church at Winburne, Clearfield County. He wrote from Winburne, July 30, 1898, to a friend: " Ever since leaving Princeton in June, I have been up here among the Allegheny hills, at this little mining village. My work closes here on the 7th of August, and then my vacation will really begin. I have enjoyed the work here very much, have gotten on well with the people, and they have treated me white. Most of them are miners, rough in appearance and manners, but good-hearted, generous, kind, and quite intelli- gento I preach twice on Sunday, once here and once in a neighboring town larger than Win- burne. The people have been without regular preaching for over two years, so you can imagine how hungry some of them are, and how indiffer- ent others are. Of course, Sunday schools have 74 WALTER LOWRIE been kept up, we have a thriving one, and occa- sional supply preaching; but the people cer- tainly have learned to appreciate religious services. Last Sunday, a scorcher, the little church was full. " In the neighboring town I preach in a deserted Episcopal church, whose sanctum sanc- torum has been boarded off from unholy hands, so that I have to preach from a sort of box stall arrangement. Oh! one learns batches and gobs of experience up here. I have enjoyed the work ; it has helped me, and I have the satisfaction of knowing that I have accomplished some good." His people wanted him to stay here, but he refused to do so because an older man was ready to take the place, and he would never stand in the way of anyone else. This same principle controlled him when, at the close of his seminary course, he was called to be assistant to the Rev. Wilton Merle Smith, D. D., in the Cen- tral Presbyterian Church of New York city. He would not accept the place so long as there was any chance of their calling another man. He took up his work in the Central Church at A GENTLEMAN OF STRENGTH 75 once, in May, 1899, and great things were ex- pected of him. As Dr. Warfield, of Princeton, wrote of him when he had gone : " You know we all knew and loved Mr. Lowrie here, and I can- not think without sharp pangs that I shall not see his face again. We had hoped — confidently expected — such great things from him! Well, to go and stand before the Father's face is per- haps the greatest thing of all ! " He began at once to fulfill the expectations which had been formed for him. He was never too busy to do Christ's business. " We could never come in touch with him," wrote one whom he had often helped, " without feeling the better for it." The children of the church at once understood him, pronounced him genuine, and loved him. " He used to come to our Junior society meetings twice a month," writes one of the church work- ers, " to give the children a special lesson. And the little heads were all the time turning to look for him to come, and one time, when he had to leave early a dear little child turned and said, ' Isn't he just lovely? ' " This lesson was in the Catechism, and it was evidence of his power that there was no lesson the children looked forward 76 WALTER LOWRIE to with such real eagerness and impatience as this one with him. He was indefatigable in his calling on people. There was one invalid who had been confined to her bed for sixteen years. She had never seen a bicycle. So Walter carried his up to her room and took it apart to show it to her. Twice a month he went to see her, to bring sunshine across her shadowed life. He had a large Bible class, and in all his self- effacing, efficient ways he proved a helper in deed and truth, so that Dr. Smith could say at the memorial service: " If I had hunted the world over for an assistant, I could not have found one who would have fulfilled every hope I had in such a position more thoroughly than Walter Lowrie." Three things no one could fail to see in Wal- ter Lowrie — his honor, his purity, and his merry service of others. The idea that no young man can live a blameless life was absolutely refuted in him. As Dr. Smith said: " The very first thing that impressed me about Walter Lowrie was his high sense of honor. In our early dealings with him, he had A GENTLEMAN OF STRENGTH 77 the idea that a classmate of his might be called to our church, and he persistently refused to consider the question as long as he thought his classmate had any chance. In all my dealings with him — in the matter of his vacation, his sal- ary, and a hundred other things — he exhibited as fine a sense of honor as any man I have ever known. He impressed us all, too, with his purity of heart and life. One could see the tri- umph of noble thought revealed in his very face. His geniality and tact, his keen sense of humor, and the undertone of deep, manly seriousness that lay beneath it, together with the strong, logical virility of his mind equipped him for the ministry as few young men have been equipped." A little incident that occurred during his work in New York illustrated his unselfish- ness: " Walter had arranged to be in Staten Island on one evening to attend a wedding rehearsal of a friend, and had taken the boat from White- hall Street, which leaves about six o'clock. It was crowded with clerks and working people on 78 WALTER LOWRIE their way home. The number on board was esti- mated at one thousand. The North-field had scarcely reached open water when she came in collision with another boat which was trying to cross her bow. Walter was on the lower deck, and as the shock was slight there, he was not immediately aware of anything serious having happened. There was soon a rush for the upper deck, however, and when he reached there the scene was one of great confusion and panic. Many jumped overboard and were picked up by tugs and other craft that soon appeared. Mean- while the boat was settling rapidly and swaying alarmingly. Walter made no effort to get off or to secure a life preserver, but was trying to quiet and reassure those near him, and finally to assist a woman with whom he was not ac- quainted, and in whom he had no possible interest. This while the water was several feet deep on the deck. Finally, after seeing her safely trans- ferred, he was pulled onto a tug, and was the last one off the boat." But it was in the water that the end came. On August twenty-ninth, 1901, he was in swim- A GENTLEMAN OF STRENGTH 79 ming at Newport, with a friend whom he was visiting, when he was seized with cramp, and sank before help could reach him, becoming entangled in the long sea grass at the bottom, so that his body was only recovered by the efforts of a government submarine diver. All attempts at restoration were vain, and the happy, unsullied life went on to the higher serv- ice. A young men's club in Newport has sprung from his influence and memory. It bears his name, and its constitution defines its object to be, " To carry on the work of Walter Lowrie : (1) by leading to Christ young men who have never taken Him as their Saviour and King; (2) by helping those who have confessed Christ's name to live more worthy of Him; (3) by bringing loving cheer to other lives through helpful, Christlike service." " I feel it impossible," says one who knew him best, " for me to find words to describe the beauty of his well-rounded, beautiful character, as it developed from the shy, sensitive, rather sober little boy. * The joy of the Lord was his strength,' and his chief power of attraction. It 80 WALTER LOWRIE was striking to hear many who had lately seen him, say, * Well, I saw Walter the other day, and he was happy as could be.' Or, • He was running over with life and happiness.' And yet no one realized more keenly the burden and sorrow and sin of the world, nor felt his respon- sibility more deeply. That joy was a grace which he sought and received." Surely what Christ made him, he can make others also. VI HENRY WARD CAMP "THE KNIGHTLY SOLDIER 9 * WE of this generation cannot conceive of the horrors and testings of the terrible times of the Civil War. Those were days of character-trying and char- acter-making. With all that is awful and ap- palling in it, war does, nevertheless, provide a great school for the discipline of life, and the marring and making of manhood. We all need such a school and discipline. Professor James, of Harvard, suggests that we may find it, as war becomes less tolerable, in voluntary pov- erty and heroic unselfishness ; but forty years ago there was no need of seeking some dis- ciplinary substitute for war, for the nation was absorbed in the greatest struggle ever known in the world, and not men only, but boys, were engaged in a conflict which held them under the 81 82 HENRY WARD CAMP influence of the greatest forces which can work on character — the forces of love and hate, of sacrifice and selfishness, of courage and cow- ardice, of life and death. Thousands of heroes were revealed by that testing, some unknown to all save a few near them, and others known and reverenced to this day, to be known and rev- erenced forever. One of the noblest of these was Henry Ward Camp. He was born at Hartford, Connecticut, on February fourth, 1839, his father being professor in the American Asylum for the Deaf and Dumb. He was a quiet boy, who learned to read almost unaided, and from the age of four found his chief pleasure in books. Indeed, he was too much with books, and at the age of eight had to be sent to the country to run free, with all books forbidden. He had an " exquisite sensitiveness of conscience," which led him to a great fear and shrinking from evil. When he was five years old a baby sister was born in his home. After his first look at the little new- comer, he went out of the room. On his return, his mother asked him where he had been. " I've been," he said, " to pray to God that I may "THE KNIGHTLY SOLDIER" 83 never hurt the soul of dear little sister." His sensitiveness was almost morbid at times. " At six years of age," says Dr. Trumbull, in his biography of Camp, The Knightly Sol- dier, which every boy should read, " he exer- cised himself in writing a little book of sermons, taking a text, and making on it brief com- ments as striking and original as the employ- ment was unique for a boy of his years. In looking over the manuscript, his good mother observed frequent blanks where the name of God should appear. Inquiring the reason of these omissions, Henry informed her that he feared he was not feeling just right while he was writing, and, lest he should take the name of God in vain by using it then, he had left blanks in its stead. The strictest letter of the Jewish law could scarcely exact more reverent use of the ineffable name of Jehovah than was de- manded by the tender conscience of this pure- minded boy." When he was ten he entered the Hartford Public High School, where, without seeking it, he became what he was by nature and character, 84 HENRY WARD CAMP a leader of his fellows. In everything he was a clean, wholesome pattern for others, with a rare charm of personality, a general favorite with other boys through his generosity and manli- ness, and at the head of his classes. " He de- spised everything mean," says one of his teach- ers, " but it was chiefly his uncommon nobleness of character which made him conspicuous then as in later years." In the summer of 1855 he passed the exam- inations for admission to Yale, but, as he was only sixteen, he waited, and entered in the fall of 1856. During his vacation the following spring he joined his home church in Hartford, of which Dr. Horace Bushnell was pastor. Dr. Bushnell wrote of him : " It was my privilege to know this young patriot and soldier from his childhood up. The freshly-vigorous, wonderfully-lustrous, un- soiled look he bore in his childhood made it con- sciously a kind of pleasure to pass him, or catch the sight of his face in the street. I do not re- call ever having had such an impression, or one so captivating for its moral beauty, from any "THE KNIGHTLY SOLDIER" 85 other child. And it was just as great a satis- faction to see him grow as it was to see him He was such a man as, going into a crowd of strangers, would not only at- tract general attention by his person, by his noble figure and the fine classic cut of his features, by the cool, clear beaming of his in- telligence, by the visible repose of his justice, by a certain almost superlative sweetness of mod- esty ; but there was above all an impression of intense purity in his looks that is almost never seen among men, and which everybody must and would distinctly feel. ... I never saw him when I did not think he was a Christian, and I do not believe that he ever saw himself early enough to properly think otherwise. Still, he did think otherwise much longer than I wished. The difficulty was to get him away from the tyranny of his conscience. It was so delicate and steadfast and strong that his faith could not get foothold to stand. I feared many times that he was going to be preyed upon all his life long by a morbid conscience. Still, there was a manly force visible, even in his childhood ; and I contrived, in what ways I could, to get 86 HENRY WARD CAMP that kindled by a free inspiration. To get him under impulse, afterwards, for the war was not half as difficult — all the less difficult that the point of my endeavor was already carried; for, having now become a soldier of Christ, by a clear and conscious devotion, he had only to ex- tend that soldiership for the kingdom of heaven's sake." In Yale Henry Camp was the true man he had always been, and the same happy, full- orbed man. He was a joyous athlete, and rowed in the Yale boat in the great Quinsigamond Re- gatta in 1859. The first day Harvard won, but Camp insisted on Yale's entrance in the next day's races, when, thanks as much to him as to anyone, the tables were turned. The Rev. Joseph Twitchell, of Hartford, rowed next to Camp in the Yale boat. " In looking back to Henry Camp," he wrote, " as I knew him in college, it is impossible not to recall his singular physical beauty. His handsome face, his manly bearing, and his glorious strength made that rare gentleness and goodness which won our love the more illustri- "THE KNIGHTLY SOLDIER" 87 ous. I well remember, while at college, riding out one day with a classmate of his, and passing him as, erect and light of foot, he strode lustily up a long hill, and the enthusiasm with which my comrade pronounced this eulogy, ' There's Henry Camp, a perfect man, who never did any- thing to hurt his body or his soul ! ' " He was graduated from college in 1860 with high honor; but, what is more, with the deep love of men who had seen no flaw in him, and some of whom he had won to the Saviour. " On entering college," wrote one of his class- mates, " I was wholly without hope and without God in the world. I was beyond the reach of any power except the power of Jesus. I do not know whether I believed the Bible or not. . . . I saw in Camp a character and a life I had never seen before. By his life I was forced to admit that his profession was per se no libel on the Master in whose service he was. I do not recol- lect what part of our college life it was when he first spoke to me on the subject of my soul's salvation. It was not, however, till after his up- 88 HENRY WARD CAMP right and godly life had forced from me the most profound respect for him and the Saviour to whom he prayed. He said very little ; but he said enough to lead me to think over my past life, and to cast a glance at the future. I shall never forget the impression that first conversa- tion had upon my mind. It was not so much what he said as the way he said it. He believed he was setting forth God's truth, and spoke as if he knew it was so. I believed that he knew it was true, though unable to explain how he be- came conscious of it. This I pondered, and felt that he had evidences that had been with- held from me. He spoke with me only a few times on this wise, but every time with telling effect. I could not help thinking of it; and after we were parted, and I had lost his com- panionship, I made his thoughts the compan- ions of my lonely hours. I began to love him more than ever, and with love for him grew the love of the same Lord whom he loved and served. ... I cannot but feel that he was the instrument chosen of God to unveil the dark- ness that shut out the light from my soul. 1 fear that, had I never known him, I had never "THE KNIGHTLY SOLDIER" 89 known the love of God, nor welcomed the glad enjoyment of a Christian experience." Men believed what Camp said because they believed in him. " Prominent among his traits," wrote another classmate, " was his absolute, unqualified, and unmistakable hatred of everything mean. He could be silent under an act of injustice, of in- jury, even of insult, when he believed it to be the result of thoughtlessness or ignorance ; but his detestation of meanness begotten of delib- erate malice or of littleness of soul was inex- pressibly withering. ' I never saw him angry on any other account,' .writes a classmate who knew him well, ' but a mean act would make his eyes flash fire ; and his words on such occasions, though few, were emphatic' He seemed almost to have belonged to an order of Christian knighthood whose mission might be to ex- terminate dastardly and premeditated wick- edness." After leaving Yale College Camp took charge for six months of the West Hartford 90 HENRY WARD CAMP High School. In the fall of I860 he cast his vote for Abraham Lincoln. " He had never lifted a hand in anger, or even struck a blow in self-defense," but he believed in a united nation, and he was ready to do his part to defend it. When the war began he was studying law in East Hartford, and, reluctantly, he continued his law studies for the first seven months of the war; but, in November, a commission in the Tenth Regiment of Connecticut Volunteers was offered to him, and he obtained his parents' con- sent, and, as he believed, God's, and joyfully accepted the position to which he was called. When he was called upon in his old Sunday school, where he was teaching, for a farewell word, he said, simply : " Although I love my home, and love this old school, I cannot say that I am sorry I am going away. I cannot even say that I leave you all because I deem it my duty to go. I rejoice, rather, that, at length, I am to have the part I have longed for, but which has been denied me until now, in defending my Government and in serving my country. I go because I want to "THE KNIGHTLY SOLDIER" 91 go; and I give God thanks for the privilege of going." Thus he went off to the war. In the army he was clean and he was strong. A brother officer tells " of sitting by a table with him, in a saloon of the New Brunswick, one evening, playing chess, when an officer near them indulged in impure language. Camp," he says, " fairly blushed like a maiden ; and then, as the same style of remark was repeated, he rose from his seat, saying, ' Let us find another place ; the air is very foul here.' " When the City of New York was wrecked off Hatteras Inlet, Camp was one of the boat's crew which went off to attempt rescue. The old skipper re- fused to take him in the boat at first, as too fair and youthful; but when they returned after a fruitless struggle, the old man said, " Lieu- tenant Camp was game, and the pluckiest fel- low I ever saw ; if I had had a boat's crew like him, I could have gone through to the wreck." His first taste of conflict was at Roanoke Island. There he was in the battle of New Berne, and after many experiences in the fight- ing on James and Morris Islands, before 92 HENRY WARD CAMP Charleston, he and his friend, Chaplain Trum- bull, were captured and confined as prisoners in Charleston and afterwards in the Columbia jail. With Captain Chamberlain, Camp escaped from prison by digging a hole in the wall, but was recaptured and shut up in the jail at Ches- terville, and then returned to Columbia, and thence shortly transferred to Libby Prison, in Richmond. When he was paroled, he went home until exchanged. In five days he heard that he had been exchanged, and at once he started back to the front. He was at the battles of Drewry's Bluff, and in the constant fighting of the Army of the James during the summer of 1864, and received from General Buckingham, before Petersburg, his well-deserved commission as Major of the regiment. In October his regiment was fighting before Richmond. On the thirteenth there was an at- tack on the plains between the Darbytown road and the Charles City road. Camp's regiment led the assaulting column, and Camp himself, at his request, had the front line, and there, as he was leading his men, waving his sword, and "THE KNIGHTLY SOLDIER" 93 calling out cheerily, " Come on, boys, come on ! " he fell. His friend, the chaplain, recovered his body, and it was buried in the Cedar Hill Ceme- tery at Hartford with the inscription: Henry Ward Camp. Major of the Tenth Connecticut Volunteers. Born at Hartford, Conn., Feb. 4, 1839. Killed in Battle, before Richmond, Va., Oct. 13, 1864. "A true knight: Not yet mature, yet matchless." Erected by his fellow-citizens of Hartford as a tribute to his patriotic services and to his noble Christian character. " All of us who were about him," said a col- lege friend, " perceived that Henry Camp was a Christian who followed Christ. All things that were true, honest, just, pure, lovely, of good report, shone in his walk and conversation among us." " My impression of him," said Dr. Bushnell, at the celebration at Yale, in 1865, commemorative of the men who had died " for God, for country, and for Yale," in the great 94 HENRY WARD CAMP war, " is that I have never known so much of worth, and beauty, and truth, and massive majesty — so much, in a word, of all kinds of promise — embodied in any young person." This is the type of man Christ creates. It cannot be created otherwise. VII HARRY MacINNES "JOYFULLY READY" ONE of the most honored names in the his- tory of England during the nineteenth century was Sir Thomas Fowell Bux- ton's. He was one of the great English philan- thropists, and was parliamentary leader of the anti-slavery party after 1824. No good work lacked his sympathy and support. He was one of the best friends of the work of missions, and he was a man of character and power, whose monument stands in the aisle of the north tran- sept of Westminster Abbey near that of Wilber- force. There is a suitable inscription on the stone, but it is not as strong as Buxton's own vigorous words; " The longer I live the more certain I am that the great difference between men, the feeble and the powerful, the great and the insignificant, is energy and invincible determination — a purpose 95 96 HARRY MacINNES once fixed, and then death or victory. That quality will do anything that can be done in this world ; and no titles, no circumstances, no op- portunities, will make a two-legged creature a man without it." Harry Maclnnes was Fowell Buxton's grand- son. His mother, who was Buxton's daughter, was married on the day of the emancipation of slaves in the British colonies, August first, 1834, and Harry was born June sixteenth, 1863, in London, where the earlier part of his life was spent. " Before he could speak, he was described as ' breaking into loving, beaming smiles whenever anyone speaks to him.' To this sociability was added a practical matter-of-fact energy, which showed itself in many of his childish schemes. When barely five years old he was found on a hot summer evening dealing out water through the railing of the square garden in which he was playing to any of the passers-by who would accept it, and especially to his friends the cab- bies, and another day, hearing a cab was wanted, he ran off before he could be missed, to a stand "JOYFULLY READY" 97 at a little distance, where he found his 'wheel four,' and soon returned, seated within, his merry face just showing above the edge of the window. He was always a ' jolly ' boy, and the friends of later days would have recognized in the sturdy little fellow the same independence of character they knew so well." The lad's determined character developed fast, and his self-will often required correction. It was not only strong, but pertinacious — any object upon which his heart was set, that object he pursued with his whole mind, till he gained it, or was obliged, by the exertion of a stronger will than his own, to give it up. His school life began at Hampstead, and was continued at Rottingdean, near Brighton, where he went in 1874, and in 1876 he was sent to Stubbington, in Hampshire, to read for his ex- aminations for a cadetship in the royal navy, the boy having set his heart on being a sailor. When he passed his examinations, the Bishop of Dover wrote to him: " I have no fear but that you will serve your country bravely and honestly, if need be. But 98 HARRY MacINNES in peace or war, I hope you will never be ashamed to be found fighting on the side of Christ, and under His flag. Depend upon it, it is the winning side. But no battles can be won without some hard knocks." In September, 1876, Harry joined H. M. S. Britannia, the training ship at Dartmouth. Here he stayed two years, and lived his clean, fearless life. He had his Daily Text-book, and was not afraid to read it daily ; but, boylike, he had not come to the deeper knowledge. Dur- ing his stay on the training ship his brother Campbell died, and that took him a little farther into the real soberness of life. When his training course ended in 1878 he was sent to sea on the Euryalus. At Malta he was transferred to the Wye, and at Crete to the Invincible. He was a jolly, happy fellow, the friend of everyone, and he found his total absti- nence habit a little difficult. " I have now and then dined in the wardroom," he wrote from Artika Bay. " The officers often ask us. It is awfully hard to keep from taking wine, etc., as, whenever you go, you are always asked to take "JOYFULLY READY" 99 something, and they are always surprised if you refuse." A messmate wrote afterwards about one of the boy's acts of fidelity to principle in this regard: " I know you will like to hear something he would not have told you himself, as it illustrates his firmness and constancy so well that it made a great impression upon me at the time, and I have never forgotten it. One evening on board the Invincible it happened to be someone's birth- day, and as is sometimes done in the service, champagne was handed round for everyone to drink his health. Poor Harry was evidently very distressed at not being able to do this, as he thought it might appear rude; and when the mid, whose birthday it was, said that he hoped he would drink his health, he told him that he could not do so in wine. The mid rather pressed him to take some, but Harry told him quietly that he had promised his father and mother that he would not touch any wine, and therefore that it was out of his power to do so, but that he wished him every happiness notwith- standing. Harry did this in such a firm, pleas- 100 HARRY MacINNES ant manner, that everything was made all right." As they cruised round the eastern Mediter- ranean, he was constantly hunting, riding, and exploring the country. " We rode right over part of the great Plains of Troy," he wrote from Besika Bay. From Malta, he wrote, on March twenty-ninth, " I am now signal midshipman with Browning ; he and I keep watch alternately. We do not have any night work to do ; we have to look after all the signals going on. I want to ask you if you would mind my going to the opera here? Lots of the fellows have gone there to-night. Do tell me just what you would like about it, and if you would not like me to go I should be quite contented, as I do not want to do anything you would not like." As a matter of fact, he was left to decide for himself, and he did not go. After a visit home in 1879 he sailed again on the Invincible, and visited Egypt and then Greece; but his health not being satisfactory, he decided to resign his commission. This he did with a clean record behind him. When he "JOYFULLY READY" 101 left the service his captain wrote: " He is thoroughly steady and high-principled, and I am glad to have had him with me." In the summer of 1882 he went to the Kes- wick Convention, corresponding to the North- field Conference in our country. When it was over he wrote to his mother: " I seem in a way to be rather bewildered now about the subjects of the different speakers; but the whole thing I found most helpful; I see much more distinctly now what a real Chris- tian's life ought to be ; and I do trust and pray that I may have strength to act as God would have me. On Sunday evening we attended the Holy Communion, which was, at a time like this, specially strengthening. I am longing to see you, to talk it over. I do want to be of some use in my life for the Lord." He entered Trinity College, Cambridge, in October, 1882. Mr. Moody visited Cambridge that fall, and he wrote : " It is so pleasant to hear his plain-spoken language again. On Tuesday he dwelt a good 102 HARRY MacINNES deal on conversions, and said in one part of his address that he firmly believed in an instanta- neous change of life. He gave a good illustra- tion of this, saying, supposing he were to speak to a man who was anxious about his soul, and if this man's special sin was that he swore a hun- dred times a day, would it be right of him to say : ' To-morrow you must swear only eighty times, the day after that only sixty times,' and so on? No, of course there must be a complete change at once. There must be a time when a man passes from death unto life." He entered upon Christian work heartily as a result of Mr. Moody's meeting. He visited the brick fields round Cambridge, and went fear- lessly about the rooms of undergraduates, call- ing upon men in behalf of the claims of Christ. And he was eager to be of help to his own brothers : " I am so glad to hear," he wrote to them, " that you have got a fellow to join the Bible Union. Curiously enough, I have felt the desire to write and ask you to get up a little Bible- reading for those who belong, or who care to "JOYFULLY READY" 103 read. Ask anybody who would be at all inclined to come ; you will know the most convenient time ; don't have it when you are sleepy. I know you will like me to suggest one or two things. Always begin with asking God's blessing on the word read; and do read expecting to find some treasure, something to carry away with you; it is always there if you seek. I firmly believe the greatest thing toward walking faithfully is read- ing the Bible. Also make it always cheerful so that all may keep up the interest. Do let us ask that the ' fear of man ' may be taken away from us. I am sure this is what is keeping us back so from coming out. In asking anyone to join, you might tell of our meetings here, and how they help us." The next summer he went to Keswick again, when, as he said, " there seemed to be a halo about the place. I hardly like to say much, as we must i be doers, not hearers only,' but I am sure God is going to keep me." In August he joined some friends for seashore services for children and young people at seaside resorts, where in his happy way he won many boys to 104 HARRY MacINNES Christ. In October he returned to college at Cambridge. Of his ways there, one of his friends wrote: " I had the great privilege of being up at Cambridge with him for one term, and I shall never forget what a rejoicing Christian he was. I never heard him say a hard or unkind word of anybody; and in everything he did he was always so thorough and whole-hearted that it was a great pleasure to be with him." At Cambridge he again took up Christian work earnestly. A friend recalls his going in one night to a room where a party of men were drinking, to invite to some meetings the man who occupied the room. Instead of alienating them, he won their respect, and on the last night of the meetings that whole drinking party came. After his death a young man of a fast set at college wrote of him: " I do hope you will bring out in his character the combination of thorough geniality with true religion. I don't know why it was, but while I was at Cambridge it was always felt "JOYFULLY READY" 105 that such a combination did not exist, but I never saw a better example than Harry. . . . My position at Cambridge made his care for me more than ordinarily brave. I had many ac- quaintances in a really fast set, and certainly did not myself keep quite out of it. Harry knew this well, and, instead of any shyness, any shrinking from fear of what might be said, redoubled his care for me. He often came into my room, begging me to come to some meeting ; often he found there men who, I am sure, he knew would have burst out laughing at him, as soon as his back was turned, had they not known he was my friend. On one occasion specially, I had a large breakfast party; there was to be a meeting that day, held by a man who had formerly led a very bad life, had been converted, and now works much to do good amongst under- graduates. Harry came into my room, and had the pluck to speak of such things before a com- pany which he must have known rather mocked at religion. He was successful, and three of us went to the meeting, and I for one felt better for it (as I always did after a visit from him). This is only one instance among many. I don't. 106 HARRY MacINNES think anyone who does not know university life can appreciate properly the pluck required for such a life as Harry's." When vacation came in 1884 he went to Ger- many, and then to Switzerland, where he and his brothers were climbing the mountains for fun, and commending Christ for love. Sir Frederick Montague-Pollock remembered a " talk with him about matters of religion — about the dis- puted questions of the present day, and the various form of unbelief. The great thing, he said, in any difficulty, was to put one's whole trust in God. He also happened to remark — a thing which struck me very forcibly afterwards, though not so much at the time — that the death of a Christian was always happy." On one of his walks he lost his pocketbook, with all his memoranda, but he bore it unruffled, made sport for everyone just the same, and the next morn- ing at three he and his brother, Neil, started back to find his book if they could. As soon as possible they reached the point which led to the path through the fir woods which they had followed the evening before. Harry said, "JOYFULLY READY" 107 " We will now ask again that we may find it." Three minutes after, as they walked on, there lay the pocketbook in the middle of the well-beaten path, with the dew still upon it. On September twenty-second, he and his brother Neil climbed over one of the spurs of the Diablerets range. Away up above the tree line they sat down for luncheon. " Then," said his brother, " he jumped up and walked round to where he could see the valley (we were sitting with our backs to it). He said he had been thinking a good deal lately of that verse, ' The works of the Lord are great.' I finished it, ' sought out of all them that have pleasure therein.' After putting a French picture-text into our empty coffee bottle, and writing our names on it, he sat down and read Psalm Twenty- four. I remember distinctly his reading that verse, ' He that hath clean hands and a pure heart.' " As they started on, he told Neil that his motto for the day was, " I will be glad in the Lord," " laying such emphasis on the word * will,' as if to say it is in our power to take what we may claim as our right." Then they climbed on up till they came to a place where the rocks rose 108 HARRY MacINNES precipitously. The father wrote afterwards of what followed: " Each step they hoped would be easier, but it grew worse. Neil dared not look down or back ; Harry called, * Don't go where you can't get back ! ' Neil reached the top, and threw himself down ; heard as if two great stones had fallen. Harry never appeared; Neil shouted, but no answer came. He got down somehow (scrambling down another way in about three quarters of an hour) to where he believed he should see him. He prayed for help, and strength was given for the tremendous effort. There lay our most precious one, in the bed of a little torrent on the steep mountain side. Neil felt his heart, his pulse, but death must have been instantaneous. He laid him straight, folded the hands, and sat watching the calm face. A chamois-hunter had been watching the two (from the other side of the valley). He saw the fall with his glass. He and two wood- cutters soon came. ' Mon frere — avec Dieul ' soon told them all, though they needed no telling." "JOYFULLY READY" 109 His father visited the place several days later, and said that the boys had tried nothing rash, but the lad's fair life was done. Of what the life had been, Dr. Moule, now Bishop of Durham, wrote to his father: "Your dear son will ever dwell among my brightest and purest memories of young Cambridge Chris- tians. Truly he lived and shone." Some young men say, " When we are of age, we will begin to live. These earlier years are the time of play alone." But Harry Maclnnes was gone at twenty-one, and the simple little biography which has been published is rightly named, Joyfully Ready. No, the only time we have to live is now. Young men should live their lives for Christ, remembering that the life they have is the only life they ever will have, and that what they would do ever they must do now. VIII MARSHALL NEWELL A NATURAL CHRISTIAN MARSHALL NEWELL was born in Clifton, New Jersey, April second, 1871. His father was a farmer, and a college man, who had been graduated from Harvard in the class of 1857. Most of his early life young Newell spent on his father's farm at Great Barrington, Massachusetts, among the Berkshire hills. In the fall of 1887 he went to Phillips Academy, at Exeter, New Hampshire, and spent three years in the academy. It was there that he became interested in athletics, playing football at first on his class team, and later on the school eleven. He was not neglecting his other work, however, and in 1890 he was grad- uated with honor, and in the fall entered Har- vard. There he soon became the foremost man 110 A NATURAL CHRISTIAN 111 in the athletic life of the university. He was on the victorious football eleven of 1890, and on the winning crew of the following spring, both in his freshman year. He played on his freshman eleven also, and on the university eleven for all the three following years of his course, and he rowed on the University crews in 1892 and 1893. " While so prominent a figure in athletics," the Class memorial declared of him after his death, " he by no means neglected the academic side of college life. He was interested in his courses and always stood well in them. He had the respect and friendship of instructors as well as students. Socially, he was popular as few have been. He was a member of the Institute of 1770, Dickey, Hasty Pudding Club, and Signet. He was the unanimous choice of his class for second marshal on Class day. Higher honors he might have had, but he took only such as were forced upon him." This was no mean triumph for a poor country lad who had come to school and college from his father's farm, with no social prestige and few 112 MARSHALL NEWELL earlier acquaintances. How did he achieve such a success ? Here are three explanations of it : Professor Peabody, in a memorial address in Appleton Chapel, said: " His alert and vigorous body made him admired, and his open, unselfish nature made him beloved. He was reserved, yet companion- able. He was not in the least a preacher of virtue, but in his presence harsh judgments and loose talk simply found themselves silenced. Thus he was true to the type of wholesome, single-hearted, right-minded youth, who leaven our life and whose memory the college recalls with gratitude and pride." The memorial adopted by his class said: " He lived his life so quietly in our midst, and was so thoroughly one of us, that not until the realization of his loss came to us were we able to appreciate the value of his influence. If we look back upon the time of our association with him, we know him to have been possessed of a high and pure character; of great ideals, to which his life was exceptionally true; of a A NATURAL CHRISTIAN 113 morality that was strong enough to take no thought save that which was right, because it was right and true, and could not be led away by what others might think. " An athlete in the best sense of the word, he loved sport for sport's sake. In football, strong and alert, he was effective without being rough. As an oarsman, he was persistent, de- termined, powerful. Always to be trusted, his spirit never flagged, his courage never faltered. He was tried often and never found wanting. His character was as sturdy as his body." An old Harvard man's explanation was: " Of Marshall Newell it was indeed true that ' None knew him but to love him, none named him but to praise.' And what was the secret of this love and respect that he inspired in all who knew him? I think it is best answered by one word — character. Through his whole life, his high character was stamped on whatever he did, whether at his studies or in athletics, or while working on the far away Berkshire farm, or engaged in his business occupations of the past two years. Never did a man better exemplify 114 MARSHALL NEWELL Harvard's motto of Veritas. He seemed to be true to his own self in everything he did and said. We all felt, as we looked into his clear, open face, that here was a man in whom im- plicit trust and confidence could be placed, while to his strength and honesty were united a sincerity, simplicity, and innocence always refreshing and inspiring. He reminded me of some strong, healthy, and noble oak or pine of the Berkshire hills which he loved so well, and his life seemed to be as pure and sweet as some crystal stream flowing down Monument Mountain." It was this character that gave him his power and made him the most popular, the most beloved, the most influential man in the univer- sity. A student who entered the university the year Newell left has described his influence on undergraduates : " In many ways he was, and still is, a living personality to us all. There is hardly a man in college who does not associate his name with something worth imitating. " Newell represents to Harvard men of to- A NATURAL CHRISTIAN 115 day all that an athlete should be. He stood for that sort of athletic achievement which is all elevating, manly, and healthful for body and mind. Above all, he was the kind of athlete to put to shame the notoriety-seekers whose per- version of honest sport has done so much to injure athletics. . . . Because they prize the loyalty which makes boys strain side by side for each other, and for their college, they re- spect the chivalry which will not stoop to under- hand methods. They admire, with the full force of youthful enthusiasm, the honest rivalry which teaches them to keep their tempers, to endure silently whatever reverses may meet them, and to acquire a hearty contempt for hard knocks, and all manner of annoyance. Now imagine these qualities summed up and personi- fied in one man, and imagine all the vague long- ing to emulate them in the abstract, transformed into quick, sincere affection for that man, and you can form some idea of the attitude of the undergraduates toward Marshall Newell, and of the nature of his influence. " It would be difficult for any institution to provide its members with a set of principles 116 MARSHALL NEWELL more lofty and inspiring than the code he taught as athlete and as coach. " If anybody had the ' blues,' the best thing that could happen to him was to watch ' Ma ' hustle a football squad through the last ten min- utes of play, or to meet him coming round the corner. It was a sure cure. And for any other college ills, a sight of that sturdy body, and wide-awake, good-tempered glance, that met one half-way, was a panacea. Snobbishness, indifference, selfishness, and the like retired at once. " He impressed upon Harvard undergradu- ates the value of saying little and doing much ; of facing small duties squarely, doing them well, and enjoying them, and of getting both pleasure and profit out of little, everyday affairs." Upon leaving Harvard, Newell returned, as he had been accustomed to do each vacation, to his father's farm and his duties there. In the fall of 1894 he left the farm to coach, with great success, the Cornell football team, and then returned to Great Barrington. In the fall A NATURAL CHRISTIAN 117 of 1895 he coached at Cornell and Harvard, and then, in December, came to Boston to work in the office of Lorin F. Leland. From this time on to the end of his life he kept a journal, which reveals something of the secrets of character which his reserve had not opened up to men. These are some extracts during the long winter days that Newell spent in Boston, doing office work: " December 2. Read some of James Russell Lowell's letters to-day. If all should write their thoughts, how soon we should be shamed to bet- ter ones or stop thinking. " December 3. Business men must think a good deal more of money than I do, to care about such a life. There is no air, and nature is crushed. On every hand everyone is work- ing, not for his own enjoyment, but to earn money, and he who can earn the most is the most successful. Late in the afternoon, as the sun was setting, I stood in one of the windows of the office and watched the smoke from the many chimneys of the city as it was blown over the housetops; some of it brightened by the 118 MARSHALL NEWELL sunlight, but most of it black with its own soot. Below in the buildings the business men are working to finish their day's tasks, and in the streets people are hurrying back and forth. And then I thought of an afternoon on the farm, when, after the work in the open air, I took up the milk pails and went to the barn ; and when I had milked, walked in in the twilight and made ready for supper. The firelight danced in the fireplace as we sat down together and ate in comfort and peace. " December 6. Left the office a little past five and walked out to Cambridge over the new bridge. The air was fine and the stars bright and sparkling. There is nothing like nature in the open air, and that is the life for me. ' Make Thou my spirit pure and clear as are the frosty skies.' " December 7. Received to-day the first money I have earned as a business man. A very pleasant sensation to receive it and feel that it is yours and you have a right to ask for it. And no one is favoring you — yes, they are, for they might refuse to pay except by the month or year. It would be a difficult under- A NATURAL CHRISTIAN 119 taking to go through this world without re- ceiving a favor, and life would be wasted if no favors were granted. " December 22. Read some of Hazlitt dur- ing the evening. As I was sitting in front of the open fire in the grate after dinner this even- ing, I stopped reading and began to look at the coals, as I used to at the wood fire at home ; but they would suggest no pictures, and only wearied my eyes. There is a different spirit in the atmosphere in the city from the atmosphere out on the farm, and we have not yet become well enough acquainted to be on speaking terms." His heart was turning back to the open air and the peace of the farm, and on February eighth, 1896, he left Boston and returned to Great Barrington. This was the first entry in his diary after his return : " 1896, February 9. Snowstorm. Got up at half -past six, milked one cow. Does not take as long to get over a longing for some things as it does to acquire it. Cannot see so much in the weather and the woods as I used to. Hope it 120 MARSHALL NEWELL will come again. Read The Spectator and Great Expectations, not because I have any myself, but I thought I should like to know how a person might feel under such conditions." The charm and joy soon came back, how- ever. On March third, he writes : " What a strength there is in the air. It may be rough at times, but it is true and does not lie. What would the world be if all were open and frank as the day or the sunshine ! " At first the pictures would not come back into the flames of the wood fire ; but on February twenty-seventh he writes : " Fine fire in the fire- place this evening ; am beginning to see pictures in it." And as the springtime came, he moved about his work with delight in the new life and freedom. In October and November he coached the Harvard eleven again, and then, in December, 1896, he accepted a position as assistant super- intendent of the Springfield division of the Bos- ton and Albany Railroad. These are some of the entries in his diary for 1897 : " January 21. Went to Athol on the freight A NATURAL CHRISTIAN 121 and came back on 375. Rode on the engine nearly all the way back. Wondered if I could be any happier if I owned the road. " April 19. If I were free and in the country all the time, my thoughts would be as fresh and clear as all its objects. " July 11. In the office this evening. The niffht hawks are screaming over the city. If I could only live in the country and have no care, but view the beauties that are there; and see the glories of the rising sun and gentle beauties of the morning dew. The music of the happy birds; the flight of swallows after flies and gnats; enjoy the shade of trees at noon and listen to the language of the leaves. Dream that the world was filled with love and music ; and the flowers had a language of their own, taught only to a favored few, and I among them. And at evening feel the grandeur of the colors in the west, and ride upon the golden shafts of light, and almost hear the music of the rays; the twilight slowly gather and the breezes in the trees imitate the falling water. Count the stars that first so slowly send their light, until the heavens seem to open all their 122 MARSHALL NEWELL gates and blaze with milky way and dippers, crows, and crosses. Breathe a thanks to the Protector for the pleasures we enjoy, and sleep in dreams so pleasant that the sunshine of the daytime seems a shadow. " July 31. Went to North Adams Junction. Watched the sky through the clouds ; some places it was light and dreamy, and in others a deep, true, and grand hue that raised spirits and thoughts to higher levels. If I could only look at business as I do the sky ; but I have been taught in a different school. " August 11. Stayed in the office all day. Feel like a fool when I am sitting at a desk." He kept busily at his work on the road, and especially enjoyed, as he said, the out-of-door part of it when there was something vigorous to be done. Professor Peabody recalls his last sight of him under such circumstances : " The last time I met him was some months ago, in a washout on his railroad. Out of the dim, wet, early dawn he came, striding along the track at the head of his men, bringing courage to the anxious passengers; happy, A NATURAL CHRISTIAN 123 proud, and fearless in the emergency, a figure emerging out of the mist like a young Viking taking possession of a strange land; and it made one glad to think that our college, amid its great work of making scholars, still had power to breed sturdy, healthy, happy, work- ing men." And it was out on the road that the end came. On Christmas Eve, 1897, " while attending to his duties," he was killed in an accident on the tracks in the freight yards at Springfield. " While attending to his duties " — what better ending could a man's life have? IX THEODORICK BLAND PRYOR THE PHENOMENAL SCHOLAR EVEN men of whom the world was talking in their day are forgotten by the world the day after. It is not to be wondered at that the multitude of men who in their day were not known to the world, but only to some small circle of friends, should be unremembered. And yet, often these unknown and forgotten men are the men more worth remembering than some to whom fame or notoriety has given immortality. It was the judgment of those who knew him that Theodorick Bland Pryor was one of these. He must have been a young man of rare personality and unusual power to have made on college friends and on all who came to know him and who discovered his gifts, an impression so deep and abiding. They refer to him to this day as the rarest intellect and the most brilliant nature they ever met. 124 THE PHENOMENAL SCHOLAR 125 He was born at Rock Hill, near Charlottes- ville, Virginia, on July eighth, 1851. His an- cestors were among the oldest families in Vir- ginia, with the exception of his grandmother, Mary Blair Rice, a daughter of the Rev. Sam- uel Blair of Pennsylvania. It was said of her that " she was a woman of uncommon strength of mind, and most cheerfully brought the re- sources of her mind into action. The heart of her husband did safely trust in her. She did him good and not evil all the days of her life. Nor was she merely a helpmate for him with respect to this world. Having herself enjoyed a full and systematic religious education, and being blest with a considerable genius, a taste for reading, and a mind habituated to reflection, she had acquired a knowledge of the doctrines and the duties of Christianity beyond many. She professed great influence over her friends, and wrote many letters on the necessity and importance of religion. So deep an impression did she make on her son, William Rice, that he requested that her name should be perpetuated in all succeeding generations, a request which has been respected to the present day." 126 THEODORICK BLAND PRYOR The boy Theodorick grew up in his native town of Charlottesville, where the great Uni- versity of the South, founded by Thomas Jef- ferson, was located, and not far from the states- man's home at Monticello. From the beginning he was a boy of fresh and original mind. " He was only five years old," says the little bio- graphical volume published in 1879, " when the Crimean War engrossed his attention. At that time he was visiting his mother at Petersburg, and amused himself by making a panorama of the events of the war, which was considered a wonderful production by his little cousins. Every day he would learn the last news from Sebastopol, beg a sheet of foolscap, and add to his panorama. At last he rolled it into a box, and exhibited it, illuminated by a candle, with all the manner of a lecturer. About this time his father was a candidate for Congress, and the little fellow entered with ardor into all the ques- tions of the hour. On election day he was at the polls, and selecting a commanding position, exulted in the votes cast for his father. He was an ardent lover of play, and delighted in mock battles with wild animals, and in enacting thrill- THE PHENOrvIENAL SCHOLAR 127 ing scenes from English history." His sister recalls that " he delighted in mimic battles. If out of doors, a pile of stones would be a fort, behind which one of us would take position, while the other assailed it with turf, corn-stalks, etc. In the house we substituted a chair and news- papers. He never failed to become greatly excited, and having found somewhere a book of military tactics, he always planned his move- ments in accordance with rule and prece- dent. ... I do not know how or when he became interested in astronomy, but I remember, when we were spending a day or two with a large family of children, the great amusement of the older people on finding out that he had arranged us all to represent the solar system, while he, with a long train of newspapers pinned behind, darted erratically among us all in the role of a comet." At the age of eleven he was sent to a school in Isle of Wight County, where he rose at once to the place of undisputed preeminence. " I recollect," says his instructor, Mr. Good- son, " no particular incident illustrative of his 128 THEODORICK BLAND PRYOR marked traits of character, except one, perhaps, showing his extreme sensitiveness, his pride, and high sense of honor. On one occasion I was so unfortunate as to reprove him for something for which he was in no degree responsible, and it had such an effect on him that I would have given anything to have been able to recall it. I thought it would break his manly little heart, and it taught me a lesson, which I trust I may never forgot." After leaving Mr. Goodson's school, Pryor studied with the Rev. Dr. William J. Hoge, and both teacher and pupil found unlimited delight in the relationship. On one occasion when Dr. Hoge had kept his scholars too long, and, suddenly remembering, bade them go, Theodorick cried out, " No, no, Mr. Hoge ; please, Mr. Hoge, go on, this is better than play:' It was like Mr. Morley's story of Mr. Gladstone's examination at Oxford, where the examiner being satisfied, remarked to Mr. Glad- stone, " We will now leave the subject," and was astounded by the earnest reply, " Oh, no sir, THE PHENOMENAL SCHOLAR 129 we will not leave it," while the young Gladstone went on to pour out a flood of knowledge which he could not repress. Pryor was ten years old when the Civil War broke out. His father, General Roger A. Pryor, was a soldier in the Confederate armies, and the rest of the family spent most of the ter- rible years on a farm near Petersburg. At first Pryor was with his parents. He spent the first winter in camp with his father. Though he was but ten years old, " among other things he acquired proficiency in details of drill and com- pany movements, while making army tactics a subject of careful study. He read all his father's books, and borrowed others from Major-General Pemberton. This study en- grossed him during the greater part of the winter, and when General Pryor left his com- mand temporarily to take his seat in the Southern Congress at Richmond, the soldiers persuaded him to drill their regiments, lavish- ing upon him an amount of adulation which might have injured a boy of less modesty and humility. His father had no opponent at the Congressional election but his son, for when the 130 THEODORICK BLAND PRYOR ballots were consulted, some were found to have been cast for Theodorick ! " After this he was sent off to a remote section of Virginia to school to be out of harm's way, but insisted on coming to Petersburg to join his mother, and there he experienced the perils and discipline of the awful struggle, studying as best he could amid the sounds of the strife of the last great battles of the war. When the war was concluded General Pryor went North to New York City, to practice law, the war having destroyed all the wealth of the family in Virginia. Theodorick soon joined his father, but was shortly sent back to Petersburg to the school of John Christian, to whom his mother delivered him at the age of fourteen, with the remark, " I have brought you no ordi- nary boy ; he is a scholar and a gentleman." Mr. Christian testifies that this was no over- praise. He soon proved himself the most won- derful boy Mr. Christian had ever taught. He and one other boy, his teacher said, would stand foremost among the brave hearts we would ever honor, having, beside their commanding ability, set " such an example of courage and honesty, THE PHENOMENAL SCHOLAR 131 maintaining such a tone of absolute truth and delicate honor, as made every boy, down to the lowest classes in the school, ashamed to tell a lie ! " In 1868 Pryor went to Princeton, entering Junior year. It was the largest class that up to that time had ever been gathered at Prince- ton, but though handicapped as every student is who enters a class late, Pryor at once went up to the head of it. " He raised the standard of scholarship in his class," says a classmate, "and it is not saying too much to affirm that his influence was felt by every member of it. True, no one ever competed successfully with him. He was, intellectually speaking, head and shoulders taller than the tallest in his class." He was not an athlete, but he was no recluse, and was as popular as he was able. He and four friends formed a debating club. It was their custom to meet, determine by lot who were to take the two sides, and then the subject was an- nounced, and the first man had at once to rise and begin the debate. This was to prevent the possibility of preparation, and to cultivate the power of instant thought and statement. Dur- 132 THEODORICK BLAND PRYOR ing his senior year there was a great revival in the college, and within a month of his gradua- tion he gave his heart to Christ, and at once set about winning others. To his mother he wrote of what he had done : "My Dear Mother: " God has been pleased, in answer to prayer, as I believe, to pardon my sins, and has given me strength to state the fact to my classmates. I had yesterday a talk with Dr. Duffield, who prayed with me and gave me great hope, and to-day I feel that I trust wholly in my Saviour for salvation. " Dear mother, you know not how thankful I am for the efforts of you and sister in praying for me, as I know you have done. Please pray now that I may receive grace from on high to lead a consistent Christian life and give all the glory to God. " I am often troubled by pride and doubts, but Dr. Duffield says they are felt by all Chris- tians. Pray to God to remove them and give me greater love to His Son. Give my dearest love to all. Your affectionate son, " T. B. Peyob. THE PHENOMENAL SCHOLAR 133 " P. S. — I wish, too, that you and sister would ask God to bless my classmates, for there are many whom I wish to bring to Christ. The Christians of my class have been very kind to me, and Wallie Miller and several other friends have been praying specially in my behalf." " His faith," wrote one of his classmates, " was not without works. I was in trouble my- self at that time, and I shall ever remember, with gratitude, his labors of love. I know four of the class who were among the most callous in it, with whom he labored unceasingly, to induce them to seek their soul's salvation. Two of these are now professing Christians, and testify that Pryor was the instrument in God's hands of their conversion." When the class was graduated Pryor was at the head of it. " His average grade," says his biographer, " which secured him the first honor, was only a tenth short of absolute per- fection! In all the previous history of the college this mark had been obtained by only one other — Aaron Burr, in 1772." He was awarded the Mathematical Fellowship and went the next year to Cambridge University to study. He 134 THEODORICK BLAND PRYOR would have preferred to be near Princeton, but Dr. McCosh urged his going and he went, though he did not enjoy the reticence and re- serve of English student life, his heart longing for the warm friendships that he had known at Princeton. Even before going to Cambridge a spirit of dejection had come into his mind, and the unsatisfying life at Cambridge only con- firmed this. In 1871 he returned home. He was uncertain as to his duty for the future. He had wished to enter the ministry, but other motives constrained him, and he decided to study law for a year, and at the end of the year to reach a final decision. The end of the year never came. Though he realized his peril and fought against the mood of despondency which was upon him, it grew, his ideals seeming unattainable, and the actual world so hopeless and evil. Time and healthful diversions might have carried him safely through, but the end was too near. One night in October, 1871, he left his home in Brooklyn, and never returned. After nine days his body was found in the East River. He had walked down to the river, and wrapped in medi- tation or unaware of where he was going or by THE PHENOMENAL SCHOLAR 135 some accident or misstep, as his sister believed, had fallen into the water and been drowned. His body was taken to Princeton and buried in the old cemetery, where Jonathan Edwards, the Alexanders, and other great men rested, and where now Charles Hodge and Dr. McCosh lie. Theodorick Pryor made a profound impres- sion on all who knew him. Classmates and others look back upon him as a man of pre- ternatural gifts and qualities. " As to the nature and extent of his attain- ments," says one, " we can scarcely trust our- selves to speak ; anything like what we be- lieve to be the truth in this respect might challenge belief among those who knew him not. . . . Pryor was fascinating, both by demonstrativeness and by reticence, his frankness and his mystery. ' His soul was often seen on his lips ready to fly,' and there was now and then a spiritual unveiling, wonderful in quality and quantity. He was too much occu- pied, however — too grave, too earnest, and quiet — for that fragmentary jocosity, or free- and-easy intercourse on the level of little noth- 136 THEODORICK BLAND PRYOR ings, in which average natures take pleasure. His studies of himself and his states ; his stead- fast sympathies with the simplest objects, as well as his insight into the subtleties of nature, history, and philosophy, neutralized the strong affections which he cherished for those around him, and effected an insulation from his fellows which was not the result of his own choice. Throughout life he was separated from the mass around him by the manifold superiority of his soul, the greater quickness and richness of his sensibility, the peculiar keenness and gravity of his conscience, the distinguishing force and constancy of his aspirations after internal harmony and usefulness. No being was ever more simple, unpretending, and kindly-natured, and yet he seemed inaccessible." Another Princeton student, Mr. Henry W. Rankin, recalls across the years Pryor's noble character : " During all these thirty-three years young Pryor has lived in my memory as the ideal col- lege man, though I never knew him. I was in Princeton at his Commencement, and for a THE PHENOMENAL SCHOLAR 137 week's time before that taking my own entrance examinations. I stayed with cousins, of whom the elder was one class behind Pryor, and was well acquainted with him. They told me much about Pryor, who was idolized by the whole col- lege and the faculty. He was pointed out to me, and several times I saw him on the campus, on the street, and looked on him with a lover's eyes." Mr. Rankin wrote several years ago a sonnet, which will show how deep was the impress that Pryor's unsullied life and his rare powers made on other men: " Fearless and honored and beloved, he stood First of a century on a college roll In various learning, and in liberal arts; While in just judgment of remembering hearts, Of all that knew him, first was he in soul, Surpassing beautiful and true and good. And goodly in his outward presence too — Ah! still in eyes that saw him tears will leap- In shape and stature and in countenance, In gentle carriage, and so noble glance; Fair also unto God, who, from the deep, Took him on high there to uplift our view. Look ! But his glory now, transcending sight, Is hidden from our gaze till we can bear its light." X GEORGE H. C. MacGREGOR A MODERN MYSTIC LL who attended the General Bible Con- ference at Northfield in August, 1897, and the following year, remember a young Scotchman, rather slight, with a clear Highland voice, and an even clearer mind, abso- lutely simple and unpretentious, but strong and positive, who had lived deeply and thought much, and whom God had taught. Those who saw him there and were helped by his clear and honest Christian speech little thought that his course was so nearly run. And now, though he has been gone for three years, they recall him vividly, and thank God for having known him. I did not hear him then, but in 1894, at Keswick, England, at the great Christian Con- ference there, in the beauty of the Lake 138 A MODERN MYSTIC 139 Country, I heard him speak a simple message that for its simplicity was unforgettable. George Hogarth Carnaby Macgregor was born in 1864, in Ferintosh, Scotland, where his father was minister. He grew up in the rugged, godly circumstances of such a home. The lad had from the first a thoughtful mind. At the age of nine he was sent with an elder brother to Inverness, and attended the academy for five years. At fourteen he was one of the head boys in the school, and gained the medal for mathe- matics. In shorthand he had obtained a full cer- tificate from Sir Isaac Pitman's Institute at Bath, as one qualified to teach the system. Afterwards he wrote all his sermons and private memoranda in shorthand. As he left Inverness, a relative offered to pay his college expenses if he would study law, but he declined, preferring to work his own way through into the ministry. It is charged some- times that weak men are bribed into the min- istry by the financial aids to education ; but George Macgregor turned away from such help to law, to work into the ministry without it. In October, 1878, at the age of fourteen, he 140 GEORGE H. C. MacGREGOR entered the University of Edinburgh. Like many Scottish lads, he supported himself from the first almost entirely by gaining bursaries and by teaching. Those quiet, plodding years saw the formation of habits of the most deter- mined and unsparing industry, of a rigid accuracy and economy, both of means and time, and self-denial that became a second nature. Out of such a training grew the self-reliance, the fearlessness, and the strong manhood that marked him in after years. He lived in simple lodgings with his brother Alec, three years his senior, who was studying medicine. The two bright young Highlanders had no lack of friends, but they had no leisure to accept many invitations. Their business was to work, and to make the most of those precious years and the opportunities which would not return. " I do most thoroughly believe in hard work," George wrote to his sister. This is one of the entries in his journal in the spring of 1883, as he closed his course: " Saturday, April 7. — At 9:10 saw Alec off, the last of him for more than a year, perhaps A MODERN MYSTIC 141 forever. Thank God he is saved, and will meet me in heaven ! O God, bless him and make him a blessing. May he do good not only to the bodies, but also to the souls, of many on the ship. " How solemn to think of my arts course being finished. Five years' study come to an end. Blessed be God for His goodness to me dur- ing it, and especially for His goodness to me during this last season. I must yet pray and pray and pray that He may use me for His glory, for, unless He do so, my life will be useless." The year after his graduation he spent at home, tutoring some boys and assisting his father, having a Bible class which grew to a membership of one hundred. He had worked his way to a living faith in the Bible, and others came to the man who believed with such faith. A letter written in 1897 to an inquirer for help tells something of his experience: " You ask me about my faith in Scripture as the word of God. I was trained up in the strictest possible way to believe in the inspira- 142 GEORGE H. C. MacGREGOR tion of the Bible. But the faith that was the result of this training utterly gave way, and for a time I lost all faith in the Bible as inspired. I became an utter skeptic. But amid all my skepticism and doubt there was one thing that I could not doubt. That was that I was not what I ought to be. I was a sinner. Sin was a fact in my life. It was the discovery of this as a fact that led me back to the Bible. I found it dealt with sin as no other book did, and under- stood sin as no other book did. Other books spoke of evil, vice, crime ; this of sin. I began to see that the inspiration of the Bible did not lie so much in its being a miraculously accurate book, as in its being a book written from God's point of view. I found that this same point of view was kept all through the books written at such different times and by such different men. The whole book was about God. As I said, it was * sin ' that brought me back to the Bible, but I found hundreds of things converging to confirm my growing conviction that the book was of God. Our Lord Jesus became a reality to me. He accepted the Old Testament as the word of God. He became a witness to it for me. A MODERN MYSTIC 143 As I have become more familiar with the Bible, the conviction has grown that God has had His way all through in connection with this book. Our difficulties almost all arise either from ignorance or misunderstanding. A valuable subsidiary evidence is the effect that the Bible has on those who accept. The history of our Bible Societies, and a knowledge of what they are doing, furnishes an answer to many a dif- ficulty. If the Bible be not inspired, to explain its influence and power is impossible; if it be, all is plain." After this year at home he went back to Edinburgh for his theological course in the New College. After his four years there, he came over to Nova Scotia. At the close of his season of work there at Bridgetown, he wrote to his father: " September 14, 1885. — My work here is now over, and looking back on it, as I do with a feel- ing of profoundest thankfulness, I seek to say and feel, ' Not unto us, Lord, not to us, but to thy name be all the glory.' The Sabbath morn- ing attendance has increased from twenty-five 144 GEORGE H. C. MacGREGOR to one hundred and seventy, the afternoon from fifty to one hundred and fifty. There was no prayer-meeting, but once begun, the attendance increased from eight to forty-two. The amount raised for church purposes has risen from one hundred dollars to four hundred and fifty dol- lars. I find it very, very hard to get away. The people have asked me again and again, have said that they will call me as soon as they can get through the preliminaries, and offer me seven hundred and fifty dollars and a manse if I will stay. I, of course, told them that my going home is a settled thing ; and so now they are looking forward, in spite of all that I can do to dissuade them, to my return in the spring to remain finally with them. " The work has been hard, but strength has been given, and now at the end I feel strong and vigorous. I have preached since May first about fifty times, and written thirty-six new sermons. The Want of books made the sermon-writing very hard, but constant contact with the people and observation of their weaknesses, their trials, temptations, and difficulties was more valuable than any library." A MODERN MYSTIC 145 The summer of 1886 Macgregor spent in Glasgow, as assistant in the Paisley Road Free Church. The next year he was tutoring and lecturing in Hebrew, preparing men for the Divinity Hall, and doing City Mission work, and then the call came to him to go out to Arabia to take up Keith-Falconer's work. His father wrote to him of this call as follows : " My Dear George : Your letter has put me in great perplexity. I took two days to think over it and pray over it ; and yet I can give no opinion. It is a post of high honor you are desired to fill. The elements that should go to decide are your fitness for the post, the leaning of your mind, and the suitableness of the climate for your constitution. If soldiers and sailors go into the service of an earthly queen, the sol- diers of the Cross should not be behind them in heroism. Though I shall be very sorry and heartsore to part with you, if the matter is of the Lord, I can neither say good nor bad; and if it is His, I hope He will make the way clear. The first missionary and founder of the station fell a martyr to a noble cause. I trust and pray 146 GEORGE H. C. MacGREGOR the grain of wheat that died may bring forth much fruit. Pray that God may guide you wisely. With all our love. " Your affectionate father, "M. Macgregor." But he was not to go. Dr. George Smith, the secretary of the Free Church's Foreign Mis- sions, in his account of the matter, explains why he stayed: " On the sudden death of the Hon. Ion Keith- Falconer, at Sheikh Othman, near Aden, on May eleventh, 1887, it was my duty to find a suc- cessor among our young ministers or senior divin- ity students. In the session of 1887-88 I sent for George Macgregor, whose visit to Canada I was aware of, whose combination of scholarship and spiritual zeal I knew that winter. ' Will you,' I said to him, ' take up Ion Keith-Falconer's mantle if the committee call you to be his suc- cessor? ' His face lighted up immediately, and then clouded as he replied that he could not believe he would be found worthy of such a call, but, God helping him, he was ready to accept it if offered to him. A medical examination re- A MODERN MYSTIC 147 suited in his being forbidden to work in the tropics. His disappointment was intense. His was the will, hearty, immediate, and self-sacri- ficing ; and God, I doubt not, reckoned it to him in his future career." The man who was willing to go to Arabia, however, was the man whom God could use at home. And, in 1888, Macgregor was called to the East Church in Aberdeen. These were the last words of the young man's acceptance of the call to this important church: " I am determined, God helping me, to spend and be spent in your service, and I do trust and believe that you will do all that you can to help me. I draw toward the young people, and expect that they will rally round me. And I expect sympathy and help from the older peo- ple, and the benefit and experience of their Christian life. And from all I do expect, and demand as my right, your earnest prayers to God on my behalf, that I may be earnest and faithful in His work among you. I am a great believer in joy, and in putting as much joy into my work as I can. I go on in hope and faith. 148 GEORGE H. C. MacGREGOR It is Christ's work, and I believe that His king- dom is coming. I pray that you and I may take as our motto these words : ' I will go in the strength of the Lord God ; I will make mention of Thy righteousness, even of Thine only.' ' The following year. Macgregor made his first visit to Keswick, to the great convention there. The last Sunday evening he wrote to his sister : " Sunday evening, July 28, 1889.— The con- vention is now over, and to-morrow we go back to the world. To say I have enjoyed it is to say nothing. To call it heaven may seem hyper- bole, but it is, perhaps, the best and shortest way of speaking of it. I fear I shall never be able to speak of it. The joy is unspeakable and full of glory. I have learned innumerable lessons, principally these: my own sinfulness and shortcoming. I have been searched through, and through, and bared and exposed and scorched by God's searching Spirit. And then I have learned the unsearchableness of Christ. How Christ is magnified here you can scarcely have any idea. I got such a view of the good- A MODERN MYSTIC 149 ness of God to-day that it made me weep. I was completely broken down, and could not con- trol myself, but had a fit of weeping. And I have learned the absolute necessity of obedience. Given obedience and faith, nothing is impossible. I have committed myself into God's hands and He has taken me, and life can never be the same again. It must be infinitely brighter than ever. To-morrow, D. V., I go to Glasgow, and then pass on as rapidly as possible to Inverness. I want to have some time with George Ross. Then to Dingwall, where I shall get your letters. I hope you had a good day. God bless you all. " Love from your boy, " George." In this new power he returned to his work at Aberdeen. His work was not confined, however, to this place. In 1893 he came on a mission to America, and Mr. Moody tried to persuade him to remain in Chicago as pastor of the Chicago Avenue Church. This call he declined, however. " I do not think I am fitted for this post in the center of a new world," he said. Only a little while after his return he was called to " the center of the whole world," as he called it, and 150 GEORGE H. C. MacGREGOR went to London. " The path of ease," he wrote, " is not always the path of duty, and that the path of duty leads me to London I feel very strongly." On May twenty-fourth, 1894, he became pastor of the Notting Hill Church. He threw himself wholly into the work of the church. He made it a thoroughly foreign missionary church. Seven went out from it to India, China, Africa, and Palestine. Above all he was a worker for souls. It was not easy work, but he did it without shrinking or reserve. He went out from his new field on special missions as he had gone from his old, and he wrote constantly to hearts needing help, and with which, in one way or another, he was brought into touch. It was while in the Not- ting Hill Church that Mr. Macgregor came over to Northfield. " The nearer one comes to Moody," he wrote in his journal, " the more one is impressed by him. He is a giant; the greatest religious force in America to-day." Busy and active as this life was, and rich in promise of long usefulness, it was, like its Mas- ter's, to be a short life, and it came to a close in peace and reality. His wife writes: A MODERN MYSTIC 151 " I have been thinking over little details in his life which show how wonderfully he lived out all he preached. He never got a check, how- ever small, without at once marking down the tenth of it in his charity book to be given away. Then he never was worried about anything. He just seemed to cast all his cares on his Saviour, and nothing ever seemed to ruffle his calm. However busy he was, he was never put out if interruptions came. Often, when I used to com- plain of people paying him long visits in the study, when I knew he could ill spare the time, he would only smile, and say he was thankful if he could give them any spiritual help. When he came home tired he used to go to the organ and sit down and play and sing hymns, which he said rested him more than anything. The last Sunday night before his illness, I remember so well his sitting down and singing that lovely hymn, ' Sleep on, beloved,' right through. It was the last time I heard him sing. Strange that he should have chosen that ! " In April, 1900, after a very hard winter's work, of which he had written, " I am very well, 152 GEORGE H. C. MacGREGOR but driven like a slave. I have hardly leisure to sleep. Yet I am getting fat," he was taken ill with meningitis, and it was his last illness, and in it he was what he had ever been. His doctor says: " All through his illness, when for brief moments the delirium left him, he thought not of himself, but of others. Early in his illness, when I was left alone with him, be beckoned to me, and whispered, with a sweet smile, ' Dear doctor, I am so sorry for all the trouble I am giving you and the other dear ones ; but I know it is useless, I know I am going home.' I shall never forget the lovely smile and the radiant joy that seemed to light up his face as he said it. His thoughts and prayers, so far as we could make them out, seemed to be all for his beloved people and the Jews, and only once did he say to us, when we asked what he was sa} r ing (fear- ing he required something which we might have omitted), ' Oh, I am just telling Jehovah about my sickness ! ' " And Jehovah heard and carried him through into the perfect health of heaven. XI MIRZA IBRAHIM AN ALIEN BROTHER OF FIDELITY IT would be unjust not to include in this series some young man not of our own race. The difficulty is not to find some one worthy to be numbered with these others, but to select one from the scores whose lives ought to be known by us. The one I have chosen was a young Persian Mohammedan, who openly fol- lowed Christ and paid for his fidelity with his life. Islam is the only religion which proclaims Christ a prophet, and it is the only religion which deems His discipleship crime. There is opposition to Christianity, of course, in Hindu and Buddhist and Confucianist lands, but in none of these lands is apostasy practically a capital offense as it is in Turkey and Persia. There are hundreds of Mohammedans who have become Christians in these lands and in India, 143 154 MIRZA IBRAHIM but where the government is Moslem as well as the church, it is usually because they are un- known that such Christians are allowed to live. In the early years of the last century the Turk- ish government frankly declared that none of its Moslem subjects might change his religion, and in 1853 a young Moslem was publicly exe- cuted after judicial condemnation to death for the crime of having apostatized to Christianity. After this execution, the British Minister of Foreign Affairs, the Earl of Clarendon, wrote to the British Ambassador at Constantinople: " The Christian powers, who are making gigantic efforts and submitting to enormous sacrifices to save the Turkish Empire from ruin and destruction, cannot permit the continuance of a law in Turkey, which is not only a standing insult to them, but a source of cruel persecution to their co-religionists, which they never can consent to perpetuate by the successes of their fleets and armies. They are entitled to demand, and her majesty's government does distinctly demand, that no punishment whatever shall at- tach to the Mohammedan who becomes a Christian." AN ALIEN BROTHER 155 Neither in Turkey nor in Persia, however, have the Christian powers enforced this view, and open and aggressive discipleship of Christ on the part of one who has been a Mohammedan is likely to result as such devotion did result in the case of Mirza Ibrahim. Mirza Ibrahim was a native of Khoi, a city in the province of Azerbaijan in northwestern Persia. About 1888 he began to appear in the meeting room of the Protestant Christians in Khoi. As he came to understand more perfectly the pure Christianity which he found in this lit- tle meeting room, he became convinced of its truth, and he sought to be baptized as a Chris- tian. His poverty, however, and distrust of the innate duplicity of Persian character, led to fear as to his motives, and he was delayed. But nothing discouraged him. His wife and friends scoffed at him, but he stood firm, and after a year's probation he was openly received and baptized into the name of Christ. Believers and unbelievers were present, and saw with wonder- ing hearts the bold confession. One of those present " was a Moslem, himself a half -believer, who, after the ceremony, gave our brother the 156 MIRZA IBRAHIM right hand of congratulation, wishing that he had like courage to avow his belief in Jesus." The test of his faith came immediately. His wife and children and small property were taken from him by fanatical Moslems, and though sick and feeble, he was forced to flee. He went to Urumia, and found refuge in Dr. Cochran's hos- pital. The name of Dr. Cochran, the " Hakim Sahib," is a strong tower in northwestern Persia. The persecuted man runs into it and is safe. In Urumia the simplicity and firmness of Ibra- him's faith won the confidence of all. He was first employed to copy books for a little Turkish- speaking school, and then, as Dr. Labaree writes, in a sketch of Mirza Ibrahim: " After a year or two he was sent out, at his own request, to carry the glad tidings of the gospel to the villagers around, with the small compensation of four dollars a month. " With such fearlessness and vigor did he proclaim the way of life through Christ alone, that the wrath of the enemy was aroused against him; but he only grew the bolder. Such a course, however, could issue in but one way. The AN ALIEN BROTHER 157 arm of the civil law, at the behest of Moham- medan priests, was laid upon him. He was arrested and brought before the Serparest, a sub-governor appointed over the Christians. When arraigned for investigation, a crowd of scowling mullahs and other Moslems being gathered around, the Serparest inquired of him, ' Why should you, a Moslem, be teaching the Christian's doctrines ? ' Mirza Ibrahim took out his Testament from his bosom, and asked in reply : ' Is not this Ingil a holy book? ' The Ser- parest acknowledged that it was, for the Mos- lems recognized the Old and New Testaments as revelations from God. The prisoner replied: i Am I not right, then, in reading it and teach- ing it?' 'But how about Mohammed?' was the question that followed, to which the prisoner replied : ' That is for you to say ; my faith is in Christ and His word ; He is my Saviour.' At this the command was given, i Beat him.' Ibrahim was knocked down and terribly kicked, even by the Serparest himself. Some in the crowd de- manded his blood, but he was taken from this lesser tribunal to the governor of the city, where, in the presence of many dignitaries, he 158 MIRZA IBRAHIM reaffirmed his faith in Christ as the only Saviour of his soul. Wealthy officials stood ready to raise a purse of money for him if the want of that had tempted him to abjure his allegiance to Islam. But his patient endurance of the abusive treatment heaped upon him proved to them that something other than money was at the bottom of his bold denunciation of Moham- medanism. Some declared him crazy; but not a few of the more intelligent military men, who have come to hold more liberal sentiments toward Christianity through their intercourse with Dr. Cochran and the better class of our native Christians, were convinced that Mirza Ibrahim had come to be an honest believer in Jesus Christ, and his courage in confessing Him moved them much. " He was thrown into prison with a chain about his neck, and his feet made fast in stocks. The city was in an uproar, and the mob about the prison gates demanded his execution. A torturing death stared him in the face as among the possibilities, but through all this ordeal his countenance is said to have shone like that of an angel. Firmly he declared : ' You may shoot AN ALIEN BROTHER 159 me from the mouth of a cannon, but you cannot take away my faith in Christ.' In consequence of the uproar in the community, and the desire of the authorities to avoid a violent termination of the case, it was decided to send him to Tabriz to appear before the highest tribunal of the province. A Nestorian brother of Mirza Ibra- him in heralding the cross among Mohammedan villages, went to bid him good-by on the day he was to start for Tabriz. He found him tying his clothing in a handkerchief, ready to go. Turning to his fellow-prisoners he said : * I have shown to you Christ, the all-sufficient Saviour; you have learned truth enough to save your souls if you only receive it.' He bade them a tender farewell, and they all arose with heavy fetters on hands and feet, and chains upon their necks, and bade him go in peace, tears streaming down many of their wretched faces. An extra supply of provisions sent him by his Christian friends being left over, the soldiers suggested that he take it with him for his j ourney's needs ; but he answered, ' No, I have a Master who will pro- vide for me ; I will leave this bread for the poor prisoners here.' As he left the prison he turned, 160 MIRZA IBRAHIM and raising his hand, solemnly called God to witness that if on the judgment day he should meet any of these souls unsaved, he had declared to them the way of life, and that he was free from their blood. Eight soldiers took him to the house of the general of the cavalry, whose men were to escort Mirza to Tabriz. In the house was gathered a crowd of Mohammedans, curious to see the man that dared to defy mullahs and deny the authority of the prophet. The priests among them began plying him with questions, and scoffing at him, but he answered them so clearly and pointedly that they became ashamed to pursue the matter before the assembled crowd. The general now permitted the Nestorian brother Absalom to have a final interview with the prisoner. They embraced one another af- fectionately, and spoke of faith and love, and possible death for the Master's sake. To the missionaries and other friends he sent a message asking that they pray to God for the increase of his faith. ' Tell them,' he said, ' this firm- ness is not of myself, but God is helping me.' They knelt together, the general and the mul- lahs looking on, and each offered to God a part- AN ALIEN BROTHER 161 ing prayer. As they arose, the general kindly said, ' Have you finished, my son? ' After this he was led out to mount the horse which friends had provided for his five days' journey; other- wise he must have gone on foot. The general was one of those who had been deeply impressed with the sincerity of the prisoner's new faith, and was ready to show him all the favor con- sistent with his position. To the escort of sol- diers he said, ' I swear by the spirit of Christ if any of you maltreat this man I will cause you to eat your fathers,' a caustic form of threat common among the Persians. Ibrahim's last words to the brother Absalom were, ' Pray for me that I may witness for Christ among my peo- ple. It is a privilege given to me, one, perhaps, that would not be given to one of you. Pray that I may be firm. I have no fear whatever, though I know I may have to die. Good-by.' '' As he went away, a Mohammedan officer said, " This is a wonderful man. He is as brave as a lion." When he reached Tabriz he was taken before the governor, and asked what had been given 162 MIRZA IBRAHIM to him to induce him to become a Christian. His reply was, " Nothing but these bonds and this imprisonment." He was cast into a dark dun- geon, his feet put in stocks, beaten and stoned, and a heavy iron collar and chain were fastened on his neck. In Persia the government does not furnish prisoners with food, and unless friends help them they would starve. Through a friendly Moslem, the missionaries in Tabriz sent Ibrahim food and a piece of matting, and re- deemed for him his cloak, which he had pawned for bread. He " was allowed to have his New Testament with him, and most constantly and faithfully did he preach the true life to his fel- low-bondsmen. Thrust into prison for preach- ing Christ, and yet allowed to carry on this ' criminal ' work in the prison itself ! Many of the prisoners were profoundly moved by the message from this brother. One of them, a thief, was so moved with contrition and melted under his instructions and appeals, that he made full confession of his sins, and revealed where he had secreted certain stolen goods." The government hesitated to execute Ibrahim openly lest it should only increase interest in AN ALIEN BROTHER 163 Christianity, and shake confidence in Islam to see one who had abandoned it die boldly for his new faith. So he was left in prison at the mercy of an inhuman keeper. After a while he was put down into a moldy cellar and chained to a gang of murderers, who robbed him of his coat and bedding. Even these he tried to win to Christ. " One night," says Dr. Labaree, " after they had been locked up for the night, the prison inmates had been talking of the two religions of Jesus and of Mohammed. His fel- low-prisoners declared to Ibrahim that if he did not say that Jesus was false and Ali (one of their mediators) true, they would choke him to death. By turn each of the base fellows put him to the test, and each time his answer came back, i Jesus is true, choke me if you will.' And they did so, one after the other, until his eyes bulged out and for minutes he lost consciousness. They desisted without actually taking his life on the spot, but as a consequence of their brutal treat- ment his throat so swelled as to prevent his eat- ing his dry prison fare, and he became weaker and weaker." His condition touched even his keeper, and 164 MIRZA IBRAHIM he was moved to the upper prison. But it was too late, and on Sunday, May fourteenth, 1893, he died from his injuries. When the Crown Prince was informed of his death, he asked, " How did he die ? " And the jailor answered, " He died like a Christian." *'He through fiery trials trod, And from great affliction came; Now before the throne of God, Sealed with His almighty name, Clad in raiment pure and white, Victor palms within his hands, Through his dear Redeemer's might More than conqueror he stands." He was buried by night in the grave of a rich Moslem, whose body had been removed. Like his Master, he made his grave with the wicked and with the rich in his death. His martyrdom sent a thrill through Persia, and brought many a weak, secret Christian fac to face with the pos- sible consequences of an open confession of his Faith. If Mirza Ibrahim was not afraid to follow, to confess, and to serve Christ in Persia, have we any right to be afraid in America? Perhaps we dream of how ready we would be AN ALIEN BROTHER 165 to die for Christ. But are we living for Him? This Persian was able to die for his faith be- cause he had lived for it. And no man's dying will be of much honor to God if his living has dishonored Him. Whether we shall ever die like Mirza Ibrahim is of no consequence. Are we living as he lived? " So he died for his faith. That is fine — More than most of us do. But, say, can you add to that line That he lived for it, too? " In his death he bore witness at last As a martyr to truth, Did his life do the same in the past From the days of his youth? " It is easy to die. Men have died For a wish or a whim — ■ From bravado or passion or pride. Was it harder for him? " But to live — every day to live out All the truth that he dreamt, While his friends met his conduct with doubt And the world with contempt. "Was it thus that he plodded ahead, Never turning aside? Then we'll talk of the life that he led, Never mind how he died." XII WILLIAM EARL DODGE A CHRISTIAN OF PRIVILEGE OF all the young men whose lives are sketched in these pages, none left upon all who knew him an impression of more beauty and nobility of character than Earl Dodge. To every advantage of family and wealth he added the attraction of a pure and joyous and unselfish soul. All who knew him re- member him as next to flawless. The testimony of the Hon. Abram S. Hewitt would be the testi- mony of all : " I never knew a more loving and promising young man. I have often referred to him as a model of what a young man should be. He seemed to me to be the very embodiment of ' sweetness and light.' It is hard to understand such a dispensation (as his early death) for he 166 A CHRISTIAN OF PRIVILEGE 167 was the very flower of promise in all good works." William Earl Dodge was born in New York city on October seventeenth, 1858. He bore the name of his father and his grandfather, a name exalted by each of them to the highest honor, and he glorified the name that he bore. There are men who inherit a good name and defile it. Evil eats back into the past and attacks ancient honors to bedim and degrade them. Men for- get this. But such iniquity was as far from Earl Dodge's nature as darkness from light. At the age of fourteen he went to Williston Seminary at Easthampton, Massachusetts. There his inti- mate friends were students older than himself, who were of but moderate means and who were working for their education or getting it at self- sacrifice. His wealth did not seek the associa- tions of wealth. It was his character that sought fine character in others, rich or poor. He joined the Madison Square Presbyterian Church in New York during his first year at school. He asked that he might return home for this purpose, on the ground that he wanted 168 WILLIAM EARL DODGE to be able to exert the greater influence, which this positive stand as a Christian would give him. " He was known among the boys," wrote a schoolmate, " as one who would do no hurt to another's feelings even, and we all knew where to find him in a question of right or wrong, even if he stood alone." He left Williston in 1875, spending the summer in Europe and entered Princeton in the fall with the class of 1879. In College he at once took his place as an unostentatious, beloved and admired leader of men. From the begin- ning, he threw himself into athletics. " Earl Dodge," says the president of his class, the Rev. Dr. Halsey, w was a born athlete. His tall, lithe, graceful figure lent itself easily to all kinds of athletic sports. Such a generous, breezy soul could not be confined within the four walls of a room. He lived in the open. The exuberance of his animal spirits and the intensity of his buoyant nature — he did noth- ing by halves — drove him into every kind of outdoor exercise. He began to play ball within twenty-four hours after entering college. Ho A CHRISTIAN OF PRIVILEGE 169 was among the first of the undergraduates to introduce lawn-tennis at Princeton. The first lawn-tennis court was laid out by his hand on the open space between the gymnasium and the old observatory. He rode a bicycle in the days when the number of 'wheels ' in college could be counted on the fingers of one hand. To enu- merate the various athletic interests with which he was identified, either as a player, director, or promoter, would be to give a catalogue of all such organizations in the college during the period from 1875 to 1879. His chief contribu- tion, however, to the cause of athletics at Princeton was not the liberal gifts of money nor the rare skill and prowess displayed on many a well-fought field, but the new spirit he enthused into every branch of college sport. " Earl Dodge was first, last, and all the time a gentleman. He was as conscientious in play as in study, as courteous in a football game as he was dignified in leading a prayer-meeting. He was no weakling. He played for all he was worth. i Dodge had his shirt torn into ribhons,' is the record of one of the Harvard-Princeton 170 WILLIAM EARL DODGE football games. He played ball, but he always played fair, and set an example both on the field and in the no less trying position in the commit- tee-room, which won the respect and confidence of friend and opponent alike. " It was largely due to his tact, forbearance, gracious manner, and yielding spirit that the first conference of the representatives of Yale, Harvard, Columbia, and Princeton, held at Springfield, Mass., November twenty-second, 1876, for the purpose of forming a football asso- ciation under modified Rugby rules, came to an amicable agreement, and a new football era in the college world was inaugurated. He was a leader among men, throwing himself with such ardor into all sports that he inspired the same zeal in others. In the old days it was the custom for the football team to have a short practice after evening chapel. The then open space be- tween Reunion and the gymnasium was the scene of many a contest. One can never forget the way Earl Dodge spurred on the team to do bet- ter work in these few moments of practice. He was in every play, all over the field, with a word of encouragement here and a word of censure A CHRISTIAN OF PRIVILEGE 171 there, and if there came a sudden * slump ' in the game, his clear, musical voice rang out above all other sounds : ' Line up, fellows, line up ; you are not playing at all.' " He played cricket, tennis, baseball, football — anything. And it was not athletics alone that interested him. He was a fine student, grad- uating high in his class. He loved music. He rejoiced in good fellowship, and above all, he was a man of fearless and noble Christian character. " A great many beautiful and tender words have been spoken to-night in memory of dear Earl," said the Rev. W. T. Elsing, D.D., another classmate, at the Memorial service in Princeton on October ninth, 1884: "But no words can fully set forth the beauty and strength of his character. Everyone who knew him can bring to this service the grateful tribute of praise. His life was rounded out, full and complete. He died you ng in years but old in goodness. Earl was manly, conscientious, unselfish and gener- ous. He was dignified, and at the same time humble and unostentatious. He was the strong 172 WILLIAM EARL DODGE and fearless leader of the ' Champion Eleven,' and yet was delicate, sensitive, and refined in his feelings as a little child. We love Earl for what he was and for what he taught us. Many of us could write over the grave beneath which his dear body sleeps, ' He made me a better man.' " In every word and act in college, he was clean. Men who associated with him felt the contagion of his purity. It went into athletics. No mean- ness or unsportsmanlike ways or foul play or cowardice were tolerable with him. " He came among us," said Dean Murray of him in a ser- mon in the college chapel, " bearing an honored name. He has left that name unsullied. . . His scorn of what was low and bad, which, like a shield, struck from him every bad and insidious temptation, lifted him into a posi- tion of moral supremacy. And yet, his whole nature was so thoroughly full of kindliness, that he was the man trusted by his compeers, as few were in college, with the general confi- dence His Christian character hung on no perilous edge of doubtful prac- A CHRISTIAN OF PRIVILEGE 173 tices. He confessed his Saviour before men. So, throughout his college career, he walked with God, and left behind him, when he went from us, the blessed memory of a good and Christian name." " Everybody believed in him," said a man in the class of '80. " He stood the test of ball-field, class-room, campus, and Christian Conference. Everywhere, he was a Christian gentleman." During his college course he had been not only a Christian man, but a Christian worker. He wrought personally for men. " The dear, old, manly fellow," wrote a classmate, " so full of health and strength — who came nearer to what a man ought to be than anyone I ever knew. On Sunday night two of the class were with me and we talked over all the fellows, and especially of Earl and of his un- usual influence and promise ; and I told them of one night after Moody had preached, how Earl got me to go over with him to 's and 's room and he asked them if they could have a prayer-meeting. There was a whole room full of unsympathking and unsympathetic men — 174 WILLIAM EARL DODGE yet it was touching to see how earnest they be- came and how one after another made a short prayer." And he was one of the little group of those Princeton students from whose con- ference in December, 1876, the Intercollegiate Young Men's Christian Association grew. One of Earl's classmates writes of his activ- ity in this matter and of his many noble qualities : " 1. Earl was, to use his own expression, always ' Helping fellows.' I could give many illustrations. He would ask whether such and such a man needed money. When Dutton, the first man to die after we had entered col- lege, had passed away, Earl was first to sug- gest erecting a headstone to mark his grave. Near the close of my senior year he asked me if I did not want to go to Union Seminary. His father was interested. He could get me work in some Sunday school and a scholarship which would relieve me of any need. I was poor then and he knew it. " It was Earl who asked me for the name of the best man in the class to send to the Syrian A CHRISTIAN OF PRIVILEGE 175 Protestant College at Beirut to teach English for three years. I suggested one fellow — a fine man whom everyone respected for his character and ability. c Just the man,' said Earl, ' why did I not think of him before? ' He secured him at once, the first of a long list of Princeton men who have gone to Beirut. " 2. He was always full of plans. He had initiative. There was much loose living and im- morality among a certain type of fellows in the college. Earl obtained permission from the faculty to have a course of lectures calculated to reach the fellows. A prominent New York physician gave a lecture on ' Sins of the Body.' Dr. Crosby gave a magnificent talk on * The Use of the Mind,' Dr. John Hall on a ' Young Man's Religion.' " 3. He was always tactful, yet ever on the lookout for changes which would prove bene- ficial. One night at Thursday evening College Prayer Meeting, Dr. Murray remarked on the dingy room (we met in the old college offices before they were renovated), and asked, ' What has become of the legacy of Hamilton Mur- ray?' Earl spoke to Dr. Murray at the close 176 WILLIAM EARL DODGE of the meeting, then called two or three of us together. We went to the treasurer of the col- lege, Mr. Harris, found out the amount of the legacy and on Friday Earl was on his way to New York to interest his father. The extra money needed was furnished by Mr. Dodge and Murray Hall was built. Through it all Earl was tactful, aggressive, and always ready for suggestions or advice. " His tact manifested itself in an especial manner when it was proposed to link the Phila- delphian Society with the Young Men's Chris- tian Association. There was much opposition — even bitter opposition. Earl had Mr. McBur- ney come down from New York. Meetings were held, plans discussed and finally the proposi- tion went through. Without his aid I doubt whether it could have been accomplished for years. " The same combination of strength and sweetness or gentleness was manifest in the change from the old ' Association Game ' of football to the ' Rugby.' The opposition here was intense. Princeton had held undisputed sway for many years; she would surely be A CHRISTIAN OF PRIVILEGE 177 beaten by Yale and Harvard, etc. Earl was largely instrumental in effecting the change. He had the good will of everybody. The fel- lows all trusted him. " 4. His Christian character was ' v pro- nounced. He was always at prayer-meeting, and was a soul winner. During the revival of '76 he labored long with one man who was ' far from the kingdom.' This man was one of the brightest men in the class. He now occupies a prominent position where his influence for Christ tells every day. In the providence of God Earl led this man to a decision. He made no parade of his piety, but it was genuine, deep-rooted, and vital." He left Princeton with his class in the spring of 1879 and entered the firm of Phelps, Dodge & Co., in New York city. In December he was married to Miss Emeline Harriman. After a careful study of business he was admitted as a partner in his father's firm on January first,. 1883. He entered at once into many forms of useful activity in the city. He became at once active in the city work of the Young Men's 178 WILLIAM EARL DODGE Christian Association, taking his father's place as chairman of its Executive Committee. In the rooms of the committee to-day hangs a large portrait of the young chairman, whose memory is undyingly fragrant in the work. He was elected a director of the Fulton Na- tional Bank and became a member of the Chamber of Commerce. He took the keenest interest in the support of his old college. He gave time and thought to the Prison Associa- tion, the New York Free Library, the Re- form Club and the Manhattan Eye and Ear Hospital, Newsboys' Lodging Houses, to the mission work of the Fifth Avenue Presbyterian Church, of which he became a member, and to the Children's Aid Society. And in all his busi- ness he was a Christian and a gentleman, a man interested in the highest life of other men. The clerks who worked with him testified to the sweetness and charm and genuine friendship of his thought for them. He took an active interest in politics and believed in discharging the duties as well as accepting the privileges of citizenship. But the glorious life was not to last long. In A CHRISTIAN OF PRIVILEGE 179 September, 1884, the very night of the return of his parents from Europe, he was taken ill, suffered greatly from a fever and then after a sudden change in his condition, died quietly on Sunday morning, September fourteenth. And there was left in the whole city no truer, nobler man. Earl was his name and his name was his character. He was in the world to share in its work. He evaded no responsibilities. He shirked no tasks. He modestly bent his strong back to the burden of a man's duties, and with no noise he served righteousness with power. What a trustee of the college wrote of his col- lege life was true of all his life, so bright, so brief : " During the time he was in college, his influence on the side of religion and all that is high and honorable can never be computed. His record in that direction is on high. He stood peerless in the college. All of us predicted for him a brilliant career. We felt that he would be his noble grandfather over again. Mr. Earl Dodge, as we used to call him, was one of the most complete and excellent young men I have ever known. He was a model Christian and gentleman." If ever a man deserved the words 180 WILLIAM EARL DODGE inscribed on the stone in Derry Cathedral, it was he: " Down through our crowded walks and closer air Oh friend, how beautiful thy footsteps were! When through the fever's heat at last they trod A form was with them like the Son of God. 'Twas but one step for those victorious feet From their day's path unto the golden street, And we who watched their walk, so bright, so brief, Have marked this marble with our hope and grief." XIII HEDLEY VICARS ONE OF CHRIST'S CAPTAINS ABOUT seventy years ago a small boy, y\^ who had behaved ill at family prayers and been reproved by his mother, did what many small boys resolve to do under de- served reproof — felt himself greatly aggrieved, withdrew to a little cave in the garden, blocked the entrance to prevent pursuit, and declared that he would stay there for the night. Of course, like small boys in the same bad spirit to-day, he did not spend the night there, but came back sensibly to his own comfortable bed. This most typical small boy was Hedley Vic- ars, whose name has been for generations a synonym of fearless and reverent Christian de- votion in his life as a soldier. He was born on December seventh, 1826, in Mauritius, an island east of Madagascar, where his father was sta- tioned in discharge of his military duties. His 181 182 HEDLEY VICARS family was descended from a Spaniard, who came to England with Catherine of Aragon. The father died when Hedley was yet a boy, and one of the last things he did was to lay his hand on his son's head and pray that he might be a good soldier of Jesus Christ. The lad was full of other thoughts, however, and his school years in preparation for his own army life were not wisely spent years. Like other foolish boys, he dodged " the drudgery which would have laid the foundation for honors and advance- ment." By the time he was seventeen he had entered the army and was attached to the Ninety- seventh Regiment in the Isle of Wight and thence removed to the Island of Corfu off the west coast of Turkey. He wrote in after years of these days, " I would give worlds to undo what I then did." Even his Bible had been lost and the loss was no worriment to him. From Corfu he went to Cephalonia and Zante, and sowed more wild oats as he went, in reckless liv- ing and waste, laying up debts, which troubled him more to pay than to incur. After three years in the Mediterranean his regiment was ONE OF CHRIST'S CAPTAINS 183 ordered across the Atlantic to Jamaica and then in 1851 to Halifax. An assignment of duty took him past Niagara, and the Falls preached him a memorable sermon on the waste of life and the duty of living to God. When he returned to Halifax, thoughtful about him- self, he was waiting in barracks one evening for a fellow-officer and saw a Bible lying near. He picked it up to while away the time, and as he turned over the pages, his eye fell on the words in the First Epistle of John : " The blood of Jesus Christ his Son cleanseth us from all sin." That was enough. The teaching of his boyhood came to fruitage, and his father's last prayer began its fulfillment. That night Vicars broke from the old life and began the new. " What I have to do," said he, as he set out on the course in which he never wavered, " is to go forward. I cannot return to the sins from which my Saviour has cleansed me with His own blood." He resolved at once to fly his colors. That next morning he bought a large Bible and laid it openly on his table. " It was to speak for me," he said, " before I was strong enough to speak for myself." It spoke with effect, and 184 HEDLEY VICARS many of his old companions made sport of his religion or cut him for it. He stood by his guns, but not without trembling. " Would that I felt as little fear of being called a Christian," he said, " as I used to feel in being enlisted against Christianity." Yet trembling was not retreating, and he went straight on with his duties alike as a Christian and as a soldier. " Enable me, Lord Jesus," he prayed, " to please my colonel and yet to please Thee." In 1853 his regiment was ordered home. The man who came back was a very different man from the young fellow who had sailed for Corfu seven years before. This man was clean and honest, compact in character, serious and steady, and an outspoken Christian, who, when he felt shame, conquered it, and lived his life as a Christian openly before men. All that his Christianity could do for him in giving courage and strength he was to need, for in a year he was ordered off with his regiment to the Cri- mean War. It was a different regiment through his influence. " Mr. Vicars has steadied nearly four hundred men in the regiment," said a sol- dier, " four hundred of the wildest and most ONE OF CHRIST'S CAPTAINS 185 drunken lot. There isn't a better officer In the queen's service." And he was to steady his men in the midst of battle, too, and from the storm and peril he was never to return. The Crimean War, almost everyone now feels, was a very miserable piece of business. It was fought by England and France against Rus- sia for the sake of Turkey, which ought long ago to have been taken away from the Sultan. It accomplished little lasting good, and it did a great deal of lasting harm. And part of its harm, as in all war, was the wasteful destruc- tion of thousands of useful lives. The war was horribly mismanaged and multitudes of English and French soldiers died of disease or because of inefficient commissary service. " Even when stores came safely into the har- bor of Balaklava, they very often did not reach the troops encamped on the heights for weeks afterwards, or were even sent back to the Bos- phorus, because there were no hands for un- loading, or no official who could give orders re- garding a particular cargo, or else the one who was there made some ridiculous blunder. In this way, medicines and hospital stores were 186 HEDLEY VICARS actually carried away from the sick and wounded. Stretchers could not be obtained, because the canvas was in one ship and the frames in another. Cabbages floated about in the sea and the lime juice waited in the ships, while the men were dying of scurvy for the want of them both. Tents that were needed in November arrived in April and immense stores of warm clothing lay idle while the men were shivering in rags." It was into this misery that Hedley Vicars came on November twentieth, 1854. It was in a pouring rain, and the men marched through mud, " looking," as he said, " more like drowned rats than like soldiers." That night by the bivouac fire he read with a friend the Twenty- third, Ninetieth, and Ninety-first Psalms, and then slept on a bed of leaves with a stone for a pillow. All that winter the troops sat in front of Sebastapol, the cholera pla} r ing havoc with them, and the Russians holding their own. It was killing work for a soldier, sitting in his trenches and looking at disease and getting no orders to rise up and fight. But in March active operations were re- ONE OF CHRIST'S CAPTAINS 187 sumed, and In one of the frequent encounters of the spring Captain Vicars ended his short life. On the last Sunday, he had spent the day in hospital visits and reading and prayers. In the evening he wrote : " I have felt this day to be just like Sunday, and have derived much comfort from communion with my God and Saviour." He had been walking with his friend Cay and tells how they had " exchanged' thoughts about Jesus." The last words he wrote were : " In Jesus I find all I want of hap- piness or enjoyment, and as weeks and months roll by, I believe He is becoming more and more lovely in my eyes." On the night of March twenty-second eight thousand Russians attacked the French lines, and, driving them back, marched right on the British trenches. They were at first mistaken for the French allies. Vicars discovered, how- ever, that the columns approaching were Rus- sians and not French, and made ready. He had but two hundred men, but as the Russian force of two thousand came down on him, he led his little band straight upon them in the darkness. He was wounded by a bayonet, but 188 HEDLEY VICARS springing upon the parapet of the trenches and crying, " Men of the Ninety-seventh, follow me ! " he dashed down before his men upon the enemy. There was a fierce struggle in the dark- ness. Other troops came up, and after an hour's hard fighting the Russians were driven back, but Vicars had fallen in the conflict. " He had been struck in the right arm, close to the shoulder, the ball cutting in two a main artery, from which the life-blood ebbed only too fast, unchecked, and probably unseen, in the mid- night darkness. Even the wounded man him- self was, at first, quite unaware of danger. He assured his anxious friends that his hurt was slight, and that he would soon recover, until, as they carried him forward, though apparently not suffering much pain, he was warned by in- creasing exhaustion that his life was failing fast." Chilled by the loss of blood and by ex- posure to the night air, he asked for his cloak. " Cover my face," he said a few minutes after, " cover my face," and so he passed on beyond all battle to the land of peace. They dug his grave by a milestone on the Woronzoff road and Dr. Cay afterwards set ONE OF CHRIST'S CAPTAINS 189 up a stone, marking the spot, and with an in- scription to the memory of the young soldier, who in life and death followed his Captain, Christ. Captain Hedley Vicars died before he was twenty-nine, and yet his name has been known around the world. What made it known? His courageous death? Thousands of soldiers, equally brave, have fought and died for their country. Not his death, but his life has made his memory beloved; a life of whole-hearted loyalty to Christ; of open discipleship and of earnest effort to win others to the same Mas- ter, whom he loved and served for himself. If he could face the sneers of men and live down their prejudices, and with heroic faithfulness do his duty as a Christian and a gentleman, so may every young man to-day, whether in the army or the navy, in college or in business, at home or in the Philippines, or South America or Japan. The right life is the possible life for each of us. It is the only possible life. 3QV CORTLANDT VAN RENSSELAER HODGE A PRINCETON MARTYR THE roll of martyrs contains many names of men and women of high and noble character, but those who knew Rensse- laer Hodge and his wife are sure that there have never been martyrs whose character could have been more beautiful or sincere than theirs. Each age has its own type, and the great Chris- tians of one time display a different emphasis and proportion from the Christians of another time, but in what is essential and eternally worthy, the true Christians of all times are alike. From their childhood and in all their lives before they were married and went out to China and afterwards, Rensselaer Hodge and Elsie Sinclair showed forth the qualities of per- fect purity, gentleness, and strength, which we owe to Christ and see in all Christlikeness. 190 A PRINCETON MARTYR 191 He was born in Burlington, New Jersey, July first, 1872. When he was less than a year old and his life seemed to hang by a thread in a serious illness, the skill of his uncle, Dr. H. Lenox Hodge, one of the foremost physicians in Philadelphia, suggested treatment which re- stored him to health. He grew up under the richest Christian influence in a true Christian home, where the children were taught that they were born in the Church, that Christ was their Saviour, that God was their heavenly Father, and that they were always to think of the Sav- iour and Father as theirs to love, and to obey. The boy never thought of himself as outside the fold of the Shepherd, to be some day sought and brought in. His father early suggested to him that he might have the privilege of com- ing to the Lord's Table, and the idea was wel- comed with eagerness. In his letter to the Presbyterian Board of Foreign Missions, offer- ing himself for work in China, Rensselaer recalls the quiet way in which he grew up into the Christian faith: " So far as my religious history goes, it 192 CORTLANDT Van R. HODGE is soon told. Born of earnest. God-fearing parents, from my earliest childhood I have been taught the Bible, the Shorter Catechism, and the great doctrines of our faith, and I can, in fact, truly say that, so long as I can remember, I have believed on our Lord Jesus Christ. As soon as I came to years of discretion I made a public confession of my faith, and I have tried to walk according to it ever since." Modestly thinking that he did not have the gift for public address, he felt that he should not enter the ministry, which he would have loved to do, and he chose as the work for which he was fitted the study of medicine and the life of a missionary. How he came to this purpose, he explained to the Board. In answer to the question, " How long have you entertained the desire to become a foreign missionary ? " he replied : " Ever since I was old enough to think about my life-work." And he wrote more at length : " I have thought about this matter a great deal. I have prayed about it, and ever since I have given my thought as to what I should do A PRINCETON MARTYR 193 ' when I grow up,' I have determined, If God were willing, that I would be a foreign mis- sionary. It is no sudden impulse on my part, but the result of years of thought and prayer. In fact, all through my studies at college and in the medical school, I have kept this one thought in mind, and now, as the time draws near, I am anxiously watching for the way to be opened." And again, in answer to further inquiry: " My motive for desiring to enter the foreign missionary work is simply that it has seemed to me from the very beginning that God wished me to go there. I have believed always that one should go where he can do the most in God's service, and it has always seemed to me that I could accomplish most for him as a foreign missionary. It was with this thought in mind that I started my study of medicine, and I have always only grown more determined to go, if it is God's will, as the time draws near." In preparation for his life-work he entered Princeton College in the fall of 1889 with the 194 CORTLANDT Van R. HODGE class of 1893. He led In college the same blameless life which he had lived as a boy, and when he offered himself later to the Board, one of his teachers, a man of careful speech, not given to over-praise, wrote: " I have been teaching thirteen years in Princeton, and must have had nearly two thou- sand young men in my classes during that time. Dr. Hodge is the one for whom I feel the great- est personal affection. His class (1893) was more scholarly than the average. I think he graduated third in rank. There have been only a few under my instruction whose scholarship has been as thorough and accurate as his ; only one or two in whom it has been characterized by as much refinement and good taste. It seems very superfluous to recommend him. You are getting a very rare young man." After leaving Princeton he went to the Uni- versity of Pennsylvania for his medical course, and then took a hospital appointment in the Presbyterian Hospital in Philadelphia. What he was in himself, he appeared to others — a Christian man and a gentleman. The Dean of A PRINCETON MARTYR 195 the Medical School wrote of him to the Mis- sionary Board: " I have been personally acquainted with Cortlandt Van R. Hodge since the time he en- tered the University of Pennsylvania as a student of medicine. During the entire period of his course at the university his scholastic standing was excellent, and on graduation he was considered by his instructors as one of the best equipped men in his class. Since gradua- tion he has had service in a hospital, which, of course, has contributed to his practical knowl- edge of the treatment of the sick. He is a thoroughly straightforward, energetic young man — a gentleman in every respect." There is a common notion among many young men that no young man can live a flaw- less life; that every life has its lapses and its stains ; that some conceal them and some recover from them, but that there are only spotted men and Pharisees. And there is another common notion that, when a young man does live a stainless life, he must be a man incapable of its common pleasures and joys. There are hun- 196 CORTLANDT Van R. HODGE dreds of young men whose lives correct these errors. Rensselaer Hodge was their utter refutation. No life could have been more filled with whole- some, quiet joy than his. It was one of those rounded, complete lives in which no distorted virtues stood out obtru- sively ; not filled with erratic or exceptional ex- periences, but " steadfast and still." One of his classmates, Mr. James S. Rogers, of .Phila- delphia, writes in reply to an inquiry as to such incidents as might illustrate his character: " The truth is that I have been unable to remember, or, by inquiries among a few who knew him best, learn or be reminded of many incidents which stand out as especially indica- tive of his character. It was the inherent force of Christian character uniformly present in all that he did which gave him power, rather tan particular acts of a striking nature. He was also such a well-rounded man, courageous to the suffering of a martyr's death, yet sweet and tender almost as a woman ; strong to the strong, his presence a cheer; a hard and consistent A PRINCETON MARTYR 197 worker, yet welcoming healthy pleasures; so well-rounded, in fact, and evenly balanced, that no qualities or powers were abnormally devel- oped, so that we can seize on any and say these above others differentiated him from other men. Both his character and his life stood out rather, each as an harmonious whole, grand in its sim- plicity. Of the component parts blended into the symmetry of the whole man, several may, however, be especially mentioned. First, his sympathy. It was broad and catholic toward all men. That God had breathed His spirit into men entitled all of them to sympathy, help, and love. And so in daily life, and in the doings of young and old, in their customs, labors, pleasures, friendships, and relationships, all that was good, clean, manly or womanly, and healthy, found in Hodge a responsive chord, which caused his life to vibrate in harmony with the lives round him. It is one of the great reasons for the force of his life and character that he always attracted others by his sym- pathy, and repelled none by unfeeling con- demnation, cold, self-proud righteousness, au- sterity, or a * holier-than-thou ' attitude. The 198 CORTLANDT Van R. HODGE result was that in college even those who led a very different life from his respected his char- acter and were warmly friendly to him person- ally. This was markedly demonstrated by the letters of appreciation of Hodge, and contribu- tions to the memorial tablet, sent at that time by men of all kinds in the class. " Did anyone in any way entitled to be called his neighbor, or a friend, suffer by way of be- reavement, misfortune, or sickness, or physi- cal hurt, his sympathy was extended so genu- inely, because it was genuine, as to be an honest comfort to the comforted, a sustaining hand restoring self-sustaining strength. As an in- stance of the latter, there occurred, upon one occasion when a scrub baseball team of his class on which he played was playing a challenge game with the ' Prep. School ' team, a fight between two boys about ten or eleven years of age. As they were not fighting over any prin- ciple, those nearest, of whom Hodge was one, went and separated them. That sufficed for all the rest of us ; but Hodge saw that one of them, smaller than the other, had been hurt somewhat, his nose bleeding and tears flowing. So he took A PRINCETON MARTYR 199 the youngster under his wing, used his own handkerchief to dry the boy's face of both blood and tears, and in a few minutes and with a few kindly but manly words had the boy restored to peace of mind. It was only a matter of a few minutes, and we then went on with the game, but its significance lay in the fact that, while the others only stopped the fight, he sympa- thized with and cheered up the boy who was hurt. " Children knew at once that he was their friend. They seldom showed that hesitancy which so often acts as a barrier to an older person ; but ' made friends ' with him at once. He was very tactful in getting them interested in stories, and I can remember his telling Uncle Remus's Bre'r Rabbit stories to children with great effect. " Second, may be mentioned his love of good. This exercised a guiding influence on his life as strong, perhaps, as anything else. Love of good, I mean, as distinct from condemnation of evil. It seems to me that while evil must be overthrown, yet the upbuilding of good is the most constructive work. I do not think it was 200 CORTLANDT Van R. HODGE so much a worked-out theory or belief in this as a natural love for the good which turned Hodge in this direction. But certain it is that he sought for the good in others, builded upon good, and his whole influence was constructive. This was doubtless another reason why he was able to influence men without alienating them. This characteristic caused him to be more espe- cially identified with movements or organizations promoting active good. Thus in college he was strongly in support of the introduction of the honor system in examinations. This fortunate result was accomplished in our senior year. And, though it was the result of a general agi- tation of the subject rather than individual action, yet without the backing of strong men such as Hodge, who were known to stand for manliness and right without fmicalness or girl- ishness, it must have failed. Such men are towers of strength to such a movement, and there can be no doubt that Hodge's advocacy of the honor system aided greatly in its intro- duction ; still less doubt that the sure knowledge that he and others would not endure the com- pany of men who violated their honor had much A PRINCETON MARTYR 201 to do with establishing it and making it a prac- tical success. He was a man in whose sight one did not like to do wrong. " His modesty also deserves especial men- tion. I would not do him the injustice of say- ing that he was not grateful for appreciation, but extended praise was not to his liking. If he did admirable things, he did them genuinely for themselves, because they were worth doing, not for the applause they might bring. " This leads me to consider the element of genuineness in his nature. He acted true to himself. He did not try to act other people's feeling or tastes or character; nor did he act for opinions, knowing that if his acts were right, opinions would take care of themselves. The consequence was that you felt the force of genuineness in his presence. It did not simply flow from his words, or merely follow from his acts ; it was felt. " There was a similar strength lying back of his gentleness which also was felt rather than seen. Gentleness was notably characteristic of him, but you knew it was the gentleness of power controlled. He could strike, but he did 202 CORTLANDT Van K. HODGE not need to. He exercised more control 03^ the strength of his gentleness than do the rough by force. A healthy temperament added to the evenness of his development above referred to. Essentially of a serious nature, he yet had a brightness and cheer of disposition, a love for proper recreation, which kept him from becom- ing saddened in his own heart or tiresome to others. " He could see the humor of things, and keep in touch and harmony with humanity, its joys and pleasures as well as its sorrows. He was very fond of baseball, and played a great deal, usually covering first base, where he did consistent good work. In football season he also played in scrub games, but not so fre- quently as in baseball. Being of good size and strength, he generally played in the line ; usually at tackle. He also played a good game of tennis, swam, and skated as well as, or better than, the average of us. When he went into games, he played to win, but to win fairly. " He may have had to struggle against evil tendencies in his earlier days, but he succeeded in so subordinating them that it seemed to have A PRINCETON MARTYR 203 become the natural expression of himself to be a Christian man." From his boyhood he had been a Christian worker. Missionary work with him was no romantic dream or purpose of future service. There are those who compound with conscience for present neglect of common duty by splen- did purpose of performance of future uncom- mon duty. But, as none but common duties ever come to us, every uncommon duty becom- ing common when it appears, the service of the procrastinator is always a prospective service. There was none of this in Rensselaer Hodge. He lived for God and the good of men in his present time — the only time that he had. " As to my experience in active Christian service," he told the Board, " it is as follows : As soon as I was old enough to have a class in Sunday school, I started to teach in our Mis- sion School in East Burlington, New Jersey. I taught here until I left for college in Princeton, New Jersey. Here I taught, I believe for two years, in a mission school at Queenstown, and then for two years attended a Bible class in the 204 CORTLANDT Van R. HODGE First Church Sunday school. During a re- vival of religious interest in college during my senior year (I think it was), I tried to take an active part in the work. During my course of study at the medical school I taught and super- intended a mission school among the Italians and Syrians round Ninth and Carpenter streets for some time, and then taught in the Wood- land Sunday school until I was obliged to give this up on account of 'my duties here at the hospital." His hospital work was true Christian work. " In the Presbyterian Hospital," says his father, " he had to be brought into relation with all its many interests, the patients in the wards, the patients in the private rooms, the nurses, those on probation, and those accepted, fellow- residents, and the visiting physicians and sur- geons, the men in the office, the chaplain, and others interested in the religious services, and the ladies of the Hospital Aid Society. In all these relations he seems to have acted with rare discretion, and I have reason to know that he was of substantial help in spiritual matters to A PRINCETON MARTYR 205 those who came under his influence. He had great sympathy with the nurses and did not like to see them overburdened, giving personal at- tention to measures for their relief. Wrong- doing excited his indignation, but he had patient regard for those who went astray, and he gave thought and care to the task of lead- ing back to the right way." He and Miss Sinclair, who was a graduate of Bryn Mawr, were appointed as missionaries in January, 1899, were married on February four- teenth, and sailed for China in April. No one could well enter upon the work better prepared. Dr. and Mrs. Hodge went at once to their station at Paotingfu, China, where he was to have during his novitiate the invaluable help of the advice and association of Dr. George Yard- ley Taylor, a graduate of Princeton In the class of 1882, and a member of the Burlington church under the pastorate of Rensselaer's father. The first work, of course, was the lan- guage. But in November Dr. Hodge was far enough along to go off on a long trip south- ward with Mr. Lowrie and Mr. Killie, for the 206 CORTLANDT Van R. HODGE purpose of selecting a site for a new mission station, which was only made possible by the re- establishment of order in China after the Boxer troubles, on one hand, and, on the other, the gen- erosity of the Fifth Avenue Presbyterian Church in New York, which had undertaken as an extra contribution to provide the entire expense of the new station. Dr. Hodge was not to see it occu- pied. He had, however, the great satisfaction of learning of his appointment as physician in charge of the medical work of the Mission in the city of Peking. Everything hitherto had been but preparatory to this. He had now reached the goal to attain which so many years of toil and training had been given. The last letter re- ceived from his hands began : " Dear father, such wonderful news ! " Then he goes on to tell of the appointment, and of his prompt visit to Peking with Mrs. Hodge to make arrange- ments to assume the duties of his post. Imme- diately after their return to Paotingfu, in the spring of 1900, the tempest of the Boxer up- rising broke over China, and the little company at that station perished in the storm. On Sat- urday afternoon, June thirtieth, the Boxers A PRINCETON MARTYR 207 fiade the attack on the Presbyterian compound. Dr. and Mrs. Hodge and Dr. Taylor had gone to the home of Mr. and Mrs. Simcox, and there, with the three little Simcox children, all passed on together out of great tribulation into the presence of the Saviour whom they had unfal- teringly served. Just two years later the classes of 1882 and 1893 presented to Princeton University a tablet commemorative of Dr. Taylor and Dr. Hodge, and it was set in the wall of Marquand Chapel. In presenting the tablet in behalf of the class of 1893, Mr. Rogers told of a remark of a little child, who, when its mother was explaining the story of Jesus one day, and telling how loving and kind and helpful He was, exclaimed, " Mother, I know what Jesus was like — He was like Van Rensselaer ! " And in accepting the tablet in behalf of the university, President Patton replied: " One by one, by window and by mural tablet, we are adding to those visible memorials of the services of the sons of Princeton University which enrich, and give enhanced solemnity to, 208 CORTLANDT Van R. HODGE this house of worship. And I can say, in all the solemnity that becomes the moment, that no names are more worthy than those which are added this morning to the increasing roll of Princeton's Christian martyrs. These men represent what we hope will ever be the spirit of the teaching of Princeton University. They were men, Christian men, hesitating at no step which pointed to duty. " I accept, in the name of the Trustees, this tablet in grateful appreciation of their lives and services, with the hope that coming generations of undergraduates may find in it an inspiration to go out likewise in the service of their Lord." But the inspiration of such a life is not the possession of any one university. It belongs to every young man. It calls to every boy. Who can refuse to rise up and try to live for himself such a glorious life? XV ISAAC PARKER COALE A WINNER OF HIS OWN VICTORY SOME time ago I received from a gentle- man in a lumber town in Michigan, who was greatly interested in work for young men, a letter in which he expressed his feeling that the life of Hugh Beaver, while encourag- ing to boys of situations in life like his, was yet not as great an encouragement to man} 7 young men as the story of some young boy who had to fight his way against greater difficulties and who had shown by his victory over want, that others could achieve success in spite of the absence of influence and of what a poor boy would consider wealth. The boy who rises to self-sacrifice out of a comfortable home and who achieves a character of independence and self-reliance even if gen- erously helped during his early years by his 209 210 ISAAC PARKER CO ALE family wins his victory. Thousands of men, whose boyhood would be thus described, are doing as good work as is being done in our land. And there are thousands of others who have from early years by economy and self- help, but with such assistance from earnest homes as could be given, or little or no assist- ance at all, wrought their way through to suc- cess, the best kind of success, the winning of places of high regard and confidence in the community, and the accomplishment of great and unselfish work in the world. Isaac Parker Coale was a representative of this large class, perhaps the largest class of educated young men in our land. On one side he came of Scotch and Irish stock, well-to-do, devout gentry, and on the other of Virginian blood. He was the oldest of ten children, and was born November twenty-first, 1868, in Bal- timore, where his father was pastor of one of the Presbyterian churches. Two years later the family moved to Arch Spring, Pennsyl- vania, which was Isaac's home until after he left college. The Arch Spring Church is in a fertile valley in central Pennsylvania, where in a whole- WINNER OF HIS OWN VICTORY 211 some, religious, farming community, Isaac spent his childhood. At the age of thirteen he went to the Mountain Seminary, a school for girls at Birmingham, Pennsylvania, three and one-half miles from Arch Spring, where provision was made for a few smaller boys. Isaac studied in the Seminary for three years, walking most of the way to and fro each day. During this time he united with the home church at the age of fifteen, three other older children joining with him. There was no great transformation in him. There was need of none. He went on to be the same open, genuine, clean-principled boy he had always been, the confidential friend of his father, having nothing to hide from anyone. In 1884 he went to Blair Hall, Blairstown, New Jersey, for a final year of preparation for college. He was exceedingly diffident. He had grown up in the country, he was aware of his bright red hair, contact with other boys and with the world had not robbed him of his self- consciousness ; he had taken no part in athletic exercises giving him physical carriage and ease, and he began to be alive to all this. His pro- 212 ISAAC PARKER COALE tection at Blair Hall was his air of excessive dignity. In spite of this, he had the respect of everyone. During the Christmas vacation ten or twelve of the young people remained at the school. Once, as they sat down at the table with great hilarity, one of the teachers overheard Isaac, who was one of the youngest pres- ent, say quietly, that if they would be silent a moment, he would ask the blessing. They hushed instantly, and she heard his voice in prayer. This was the sort of thing that it cost to do, but the boy received his unconscious re- ward in firmer character and greater fearless- ness of conviction. There was no priggish- ness in him, however. His droll sense of humor would have saved him from that, if his character had not been destitute of it. In the fall of 1885 he entered Princeton. The qualities which had led him to bear him- self with a rather unnatural dignity at school were such as laid a freshman open to a good deal of chaffing in college, and Coale had to en- dure a great deal of it from sophomores and from his own classmates. He was nicknamed at WINNER OF HIS OWN VICTORY 213 once and it was a favorite form of guying him to pretend to confuse him and another man in the class whose hair was of the same color and to call each by the other's name. Coale took all this in admirable spirit. He laughed at it as long as it did not go too far, and he resented it, with a quiet but wholly effective dignity, when it did. In due time he won out. Men soon found the man in him, and though the chaffing went on more or less, it was thoroughly good- natured, the result of increasing affection and of Coale's own hearty geniality. By the end of his college course no man in the class was more respected than he. The discipline of col- lege life had been just what he needed to solidify his character, to train his raw abilities into power, to make of him a firm, fearless, modest, self-understanding, effective man. When the class of 1889 separated at the end of its course, Isaac Coale went out with every man's abso- lute confidence, every man's high respect, every man's hearty love, and he had won them him- self. No money, no fictitious gifts were his aids. The influence that he might have used, through his father's friends, he studiously 214 ISAAC PARKER COALE avoided touching. He had achieved a great success. He had done it by character. And whether he knew it or not, the victory he had achieved was a character, a character of solid and flawless righteousness, of strength and re- pose, of kindly charity and friendliness, of just and fearless fidelity. He went out of college, not quite twenty-one, to make his own way, and to give what help he could at home to his younger brothers and sis- ter in their education. For about two months he taught in the Institution for the Blind in Philadelphia, and then went to Lawrenceville, New Jersey, where he taught for two years in the school there; then to Stamford, Connecticut, where for two years more he taught at King's School. Meanwhile he had been reading Black- stone, and in 1893 he went to New York city to complete the study of law. All the while he was feeling the sense of responsibility for helping the younger children and was planning with them and for them every day. His good sense and growing breadth of judgment revealed them- selves constantly. He felt that he had made a mistake in his own college course in not mingling WINNER OF HIS OWN VICTORY 215 enough In the college life, in athletics, and other college contests, and he strove to get those who were to follow to enter fully into them. He saw that the attrition of college life had done a great deal for his own character, and he came to value it as of importance only next to the intellectual work set to be done. It was no easy course he was following. He was hewing his own way. There were influential friends in New York on whom he might have called. His sturdy sense of independence led him almost to avoid them. He wanted to win his own battle. He asked no assistance, save the assistance of God, which he was asking daily. And that assistance he had, though at times he felt that his prospect of winning was not bright. When he was pursuing his law studies in New York in 1894* he wrote : " The world seems all upside down just now." Some finan- cial losses, including his failure to collect a bill for tutoring, and his inability to get remuner- ative work while he was studying in the Law School " have combined " he wrote, " to lay me flat and almost pinion my hands besides. I am 216 ISAAC PARKER CO ALE doing my best now to struggle free, but am likely to be obliged to break off my study of law and go again to the country as a teacher." But he held on and conquered. That was one of the secrets he had learned — to keep his struggles to himself, to " burn his own smoke," as Robert- son, of Brighton, said, and to stick to a right purpose with the tenacity of steel. He went on with his studies, teaching meanwhile in a private school in New York, in thorough good nature. Hard though his struggle was it never clouded his sense of humor or his merriment under the stress of life. In 1895 he was admitted to the bar, and soon joined the firm of Parker & Scudder. How well prepared he was and how he viewed his work is indicated in the letter he wrote to Mr. Townsend Scudder, whose law partner he subsequently became : " I desire to be considered by you in connection with the position in your office as per to-day's Law Journal. "I am a graduate of the New York Law School and have been admitted to practice in the first department nearly WINNER OF HIS OWN VICTORY 217 two years. Not all this time has been spent in practice, for I continued teach- ing and pursuing a graduate course at the law school after my admission to the bar, and have also devoted several months to editorial work on a digest and a text-book; I have, however, become acquainted with a large part of the routine of office work through my clerkship in the offices of Reeves, Todd & Swain, 55 Liberty Street, before admission to the bar, and subse- quently in the offices of Cardozo & Nathan, 120 Broadway, and Mr. Robert C. Taylor, 253 Broadway. I take pleasure in referring to any of the members of the firms above mentioned; also to Professor Geo. Chase, 120 Broadway, of the New York Law School; Mr. A. R. Gulick, 120 Broadway; and Mr. Thos. G. Ritch, 18 Wall Street. After spending last winter in the offices of Messrs. Cardozo & Nathan and Mr. R. C. Taylor, I accepted an offer from Mr. Wm. Draper Lewis, Dean elect of the University of Pennsylvania Law School, to work on a digest of Pennsylvania decisions, which he was engaged in preparing. I spent a large part of the sum- mer on this work in Philadelphia, and since 218 ISAAC PARKER CO ALE coming to New York again, I have been working for him on an edition of Blackstone which is to be issued shortly. I mention my work on these books, because it is in line with the work called for in your advertisement. I can procure a let- ter from Mr. Lewis as to my efficiency in this work, but would prefer to refer you to him directly. His address is William Draper Lewis, Drexel Building, Philadelphia, Pa. " I am now twenty-seven years of age. I was graduated with the degree of Bachelor of Arts from Princeton, in 1889, before I was twenty- one years of age. After four years' experience in teaching at the Lawrenceville School and at Mr. King's School for Boys, Stamford, Con- necticut, I came to New York in 1893 and entered the Senior Class of the New York Law School. " I wish now to connect myself with an office and engage in practice uninterruptedly. My residence is 357 Lenox Avenue, and my business address is care Gulick, Kerr & Marsh, 120 Broadway. I spend most of my time in the Equitable Library, where I am bringing to a close my work on Blackstone. WINNER OF HIS OWN VICTORY 219 " I trust that I may have the favor of an early communication from you, and should be pleased to call at your office, if you request- " Very respectfully yours, "(Signed) Isaac P. Coale." Mr. Scudder was greatly pleased with this let- ter. Coale soon became managing clerk and when Mr. Scudder was elected to Congress in 1899 Isaac was taken into partnership with him under the firm name of Scudder & Coale. The qualities of absolute rectitude, of genial good- will, of sound sense, of indefatigable industry, of honesty as reliable as the sun, whose seeds had been sown in his home and nourished by all the stiff discipline of his life, fitted Isaac Coale for any trust and won him the confidence of all who came to know him. He had started in New York alone and he was winning his way steadily in the knowledge and acquaintance which are indispen- sable in New York and in the respect and admir- ation and trust of all who met his simple, strong, solid nature. He took an active part in Christian work in the Rutgers Riverside Presbyterian Church, of 220 ISAAC PARKER COALE which he was a member. He had always been faithful in his church relationships. Of a Washington's Birthday at Stamford, he writes : " I spent the day quietly here, working a little and reading and going, like a good Presby- terian, to prayer-meeting in the evening." At Rutgers Church he was active in the work of the Christian Endeavor Society, superintendent of the Mission Sunday school, and faithful and dependable in all the work of the church. Every- one felt what one described as " the strength and reality of his Christian character." There was no gush or effusion about him, but, on the other hand, there was no concealment, no false reticence. He had been with Christ, one writes, and no one could deal with him and not discover it. A city missionary who is also a worker in the Mission Sunday school of the church said that the last time she saw him he was inquiring for one of the boys of the school. On learning that he could not go to the country for want of shoes, he had handed her the money to buy them. That last act, she said, was characteristic of his whole life as she had known him. He was full of quiet good works. " I started thirty-six WINNER OF HIS OWN VICTORY 221 youngsters off this morning for a two weeks' vacation among the Berkshire Hills," he writes in midsummer from the city, where he was hard at work. His range of interest reached beyond his pro- fession and his church. He was a member of the Seventh Regiment, a company of which came to his funeral, some of the members at great inconvenience, to show their respect for him. He was a member of the Discipline Com- mittee of his company and even the delinquents admired him for his justice, several of the men speaking of his fairness and his sound judgment. He was counsel for the Christadora House, a Christian settlement on the East Side, to which he gave his services and a great deal of time as a labor of disinterested love. The Christian Endeavor Society of Rutgers Riverside Church presented a tall mahogany clock to the house in memory of one who had been as a quiet rock of strength to both. He was a valued member also of the Pennsylvania Society. In many ways, he was fitting into the intri- cate life of the great city. Little by little, his ISAAC PARKER COALE influence was growing and he, himself, was growing into a larger, a more adaptive, a more powerful man. He was the type of man needed for the city's life. All that entered into its development was coming to be of interest to him as his position became assured, and he saw his opportunities enlarging. He took an active part in politics. He spoke a number of times in the Congressional district where the Hon. William H. Douglas was elected to Con- gress, and Mr. Douglas writes, " He was looked upon by all of us as a man of strong character, uprightness, and integrity." But all hopes of the future were vain — vain for this present world. The clean, unselfish life ended in the Presbyterian Hospital, New York city, on August twenty-third, 1901, an attack of peritonitis following appendicitis, and the best medical and surgical effort proving unavailing. The newspaper published at Mr. Scudder's summer home, where Coale had become well known, spoke of him as " A man of sterling qualities, of true worth, WINNER OF HIS OWN VICTORY 223 of honest courage . . . considerate of others, courteous, refined, with high ideals. He had a splendid future before him. His loyalty and zeal were unusual. A better friend was hard to find. He made friends wherever he went, and was highly regarded and respected by all who met him. One could truly say, * His word was as good as any bond.' It was never broken. What he said he would do, he did. It was his nature, as it was the rule of the office to which he belonged." Mr. Scudder himself writes of him : " He never had come to him any cases that can be singled out as notable. He did with faithful- ness, zeal, and courage the drudgery of office work that all young lawyers have to do ; he did it with an attention to detail which showed the control he had over himself. He made for him- self no great name, because the opportunity was lacking, any more than I have or five thou- sand other lawyers in New York have. His work was nearly entirely office work. He argued for me two or three cases and always acquitted himself with credit by reason of the thorough- 224 ISAAC PARKER COALE ness of his preparation. He always believed what he said, and his earnestness won him the attention of the courts. He had the legal mind and the application. Had he lived, he un- doubtedly would have won for himself a high place at the bar. He died before he reaped any of the fruits of his early struggles." Yet he won his reward, the reward of a blameless soul and a stainless character. I knew him for nearly twenty years and never heard one word of discredit or reproach regarding him. He left his name absolutely untarnished. He left it glorified with the beauty of a true and worthy life. There was no mean- ness in him and none came out of him. His kindly, open face represented truly the large, simple nature within, and the city and the Church lost a good, a true, and a useful man, and his friends a heart of gold, when Isaac Coale's short life came to a close. Why should not every young man aspire to be as honorable, as just, as faithful, as good a man? CONCLUSION WHEN the principles of the highest and most devoted type of life are set before men, some reply at once: " Yes, those are great principles, but they are impracticable. No young man can live on that plane." To this objection these lives which have been considered here are the sufficient answer. Or others say, " Are not such ideals likely to discourage young men? We are only human and you must not demand too much. If you do, you will get nothing. It is better to allow some innocent indulgences and to be rigid only on the great moral issues." But it is the little heroisms and self-denials which prepare men for the great ones. Professor James makes an appeal to us on psychological grounds to be stiff in the small things, if we would be fitted to behave like men in greater things : " Keep the faculty of effort alive in you by a little 295 226 CONCLUSION gratuitous exercise every day. That is, be systematically ascetic or heroic in little unneces- sary points, do every day or two something for no other reason than that you would rather not do it, so that when the hour of dire need draws nigh, it may find you not unnerved and untrained to stand the test. Asceticism of this sort is like the insurance which a man pays on his house and goods. The tax does him no good at the time, and possibly may never bring him a return. But if the fire does come, his having paid it will be his salvation from ruin. So with the man who has daily inured himself to habits of concentrated attention, energetic volition, and self-denial in unnecessary things. He will stand like a tower when everything rocks around him and when his softer fellow-mortals are winnowed like chaff in the blast." And I ask whether such young men as these we have been considering really discourage us. They were very flesh and blood. They had to fight for what they were. If they won, we too may win. If men do not like the rigidity of right CONCLUSION 227 principle, it cannot be helped. It would be falsehood and treason to tell them that it doesn't matter, that if they don't like the stiff demands of the higher life, they are free to let down the bars. They can of course do this if they wish, and the majority follow this course. But they pay for it, and some day they will realize the terrible price that they paid — a price regis- tered in character and in capacity for char- acter forever. But someone will say, " These men were devotees." Some of them were men of deep religious natures, but the others had no special temperamental piety. They were all healthy, human men, men of play and joy, popular with all sorts of people, leaders wherever they were, capable, effective men who came to mastery by the right road, the road open to all. "Soul, rule thyself; on passion, deed, desire Lay thou the law of thy deliberate will; Stand at thy chosen post, Faith's sentinel. Learn to endure. Thine the reward Of those who make living Light their Lord. Clothed with celestial steel these stand secure, Masters, not slaves." 228 CONCLUSION The highest life represents more, not less, life than the lower life. We speak of giving up habits and indulgences, but this is a mislead- ing form of speech. The pauper gives up his rags when he is clad. The lame man gives up his crutches when he is healed. But these are not sacrifices. The Christian man throws away all that hampers his freedom as the slave sur- renders his chains when he steps forth into lib- erty. Christ's call is to the free, the abundant, the unencumbered life. But character will take care of itself if men will serve. And the summons which comes down to us from the height where these men lived and worked is the summons of the Saviour who saved others but had no care to save Himself. Why need He? Having done his duty, He could securely trust Himself to His Father, the God of all duty-doers. He will care last for the, men who care first for His will. It was in this spirit that these men wrought for others, not themselves. It was Chinese Gordon's spirit and it is inscribed on his monument in St. Paul's: CONCLUSION 229 Major General Charles George Gordon, C. B. who at all times and everywhere gave his strength to the weak, Ms substance to the poor, his sympathy to the suffering, his heart to God. Born at Woolwich 28 Jan., 1833 Slain al Khartoum 26 Jan., 1885 He saved an empire by Us warlike genius, he ruled vast provinces with justice, ivMom and power; and lastly, obedient to his sovereign's command, he died in the heroic' attempt to save men, women and children from imminent and deadly peril. Greater love hath no man than this, that a man lay down his life for his friends. And now we must make our choice, for the high life or the low, for the life lived for self and the unenduring, or for the eternities and God. The question is not a question of necessities or of impossibilities. It is a ques- tion of personal choice, of personal choice now. It is as it was of old, " To-day— if ye will hear His voice, harden not you hearts. To-day!" d Princeton Theological Semmary-Speer 1 1012 01097 6233 DATE DUE ML «*»- ET .fofr^g fay ^ - '- : . CAYLORO HINTtOIN U.S.*.