BV 4012 .H7 1923 
 
 Hough, Lynn Harold, 1877- 
 
 Twelve merry fishermen 
 
Digitized by the Internet Archive 
 in 2019 with funding from 
 Princeton Theological Seminary Library 
 
 https://archive.org/details/twelvernerryfishe00houg_0 
 
OTHER BOOKS BY DR. HOUGH 
 
 THE EYES OF FAITH 
 
 THE MAN OF POWER 
 
 IN THE VALLEY OF DECISION 
 
 THE MEN OF THE GOSPELS 
 
 THE LURE OF BOOKS 
 
 ATHANASIUS: THE HERO 
 
 THE THEOLOGY OF A PREACHER 
 
 THE QUEST FOR WONDER, AND OTHER PHIL¬ 
 OSOPHICAL AND THEOLOGICAL STUDIES 
 
 THE LITTLE OLD LADY 
 
 THE CLEAN SWORD 
 
 THE SIGNIFICANCE OF THE PROTESTANT 
 REFORMATION 
 
 FLYING OVER LONDON 
 
 THE OPINIONS OF JOHN CLEARFIELD 
 
 A LITTLE BOOK OF SERMONS 
 
 THE INEVITABLE BOOK 
 
TWELVE 
 
 MERRY FISHERMEN 
 
 By ,/ 
 
 LYNN HAROLD HOUGH 
 
 P I 
 
 THE ABINGDON PRESS 
 
 NEW YORK 
 
 CINCINNATI 
 
Copyright, 1923, by 
 
 LYNN HAROLD HOUGH 
 
 Printed in the United States of America 
 
.IN MEMORY OF MY FRIEND 
 
 DR. HUGH JOHNSTON 
 
 THE PASTOR OF GREAT CHURCHES IN CAN¬ 
 ADA AND THE UNITED STATES; FOR OVER 
 HALF A CENTURY A POWERFUL AND GRA¬ 
 CIOUS MINISTER OF THE GOSPEL; A MAN 
 WHO WON LOVE AND ADMIRATION IN EVERY 
 CITY WHERE HE EXERCISED HIS MANIFOLD 
 
 MINISTRY 
 
I 
 
 
CONTENTS 
 
 PAGE 
 
 Just at the Beginning. 9 
 
 I. Coordinating the World. 11 
 
 II. A Man Among His Books. 18 
 
 III. The Man and the Machine .... 25 
 
 IV. Preaching and Paganism. 32 
 
 V. The Jew and Civilization. 40 
 
 VI. The Furtive People. 47 
 
 VII. Commerce and Character. 56 
 
 VHI. The Creative Past. 63 
 
 IX. The Color Scheme of the 
 
 World. 70 
 
 X. General William Booth. 78 
 
 XI. “Saint William and the Dragon” 87 
 
 XII. The Scholar and the Prophet .. 95 
 
 XIII. The Faith Once Delivered and 
 
 Often Interpreted.103 
 
 XIV. Philosophy, Exposition and So¬ 
 
 cial Passion.112 
 
 XV. Personality and Philosophic 
 
 Thought.120 
 
JUST AT THE BEGINNING 
 
 It has been the happy fortune of the author 
 of these tales of a ministerial club to belong 
 to a good many such organizations. The 
 Alpha Kappa Club, of Brooklyn; The Jolly 
 Friars, of short life but of bright memory; the 
 Monday Club, of New York; the Eclectic 
 Club, of Baltimore, perhaps the oldest minis¬ 
 terial club in America; the Interchurch and 
 the Monday Clubs, of the same city; the more 
 formal Society of Biblical Research, of Chi¬ 
 cago; and the delightful Wranglers Club, of 
 Detroit, have given him many opportunities 
 to observe this aspect of ministerial life. In 
 none of the chapters of this book is there any 
 attempt to describe a particular club or to 
 portray a particular person. But doubtless all 
 of these clubs have had a share in creating the 
 atmosphere of the circle called the Twelve 
 Merry Fishermen. 
 
 L. H. H. 
 
 s 
 

 
 
 
 
I. COORDINATING THE WORLD 
 
 The Twelve Merry Fishermen were a group 
 of ministers. And this was the name they 
 gave to a ministerial club which they were 
 willing to admit was unique among such 
 organizations. It represented pretty much 
 every conceivable point of view, and the men 
 were united bv fundamental earnestness and 
 
 t/ 
 
 desire to have a share in the making of a 
 better world rather than by a common bond 
 of opinion. They respected each other in spite 
 of their differences and the tenacity with which 
 some of them adhered to particular views and 
 the vigor with which they expressed them. 
 They met on one Monday of every month “to 
 enjoy an intellectual shower bath,” as Bowen 
 Tillman, busy minister of a downtown church, 
 expressed it. They all lived in or near one of 
 America’s largest cities, and from the head 
 of a great institutional church ministering to 
 every aspect of the need of the metropolis to 
 the theological professor from a nearby divinity 
 school and the pastor of a flourishing rural 
 
 community, they were men alive to the finger- 
 
 11 
 
12 TWELVE MERRY FISHERMEN 
 
 tips. We will not introduce them in any 
 formal way. We will just secrete the reader 
 in a dim corner of the private dining room 
 where they met and let him watch and look 
 and listen and judge for himself. 
 
 It was the first meeting after the Presidential 
 election. And there was a touch of somewhat 
 grim irony about the fact that at this par¬ 
 ticular meeting Monroe Burton, who had a 
 taste for international affairs, and an abiding 
 idealism which glowed all the brighter in days 
 of contemporary disillusionment and cynicism, 
 had read a paper on the subject “The Present 
 Status of the League of Nations.” It had 
 been a particularly well-wrought-out piece of 
 work, going rapidly over the history of vari¬ 
 ous attempts to organize the life of the world, 
 paying its disrespects to the Holy Alliance 
 which followed the Napoleonic wars, and then 
 deftly pointing out the steps by which the 
 present organization was created, the world¬ 
 wide enthusiasm with which the idea was 
 greeted, and the tide of reaction which fol¬ 
 lowed the meeting of the Peace Conference. 
 The final paragraphs were given to a closely 
 reasoned setting forth of the elements in the 
 situation which made it impossible that the 
 
COORDINATING THE WORLD 13 
 
 idea should die, and made inevitable some 
 sort of world organization. The last sentence 
 was particularly pregnant: “Civilization can¬ 
 not survive another World War with all the 
 increased potencies of destruction which are 
 now within our reach. And it will soon be¬ 
 come evident that some sort of world-wide 
 organization is the only way to save the intel¬ 
 lectual and moral and spiritual gains of the last 
 three thousand years.” 
 
 Bowen Tillman, busy with the problems of 
 his own church, an efficiency expert who made 
 his organization the marvel of all the men 
 who witnessed its activities, spoke first. 
 
 “That’s a real paper. But what Burton 
 doesn’t see is that the idea is dead. The 
 election proves it. We are going to attack 
 domestic problems and let other people try 
 the Atlas act. We have developed a new 
 modesty. We are going to let some of the 
 problems of giants wait until the giants come. 
 One man tried to be a giant. He only suc¬ 
 ceeded in breaking his own health and creating 
 a nation-wide hostility. I know a corner of 
 this big town which must be made Christian. 
 That comes pretty near to being my share 
 of the remaking of the world.” 
 
14 TWELVE MERRY FISHERMEN 
 
 Waldo Bryant spoke out very quickly and 
 with a note of rather unusual emotion in his 
 voice. He knew more history than any other 
 man in the club, and he made his pulpit a 
 place where you had a sense of meeting the 
 ages. 
 
 “There’s just one trouble with what you 
 say, Tillman,” he declared. “If the world 
 doesn’t get steadied a bit, you will have no 
 corner left in which to work. The fire which 
 had been put out may not endanger your 
 town. But it isn’t really out after all. The 
 embers are smoldering all over the world; 
 and if it burns up again, you cannot expect 
 your corner to escape. For the sake of the 
 very thing you do so well you ought to be 
 keen about the League to coordinate the life 
 of the world.” 
 
 “I have just been reading Dr. Kelman’s 
 book on international Christianity,” said Morris 
 MacDonald, professor of systematic theology in 
 a nearby school of the prophets. “Sir William 
 Robertson Nicoll’s review of the book in the 
 British Weekly set me going. Then the book 
 itself quite captured my attention. Kelman 
 makes you feel the truth of what Bryant has 
 just said. One bit of a paragraph stays in 
 
COORDINATING THE WORLD 
 
 15 
 
 my mind and sometimes I think of the words 
 when I am awake at night: ‘There are those 
 who ask, “What is the use of talking of Utopia 
 when so many people have only hovels to live 
 in?” And the answer is that if this Utopia 
 does not come, we shall not even have hovels 
 to live in, but only graves!’ ” 
 
 Hunter Morrison a young radical, one of 
 whose friends said laughingly that he preached 
 the gospel according to the New Republic, now 
 spoke up. 
 
 “It is not a League of Nations which America 
 has repudiated,” he said. “It is the particular 
 League of Nations which is tied up with the 
 treaty of peace. Before we entered the war 
 Mr. Wilson once got some progressive legis¬ 
 lation, and the price he paid for it was what 
 has been called the worst pork-barrel Con¬ 
 gress since the Civil War. He always does 
 that sort of thing. He seeks something good 
 and he pays a price for it which no man has 
 a right to pay. The new Administration will 
 find that America demands our taking our 
 place in an organized life of the world. But 
 it will get us free forever from the reactionary 
 concessions of the Paris Conference.” 
 
 Tom Tabor had been moving a little rest- 
 
16 TWELVE MERRY FISHERMEN 
 
 lessly in his chair while these words had been 
 uttered. Now he took up the gauntlet: 
 
 “You are all forgetting that the League of 
 Nations is very much alive and that it is 
 functioning effectively. It has already proved 
 that it can prevent war, and that it has mighty 
 forces behind it. After all, it was only a 
 beginning that was represented by the work 
 in France. It was just the first step. Ample 
 room was made for change and improvement. 
 If we had done our duty, the whole world 
 would be now organized in such a fashion that 
 we could begin to talk with reality of the 
 permanence of peace.” 
 
 Henry Alton was regarded as the most ju¬ 
 dicial member of the little group. Very often 
 the others addressed him as “Judge.” Now 
 he spoke, and there was a little hush of expect¬ 
 ancy as he began: 
 
 “After all, recriminations are useless, and 
 often worse,” he said. “The strategy which 
 turns a noble dream into an effective achieve¬ 
 ment was denied to the President. The whole 
 idea became involved in a mass of confusion 
 and prejudice. But go beneath the surface 
 and you will find a deep and international 
 interest in the coordination of the world. It 
 
COORDINATING THE WORLD 17 
 
 is the missionary enterprise turned into prac¬ 
 tical politics. And such mighty human forces 
 have united with this deep Christian motive 
 that in some fashion it is destined to prove 
 irresistible. As there was the day of the tribal 
 loyalty, and as there was the day of the feudal 
 loyalty, and as there was the day when the 
 nation represented the supreme synthesis, so 
 the day of an effective organization of the 
 world within which national life can nobly 
 flourish lies ahead of us. The steps may be 
 slow, but the achievement is sure.” 
 
 So the discussion ended for that day. ‘‘But 
 why,” maybe you ask, 4 ‘did this club of fishers 
 of men call themselves Merry Fishermen?” 
 Perhaps that will become evident when you 
 know them better. 
 
II. A MAN AMONG HIS BOOKS 
 
 Waldo Bryant was the man of letters of 
 the club. Most of them were bookmen in the 
 fine sense of James Russell Lowell’s use of the 
 word. But Bryant lived and moved and had 
 his being in the world of books. He frankly con¬ 
 fessed that there were times when books were 
 more real to him than people. He was a min¬ 
 ister of a church intensely proud of his noble 
 use of the good old English speech and the 
 phrases lighted with genuine distinction which 
 were sure to appear in any one of his sermons, 
 a church with a definite sense of responsibility 
 for the intellectual life of its immediate com¬ 
 munity. Hunter Morrison called it the Church 
 of Sweetness and Light, and rather scornfully 
 suggested that it was completely ignoring the 
 pressing problems of social reconstruction. He 
 and Bryant were great friends and when he 
 spoke in this vein Waldo would throw his 
 arm over Morrison’s shoulder and remark: 
 “Never mind, Hunter. When you get your 
 reconstructed society ready for action it will 
 
 be a thin sort of a world unless you have some 
 
 18 
 
A MAN AMONG HIS BOOKS 
 
 19 
 
 disciples of Matthew Arnold about to keep 
 the love of disciplined beauty alive.” 
 
 On this particular day Bryant was to read 
 a paper on the theme, “A Man’s Life With 
 Books.” The twelve men were all present, 
 and they sat back in their chairs with undis¬ 
 guised interest as he began. 4 ‘Waldo has a 
 voice which convinces you before you get his 
 ideas,” Morris MacDonald declared. And as 
 his lithe, athletic phrases fell from his lips you 
 did feel that the singularly supple voice in 
 which they were expressed added to their 
 charm and their power. “In the books of 
 the world dead men win a perpetual resur¬ 
 rection,” he began. And from the first arrest¬ 
 ing sentence every phrase was shining with 
 his own love of books and his own long and 
 intimate companionship with great minds. The 
 echoing music of many a master was felt in 
 his own sentences, and withal they rang with 
 a fresh and telling quality which was his own. 
 
 On the one hand he pictured the life of the 
 man who had never been welcomed to the 
 feast of the ages spread so bountifully in the 
 literature of the world. On the other hand 
 he called forth the men ripe and rich and full 
 of mind and nobly disciplined in taste to whom 
 
20 TWELVE MERRY FISHERMEN 
 
 the great voices of all the long-drawn years are 
 familiar. 
 
 There was many a facile bit of characteriza¬ 
 tion, as when he described Carlyle as an apoth¬ 
 ecary who sold moral bitters to the nineteenth 
 century. There were bits of fine and tri¬ 
 umphant faith, as when he described Browning 
 as a man who knew so much about human 
 nature that he could not be a pessimist. There 
 were bits of irony with their own cut as when he 
 spoke of Amy Lowell as a New England woman 
 who had kept the Puritan rude honesty and 
 had cast aside the Puritan moral passion, the 
 mistress of brittle phrases with never a glow 
 of moral or spiritual light. There were bits 
 of easy humor, as in the paragraph dealing with 
 Vachel Lindsay as the man who introduced 
 rag-time on Parnassus. 
 
 Through it all there was that sense that 
 words are deeds, that feeling for the living 
 character of writing which made all his rela¬ 
 tion to books so vivid and compelling. You 
 watched the moral fights of a man as he went 
 on with his life as a reader. You followed 
 the victories and defeats which his character 
 suffered at the hands of books. And you saw 
 him at last the monarch of a vast domain 
 
A MAN AMONG HIS BOOKS 
 
 21 
 
 where multitudes of noble books were his 
 eager slaves. The last paragraph describing 
 the voices which speak in a library had a 
 chaste and almost ethereal beauty. The men 
 sat quite still under the spell which the reader 
 had cast upon them when his voice died away 
 into silence. 
 
 Bowen Tillman recovered first. “Oh, to 
 have time for it!” he ejaculated. 
 
 “ ‘Time? what’s time? Give now to dogs 
 and apes. Man has forever,’ ” quoted Hunter 
 Morrison. 
 
 “Not at my church,” flashed back Tillman. 
 
 Henry Alton looked over at the busy down¬ 
 town minister. “I’m not sure but a shower bath 
 of reading will leave a man ready to do some 
 other things in half the time,” he observed. 
 
 “The way to do a thing quickly is to do 
 something else,” said Benny Malone, whose 
 mischief was always ready to break out and 
 whose bump of reverence was not strikingly 
 developed; at least if that bump is supposed 
 to relate itself to dignified human beings. 
 
 “There’s more in what you say than you 
 think,” began Morris MacDonald. “Out of 
 the mouths of babes and sucklings ...” inter¬ 
 rupted Malone. 
 
22 TWELVE MERRY FISHERMEN 
 
 But MacDonald was not to be halted. “The 
 fight for a fresh mind is quite as fundamental 
 as the fight for an industrious mind/’ he de¬ 
 clared. “And reading, if it is wisely chosen, 
 leaves a man ready to think his way through 
 no end of problems with a speed he could not 
 have acquired in any other way. When a 
 man tells me that he is too busy to read, I 
 reply that he is too busy not to read.” 
 
 Fletcher Hilton, who exercised an evan¬ 
 gelistic ministry which was the wonder of all 
 who knew him, now looked up. “I’m always 
 ready to read a book which will bring me 
 closer to a man,” he said. “I am always 
 ready to throw down a book which will get 
 between me and people.” 
 
 “No book would get between you and the 
 man who liked that book,” said the irre¬ 
 pressible Malone. “So you have a fairly wide 
 field.” 
 
 “There is something more I want to say,” 
 continued Hilton. “I am afraid of a certain 
 citizenship in the world of books which will 
 make me less at home with the everyday 
 people among whom I must live. If a man 
 gets to live on epigrams so that he can only 
 enjoy the society of people who are all the 
 
A MAN AMONG HIS BOOKS 
 
 23 
 
 while % saying clever things, his circle of human 
 friends will get rather small.” 
 
 “There’s one for you, Bryant,” said Morrison 
 with an amused touch of friendly malice. 
 
 “I won’t have it,” replied Bryant. “You 
 can’t possibly be a less effective servant of 
 men in the long run because you love the 
 things they ought to love rather than the 
 things which they love at the moment.” 
 
 Monroe Burton had been silent thus far. 
 Now he entered the lists. 
 
 “I’m not afraid of books pushing me away 
 from people,” he said. “As a matter of fact, 
 people can meet by means of books who would 
 find it hard to understand each other in more 
 personal contact. You get the essence of a 
 man in a book and not the individual and 
 temperamental eccentricity.” 
 
 “And precisely what you need is to see the 
 essence in its human wrappings and not out¬ 
 side of them,” declared Fletcher Hilton. 
 
 Coulton Moore, the Bohemian of the group, 
 who with all his busy activities as a minister 
 found time for an amazing number of uncon¬ 
 ventional human contacts, who knew “dips” 
 and “yeggs” and all sorts of furtive folks, 
 woke up to the idea just at this minute. 
 
24 TWELVE MERRY FISHERMEN 
 
 “Books are either on the way to people or 
 on the way from people. If they are on the 
 way to people, it’s a fine morning and a good 
 day lies ahead on the open road. If they are 
 on the way from people, the sky is getting 
 gray and the day is sure to be cheerless at 
 last. If your man of books is not a man of 
 men as well, he will get to have sawdust where 
 he thought he had brains.” 
 
 “From which fate you are forever safe,” 
 laughed Bryant. And that ended the dis¬ 
 cussion for the day. 
 
III. THE MAN AND THE MACHINE 
 
 Bowen Tillman had just finished reading 
 his paper. The theme of the paper was “The 
 Age of Machinery.” Tillman began with the 
 inventions of the last quarter of the eighteenth 
 century and moved through the whole romantic 
 tale of the methods and devices and machines 
 which have changed the face of the world and 
 the character of civilization. His paper had 
 bristled with dates. But at the command of 
 his quick and vivid imagination the dates 
 lived and glowed with color. His picture of 
 the new world the machine has made was as 
 scientific as a careful statement of facts could 
 make it, and was bright with the play of light 
 from a mind which turned hard facts into 
 golden poetry. The paper concluded with 
 some thoughtful words about the type of 
 mind needed to carry the world through all 
 the adjustments which the new application of 
 power had made necessary. “The future be¬ 
 longs to the great organizing engineer,” Tillman 
 had declared, and then he had portrayed the 
 services of this master of men and things, of 
 
 25 
 
26 TWELVE MERRY FISHERMEN 
 
 manufacturing and transportation and of the 
 problems of salesmanship. 
 
 There was silence for a moment when the 
 reading of the paper had concluded. It was 
 evident that every one of the twelve merry 
 fishermen was deeply impressed. Then Benny 
 Malone broke out! 
 
 “Give me a job as your private secretary, 
 Mr. Super-engineer. I’d like to hitch my 
 wagon to your sort of star.” 
 
 Waldo Bryant spoke up moodily: 
 
 “That’s just the temper of the age,” he said. 
 “We never stop to think of all the havoc 
 wrought by this iconoclastic age of ugly ma¬ 
 chines. We never think of all the beauty 
 which has been destroyed. We never think of 
 all the mental life which has been impover¬ 
 ished. We never—” 
 
 “0, come now,” called Coulton Moore, “you 
 are singing a dirge too soon. Of course some 
 of the old romance is gone, and it is gone 
 forever. But think of the new romance. 
 Think of all the poems hidden in the whirring 
 wheels and moving belts of great machines. 
 There is to be a new humanism based upon 
 modern inventions. It will produce a new sort 
 of man of letters. Sometimes Kipling gives you 
 
THE MAN AND THE MACHINE 27 
 
 a hint of what it will be like. You can’t turn 
 back the clock, Bryant. You’d better turn for¬ 
 ward your mind instead. Here’s a train leav¬ 
 ing Fifth-Century Athens for Twentieth-Cen¬ 
 tury America. Better come and get on board.” 
 
 Monroe Burton scarcely waited for Moore 
 to complete his last sentence, “You capitulate 
 too soon,” he said. “Let’s take time to exam¬ 
 ine the situation. It isn’t the loss of poetry 
 I am thinking so much about. It’s the loss of 
 life. I don’t object to men using machines. 
 I do object to having a man become a machine. 
 It’s all right to use a typewriter. The trouble 
 is that so many people have become human 
 typewriters. We are living in an age of de¬ 
 pleted personality. And machines have done 
 it. Our taste as well as our productive power 
 is lowered until we actually suppose that Amy 
 Lowell can write poetry. We are stamping 
 real initiative and creative energy out of 
 modern life. We are becoming the victims of 
 our inventions. We have constructed a 
 Frankenstein which seems in fair way to 
 destroy our civilization.” 
 
 “Jeremiah, I hail thee,” put in Benny 
 Malone. “Just what chapter of the Lamenta¬ 
 tions is this?” 
 
28 TWELVE MERRY FISHERMEN 
 
 Henry Alton was smiling a little. Now he 
 spoke: 
 
 4 ‘It isn’t really as bad as that, Burton,” 
 he said. “Every invention is the expression 
 of an amazing amount of really creative mental 
 power. And the extra hours for the workers 
 which these inventions have already made 
 possible give an opportunity for an ampler 
 mental life and a variety of human experience 
 which were one day impossible. The problem 
 of the age of machinery is the new leisure 
 which has come to the groups we used to de¬ 
 scribe as the working classes. If this new 
 leisure is used wisely, we can produce a genera¬ 
 tion of superbly gifted and superbly trained 
 men and women to carry on the big adventure 
 of life.” 
 
 Hunter Morrison spoke up wrathfully: 
 
 “You ought to know better, Henry Alton,” 
 he said. 4 'You do know as well as I that we 
 are living upon a crater of industrial unrest. 
 The age of machinery has produced a race of 
 slaves. And little enough real difference has 
 been made by the slight concessions in hours 
 and wages. The only hope is in a real and 
 definite reconstruction of the system under 
 which we live. A system conceived and bom 
 
THE MAN AND THE MACHINE 29 
 
 in agricultural life cannot live and flourish in 
 an industrial age which receives the very form 
 of its activity from mechanical inventions.” 
 
 Tom Tabor was on his feet at that. 
 
 “All this talk of reconstruction makes me 
 unutterably weary,” he said. “As if we had 
 not been doing just that for half a century 
 and more. We have worn some of our watch¬ 
 words threadbare. Now we need to get down 
 to realities. The progress of the nineteenth 
 century in social and industrial legislation has 
 been an amazing thing. We do not need a 
 new system. We do need more poise. Every 
 year a fuller life comes within the reach of all 
 men of all classes. Tillman is right. We need 
 bigger engineers. But it is for the purpose of 
 completing a job partly finished, and not for 
 the purpose of beginning all over again.” 
 
 “The butterfly above the road 
 Preaches contentment to the toad,” 
 
 quoted Hunter Morrison, a little maliciously. 
 
 Just here Fletcher Hilton began to speak: 
 
 “Curiously enough, none of you have said 
 anything about the effect of all this on reli¬ 
 gion,” he declared. “To me as a preacher it 
 seems that the outstanding effect of the age 
 
30 TWELVE MERRY FISHERMEN 
 
 of machinery has been to make the work of 
 evangelism more difficult. Life seems to be 
 caught up in mysterious and mechanical rela¬ 
 tionships. It is harder in all these complex 
 organizations to arouse a deep and powerful 
 sense of personal responsibility. Men are will¬ 
 ing to repent of the sins of the machine. They 
 are not willing to admit that they are per¬ 
 sonally responsible for the wrong things done 
 by the wffieels and belts.” 
 
 Morris MacDonald had turned about as 
 Hilton began speaking. Now he entered the 
 discussion with a little note of eagerness in 
 his voice: “What an indictment and what 
 a tribute!” he began. “There is the attack 
 of humanism. There is the attack of social 
 passion. There is the attack of ethics. There 
 is the attack of religion. The age of machin¬ 
 ery is really having a hard time. But really 
 it is not the fault of the machines. They are 
 only inanimate slaves. And life could be richer 
 for all of us because of their activities. The 
 age of machinery is actually an age of instru¬ 
 ments we have not yet mastered. It is an age 
 of servants we have not yet completely disci¬ 
 plined. The supreme challenge which has 
 come to humanity up to this day is just the 
 
THE MAN AND THE MACHINE 31 
 
 opportunity to bend machinery to the higher 
 purposes of life.” 
 
 Morris MacDonald paused a moment and a 
 twinkle came into his eye. “There is a pas¬ 
 sage in the book of Ezekiel which I commend 
 to your serious attention,” he said. “It is 
 this: ‘The spirit of the living creature was in 
 the wheels.’ When machinery is dominated by 
 personality the world is safe.” 
 
 “But—” said Hunter Morrison. 
 
 “However—” exclaimed Bowen Tillman. 
 
 “And yet—” cried Waldo Bryant. 
 
 And just at that moment luncheon was 
 announced. 
 
IV. PREACHING AND PAGANISM 
 
 James Clayton was the rural member of 
 the club. He was immensely proud that he 
 could call himself a country minister. He was 
 heartily a part of the life about him. You 
 could find volumes of discussion of scientific 
 agriculture on his shelves. He was a part of 
 the larger life of the world. You could often 
 find him poring over some book which set 
 about the unraveling of a knotting international 
 problem. He was a part of the vast unfolding 
 life of the church. No volumes in his well- 
 packed cases showed more evidence of fre¬ 
 quent perusal than those which told the story 
 of the thought of the church, the long tale 
 of its intellectual struggles. Somehow he 
 brought things together in his own life and in 
 his ministry which men often think about in 
 the terms of a subtle antagonism. Busy as he 
 was about his wide-lying parish, he had a keen 
 scent for the significant new book. You were 
 rather likely to find that book upon his study 
 table. 
 
 The Twelve Merry Fishermen knew the ways 
 
 32 
 
PREACHING AND PAGANISM 33 
 
 and the abilities of Clayton very well, and it 
 was with a little touch of hearty expectancy 
 that they gathered in the hotel on the day 
 when he was to read the paper. He took his 
 manuscript from his pocket, and laid beside 
 it a small but closely printed volume. “I am 
 going to discuss Professor Albert Parker Fitch’s 
 Yale Lectures, ‘Preaching and Paganism,' ” he 
 began. The men leaned back in their chairs 
 to listen. 
 
 Clayton was not a particularly attractive 
 reader. He had his own personal tricks of 
 emphasis. And he had an entirely individual 
 set of modulations of tone. But withal he 
 held your attention, and usually you forgot the 
 reader in listening to his thoughts before he 
 had been reading very long. On this particular 
 day he gave a few graphic touches to placing 
 the mental character of Professor Fitch before 
 the members of the club. You knew that the 
 man he was discussing was a cosmopolitan 
 man of letters with a gift for phrases which 
 cut their way to the heart of a subject like a 
 sharp knife. You felt the resilience of the mind 
 beginning the Yale lectures with the observa¬ 
 tion that it was necessary in that course not 
 merely to hitch one’s wagon to a star but to 
 
34 TWELVE MERRY FISHERMEN 
 
 a whole constellation. You sensed the quality 
 of close and adequate technical scholarship 
 which gave precision as well as depth to Pro¬ 
 fessor Fitch’s work. Then Clayton gave him¬ 
 self to an interpretation of the lectures them¬ 
 selves. You found that you were in the pres¬ 
 ence of a busy modern mind acquainted with 
 all the contemporary watchwords, alive with 
 social passion, warmly sympathetic with every 
 real thing in contemporary life, and at heart 
 desperately lonely for one thing, terribly hungry 
 for authentic contact with the living God. 
 This loneliness you felt had not been in vain. 
 This hunger had not left the spirit of the man 
 empty. In deep and searching analysis of his 
 own soul and of the period in which he lived, 
 he had discovered the inadequacy of human¬ 
 ism, and the hot power of that invading pagan¬ 
 ism which, wearing many a garment, peers 
 in upon us at every turn of the road. He had 
 dared to be honest with the moral problems. 
 He had scorned evasion and subterfuge. And 
 a new sense of God, a new apprehension of 
 religion, a new and startlingly vital under¬ 
 standing of redemption had come to him out 
 of all this. The passion and the enthusiasm of 
 it all was poured forth in the Yale lectures on 
 
PREACHING AND PAGANISM 
 
 35 
 
 preaching. Some of the sentences which Clay¬ 
 ton quoted were conclusive enough of the sharp 
 definiteness of the analysis of Professor Fitch, 
 and of the ethical energy of his message. 
 
 “Humanism makes an inhuman demand upon 
 the will.” “The primitive in man is a beast 
 whom it is hard to chain, nor does humanism, 
 with its semiscientific, semisentimental lauda¬ 
 tion of all natural values, produce that exact¬ 
 ing mood of inward scrutiny in which self- 
 control has most chance of succeeding.” “It 
 would appear to be generally true that society 
 at this moment is not chiefly concerned with 
 either love or justice, renunciation or discipline, 
 nor with the supplanting of the old order, but 
 with perpetuating the naturalistic principle by 
 means of a partial redivision of the spoils, a 
 series of compromises, designed to make it 
 more tolerable for one class of its former vic¬ 
 tims.” “The deepest cause of human misery is 
 not inheritance, is not environment, is not 
 ignorance, is not incompleteness: it is the in¬ 
 formed but perverse human will.” “You are 
 something more than physical hunger and 
 reproductive instinct.” “You do not make a 
 man moral by enlightening him.” “No man 
 was ever yet able to preach the living God 
 
36 TWELVE MERRY FISHERMEN 
 
 until he understood that the central need in 
 human life is to reconcile the individual con¬ 
 science to itself, compose the anarchy of the 
 spiritual life. Men want to be happy and be 
 fed; but men must have inward peace.” The 
 paper concluded with a glowing account of 
 the vital and freshly phrased expression of the 
 eternal meaning of the moral and spiritual 
 battle and the Christian peace as these are 
 set forth by Professor Fitch. 
 
 Clayton had hardly finished when Hunter 
 Morrison spoke: 
 
 “The words are the words of modernity, but 
 the spirit comes out of the Middle Ages. It’s 
 just another attempt to lead us to surrender 
 the gains of the world which has lived since 
 the days of Petrarch.” 
 
 Baldwin Paxton followed in his slow and 
 careful way. 
 
 “It seems to me that Professor Fitch under¬ 
 estimates the contribution of modern science 
 to the solution of the moral and the religious 
 problem. And with all his scholarship there is 
 a subtle appeal to the emotions which has its 
 own elements of grave danger.” 
 
 Monroe Burton had a twinkle in his eye: 
 
 “Professor Fitch is really a belated Wesley 
 
PREACHING AND PAGANISM 37 
 
 trying to preach a sermon with the vocabulary 
 of a New-England intellectual,” he said. 
 
 This was too much for Fletcher Hilton: 
 
 “Just go a little farther, Burton,” he said. 
 “You might add that he is an Augustine and a 
 Luther and a Paul. In other words, you might 
 say that being a professor of the history of 
 religion has given him a sense of historic con¬ 
 tinuity. He is trying to let the Christian ages 
 speak in the voice of the age.” 
 
 Coulton Moore now spoke up: 
 
 “I’m a bit puzzled by the contrast between 
 Professor Fitch’s little brochure, Can the Church 
 Survive in the Changing Order? and his Yale 
 lectures. One seemed the very voice of every¬ 
 thing real and restless in the life of to-day. 
 The other seems the utterance of a modern 
 man who has just gone with Moses to the 
 Mount of the Law and has been swiftly carried 
 to the Mount of Transfiguration and then has 
 come down to bend the contemporary vernacu¬ 
 lar to the meaning of what he has seen and felt.” 
 
 Waldo Bryant turned on Moore with this 
 sentence: 
 
 “One volume is diagnosis. The other is 
 prescription. And the prescription had not 
 been discovered when the diagnosis was made.” 
 
38 TWELVE MERRY FISHERMEN 
 
 Bowen Tillman moved a little eagerly: 
 
 “The thing which gripped me about ‘Preach¬ 
 ing and Paganism’ was this,” he said. “I have 
 been feeling for a hundred days that my preach¬ 
 ing was getting thin. Professor Fitch put his 
 hand on the cause. He did better. He showed 
 me the way out of my trouble. I have not 
 been calling to the deeps in human life. He 
 made me resolve to besiege the farthest citadel 
 in a man’s soul. I feel as if he had put iron 
 into my blood.” 
 
 Tom Tabor was sitting beside Tillman. Now 
 he spoke: 
 
 “Clayton said nothing about Professor 
 Fitch’s uplifting worship as over against preach¬ 
 ing. I like to think of a new appreciation of 
 worship. But I am clear that Professor Fitch 
 does not think highly enough of preaching.” 
 
 “These things ought ye to have done and 
 not to have left the others undone,” inter¬ 
 rupted Benny Malone. 
 
 Morris MacDonald was seated at the end of 
 the table. He moved a little. Everyone felt 
 that his word would close the discussion of 
 the day. 
 
 “There are things in this book I do not 
 believe,” he said. “There are trails of thought 
 
PREACHING AND PAGANISM 39 
 
 I cannot follow. I wish that Professor Fitch 
 were a little less cavalier at times with things 
 which still glow with wonder and with power 
 to multitudes of Christians. But for all that, 
 I want to say that no book about religion has 
 so stirred me for a dozen years. This little 
 volume rises right above the other things 
 which are being written in America. Once 
 again we have a book which sounds the au¬ 
 thentic note of religion as a morally trans¬ 
 forming contact with the life of the eternal. I 
 would put it on the study of every preacher 
 in the United States.” He paused a moment. 
 Then he added, “In this book at last Greece 
 pays tribute to Jerusalem.” 
 
V. THE JEW AND CIVILIZATION 
 
 Hunter Morrison could always be trusted 
 to choose a theme which was alive in the con¬ 
 temporary mind. 
 
 “I know his subject. It is ‘The Age of Steel 
 and the Age of Men/ ” declared Benny Malone, 
 as the twelve took their places around the 
 table. 
 
 Morrison looked up with some amusement in 
 his eyes. 
 
 “Guess again, Benny,” he said. 
 
 “Then it’s ‘The Closed Mind and the Open 
 Shop/ ” ventured Malone. 
 
 “Wrong once more,” said Morrison. 
 
 By this time all the members were settled 
 comfortably in their chairs. Hunter Morrison 
 took his paper from his pocket. 
 
 “My subject,” he announced, “is ‘The Jew 
 and the Safety of the World/ ” 
 
 More than one member of the club made a 
 little gesture of quickened interest. Morrison 
 had an unusual knowledge of significant radi¬ 
 cal literature. He maintained a mental life of 
 really cosmopolitan interest. And he could be 
 
 40 
 
THE JEW AND CIVILIZATION 41 
 
 trusted to deal with this problem in a large 
 and critical and fearless way. He began with 
 a discussion of the articles published in the 
 London Morning Post under the title, “The 
 Cause of the World Unrest.” He referred to 
 such expressions of opinion as you find in one 
 cutting chapter of Gilbert Chesterton’s book. 
 The New Jerusalem . He noted some of the 
 vigorous American expressions of Anti-Semitic 
 feeling. He called attention to the little book 
 of Lucien Wolf, The Myth of the Jewish Menace 
 in World Affairs , and to John Spargo’s effective 
 discussion, The Jew and American Ideals. 
 Then he turned to a quick survey of the long 
 story of the Jew. The men about the table 
 felt once more the power of that high, pure 
 faith which rose in the midst of the unabashed 
 animalism of Semitic religion. They sensed the 
 life which lay back of the noblest distinctions 
 of Hebrew law and the loftiest moral and 
 spiritual heights of Hebrew prophecy. They 
 stopped to remember that when Jesus spoke 
 his words of matchless insight and power he 
 utilized a mind trained in Jewish traditions and 
 rich with Jewish ethical and spiritual idealism. 
 “Only Israel furnished a possible background 
 for the teachings of Jesus,” declared Morrison. 
 
42 TWELVE MERRY FISHERMEN 
 
 Then the long story of Jewish life in many 
 ages and in many lands was touched upon. 
 You saw the Jew become a cosmopolitan who 
 appropriated the Greek culture in Alexandria. 
 You watched the flowering of the Jewish mind 
 in the golden age in Spain. And you looked 
 upon terrible deeds of persecution in many a 
 country. You watched the kings of the Middle 
 Ages very ready to repent of their tolerance 
 when they owed debts to wealthy Jews. Y 7 ou 
 watched the bigotry of the world fasten upon 
 a tortured race. Coming to Russia, you saw 
 men of the old regime alertly watching. When 
 the menace of revolution was near, you saw 
 once and again the attempt to make people 
 forget their desire for revolution in their con¬ 
 centration upon hatred of the Jew. And when, 
 after massacre and ruthless destruction, this 
 sort of attempt failed, you saw skillful and 
 remorseless men turning the hatred of the 
 Jew into a world-wide propaganda to further 
 purposes of their own. There was an ample 
 discussion of the Protocols of the Wise Men of 
 Zion. The contradictory accounts published 
 with varied editions were carefully analyzed. 
 The absolute absence of anything like real 
 proof of their allegations was made plain. 
 
THE JEW AND CIVILIZATION 43 
 
 “No jury would convict upon such evidence,’’ 
 declared Morrison. The assertion that “at the 
 close of a series of secret meetings of influential 
 leaders of the conspiracy, held under Masonic 
 auspices, a woman stole from one of the most 
 influential and highly initiated leaders of Free¬ 
 masonry” the documents revealing the plot 
 was quoted, and the fashion in which it was 
 contradicted was emphasized. A few telling 
 words were given to the relation between Jews 
 and Bolshevism. It was pointed out that 
 where masses of Jews lived Bolshevism was 
 less easily successful in Russia. And the vigor 
 of Anti-Bolshevistic leadership on the part of 
 the Jews was shown. The sufferings of the Jews 
 under the Bolshevist regime were made clear. 
 In a clever aside Morrison quoted from Spargo 
 the account of the absurd theory that the 
 English are a part of the Jewish race and that 
 the British government is the principal direct¬ 
 ing power of the Jewish conspiracy, and the 
 fact that this theory, carefully omitted from 
 every English translation, was reproduced in 
 the 1905 Russian edition of the work of Nilus, 
 to whom we are supposed to owe all our knowl¬ 
 edge of the Protocols. The paper then turned 
 to a tribute to some of the great Jewish thinkers 
 
44 TWELVE MERRY FISHERMEN 
 
 like Spinoza in the seventeenth century and 
 Bergson in our own. It closed with a plea for 
 that fair play upon which our very institu¬ 
 tions rest. “If a Jew breaks a law, let him be 
 punished like any other man,” said Morrison. 
 “But do not suspect him because he is a Jew. 
 Do not hate him because he is a Jew. And 
 do not let loose upon him the bitterness of that 
 race hatred which has pursued him with such 
 beastly fury almost all over the world.” The 
 last word of the paper was a picture of America 
 as a land where men of every race and every 
 religious belief may confidently expect to find 
 justice and, even more, an outreach of that 
 understanding sympathy which is brother¬ 
 hood and makes for peace. 
 
 Bowen Tillman began the discussion. “Good 
 work, my friend,” he said. “Just the same, I 
 wish rich Jews had had a little less to do with 
 the corrupting aspects of the moving-picture 
 business.” 
 
 “I’m not defending all Jews,” Morrison 
 flashed back. “I am just contending that 
 there is no Jewish conspiracy and that the 
 
 race is still the source of rich and noble ideal- 
 
 • >> 
 ism. 
 
 Waldo Bryant spoke next. 
 
THE JEW AND CIVILIZATION 45 
 
 “You commend the race to my judgment. 
 But you will never commend some members 
 of the race to my taste,” he said. 
 
 “All of which might be said of any race,” 
 said Tom Tabor. “And add to that the ages 
 of persecution. You must grow a race in a 
 garden of flowers if delicacy is the thing you 
 want most. If a race survives what would 
 annihilate most races, you must expect it to 
 have strength rather than grace. For all that, 
 you can find the delicacy and the grace too 
 in many a noble member of this racial group.” 
 
 Baldwin Paxton was waiting to get in a word. 
 
 “We must never forget,” he said, “that we 
 ought to be more careful to be just if there 
 are racial barriers. And we should be doubly 
 sure of our evidence if we even suspect that 
 we feel a touch of personal prejudice.” 
 
 Coulton Moore said the last word of the day. 
 “I’ve watched a good deal of practical social 
 ministry in my time,” he said. “The Jewish 
 welfare work is a credit to our cities, and the 
 Jews know how to sympathize and how to 
 give. They knew how to die too, in the name 
 of liberty of the world. And as Disraeli gave 
 England brilliant service and helped it to see 
 its own great destiny, so Jews have been ready 
 
46 TWELVE MERRY FISHERMEN 
 
 to love the land they made their own. They 
 have their place in America. And we are only 
 true to ourselves when we think of them as 
 fellow Americans and not as members of a 
 particular race.” 
 
VI. THE FURTIVE PEOPLE 
 
 The Club was having its last meeting be¬ 
 fore the summer vacation period. It was a 
 very old-fashioned outdoor meeting. Leaving 
 automobiles in the various garages at home 
 the men had taken a trolley car, riding about 
 twelve miles out from the city. Then they 
 took a road which wound among the hills and 
 finally pulled up at a rendezvous on the edge 
 of a high bit of forest country. There was a 
 wonderful view of hill and valley and river 
 and the men flung themselves on the grass 
 to drink it all in. Each member of the club 
 had carried his own neatly packed box of 
 provisions for the evening meal which would 
 come a little later. For a time they were 
 content to look upon the hills and the trees 
 and all the fresh beauty of early summer and 
 to let their eyes wander to the city which lay 
 in the valley, seeming this bright and clear 
 afternoon very distant and very still. 
 
 Coulton Moore was to read the paper of 
 the day. He looked a bit more the Bohemian 
 
 than usual with his dark, eager face, his deep, 
 
 47 
 
48 TWELVE MERRY FISHERMEN 
 
 flashing eyes and his slouch hat which he wore 
 with a certain careless grace. The men had 
 all found comfortable positions, and it was a 
 good and hearty group upon which Coulton 
 Moore looked as he removed his hat, took 
 his paper from his inside coat pocket and pre¬ 
 pared to read. 
 
 “My subject,” he began in a curious half 
 formal way he had which was in sharp con¬ 
 trast with his temperament as his friends 
 came to know it. “My subject is ‘The Chil¬ 
 dren of Ishmael in America.’ ” 
 
 Waldo Bryant gave a little gesture of satis¬ 
 faction followed by a half-audible ejaculation. 
 The theme suited the place and the time and 
 he settled back to listen to a man with a touch 
 of wildness in his own blood as he described 
 the life and habits of the underworld. Bryant 
 declared sometimes that Moore was like Victor 
 Hugo’s character Javert, who had to be either 
 a criminal or a detective, only in Moore’s case 
 the alternatives were an outlaw against so¬ 
 ciety or a preacher who spent much of his 
 time trying to save outlaws to civilization and 
 to Christianity. But by this time Moore was 
 reading. 
 
 He began by telling how years before he 
 
THE FURTIVE PEOPLE 
 
 49 
 
 had read Donald Lowrie’s My Life in Prison , 
 and of how it had roused his mind to the 
 experience of those who spent years in the 
 great American prisons. He told of his read¬ 
 ing of the writings of Thomas Mott Osborne 
 and of the intimate way in which he had fol¬ 
 lowed the work of that Knight Errant for the 
 Outcasts as it was carried on at Sing Sing. 
 He spoke of Wellington Scott’s Seventeen Years 
 in the Underworld with its illuminating account 
 of the processes by which an American boy 
 can become a criminal and its convincing 
 narrative regarding prison conditions as the 
 author found them. Then he plunged into 
 his own experiences with the furtive people. 
 From this moment his hearers listened with 
 rapt and eager interest. Moore had the natural 
 gift of a story-teller, and as he moved from 
 one big American city to another following the 
 trail of his adventurous endeavors to win the 
 men of the underworld his auditors felt that 
 they were indeed entering a new world. He 
 described many a visit to many a prison from 
 Sing Sing on the East to San Quentin on the 
 West, and as you followed him in and out of 
 these great fortresses there was always the 
 human touch, always the revealing insight. 
 
50 TWELVE MERRY FISHERMEN 
 
 With instinctive sympathy he seemed to dis¬ 
 cover the point of view of the man who has 
 become the foe of organized society. You 
 felt as if you were looking at the criminal 
 from within and not from without. Or, as 
 Benny Malone put it afterward, you felt as 
 if you had become the criminal. There was 
 an honest consideration of the bitter crimes 
 and the loathsome vices which infest the under¬ 
 world. But there was also the clearest sort 
 of insistence that many a criminal fights a 
 great moral fight to keep free from the darker 
 things and there was an account of the code 
 of morals of the crook which had a whim¬ 
 sical understanding of the type the reader was 
 describing. The hours of torturing conscious¬ 
 ness of what the criminal life means and the 
 wistful loneliness hidden in the heart of many 
 a crook were set forth with an insight which 
 carried conviction. And the capacity for good 
 hidden away in the cast-off lives of the children 
 of Ishmael was described with a noble and 
 passionate energy. Last of all, there were 
 just a few stories of men outside the pale whom 
 Moore had seen fight the good fight and win 
 at last, leaving the furtive ways of the furtive 
 people for the ways of integrity and good will. 
 
THE FURTIVE PEOPLE 
 
 51 
 
 The men sat quiet a little while in the late 
 afternoon. Jamds Clayton was gathering sticks 
 and bits of wood together. Soon he had 
 lighted a fire and in a few moments there was 
 the aroma of coffee and other indications that 
 an outdoor supper was being prepared. 
 
 Baldwin Paxton was the first to speak: 
 
 “I confess that I am afraid of that sort of 
 thing, 5 ’ he said. “It’s a bit too much like 
 taking down the walls. It has taken centuries 
 to achieve an orderly world and I can’t see 
 but the man who refuses to be a part of it 
 must pay the penalty. Thomas Mott Osborne 
 won the friendship of criminals. I am not so 
 sure that he won them to a permanent refor¬ 
 mation.” 
 
 “Would you say the same thing of Maude 
 Ballington Booth?” inquired Morris Mac¬ 
 Donald. 
 
 “Of course there’s a big difference,” ad¬ 
 mitted Paxton. “And I’ve no doubt she has 
 done much good. But when I hear her speak 
 I feel once and again as if her heart is nearer 
 to the prisoner than to society.” 
 
 “Thank God,” said Hunter Morrison, fer¬ 
 vently. 
 
 Bowen Tillman was holding a tiny bit of 
 
52 TWELVE MERRY FISHERMEN 
 
 bacon near a bright bit of blaze. He turned 
 to enter the conversation with results not at 
 all conducive to the attractiveness of the 
 bacon for the palate. But he went on undis¬ 
 turbed. 
 
 “I really do believe we have been thinking 
 with too much sentimentality of the criminal 
 class.” He smiled a little ruefully. “I thought 
 I was a fairly good judge of human nature. 
 But only last month I lost twenty-five dollars 
 because I believed the story of a plausible 
 confidence man. I am beginning to think 
 that a little sternness is the best kindness.” 
 
 Monroe Burton blazed into the discussion 
 just at this moment with a good deal of in¬ 
 tensity. 
 
 “I wonder if some of you men have ever 
 been on a commission which investigated con¬ 
 ditions in one of the old type of prisons. I 
 had that experience and I haven’t talked about 
 sentimental treatment of criminals since. If I 
 had to go through what some of these poor 
 chaps endured, I would be very much afraid 
 of the consequences. Many a prison has taken 
 a man who had made a bad mistake and has 
 turned him into a brute. And it’s a clear 
 waste of the most valuable raw material in 
 
THE FURTIVE PEOPLE 
 
 53 
 
 the world. Of course a man must keep his 
 head. But you needn’t fear that you’ll corrupt 
 a criminal if you show him that you have a 
 human heart.” James Clayton now found 
 time to enter the lists, though it was with a 
 very gentle word. 
 
 “There are little homes in the country from 
 which many of them come,” he said. “One 
 of my boys came back last winter. He was 
 all broken and full of despair. Life had been 
 too much for him. And he wore his terrible 
 memories of prison like a uniform in his haggard 
 face.” He waited a moment. Then a rare 
 smile kindled all his countenance. “He’s found 
 his way now. Every day he walks a little 
 more firmly. And we are all standing ready 
 to help.” 
 
 Now the supper was served and for a while 
 the talk turned to other things. 
 
 Then before the men started home Coulton 
 Moore had his final word for the day. It con¬ 
 sisted of three pictures. One was a memory of 
 Mrs. Booth, mother to so many motherless men, 
 pouring out her love of goodness and her 
 hatred of evil and her belief in the redemption 
 of men in words which glowed with power 
 while fifteen hundred men sat spell-bound in 
 
54 TWELVE MERRY FISHERMEN 
 
 a great prison. One was the story of the old 
 crook who had forgotten how to weep when, 
 one day, he saw Thomas Mott Osborne walk¬ 
 ing through the aisle of the prison wearing the 
 prison garb and submitting to all the unlovely 
 experiences met by the men under sentence. 
 The innocent man in stripes broke the hard 
 heart of the old criminal whom nothing else 
 could reach. The last picture was of a “yegg” 
 reclaimed after years and years of crime and 
 standing a test which made its appeal to 
 every instinct of his old lawless days. As he 
 stood victor in that hour you saw a hope for 
 him and for all his kind. 
 
 “X know a man may say that it is danger¬ 
 ous to generalize from individual cases/’ ad¬ 
 mitted Moore. “But in these matters you 
 can’t leave the concrete man and his victory 
 out of account. And one man who succeeds 
 is more significant than a dozen who fail.” 
 
 “And what is the secret of success?” inquired 
 Henry Alton. 
 
 “Sometimes a man finds a friend,” replied 
 Moore with a thrill in his voice. “And some¬ 
 times he finds an open door of opportunity. 
 And sometimes he learns to pray.” 
 
 By this time the men were ready for the 
 
THE FURTIVE PEOPLE 
 
 55 
 
 long walk through the light of the late after¬ 
 noon. Benny Malone was unusually sober. He 
 muttered half to himself as he walked along. 
 “I’ll have to find a son of Ishmael when I get 
 back to town.” 
 
 Coulton Moore overheard him. 
 
 “Go to it, old man,” he said. “When enough 
 men do it we’ll decrease the tribe of Ishmael 
 in the world.” 
 
VII. COMMERCE AND CHARACTER 
 
 Tom Tabor was to read the paper of the 
 day. 
 
 “It’s all the fault of my boy, Tom the Third.” 
 He began. “He has been carrying Webster’s 
 General History of Commerce under his arm and 
 telling me what a wonderful time the class 
 has been having with that book in his school. 
 The teacher must be a wizard. He has these 
 boys sailing imaginary ships in all the seas 
 and delivering cargoes in all the ports. Weil, 
 I couldn’t let this son of mine get so far ahead 
 of me. So I read Webster’s book. Then I 
 really got interested. So I bought Professor 
 Clive Day’s History of Commerce and read it 
 with no end of enjoyment. About that time 
 Professor Van Metre published his Economic 
 History of the United States. I was all ready 
 for it and read every page as if it had been 
 an engrossing novel. Then I got hold of one 
 or two commercial geographies. I followed 
 them with more general discussions, always 
 paying particular attention to what was said 
 
 about the commercial life of the various peoples 
 
 56 
 
COMMERCE AND CHARACTER 57 
 
 in the various stages of their history. And 
 out of it all has come this paper. My subject 
 is, ‘Commerce and Character.’ ” 
 
 “Prepare for the apotheosis of the status quo” 
 muttered Hunter Morrison under his breath 
 
 “The tradesman invades the minister’s sanc¬ 
 tum,” threw out Waldo Bryant. 
 
 But Tom Tabor was perfectly undisturbed. 
 He waited for complete quiet and then he 
 began his paper. 
 
 He struck a high note at the very beginning 
 by advancing the claim that trade began when 
 men discovered that they could do for each 
 other what they could not do for themselves. 
 The paper was really a tale of many cities. 
 You watched the bustle and hurry on the 
 streets of ancient Nineveh. You felt the pulse 
 of Athens when it was a mistress of commerce 
 as well as a mistress of art. You saw the 
 manifold roads leading toward Rome filled 
 with merchandise as well as echoing to the 
 feet of hard-faced soldiers. You saw the 
 growth of the commercial life of the Italian 
 cities of the Middle Ages. And even as you 
 felt their artistic splendor so you responded to 
 the skill of their merchants with their wide 
 lying trade. You moved about among the 
 
58 TWELVE MERRY FISHERMEN 
 
 cities of the Hanseatic League as it became an 
 empire of buying and selling and a political 
 power as well. You followed the growth of 
 the new commerce after the great age of dis¬ 
 covery. You followed in the ways of Portugal 
 during its days of powerful commerce. You 
 were fairly dazzled by the brilliancy of the 
 golden hour in the commercial life of Spain. 
 You watched Holland make its buying and 
 selling an effective instrument of power. Then 
 you surveyed the great struggle between France 
 and England. It was a political struggle. It 
 was a religious struggle. And in a very real 
 way it was also a commercial struggle. And 
 both in Asia and in America England was 
 triumphant. You watched the emerging of the 
 New Republic. You felt the quality of its life 
 as a carrying nation during the earlier stages 
 of the Napoleonic wars. You followed its 
 activities in a later day when its clipper ships 
 were the most wonderful carriers in all the 
 world. Then you watched the steam power 
 of England drive the clipper ship from its 
 place of power on the sea. You surveyed the 
 building of great sea giants and the spreading 
 of a network of rails over all the continents. 
 You saw the machine age transform production 
 
COMMERCE AND CHARACTER 59 
 
 just as the new transportation transformed the 
 delivery of manufactured goods. Before the 
 World War you saw the railroad mileage of 
 the world reach a total of over six hundred thou¬ 
 sand miles. You saw the world’s output of coal 
 become a billion and a third of tons in 1912. 
 You saw the world’s total registered merchant 
 tonnage reach nearly forty-seven million tons 
 in 1913. In this same year of 1913 you saw 
 the world’s trade reach the sum of about 
 forty-two billion dollars. 
 
 Turning from this array of facts and figures 
 and pictures of trade, Tom Tabor brought 
 his paper to a close with a brief but trenchant 
 analysis. “A civilization is only safe,” he de¬ 
 clared “when its growth in production and 
 distribution is paralleled by its growth in in¬ 
 tegrity. Character must keep pace with com¬ 
 merce. The tragedy of the modern world lies 
 just in the fact that the two steeds have not 
 gone down the road together. Our prosperity 
 has outrun our integrity. Our commerce has 
 developed more rapidly than our character.” 
 There were clear and vivid illustrations of what 
 the author of the paper meant by these general¬ 
 izations, and then there was a final word as 
 to the significance of the Christian Church as 
 
60 TWELVE MERRY FISHERMEN 
 
 a great producer and distributor of character. 
 This was the last sentence: “The church deals 
 in the one commodity of which the modern 
 world stands in most desperate need.” 
 
 Bowman Tillman opened the discussion: 
 
 “There is a devotee of Babson in my church 
 who would like to read that paper,” he de¬ 
 clared. “And for my part I am immensely 
 grateful to Tabor for putting the church where 
 it belongs in the great economic structure.” 
 
 “That’s just the question,” broke in Hunter 
 Morrison. “Where does the church belong? 
 Is it to be the perpetual servant of the present 
 order with all its inequalities, or is it to help 
 to produce a new order which shall really 
 reflect the will of God in the economic life? 
 It seems to me that Tabor has taken us right 
 up to the edge of the critical matters and then 
 has closed his paper. He has not told us 
 whether commerce in the present order can be 
 made Christian.” 
 
 Fletcher Hilton was ready with a charac¬ 
 teristic word: 
 
 “Any system will break down which is not 
 based upon individual integrity at last,” he 
 said. “And with all its faults our present 
 system has unrealized possibilities of good when 
 
COMMERCE AND CHARACTER 61 
 
 it is administered by men whose personal 
 character has developed a sense of social 
 responsibility.” 
 
 Morris MacDonald looked on a little whim¬ 
 sically at this bit of thrust and counterthrust 
 so typical of the two men. Then he took up 
 the discussion: 
 
 “As I have been listening to Tabor I have 
 been thinking all the while of an invisible com¬ 
 merce which he did not mention. I could see 
 not only the bales containing all the material 
 wares of trade, but the vast treasures of the 
 mind which have been carried about on all 
 the ships and on all the routes of trade. The 
 commerce in ideas has often been far more 
 important than the commerce in things.” 
 
 “And I would like to carry that a step 
 farther,” said James Clayton. “There is a 
 commerce in the things of the conscience and the 
 things of the spirit which has changed the face 
 of the world. When Paul embarked in a Medi¬ 
 terranean grain ship something more important 
 was on board than all the food supplies. When 
 merchants with packs on their backs told the 
 story of the Christian religion to ladies in far 
 fortresses while they showed their silks and 
 laces, a commerce in ideals of life was being 
 
62 TWELVE MERRY FISHERMEN 
 
 carried on which was to have its own share in 
 the making of the modern world. When Pacific 
 steamers carry prophets with the flame of the 
 Christian passion in their hearts to the wait¬ 
 ing East they carry destiny with them.” 
 
 Henry Alton had a quiet light in his eye as 
 he listened. Now he spoke that last word of 
 the day’s discussion. 
 
 “We need them all,” he said. “The mer¬ 
 chants in things and the merchants in ideas 
 and the merchants in ideals. We need them 
 all together thinking and struggling and work¬ 
 ing. We must be clear-eyed and honest and 
 steady. We must be as conservative as ancient 
 good. We must be as radical as newly dis¬ 
 covered truth. We must remember that no 
 group has a monopoly in the possession of truth. 
 It will require all the experience and all the 
 idealism of all the groups to bring in the better 
 day. The prophet of scorn is sure to despise 
 something which he needs for the completion 
 of his own work. Numberless merchants who 
 go about with good will as their commodity 
 must help us to live together patiently, to under¬ 
 stand each other with friendly sympathy. And 
 then we can create the structure upon which 
 the nobler commerce of the future will rest.” 
 
VIII. THE CREATIVE PAST 
 
 Benny Malone had been converted to the 
 study of history. It began with H. G. Wells. 
 He read the Outline of History with feverish 
 interest. Then he read Breasted’s Ancient 
 Times, and Robinson’s Medieval and Modern 
 Times, hurrying through them to use his own 
 phrase, “sixty miles an hour.” W 7 hen Pro¬ 
 fessor Van Loon’s Story of Mankind was pub¬ 
 lished he threw himself into it as if it had 
 been a thrilling tale of adventure—“as it is,” 
 he declared. Then he got hold of that ripe 
 and thoughtful little book. The Living Past, by 
 F. S. Marvin, and perused it with fascinated 
 interest. Borrowing from the knowledge of 
 more erudite friends, he secured masterly vol¬ 
 umes which captured the very meaning of great 
 periods like that of fifth-century Athens and 
 thirteenth-century Europe and the period of the 
 Renaissance and the Protestant Revolt and the 
 French Revolution and the new industrial age. 
 Then when his mind was full of the move¬ 
 ment of it all he wrote a paper for the club. 
 
 The men were in high good humor that day. 
 
 Hunter Morrison began the chaffing as they 
 
 took their places about the table. 
 
 63 
 
64 TWELVE MERRY FISHERMEN 
 
 “I can guess Benny’s secret,” he declared. 
 4 ‘He’s going to take us into the mind of Max 
 Eastman and there discover all the long hidden 
 mysteries of the philosophy of humor.” 
 
 “I didn’t know radicals had a sense of hu¬ 
 mor,” put in Waldo Bryant. 
 
 “You prefer the glittering mental swordplay 
 of magnates who are suffocated by their own 
 magnificence,” Morrison flashed back with 
 delighted malice. 
 
 “I prefer to hear Malone read a paper on 
 ‘Salvation by Mirth,’ ” responded Bryant. “He 
 knows all sorts of secrets of conquering evils 
 by making them ridiculous. If you can get a 
 man to laugh at a thing with scornful disdain he 
 is free from its power. If you can get a sulk¬ 
 ing angry man to laugh, he forgets his wrath.” 
 
 “Who’s going to read this paper?” inter¬ 
 rupted Baldwin Paxton. 
 
 By this time the men were all in their places 
 and Malone began. 
 
 “My subject is, ‘The Momentum of His¬ 
 tory.’ ” 
 
 He gave a tiny preliminary cough. Then he 
 embarked on his first paragraph. 
 
 “The past has been buried a good many 
 times. But it has never died. You think 
 
THE CREATIVE PAST 
 
 65 
 
 you are through with it. But you never are. 
 As a matter of fact, the past hasn't happened. 
 It has only begun to happen. And the future 
 is not yet to come. It is partly over. And the 
 present is a mixture of what has been and what 
 is yet to be-” 
 
 “Shades of Gilbert Chesterton!” Bowen 
 Tillman burst out. 
 
 Malone went on: “The past has gotten up 
 steam. It can’t stop. It is in process of run¬ 
 ning away with the world. If a man really 
 starts something, he’s more alive after he is 
 dead than he was when he walked about in 
 the flesh. You can manage the living people 
 if you just know what to do with the ghosts.” 
 
 By this time the paper itself had gained 
 a fair amount of momentum and the members 
 of the club leaned forward a little as Benny 
 Malone went on with what one of them after¬ 
 ward described as a canter through history. 
 
 He began with creatures in the water and 
 described the adventure of those who made 
 the great experiment of living upon the land. 
 He spoke whimsically of the pensive memories 
 of those whose fins had turned into arms. He 
 painted a graphic picture of the fearful courage 
 with which an early man watched a fire kindled 
 
66 TWELVE MERRY FISHERMEN 
 
 by lightning, drew near to it, and with shud¬ 
 dering daring fed it and kept it alive in the 
 world. He moved with galloping steps through 
 the old stone age, the new stone age, and on 
 to the period when civilization appears in the 
 valleys of the Tigris and the Euphrates and 
 in the valley of the Nile. He pictured the 
 early Phoenicians building their ships, and at 
 last with an audacity of heroism staying out 
 of sight of land in the dark of the night rowing 
 all the while and coming to another shore on 
 another day. He put clearly that old struggle 
 as the Greeks took the sea power away from 
 the Phoenicians. And it was almost as if 
 Waldo Bryant had been speaking as he told 
 of that great flowering of the human spirit 
 whose beauty and fragrance have made the 
 fifth century in Athens immortal. He swept 
 through the period of the rise of the great 
 power north of Greece and eagerly followed 
 Alexander the Great in his conquests. He 
 paused to watch the growth of Rome and its 
 fight to the death with Carthage. He drew a 
 far-flung picture of the grandeur of the Empire 
 and stood in silent awe in a little town not 
 far from the eastern Mediterranean coast to 
 listen to the first cry of a child whose voice is 
 
THE CREATIVE PAST 
 
 67 
 
 to speak a new word of hope for the world. 
 Moving back, he traced the coming of the Bar¬ 
 barians and then on to the break-up of Rome, 
 the rise of feudalism and the imperial dream 
 of Charlemagne. He outlined the story of the 
 Holy Roman Empire with its struggles be¬ 
 tween mighty Popes and mighty emperors. 
 The Crusades captured his imagination. The 
 new life in Europe was like new life in his own 
 soul. The love of beauty in the south and 
 the love of goodness in the north spelled out 
 the story of the springtime of the world. You 
 watched great nations rise and struggle. You 
 watched brave sailors discover new continents. 
 You surveyed the beginnings of political lib¬ 
 erty and the first struggling steps of democ¬ 
 racy. You saw the birth of science. You 
 listened to the whir of the machines which 
 were to make a new world. You watched many 
 a movement of the mind and many a struggle 
 of the human spirit. And then you found 
 yourself in all the bitter convulsions of the 
 world war. And out of it all you came trail¬ 
 ing clouds of glory and ignominy, with a her¬ 
 itage of love and hate, of good and evil, with 
 the past blowing by you like a whilrwind to 
 make the future which is to be. 
 
68 TWELVE MERRY FISHERMEN 
 
 “Whew!” cried Tom Tabor as the paper 
 closed. “Let me get my breath!” 
 
 “Help me to catch hold of something,” said 
 Monroe Burton, “so that I can stop.” 
 
 “That may not be scholarship but it is life,” 
 declared Morris MacDonald in open admiration. 
 
 Then the men leaned back in their chairs for a 
 moment. And after that Baldwin Paxton began: 
 
 “It all made me think of H. G. Wells’ little 
 book on the Salvaging of Civilization. It’s all 
 very wonderful and I wish a great many people 
 knew about it. But, after all, is that realty 
 a movement in the direction of saving the 
 world? If everybody knew all that Malone has 
 told us and ever so much more, would it bring 
 the day of better things any nearer?” 
 
 “It would at least mean that people would 
 have a great fund of common knowledge about 
 which they could talk,” declared Hunter Mor¬ 
 rison. “And if a man withra message came 
 along, there would be a great mass of common 
 mental experience to which he could appeal. 
 The world needs an intellectual common for all 
 just about as much as it needs anything else.” 
 
 “People could hardly know all these things 
 without thinking about them,” ventured Tom 
 Tabor. “And out of such thought all sorts 
 
THE CREATIVE PAST 
 
 69 
 
 of good things might come. The world can’t 
 do much work on an empty stomach. And 
 it can’t do much work on an empty mind.” 
 
 “As a matter of fact,” said Waldo Bryant, 
 “the more you know about the past the larger 
 amount of material you have to misinterpret. 
 If you have any panacea, you can write the 
 history of the world in such a way that it seems 
 to make just that remedy inevitable. A 
 knowledge of history is a great thing. But 
 it won’t bring the millennium. It may just 
 bring a more brilliant chaos.” 
 
 Morris MacDonald was now ready to speak. 
 And his words proved the last for the day. 
 
 “In the long run the laboratory does its work 
 if men really know about the experiments. 
 It is only when an old failure is forgotten that 
 we make the same mistake again. Any par¬ 
 ticular generation may have a brilliant chaos 
 and try to justify it by history. But if the 
 men of good will age after age know the sig¬ 
 nificant elements in the past, you do get for¬ 
 ward. Of course you have to keep making 
 men of good will. And that is the reason that 
 the New Testament contains the most sig¬ 
 nificant series of documents which come out 
 of the past.” 
 
IX. THE COLOR SCHEME OF THE 
 
 WORLD 
 
 Bowen Tillman had been reading Lothrop 
 Stoddard’s Rising Tide of Color. The book 
 captured his imagination. He perused it with 
 a sort of fascinated dislike. For days he found 
 it difficult to think of anything else. He got 
 hold of other literature on the same subject. 
 He sat in his study late at night thinking of 
 the problem. He went among the varied 
 peoples whom his own cosmopolitan parish 
 served with many thoughts about the races 
 surging in his mind. Then he reduced his 
 thinking and his reading to a paper for the 
 club. 
 
 It was a clear cold winter’s day when the 
 men came together and each one seemed to 
 bring in some of the hard, vigorous tonic of 
 the outer air. Soon overcoats were laid aside 
 amid the exchange of vigorous greetings, and, 
 mellowed by the warmth of the room, the 
 members of the Club sat about the table wait¬ 
 ing for the order of the day. 
 
 Bowen Tillman had the presence of an orator 
 
 70 
 
COLOR SCHEME OF THE WORLD 71 
 
 and a voice whose varied and alluring modu¬ 
 lations had their own share in holding the con¬ 
 gregation of his great church. Even when he 
 read he forgot his manuscript and addressed an 
 invisible audience gathered all about the little 
 group of listeners who chanced to be with him. 
 
 “My subject,” he said, “is ‘The Color Scheme 
 of the World.’ ” 
 
 There was a dangerous light in the eye of 
 Benny Malone, but he resisted the temptation 
 to interrupt. 
 
 “The world now contains about a billion 
 seven hundred million people,” began Tillman. 
 “Roughly speaking five hundred and fifty mil¬ 
 lions of them are white, five hundred millions 
 of them are yellow, four hundred and fifty 
 millions of them are brown, a hundred and 
 fifty millions of them are black and forty mil¬ 
 lions of them are red. There are two colored 
 men for every white man in the world. At the 
 beginning of the sixteenth century there were 
 about seventy millions of white people in the 
 world. The last four hundred years have been 
 the great period of expansion and growth of 
 power for the white race. When the Great 
 W T ar broke out the white race controlled prac¬ 
 tically nine tenths of the territory of the world.” 
 
72 TWELVE MERRY FISHERMEN 
 
 After this preliminary plunge into a sea of 
 figures Bowen Tillman described the growth 
 of the white race and the expansion of its 
 influence. He discussed its contributions to 
 art and letters and the practical sciences. He 
 showed how it produced the industrial revolu¬ 
 tion which transformed the life of the world. 
 Then he placed the races as to their present 
 distribution: the yellow race principally in 
 Asia, the brown race in southern Asia and 
 northern Africa, the black race primarily in 
 Africa, and the red race in the southern part 
 of North America and in South America; the 
 white race in Europe and North America and 
 Australia and, as far as lordship is concerned, 
 in much of the remainder of the world. He 
 spoke of the easy and assured mastery of the 
 white race, of its almost insolent consciousness 
 of race superiority and the power for sustained 
 dominance. Then he turned to the war be¬ 
 tween Japan and Russia as the amazing event 
 which revealed the capacity of a people be¬ 
 longing to the yellow race to defeat a people 
 belonging to the white race. He described the 
 fashion in which the thrill of that achieve¬ 
 ment went through the world of color. Then 
 he described the suicidal character of the 
 
COLOR SCHEME OF THE WORLD 73 
 
 World War when nations of the white race 
 fought each other on a scale unparalleled and 
 brought in men of color to slay their white 
 foes. He analyzed the world unrest following 
 the war, when every race began to cherish 
 the hope through its own power or by means 
 of some alliance to have a share in limiting the 
 dominion of the white masters of the world. 
 He appraised the strength and ambition of 
 Japan, the mighty stirrings among the forces 
 of Islam, the new and sharp race consciousness 
 among Negroes, and even the cool, observant 
 watchfulness of the red man, readv to have 
 his share in any new alignment of the forces 
 of the world. 
 
 It was all done at a white heat of personal 
 interest and it was easy to see that he was 
 carrying his hearers with him. Then Tillman 
 turned to the one great question—the relation 
 of all this to the progress of the Christian forces 
 of the world. He used bold and bitter words 
 to picture the horror of that war of remorse¬ 
 less and savage races struggling for the pos¬ 
 session of the world, the war toward which 
 we are drifting unless the forces of sanity and 
 good will and justice and brotherhood can 
 come into control of the destinies of men. He 
 
74 TWELVE MERRY FISHERMEN 
 
 spoke of the missionary enterprise as the one 
 hope for the safety of the world. He described 
 that mobilization of the forces of all Christen¬ 
 dom which would pour the energies of the 
 civilization created by Christ into the great¬ 
 est of all endeavors, the endeavor to win the 
 world for a permanent life of good will. He 
 closed with two burning sentences: “Racial 
 rivalry and hatred pursued to their bitter end 
 will destroy civilization. The principles of 
 Jesus, if accepted, will make it possible for 
 the races to live together in the same world 
 with mutual respect and with permanent 
 friendliness.” 
 
 There was a little period of rather tense 
 quiet when the paper had been read. Then 
 Baldwin Paxton broke the silence: 
 
 “I’m afraid the problem is even more difficult 
 than Tillman made out,” he said. “It is easy 
 to talk about good will. But with something 
 like sixty million Japanese living in territory 
 whose productive area is about the size of the 
 State of Montana and crying out for room 
 while the civilized world goes about the task 
 of closing doors in all the continents, you have 
 a hard set of economic facts which will not 
 yield to sentiment.” 
 
COLOR SCHEME OF THE WORLD 75 
 
 “Opening the doors would only be a tem¬ 
 porary alleviation,” said Monroe Burton. “You 
 would lower the standard of living wherever 
 the doors were opened, and that relentless old 
 law of Malthus teaches us that the land of 
 larger opportunity would soon fill up, and 
 then there would be just the same pressure in 
 a depleted world.” 
 
 Hunter Morrison sprang into the discussion 
 at this point: “A scientific nation may not 
 find Malthus so relentless,” he said. “The 
 only way to prevent the nations from economic 
 war at last is by the control of the fertility of 
 the races. Overproduction is more than a 
 folly; it is crime.” 
 
 “France has learned the secret of limiting 
 the birth rate all too well. And France doesn’t 
 need to know that secret. China and Japan 
 have not learned it at all. And it is the secret 
 they need most of all to know.” It was Coulton 
 Moore who threw this remark into the cauldron 
 of discussion which was fairly seething by this 
 time. 
 
 Waldo Bryant now spoke up: 
 
 “It is all being complicated by the writers 
 of the flashing and flaming sentences which 
 the public likes to read,” he said. “Recently 
 
76 TWELVE MERRY FISHERMEN 
 
 a novelist of little literary distinction but with 
 an astonishing popular vogue has written an 
 attack on Japanese character whose inhuman 
 brutality is almost unbelievable. And multi¬ 
 tudes of people have their opinions formed by 
 just such writers. The problem is desperate 
 enough if we all keep our heads. And that 
 is just what some writers would prevent.” 
 
 Tom Tabor was knitting his brow as the 
 discussion went on. Now he spoke. “There 
 are a good many people in California and 
 British Columbia and Australia who will tell 
 you that you face the eloquence of very ugly 
 facts when the bars are let down. I don’t 
 wonder that some of them become hectic. The 
 lowering of the standard of living simply means 
 the driving out—indeed, the destruction at 
 last—of the higher type of civilization.” 
 
 There was now a good deal of rapid cross¬ 
 fire discussion. And then there was an ex¬ 
 pectant quiet as Henry Alton spoke. 
 
 “Nobody can deny the difficulties of the 
 situation,” he said. “iVnd the thoughtful know 
 that the fuse is laid to many a dangerous 
 explosive. But just because race hatred means 
 the destruction of what is good in all the races 
 the real statesmen of every race are eager to 
 
COLOR SCHEME OF THE WORLD 77 
 
 find a way. The invasion of the Orient by 
 the moving wheels of our modern machines is 
 a step toward that common life for all the 
 world which will have its own bearing at last 
 on the economic pressure. Slowly but inev¬ 
 itably we will move toward a life for all the 
 world where the workers of one land will not 
 be capable of underselling the workers of 
 another. The new transportation and the fac¬ 
 tories are already transforming the Orient. 
 There will be terrible labor struggles. But 
 at last the economic life of the world will find 
 that equilibrium in which there is a new prom¬ 
 ise of safety. Then with a scientific under¬ 
 standing of the relation between race productiv¬ 
 ity and the production of food and all material 
 things a new equilibrium between the supply 
 and demand of people and the necessities of 
 life will be established. The patience to work 
 and wait for this and the character to secure 
 it must be provided by the motives of the 
 Christian religion. I agree with Tillman that 
 the missionary enterprise has at its heart and 
 in its brain the hope of the world.” 
 
X. GENERAL WILLIAM BOOTH 
 
 During the latter part of the month of 
 January most of the religious weeklies had 
 been full of accounts of evangelistic services. 
 And even the great dailies of the city had given 
 a good deal of space to some of the more spec¬ 
 tacular services held for the spreading abroad 
 of the experience and practice of the Chris¬ 
 tian faith. New fires of devotion were burn¬ 
 ing everywhere and for a time religion had 
 become the main topic of discussion among 
 all classes of people in the great town. Fletcher 
 Hilton was in his element. He conducted 
 wonderfully effective evangelistic meetings in 
 his own church. Then he gave himself unspar¬ 
 ingly to helping other ministers in similar 
 work. He looked a trifle thin but very much 
 alive as he came to the meeting of the Club 
 on the day when he was to read the paper. 
 There was a hint of the light never seen on 
 sea or land in his eye, but he carried himself 
 with his usual quiet poise. 
 
 “I don’t believe he has any paper,” declared 
 Tom Tabor as Hilton entered. “He’s been 
 
 78 
 
GENERAL WILLIAM BOOTH 
 
 79 
 
 too busy conducting five meetings a day and 
 eight on Sunday. He hasn’t had time to put 
 his pen on a page of paper.” 
 
 “Evangelists do not need heads. They only 
 need hearts,” said Hunter Morrison. 
 
 “That’s where you are completely wrong. 
 It takes all the brains a man has to do a good 
 piece of evangelistic work. And more brains 
 than most of us are able to bring to the task 
 would find use and opportunity. In any event 
 I’ve read a book a week through all this period 
 of special meetings. And the paper I am going 
 to read to-day was finished last night.” 
 
 “Bravo for Hilton!” cried Morris Mac¬ 
 Donald, heartily. The minister who found 
 time to read always roused the enthusiasm of 
 this professor of systematic theology. 
 
 Hilton looked at him with a twinkle in his eye. 
 
 “Really I have a right to that bravo,” he 
 said. “I have read five books on doctrine in 
 the last seven weeks. And one of them was 
 The Christian Faith , by your old friend, Olin 
 Alfred Curtis. That book is worth a whole 
 course in theology to me.” 
 
 By this time the men were all in their places. 
 Hilton carefully took his paper from the inner 
 pocket of his coat. 
 
80 TWELVE MERRY FISHERMEN 
 
 “My subject is ‘A Napoleon of Evangelism,’ ” 
 lie began. “And I am going to ask you to con¬ 
 sider the life of General William Booth.” 
 
 Commissioner G. S. Railton’s Life of General 
 William Booth and the two fat volumes in which 
 that powerful journalist, Harold Begbie, dis¬ 
 cusses the General had been read and mastered 
 by Hilton. He had personal contacts with the 
 work of the Army, and he reached out occa¬ 
 sionally for a comment or an estimate from 
 some contemporary writer. You had a feeling 
 that he had written in love about a man 
 whose career had captured his imagination and 
 inspired his own life. 
 
 The paper began by reminding the listeners 
 that in 1829, the year of the birth of William 
 Booth, George the Fourth was on the throne 
 of England and Andrew Jackson became the 
 President of the United States. There was a 
 brief account of the ambitious business man 
 who lost everything in unfortunate speculation 
 who was the father of Booth and of the proud, 
 reserved woman nursing her humiliation when 
 financial reverses brought hardship to the 
 home: a mother whose memories were brighter 
 than her hopes. It was not a religious home, 
 and it is remarkable that out of it came the 
 
GENERAL WILLIAM BOOTH 
 
 81 
 
 mightiest exponent of evangelical religion whom 
 the century produced. Hilton described the 
 beginning of Booth’s religious life in a vital 
 and commanding personal acceptance and 
 appropriation of the realities of evangelical 
 piety when he was but a lad. He pictured his 
 early efforts to win others to the faith which 
 had given a new gladness to his own spirit. 
 Then there was an account of his days and 
 years of struggle, of the period when he was a 
 Methodist minister, and of the fashion in which 
 his vivid and eager spirit wrought in the midst 
 of surroundings hardened by convention and 
 secured results which both shocked and startled 
 many of his brethren. The tale of his court¬ 
 ship of Catherine Mumford was told with 
 hearty sympathy. You felt the virile intel¬ 
 lectual power and sturdy will of the young 
 woman and the combination of humble affection 
 and flashes of masterfulness in the young man. 
 You came at last to the crisis when Booth 
 refused to compromise with a church which 
 failed to give him a real standing room and 
 with his wife embarked upon the unknown seas 
 not knowing what the future would bring 
 forth. You watched the first beginnings of 
 the Salvation Army and its formal organiza- 
 
82 TWELVE MERRY FISHERMEN 
 
 tion in 1878. You were allowed to look into 
 the soul of Booth and see the consuming pas¬ 
 sion for the least and the lowest and the last, 
 a passion which mastered his mind, dominated 
 his conscience, and swept through his heart in 
 gales of ever-renewed intensity of feeling. You 
 witnessed the strange and spectacular methods 
 of the army. You watched its coming to blows 
 with the liquor traffic. You saw the flash of 
 its sword as it fought impurity. With utter 
 abandon and with utter daring it set itself 
 against those dark and disintegrating forces 
 which destroy men and deplete civilizations. 
 You saw the forces of evil gather their wrath¬ 
 ful energies together for the complete undoing 
 of this new foe. Y T ou were amazed at the fury 
 and the malignity of the persecution. Y r ou 
 were astonished at the sincere and good men 
 who opposed the Army. Then you saw the 
 clouds clearing. You saw the Army spreading 
 all over the world. You saw its General recog¬ 
 nized as one of the most distinguished men of 
 his age. You saw Oxford give him the honor¬ 
 ary degree of Doctor of Civil Laws. Y 7 ou saw 
 London in formal and splendid fashion give 
 him the freedom of the city. You saw him 
 welcomed in audience by the King of his own 
 
GENERAL WILLIAM BOOTH 
 
 83 
 
 land and by many another ruler. You saw him 
 travel in triumph among the nations, every¬ 
 where received with amazing honor and rever¬ 
 ence. And all the while you saw him busy 
 perfecting his w'orld-wide organization for bring¬ 
 ing the gospel to those in darkest and most 
 terrible need. You witnessed the beginning 
 and growth of his social work until he was 
 doing as much for the bodies as he was doing 
 for the souls of men. You saw him bend under 
 tragic grief, as when his wife died after years 
 of intolerable suffering with a disease which 
 stabs its victim with repeated and cumulative 
 hours of pain. You saw him when, blind at 
 last, he declared that he had tried to serve 
 God and the people with his eyes and now he 
 would try to serve God and the people with¬ 
 out his eyes. You saw the coming of the last 
 hour when the valiant old man, every inch a 
 soldier and every inch a general, laid down 
 his sword. 
 
 As he came to the close of the paper Hilton 
 read passages from Nicholas Vachel Lindsay’s 
 poem “General William Booth Enters into 
 Heaven” 1 : 
 
 1 Copyrighted by the Macmillan Company, Publishers. 
 
84 TWELVE MERRY FISHERMEN 
 
 “Booth led boldly with his big bass drum— 
 
 (Are you washed in the blood of the Lamb?) 
 
 The saints smiled gravely and they said ‘He’s come* 
 (Are you washed in the blood of the Lamb?) 
 
 Walking lepers followed, rank on rank. 
 
 Lurching bravoes from the ditches dank, 
 
 Drabs from the alleyways and drug fiends pale— 
 Minds still passion ridden, soul powers frail— 
 Vermin-eaten saints with moldy breath, 
 
 Unwashed legions with the ways of Death— 
 
 (Are you washed in the blood of the Lamb?)” 
 
 Then in a few final words Hilton pictured 
 Booth’s vast dream of triumphantly evangel¬ 
 izing the whole world. With all his social 
 work Booth never doubted that the funda¬ 
 mental matter is to bring every individual man 
 and woman and child into right relations with 
 God. Everything else comes from that. 
 Dreaming this dream of world-wide evangelism 
 Booth left his footprints on every continent. 
 There are living monuments to his successful 
 evangelism in every city in the world. He 
 knew that if you give men a heart of peace 
 and a heart of love and a heart of triumph, 
 they can renew every aspect of the life of the 
 world. He was the Napoleon of evangelists 
 because he planned and worked upon a world¬ 
 wide scale. His armies fought in every con- 
 
GENERAL WILLIAM BOOTH 
 
 85 
 
 tinent. They won victories wherever men felt 
 the pain and the burden and the bewilderment 
 and the tragedy of life. The sword of the 
 great old General is at rest. But the fight is 
 still on. 
 
 When the paper came to an end nearly every 
 member of the club seemed to want to speak. 
 Tribute and criticism, enthusiasm and depre¬ 
 ciation mingled in their speech. Bowen Tillman 
 was unqualified in his approval. 
 
 “Booth knew the secret. We must learn it 
 from him,” he said. 
 
 Waldo Bryant was full of hesitations. 
 
 “Why must you violate the canons of good 
 taste in order to do what is good for the soul?” 
 he asked. 
 
 Hunter Morrison mingled criticism and 
 praise. 
 
 “I admire his social work,” he said. “But 
 what an old autocrat he was! The Czar was 
 not so absolute.” 
 
 Baldwin Paxton broke in unexpectedly here: 
 
 “You have to have authority if you are going 
 to have efficiency,” he said. “There is a kind 
 of democracy for which you pay by being 
 unable to do anything deep or permanent in 
 the life of the world.” 
 
86 TWELVE MERRY FISHERMEN 
 
 Coulton Moore was full of eager praise for 
 the way in which Booth understood the people 
 society never appreciates. “He had enough of 
 the heart of a Bohemian to know that Bohemia 
 produces princes,” he declared. 
 
 Henry Alton now entered the lists. 
 
 “Men like Booth leave much for others to 
 do. They are like men who plow. They turn 
 up a good deal of soil which does not look very 
 inviting. They are like men who sow seed. 
 There is nothing particularly artistic about the 
 seed or the soil. But they are necessary if 
 you are going to have the beautiful and golden 
 harvest which so charms the fastidious, aesthetic 
 eye.” He looked with a wry little smile at 
 Bryant. 
 
 It was Hilton who added the final word. 
 
 “The wonder of the love of God never 
 faded in the mind of Booth / 5 he said. “He 
 had the mind of a great organizer and he kept 
 the heart of an eager child. It was the child’s 
 heart in him which spoke to the child’s heart 
 of the world.” 
 
XI. “SAINT WILLIAM AND THE 
 DRAGON” 
 
 Baldwin Paxton was usually calm. He was 
 more than that. He was precise. He was 
 meticulous in the carefulness of his writing 
 and even of his speech. But to-day there was 
 a little flush of red in his cheek. There was an 
 unusual vibrancy in his voice. And some of his 
 sentences betrayed an unusual inrush of feeling. 
 It was evident that he was deeply stirred. 
 
 The Twelve Merry Fishermen sat about the 
 table in characteristic attitudes. Usually a 
 paper by Paxton was very informing but not at 
 all exciting. Everybody came to the club feeling 
 comfortable and friendly. They were going to 
 have a good time and listen to a good paper. 
 But the moment Baldwin Paxton announced 
 his subject the men sat a little straighter 
 and a new interest came into their eyes. 
 
 “I shall discuss ‘The Attack on Science/ 99 
 the reader of the day began. 
 
 Baldwin Paxton was more than familiar 
 with the history of his subject. He began 
 with a general outline in which he was obvi¬ 
 ously much indebted to Dr. Andrew D. White’s 
 
 87 
 
88 TWELVE MERRY FISHERMEN 
 
 History of the Warfare of Science with Theology 
 in Christendom , and in dealing with the latter 
 part of the nineteenth century he reflected 
 something of the mood and method of Pro¬ 
 fessor William North Rice’s Christian Faith in 
 an Age of Science. He paid loving tribute to 
 the life and labors of Charles Darwin, referring 
 with much appreciation to the fine influence of 
 Dr. S. Parkes Cadman’s book Charles Darwin 
 and Other English Thinkers. Step by step he 
 moved through the story of the struggles of 
 the great representatives of precise observation 
 and accurate thinking from the days of Roger 
 Bacon through the time of Galileo on to the 
 storm which burst about the head of the 
 scientific thinkers in the last half of the nine¬ 
 teenth century. It was evident that devotion 
 to the finding and the expressing of truth was 
 a central part of the religion of Baldwin Paxton. 
 The great scientists were his saints. The men 
 who obstructed their path were the men of 
 evil spirit whose influence should be cast out 
 of the world. He spoke of the infinite patience 
 of scientific investigation, of its noble hesita¬ 
 tion and caution, of the fashion in which 
 slowly and with endless pains the significant 
 facts were collected and at last upon a sound 
 
“SAINT WILLIAM AND THE DRAGON” 89 
 
 foundation the structure of generalization was 
 built. He told the tale of the superstitions 
 cast out by science and the new and helpful 
 knowledge which science has poured bounti¬ 
 fully into the lap of humanity. He pictured 
 science as a priestess who was to save the 
 world from ignorance and folly and failure and 
 point the way to stable and orderly life. Then 
 he came to the matter which it was evident 
 had inspired the paper. He took up the attack 
 Mr. William Jennings Bryan has put forth in 
 many places and ways, perhaps most character¬ 
 istically in the James Sprunt Lectures, pub¬ 
 lished under the title In His Image. The 
 position of Mr. Bryan was summed up in his 
 own words: “I have called attention to the 
 destructive influence exerted by the doctrine 
 of evolution, as applied to man, and have 
 pointed out how Darwinism weakens faith in 
 God, makes a mockery of prayer, undermines 
 belief in immortality, reduces Christ to the 
 stature of a man, lessens the sense of brother¬ 
 hood, and encourages brutishness.” From this 
 summary Paxton proceeded to a close analysis 
 of the chapter of Mr. Bryan’s book dealing 
 with the origin of man. He declared that Mr. 
 Bryan confused every issue he raised, set in 
 
90 TWELVE MERRY FISHERMEN 
 
 false light the movements he discussed, and 
 showed himself completely unable to under¬ 
 stand the scientific mind and the scientific 
 method. He described Mr. Bryan’s views of 
 the Bible as a set of mechanical conceptions 
 which could not be brought to the test pro¬ 
 vided by the biblical documents and could not 
 survive even a little candid investigation. 
 Then he came as near to being eloquent as 
 was ever possible to this quiet man with his 
 precise mind as he described the larger uni¬ 
 verse, the larger thought of man, and the 
 more vital thought of God which the general 
 position of scientific evolutionists has made 
 possible. “Science has rescued the Bible from 
 the artificial hair-splitting of scholasticism. It 
 has rescued theology from the barren distinc¬ 
 tions of an arid type of metaphysics. It has 
 put a growing man in a vast and potential 
 world. And it has revealed a mighty and 
 orderly universe in which it is easy for the 
 Christian to find a mightier and more worthy 
 God than he ever knew before.” 
 
 So the paper closed. And there was the 
 light of a great eagerness for talk in the eyes 
 of every one of the men who sat about the 
 table. It was Tom Tabor who began: 
 
“SAINT WILLIAM AND THE DRAGON” 91 
 
 “I haven’t any illusions about Mr. Bryan,” 
 he said. “I think he has a provincial mind 
 attached to a gift for rhetoric and a capacity 
 for the coining of clever phrases. But that 
 isn’t all there is of Mr. Bryan. And I don’t 
 like to lose the man in the Don Quixote. He 
 isn’t all the while fighting windmills. There is 
 a wealth of shrewd, homely wisdom about him. 
 He is sound about every fundamental matter 
 of morals. And if you leave out one or two 
 chapters and an occasional paragraph the book 
 In His Image is packed with the sort of sound 
 practical talk it is good for young men to 
 hear. I don’t think Saint William can con¬ 
 quer the modern dragons, but I do think he’s 
 a good, solid man for all that.” 
 
 “All of which makes him the more dangerous 
 when he is in a field of wdiich he knows less than 
 nothing,” broke in Hunter Morrison, bitterly. 
 “I am not keen about the type of decadent criti¬ 
 cism represented by a book like Main Street. 
 But a man like Mr. Bryan reminds us that 
 there is a Main-Street mind whose provincial 
 cocksureness and untutored egotism is a men¬ 
 ace to the intellectual life of the republic.” 
 
 “I suppose you would prefer the emancipa¬ 
 tion of H. L. Mencken with a world which 
 
92 TWELVE MERRY FISHERMEN 
 
 smiles in superior wisdom at the Ten Com¬ 
 mandments to the moral order in which Mr. 
 Bryan believes that he lives,” threw in Fletcher 
 Hilton, in a tone whose caustic cut was re¬ 
 lieved by the friendly light in his eye. 
 
 Bowen Tillman entered the lists at the 
 moment. 
 
 “That is just part of the tragedy of the 
 whole situation. It isn’t true that only a pro¬ 
 vincial can be a man of moral passion. But a 
 man like Mr. Bryan makes it easy for a good 
 many perplexed young people to think that 
 it is so. And it is a travesty on the facts to 
 claim that only a man who refused to live in 
 the modern world can believe in the power 
 of God and the potency of Christ. But Mr. 
 Bryan puts many a person in the position of 
 supposing that this is true. He is raising false 
 dilemmas all the while. Again and again he 
 says This or that’ when he ought to say This 
 and that.’ ” 
 
 Monroe Burton was listening intently. Now 
 he spoke. 
 
 “I am interested in Mr. Bryan rather as a 
 symptom than as a physician,” he said. “And 
 I find him a very significant symptom. He 
 represents the impatience of the popular mind 
 
44 SAINT WILLIAM AND THE DRAGON” 93 
 
 with all thinking which robs life of inspiration 
 and depletes its moral vigor and lessens its 
 spiritual dynamic. His diagnosis may be in¬ 
 correct. He may misplace his attack. But 
 he does reflect an actual situation. And we 
 must get a correct diagnosis and deal with 
 the disease in an adequate way.” 
 
 Fletcher Hilton spoke again: “I was interested 
 in the bitter attack upon Darwin which one 
 finds in Harold Begbie’s Life of General William 
 Booth. He surely represents a very different 
 type of mind and a much more cosmopolitan 
 spirit. Yet he too hurled his spear in the 
 direction of the author of the Descent of Man” 
 
 Baldwin Paxton spoke a little more quickly 
 than was his wont. 
 
 “Of course Darwin could not say every¬ 
 thing. And, of course, one method unchecked 
 and unsupplemented does become dangerous. 
 Nietzsche represents one Darwinian principle 
 gone mad. But it is not right to blame Darwin 
 for that. Prince Kropotkin’s Mutual Aid gives 
 you the supplementing principle and would 
 save any man from the mistakes of Nietzsche. 
 With all his wide reading Begbie goes off on 
 a tangent when he talks of Darwin.” 
 
 Morris MacDonald was smiling a little in 
 
94 TWELVE MERRY FISHERMEN 
 
 his quiet way. And when he spoke the men 
 were willing to let him have the last word of 
 the afternoon. 
 
 “It is necessary to discriminate. There is a 
 science which sees in the uniformities of nature 
 the expression of a mechanical and self-sufficient 
 system of impersonal forces. There is a science 
 which sees in the laws of nature the methods 
 of God. One would slay the ethical and spiritual 
 life of the world. The other will enrich it. 
 There is a view of evolution which always 
 interprets the higher in the terms of the lower. 
 It deserves rather hard words. There is a 
 type of evolution which always interprets the 
 lower in the terms of the higher. It is in 
 happy harmony with every sanction of the 
 Christian faith. There is a view of the Bible 
 which treats it as a corpse in order to dissect 
 it. There is a view of the Bible which regards 
 it as a living organism of spiritual power, and 
 with all its remorseless analysis and study 
 never forgets the informing and inspiring spirit. 
 Science may be destructive and it may be 
 constructive in all of these things. Scientists 
 are like poets. There are a good many kinds. 
 And you cannot attack poetry because of the 
 bad poets.” 
 
XII. THE SCHOLAR AND THE PROPHET 
 
 Somebody had been criticizing theological 
 seminaries. In fact, a number of people had 
 been saying and writing things which the 
 most optimistic and friendly person could not 
 call complimentary. Caustic and clever articles 
 had been appearing in widely read weeklies, 
 and popular masters of the platform had been 
 having their own easy and quickly applauded 
 fling. The schools of divinity were under fire. 
 Morris MacDonald was much stirred by it all, 
 and it was in the midst of the little storm that 
 he came to the club with a paper on “The 
 Scholar and the Prophet.” 
 
 The men sat about the table in attitudes 
 which expressed a good deal of relish. Mac¬ 
 Donald was always thoughtful with a brilliant 
 edge of fire blazing about the thought. And 
 when he was really roused you could see mighty 
 combat in the fiery furnace of his mind. 
 
 He began by describing the shrewd and 
 vital eloquence of the men of the pioneer 
 period. You felt their nearness to all the hard 
 actualities of that primitive life. You sensed 
 
 95 
 
96 TWELVE MERRY FISHERMEN 
 
 the rugged strength of their bodies. You saw 
 the human heartiness of their bearing and the 
 easy comradeship which came from their per¬ 
 fect understanding of the life about them. 
 And you felt the impact of that simple and 
 childlike faith which entered the very Holy 
 of holies and came back entirely sure of God 
 and able to speak of him with commanding 
 authenticity. 
 
 Then MacDonald described the development 
 of more highly articulated forms of life. He 
 followed the trails of that expanding activity 
 which conquered a continent and made the 
 way for a more sophisticated civilization. 
 Then he flung out upon larger highways and 
 described the revolutions which were affecting 
 the intellectual life of the whole world. He 
 held particularly to the story of the critical 
 analysis of the documents which go to make 
 up the Old Testament and the New. The 
 unearthing of J. E. D. and P. in the Hexateuch, 
 the mining in that mighty mass of prophecies 
 which is called the book of Isaiah, and the 
 discovery of the great unknown prophet of the 
 exile were discussed. Then in rapid and 
 trenchant phrase the hearers were carried 
 through the outstanding matters of debate in 
 
SCHOLAR AND PROPHET 
 
 97 
 
 the criticism of the books which come from the 
 older and the newer dispensation. All this 
 was seen as a by-product of that scientific 
 movement of the human mind whose great 
 devotion was accuracy and whose high enthusi¬ 
 asm was the candid following of truth wherever 
 it led. He moved out into a discussion of that 
 historical science which is based upon an 
 almost microscopic consideration of all the 
 source materials and upon the basis of the 
 most prolonged and careful appraisal of the 
 materials, a gradual and sure rising to those 
 generalizations which constitute the structure of 
 history as it moves toward completion. It is 
 in this atmosphere that the well-trained college 
 man of to-day lives and moves and has his 
 being. Such a man sits in the pew and a man 
 with the same training and a man wdio under¬ 
 stands all of his passwords must be in the 
 pulpit. It is the task of the contemporary 
 theological seminary to train the student 
 formed in this modern mold in such a fashion 
 that he will come forth a prophet. 
 
 That there are certain intrinsic difficulties 
 must be frankly admitted. The mood of metic¬ 
 ulous and detailed accuracy of observation and 
 of poised judicial estimate is not just that of 
 
98 TWELVE MERRY FISHERMEN 
 
 the passionate interpreter of a flaming passion. 
 Professor Paul Shorey’s notable phrase, 4 The 
 passionate pursuit of passionless perfection,” is 
 at least capable of being interpreted as the 
 description of a process which might eventuate 
 in the production of an exquisite marble statue 
 but hardly in a man pulsing with the pas¬ 
 sionate energy of a great evangel. There may 
 seem to be a deep gulf fixed between the expert 
 scholar fearing nothing so much as the fleck 
 of a personal prejudice upon his judgment and 
 the flaming herald blowing all the trumpets 
 which call into action the deepest feelings of 
 men. As a matter of fact, however, the prophet 
 is never safe without the scholar. And the 
 scholar is never safe without the prophet. 
 Scholarship without the fires of a great enthusi¬ 
 asm for commanding ideals becomes hard and 
 cold and scholastic. It becomes the petty 
 preoccupation with insignificant details. It be¬ 
 comes a double entry bookkeeping of the mind 
 which has lost creative enthusiasm and dis¬ 
 criminating insight. And prophecy without 
 scholarship becomes a thing of overgrown and 
 tropical luxuriance, a mood of hot feeling 
 untutored and untempered by the discipline of 
 a careful regard for facts and patient pursuit 
 
SCHOLAR AND PROPHET 
 
 99 
 
 of truth. It becomes hectic and fanatical at 
 last and loses the respect and regard of sober 
 and solid men. The theological seminary is to 
 perform the nuptials of poise and passion. 
 It is to inspire the accuracy of the painstaking 
 scholar and the passion of the enthusiastic 
 messenger of the evangel. 
 
 There is only one way in which this can be 
 done. The student who is learning to know 
 truth through the discipline of patient research 
 must all the while be learning to know God 
 in the honest wonder of a personal fellowship. 
 The growth of his mind power to classify facts 
 must at every point be paralleled by the growth 
 of his inner life in the apprehension of the 
 eternal realities. It is the glory of the true 
 school of divinity that in its halls scholarship 
 is baptized with devotion and spiritual passion 
 is stabilized by patient research and unhesi¬ 
 tating candor of mind. The man who unites 
 the accuracy of the scholar and the creative 
 energy of the man who has learned the secrets 
 of the inner communion has the future of the 
 church and the inspiration of the world in his 
 hands. 
 
 The final paragraphs of MacDonald’s paper 
 were taken up with a sharp rebuke of those 
 
100 TWELVE MERRY FISHERMEN 
 
 who would chain the mind of the church and 
 of the other group which would discredit all 
 the insight of the hour of the hidden com¬ 
 munion. Then in w T ords quick with his own 
 conviction he portrayed the work of the school 
 alive in mind and in heart which trained the 
 preachers and the leaders of a fearless church, 
 a church fearless in mind because it saw be¬ 
 fore it always the presence of its living Lord. 
 
 The men were not quick to speak at the 
 close of the paper. But at length Bowen 
 Tillman broke the silence. 
 
 “It was Dale who did the thing for me,” 
 he said. “I frankly confess that I came out 
 of theological school a bit confused. Then I 
 got into The Living Christ and the Four Gospels , 
 and before I had finished it Dale had given 
 me a platform upon wdiicli to stand. No 
 doubt much has happened in New Testament 
 criticism since that time. But I venture to 
 believe that the fundamental principles an¬ 
 nounced in this book hold true in spite of all 
 the changes through which we have passed.” 
 
 “It was the lecture on ‘Inspiration* in James 
 Denney’s Studies in Theology which gave me a 
 standing ground,” said Fletcher Hilton. “And 
 as long as Denney lived he was a sort of light- 
 
SCHOLAR AND PROPHET 
 
 101 
 
 house to me. The prophet’s passion and the 
 scholar’s careful research characterized him to 
 the very end.” 
 
 “If this is to be an experience meeting, 
 Coleridge did it for me,” added Waldo Bryant. 
 “His one phrase, ‘the Bible finds me,’ marked 
 an epoch in my life.” 
 
 “And it was Peter Forsyth who helped me 
 to find myself,” said James Clayton. “One 
 series of lectures which I heard him deliver 
 gave me a knowledge of the path where I 
 found both certainty and freedom.” 
 
 “William Newton Clarke was my guide, 
 philosopher and friend,” said Hunter Morrison. 
 “He joined sweetness and light and spiritual 
 conviction in a way which gave me just what 
 I needed.” 
 
 “Henry Drummond gave me the clue,” said 
 Tom Tabor. “It was not so much anything 
 he said as the attitude which he taught me. 
 And that attitude has been the thing I have 
 needed all the while.” 
 
 “Lyman Abbott said the thing I needed ‘in 
 my hour of stress and strain,’ ” said Coulton 
 Moore. “He did for me what Drummond did 
 for Tabor. It was not ideas I needed. It 
 was a spirit. And he gave me the spirit.” 
 
102 TWELVE MERRY FISHERMEN 
 
 Benny Malone was chuckling quietly: 
 
 “I fancy different things were done by these 
 different men. For they did live in rather 
 different worlds,” he said. 
 
 “At least,” added Henry Alton, “these men 
 all made it easier for eager truth-seeking minds 
 to find a path in an age of transition. And 
 it was a great service, different as were their 
 methods and far apart as they were in many 
 theological positions.” 
 
 “But what about the divinity schools?” 
 asked Benny Malone. 
 
 “They are sure to produce the scholars. 
 We may have to help them to produce the 
 preachers,” said Fletcher Hilton. 
 
 There was a curious half-hostile light in 
 Morris MacDonald’s eye. But he said no 
 more that day. 
 
XIII. THE FAITH ONCE DELIVERED 
 AND OFTEN INTERPRETED 
 
 The Lenten period was approaching and 
 every man in the Club was busy in his own 
 way with the task of preparing to show forth 
 anew the vitality of the ancient faith in the 
 new age. They held many different positions 
 in matters of fundamental philosophy and in 
 matters of method. But in each man’s heart 
 burned the fire of a deep devotion, and each 
 was consumingly eager to be a compelling 
 voice as well as a trusted guide in the church. 
 So it came about that there was something 
 subtly different about the atmosphere of the 
 meeting as they gathered on this particular 
 day. Perhaps this was partly owing to the 
 fact that Morris MacDonald once again was 
 to read the paper. He made his chair of sys¬ 
 tematic theology a place all shining with the 
 wonder of the gospel, and quick with the sense 
 of every potent movement in contemporary 
 thought, and full of the energy of close and 
 painstaking dialectic. When he came to the 
 Club with a paper the men knew that in some 
 
 103 
 
104 TWELVE MERRY FISHERMEN 
 
 arresting fashion they would see the Eternal 
 making itself at home in the midst of the 
 temporal. 
 
 The typewritten manuscript which Mac¬ 
 Donald held in his hand was a model of 
 neatness and good typing. He was always fas¬ 
 tidious about these things. Malone once de¬ 
 clared that he had the mind of an intellectual 
 viking and the precise habits of one’s maiden 
 aunt. His voice had a touch of that uncon¬ 
 scious quality of authority which comes from 
 years of research and thought and teaching. 
 
 Very quietly but with a certain arresting 
 note in his speech MacDonald read his subject, 
 “Three Little Books and the Changing World.” 
 The books were these: The Reasonableness of the 
 Christian Faith , by Professor David S. Cairns, 
 of Aberdeen; The Divine Initiative , by Pro¬ 
 fessor H. R. Mackintosh, of Edinburgh; and 
 The Universality of Christ , by William Temple, 
 the Bishop of Manchester. 
 
 The paper began with a statement of the 
 fashion in which each age inevitably produces 
 its own interpretation of the Christian faith. 
 This does not mean that a new faith is created 
 for each age. There is a marvelous continuity 
 in spite of all the differences. The Summa of 
 
THE FAITH ONCE DELIVERED 105 
 
 Saint Thomas Aquinas is different enough 
 from the Institutes of John Calvin. But, 
 after all, it is one faith about which they are 
 talking. Yet, in spite of all the subtle con¬ 
 tinuity from Paul to Augustine and from 
 Augustine to Luther, it remains true that the 
 deep and throbbing experience of each age 
 must be caught up and utilized by the inter¬ 
 preters of the Christian faith. Feudalism gives 
 thought forms to Anselm and it is Hugo 
 Grotius, the founder of international law, who 
 interprets the death of Christ in the terms of 
 public justice. 
 
 In every age Christianity comes to new power 
 when once the men who understand and love 
 the age and who also understand and love the 
 Christian faith express the two together in 
 words which speak in the very vernacular of 
 the time and yet ring with the ageless splendor 
 of the Christian religion. The three little books 
 by Professor Cairns, Professor Mackintosh, and 
 Bishop Temple show in an informal and yet in an 
 earnest way how this work is being done to-day. 
 And it is important to remember that each book 
 had its origin in addresses delivered to groups 
 of young university students eager to find their 
 way in this fascinating and chaotic time. 
 
106 TWELVE MERRY FISHERMEN 
 
 MacDonald took time to call attention to 
 the fashion in which each of the authors with 
 whom he was dealing heartily accepted the 
 accredited results of modern biblical scholar¬ 
 ship and was cordially friendly to all the close 
 and careful habits of the scientific mind. This 
 friendliness did not mean an uncritical accept¬ 
 ance of any position propounded by some 
 scientific authority. It did mean the most 
 eager belief that there is no impassable gulf 
 between the scientist and the Christian. There 
 are not two kinds of truth in the world. There 
 are two and more than two characteristic ways 
 of approaching one truth. The eye and the 
 ear do not fight because they have different 
 processes of access to reality. As a matter of 
 fact, each needs the other. 
 
 There was a brief characterization of each 
 of the three books: the brilliant literary style 
 of Cairns with its flashes of color and all his 
 skill in showing that the riddle of the world 
 was only made vaster by the rejection of 
 Christianity, that science itself in all its creative 
 work takes leaps of faith and then verifies by 
 slow processes of testing the data, his tri¬ 
 umphant conclusion that the one life and the 
 one deed do release forces whose authenticity 
 
THE FAITH ONCE DELIVERED 107 
 
 can be verified in history—all these things 
 were set forth with a certain vivid power. The 
 lofty dialectic of Mackintosh, his marshaling 
 of the elements of human need, his setting 
 forth of the elements of the divine response, 
 his portrayal of the human meeting of the 
 deed of God in history, his masterly setting 
 forth of the corporate quality of the Christian 
 faith; this Calvinism refined and filled with 
 generous human passion was presented by 
 MacDonald with a certain passion of his own; 
 then the closely wrought structure of Bishop 
 Temple’s philosophical argument was outlined: 
 his vigorous contention that the universal must 
 become concrete if it is to have any actual 
 meaning in the life of men, that only spirit can 
 interpret matter, that only love can express 
 the universal in every conceivable human 
 relationship—all this leading to the conclusion 
 that there is the most definite possibility and 
 actuality in respect of a universal religion; 
 and concluding with the test of the work of 
 the Christian faith on the field of history, 
 asserting that negatively the un-Christian thing 
 always goes down and that Christianity has 
 renewed the world in just so much as it has 
 been really taken seriously: the careful processes 
 
108 TWELVE MERRY FISHERMEN 
 
 of the highly trained thinker were reflected both 
 in the material with which MacDonald dealt 
 and the way in which he handled it. By 
 many a happy detailed quotation he showed 
 how the three men were at home in every 
 aspect of contemporary thought and feeling 
 and action, and how, in spite of their differ¬ 
 ences, they had the most amazing fund of 
 things in common, and each had come to a 
 perfectly fresh and commanding apprehension 
 of the historic faith. The sense of the ultimate 
 lordship of Christ, the sense of the unique 
 potency of the deed on Calvary, the appre¬ 
 hension of the reign of personality, of the 
 majesty of love and of the fellowship of a 
 brotherhood of friendly men whose corporate 
 life is to renew the word—these great and 
 creative conceptions cease to be ideas as we 
 read these books. They become luminous 
 forces in the spiritual life. They become the 
 creative inspirations of a new world. They 
 become the supreme realities of experience. 
 
 When MacDonald had finished there was a 
 rather prolonged silence. Henry Alton then 
 opened the discussion: 
 
 “A paper like that makes one believe in the 
 renaissance of theology,” he said. “Of course 
 
THE FAITH ONCE DELIVERED 109 
 
 it will be so fresh and vital a theology that a 
 good many people will not recognize it as 
 theology at all. They will only know that it 
 is wonderfully real and gripping and mastering. 55 
 
 Waldo Bryant spoke up: 
 
 “Cairns is a good illustration of the wedlock 
 between literature and theology. When a man 
 of letters whose style is dripping with the 
 beauties of the ages thinks clearly about 
 religion and writes about it, you have a style 
 which is enough to capture the most inveterate 
 hater of formal doctrine. The men of letters 
 are at last to save the theologians. 55 
 
 “At last! Do you think a theologian with a 
 style is a new phenomenon? Go back to 
 Augustine! 55 said Tom Tabor, who was all the 
 while enriching his life at the fountains of 
 patristic learning. 
 
 “I 5 11 admit the Confessions, 55 replied Bryant. 
 “But O the arid deserts through which theo¬ 
 logians who did not know how to write have 
 carried us! 55 
 
 Baldwin Paxton was waiting to speak in 
 his careful and precise way. 
 
 “It seems to me that all the three men mix 
 up imagination and actuality. After all, there 
 is a difference between a fact and a poem. 
 
110 TWELVE MERRY FISHERMEN 
 
 I do not find the metaphysics of an earlier 
 period more attractive because expressed by 
 men of charming speech who have mastered 
 the scientific vernacular. After all, they are 
 trying to put the old wine of early speculation 
 into the new bottles. It is a dangerous experi¬ 
 ment. I prefer to let the ideals of Jesus stand 
 in their own right. Then his leadership is not 
 endangered if I have to change my theory of 
 his person or my philosophy of the universe.” 
 
 “But that’s just the point,” said Fletcher 
 Hilton. “You have to have a certain set of 
 convictions about the nature of the universe 
 and about Jesus himself if his ideals are to be 
 kept authentic.” 
 
 It was an old battle between the two, and 
 each was content on this particular day with 
 bearing witness to his position. 
 
 Hunter Morrison was now speaking: 
 
 “I like these men because they do see that 
 man is more than an individual. They see 
 that he is a society. Almost Mackintosh per¬ 
 suades me to become an evangelical.” This 
 last with a friendly and whimsical look at 
 Fletcher Hilton. 
 
 Monroe Burton closed the discussion: 
 
 “I have read and reread these books,” he 
 
THE FAITH ONCE DELIVERED 111 
 
 said. “And the thing which I remember most 
 about them is this. Each author sees that al 
 the aspects of life must be met and interpreted 
 by a triumphant religion. And so it is the 
 versatility of the Christian faith which they 
 bring to the reader. It is not only as deep 
 as the sorest tragedy. It is as many sided 
 as life. It can interpret the mind and the 
 conscience and the heart and the taste. These 
 books made me see in a perfectly new way 
 what a great thing it is to have the freedom 
 of the city of God.” 
 
XIV. PHILOSOPHY, EXPOSITION, AND 
 
 SOCIAL PASSION 
 
 Henry Alton was reading the paper of the 
 day. 
 
 “My theme,” he announced, tersely, “is 
 ‘A Synthetic Mind.’ ” 
 
 “By a man who never saw anything un¬ 
 steadily or in fragments,” interrupted Benny 
 Malone. 
 
 The men sat expectantly in their chairs. 
 4 ‘Alton is never so concrete as when he is 
 dealing with principles, and never so universal 
 as when he is dealing with individuals,” Morris 
 MacDonald had declared once. It was a com¬ 
 bination which always stirred and roused the 
 minds of his hearers. 
 
 “I am going to build what I have to say 
 about the life of a vigorous leader whom you 
 all know,” began Henry Alton. “And the man 
 is Bishop Francis J. McConnell.” 
 
 There was a little movement of quickened 
 interest at that. Then the men settled down 
 to listen. The first part of the paper was dis¬ 
 tinctly biographical. It told the story of a 
 
 112 
 
PHILOSOPHY AND SOCL4L PASSION 113 
 
 deep-eyed boy growing up in a Methodist 
 parsonage, with a keen and masterful preacher 
 as a father and a woman of brooding mysticism 
 and solid strength of character as a mother. 
 It followed the lad through college and into 
 theological seminary. The theological sem¬ 
 inary was the Divinity School of Boston Uni¬ 
 versity. And the days were those when that 
 philosopher with the flashing mind and the 
 tongue tipped with ironic flame, Dr. Borden 
 P. Bowne, made his professor's chair an intel¬ 
 lectual throne. It was the pungent wit of 
 Professor Bowne which first attracted young 
 McConnell. But soon his own mind was 
 awakened and began to work as it had never 
 worked before. No subtle trail of philosophical 
 exploration was too difficult for the keen young 
 thinker who responded to every intellectual 
 challenge of his teacher with a sort of eager 
 joy. It is one thing to be attracted by a great 
 teacher and follow a few of his courses; it is 
 quite another to give all the patient industry 
 and all the long pursuit of technical attain¬ 
 ment required to become the master of the 
 point of view of a powerful thinker. It was 
 the second thing which McConnell did. He 
 became one of three or four men who in the 
 
114 TWELVE MERRY FISHERMEN 
 
 whole course of the teaching of Dr. Bowne 
 made his teaching completely their own. It 
 was no matter of slavish assent. There was 
 independence and there was constant personal 
 grapple. But the able young man was wise 
 enough to see that it was worth his while to 
 become entirely at home in every part of his 
 teacher’s system. And he made his own too 
 the tale of the long pursuit of philosophical 
 speculation from the days of the first inquiring 
 Greeks. The whole process meant everything 
 in the direction of the quickening of his own 
 mind and the developing of his own intellectual 
 life. It laid a foundation of solidity and 
 strength for whatever mental work he might 
 do in any field. Before long he was a pastor 
 capable and able and devoted to his work. 
 He had more than a touch of reserve. He was 
 the pastor of men’s minds more than of the 
 surface life of thoughtlessness. But there was 
 a flash of sympathy from the depths of his 
 personality which had a way of shining out 
 whenever there was the call of really deep 
 need. About this time he began to be a writer 
 of Biblical expositions. For years he inter¬ 
 preted the Sunday-school lessons for one of 
 the widely circulated journals of the church. 
 
PHILOSOPHY AND SOCIAL PASSION 115 
 
 His work was something new in exposition. 
 He had the most astonishing way of passing 
 by the incidental and finding the essential. 
 His training in philosophical dialectic w^as now 
 beginning to bear practical fruit. He had a 
 straightforward, forthright way of writing. 
 He never went out of his way for literary effect. 
 But he did have a sense of the power of a 
 haunting phrase, and you never read far until 
 you came to some sentence literally gleaming 
 with vital power. There was a keen moving 
 and at times an ironic mind. There was an 
 impatience with make-believe and rhetoric 
 and hectic feeling. The writing was just a 
 little hard sometimes. But it was always 
 honest and it was always capable of kindling 
 the mind of the reader. Nobody knows quite 
 how great has been the service rendered by 
 these expositions carried on through so many 
 years. The years passed swiftly. Dr. Mc¬ 
 Connell became the able administrator of a 
 growing university. Then he became a bishop 
 of the Methodist Episcopal Church. Through 
 it all his life as student and scholar was not 
 allowed to suffer. Many books came from his 
 pen as the years passed. Sometimes it was a 
 matter of philosophical exposition clear and 
 
116 TWELVE MERRY FISHERMEN 
 
 discerning, as in The Diviner Immanence. 
 Sometimes it was a philosophy of ecclesiastical 
 administration, as in the biography of that 
 noble and commanding bishop, Edward Gayer 
 Andrews. Sometimes it was a study of the 
 modern man’s relation to the Bible, as in 
 Understanding the Scriptures. Sometimes it 
 was a wonderfully fresh and original applica¬ 
 tion of the principles of democracy to Chris¬ 
 tian thinking, as in Public Opinion and Theol¬ 
 ogy. Sometimes it dealt with the most per¬ 
 plexing problems which confront the man 
 who is finding his way in this difficult age, as 
 in Religious Certainty and The Increase of 
 Faith. Sometimes it was a sympathetic view 
 of the preacher’s tasks and problems, as in 
 The Preacher and the People. All the while 
 the thinker and administrator and ecclesiastical 
 leader was becoming more and more a man 
 who felt the burdens and the tragedies of our 
 present social order. Those who followed his 
 keen and cool and critical mind saw increasing 
 evidences of a growing social passion. It be¬ 
 came evident at last that a great fire was burn¬ 
 ing in the crucible of that powerful mind. A 
 characteristic expression of this aspect of Bishop 
 McConnell’s life was the Report on the Steel 
 
PHILOSOPHY AND SOCIAL PASSION 117 
 
 Strike of 1919 , issued by a commission of inquiry 
 of which he was chairman. He now became a 
 leader of the most commanding influence 
 among those who would persuade the church 
 to set seriously about the doing of the will 
 of Christ in the very world of commerce and 
 industry in which we live. 
 
 It was a thrilling story, and Henry Alton 
 told it well. Then he came to the moral of 
 his tale. There are plenty of philosophers. 
 There are plenty of expositors. There are 
 plenty of men with social passion. The rare 
 thing is to get all these in one man. He is 
 indeed a man of synthetic mind. The habits 
 of a philosopher steady and stabilize all his 
 social activities. The habit of seeing the mes¬ 
 sage of every part of the Bible in relation to 
 the principles which emerge from a profound 
 consideration of its meaning and of their 
 relation to the modern experience of life gives 
 a moral and spiritual depth to the intellectual 
 life and a new richness and strength to the 
 social passion. It isn’t a case of Plato’s desire 
 that philosophers be kings, though in a democ¬ 
 racy you have something very like it when 
 philosophers become interpreters and leaders 
 in the movement for the industrial and social 
 
118 TWELVE MERRY FISHERMEN 
 
 welfare of men and women and little children. 
 When you get Luther and Erasmus together 
 in one man you have a notable sort of leader. 
 
 The men sat silent for a little while when 
 the paper closed. Then Hunter Morrison 
 opened the discussion: 
 
 “I capitulated to Bishop McConnell a good 
 many years ago,” he said. “I had been 
 feeling lonely and unhappy and wondering if 
 there was a place for me in the church. I 
 heard one of the series of university lectures 
 which express the very genius of McConnell’s 
 mind. I knew at once that if the church had 
 a place for him, it had a place for me, and 
 life became easier and happier from that 
 time on.” 
 
 Waldo Brvant followed: 
 
 “Bishop McConnell irritates me at times. 
 I never have any doubt as to what he means 
 to say. And, as the Judge has said, you get 
 a live phrase every other minute. But why 
 doesn’t a man who could do it if he really had 
 the desire use the good old English speech 
 with the beauty and grace and charm which 
 make it the thing of loveliness it is its genius 
 to be?” 
 
 “I don’t think he wants to be a Matthew 
 
PHILOSOPHY AND SOCIAL PASSION 119 
 
 Arnold, or a Walter Pater, or even a John 
 Ruskin. It’s a good solid English he uses with 
 plenty of pith and virility. He is about more 
 important work than making a reproduction 
 of some fine old English garden,” said Monroe 
 Burton. 
 
 “I wish he were a bit more of mystic,” said 
 Fletcher Hilton. “Sometimes I think he 
 really is more responsive to these things at 
 heart than his clear, cool dialectic would indi¬ 
 cate, and that he is really assuming along these 
 lines a good deal which he never says. Just 
 the same I wish he would say as well as assume.” 
 
 Morris MacDonald was sitting quietly with 
 his eyes glowing. 
 
 “It’s a great thing to have him,” he said. 
 “And the best thing you can say about him 
 is that he bends a raiad of the amplest power 
 to the most complete loyalty to the tasks of 
 the Christian enterprise in the world.” 
 
 It was like Henry Alton to conclude: 
 
 “Of course I was thinking of Bishop Mc¬ 
 Connell. But I was not thinking simply of 
 him. He was an illustration of a principle. 
 It is the synthetic mind which is to carve out 
 the future of the world,” 
 
XV. PERSONALITY AND PHILOSOPHIC 
 
 THOUGHT 
 
 Henry Alton was not always a particularly 
 entertaining writer. But he made up in pith 
 what he lacked in grace. His voice did not have 
 rich modulations which echoed with the color 
 of human moods, but it did have a certain 
 solid strength which made it very impressive. 
 Alton was a man of deep and ample erudition 
 rather than a technical scholar, though he did 
 know the sources in one or two periods of 
 philosophic thought fairly well and he under¬ 
 stood very clearly what exact scholarship is. 
 But his own mind brooded over vast stretches 
 of human territory and it was as a discrimi¬ 
 nating thinker that he did his best work. 
 When he read a paper before the club every 
 man knew that he must come prepared to 
 think closely and to hold his mind to finely 
 drawn distinctions. He also knew that there 
 would emerge at last a luminous view of the 
 subject discussed seen with a certain ample 
 perspective. 
 
 The theme of Henry Alton’s paper on this 
 
 particular day was “Personality and Philosophic 
 
 120 
 
PERSONALITY 
 
 121 
 
 Thought.” He had been reading the brilliant 
 Gifford lectures by Professor Clement C. J. 
 Webb, who holds the lately founded chair of 
 the philosophy of the Chrisitan religion at 
 Oxford University. These two volumes of 
 Lectures deal respectively with God and Per¬ 
 sonality and Divine Personality and Human 
 Life. Alton began by paying tribute to the 
 fine qualities of mind, the fairness of spirit, 
 and the easy mastery of his materials which 
 Professor Webb brings to his task. He spoke 
 of the happy fashion in which literature is 
 made to give hostages to philosophy in these 
 luminous discussions. And he stopped to 
 remark how easily Professor Webb picks up 
 matters of common habit and expression in 
 order to illustrate some matter of philosophic 
 import. “All the while you feel that Webb 
 is a disciplined and tempered man of letters 
 living in understanding contact with human 
 life, who has applied himself to the problems 
 of philosophical dialectic.” He spoke also of 
 the frank and understanding way in which 
 the Lord Gifford lecturer speaks from within 
 the circle of Christian experience, assuming 
 that only so can a man adequately apprehend 
 the data and understanding^ discuss their rela- 
 
122 TWELVE MERRY FISHERMEN 
 
 tionships. He spoke of how like tempered 
 steel the mind of Professor Webb moves among 
 the most subtle philosophic distinctions. Only 
 years of walking sure of foot through the 
 labyrinthine mazes of metaphysical speculation 
 can make such work possible. Then the author 
 of the paper moved through the two volumes, 
 showing how they followed the history of that 
 thought which comes to fullness in our modern 
 view of personality and of the fashion in which 
 the conception of personality is analyzed as 
 it relates itself to God and to human life. In 
 the latter discussion the economic life, the 
 scientific life, the aesthetic life, the moral life, 
 the political life, and the religious life are 
 considered. Then Naturalism is analyzed as 
 an interpretation which disintegrates person¬ 
 ality on the physical side. And absolute ideal¬ 
 ism is discussed as an interpretation which 
 disintegrates personality on the mental side. 
 The temperate discussion of the belief in 
 immortality with which these Gifford lectures 
 close came in for thoughtful treatment. 
 
 But it was evident that Henry Alton was 
 making this scrupulously careful approach for 
 the purpose of doing something more than to 
 review the commanding work of Professor 
 
PERSONALITY 
 
 123 
 
 Webb. He wanted to set forth graphically 
 and to emphasize its implications. He moved 
 out into an analysis of the implications of an 
 interpretation of life which repudiates per¬ 
 sonality. By many close and subtle bits of 
 analysis he showed that such an interpretation 
 is all the while driven to assume the very 
 things which at last it is so eager to deny. 
 He showed that what we mean by personality 
 has always been implicit in the thinking which 
 has been least conscious of the meaning of its 
 own assumptions. Then he turned to the 
 ethical experience of men and showed how its 
 very fundamental postulate is that free and 
 knowing experience and choice which is the 
 very nature of personality. He showed that 
 ethics has no standing ground in a world 
 which is not definitely personal. He viewed 
 the death of art and the decay of religion 
 which would inevitably follow any view of the 
 world which was entirely impersonal. He 
 lifted the claim that no interpretation of life 
 can be true which fails to give standing room 
 to the whole series of structural and essential 
 human experiences. Then in a final piece of 
 highly articulated dialectic he showed that on 
 the basis of an impersonal view of the universe 
 
124 TWELVE MERRY FISHERMEN 
 
 you can never account for any system of 
 philosophy, not even an impersonal system. 
 A man has to be a person in order to deny 
 that he is a person. The intellectual life goes 
 down as completely as the moral and religious 
 life in an impersonal world. But the mission 
 of philosophy is to organize human experience 
 into some harmonious totality of interpreta¬ 
 tion and not to deny its most characteristic 
 aspects. So an impersonal view of life falls 
 into ruins the moment you subject it to critical 
 analysis. Alton closed by saying that the 
 thing we mean by the word “personality” is 
 the one fundamental matter in all experience 
 human and divine. 
 
 Morris MacDonald with his Scottish enthusi¬ 
 asm for metaphysics was the first to speak. 
 
 “Here’s to you. Judge,” he said. “That’s a 
 piece of thinking after my own heart. But, 
 mind you, I do not think that either Professor 
 Webb or his interpreter has been entirely 
 just to Hegel or to some of his followers. It 
 isn’t satisfactory to push off the edge of a 
 logical dilemma the men who fought so superbly 
 against materialism and taught the world to 
 see all reality in the terms of the movement 
 of the mind.” 
 
PERSONALITY 
 
 125 
 
 Baldwin Paxton was moving a little rest¬ 
 lessly in his seat. 
 
 “Alter all,” he said, “we know very little 
 about these things concerning which we con¬ 
 struct such learned phrases. We do know 
 that we can follow certain constant processes 
 in the great order of nature. Is it not enough 
 to think of the Master of Life as the Father 
 of Order and the mission of man to achieve 
 the harmony of moral order here? Why try 
 to push the human mind into regions where 
 it has no sure data upon which to move? It 
 seems to me that all this emphasis on person¬ 
 ality very easily turns into an enthusiasm for 
 lawlessness. There is nothing fickle about the 
 laws of nature. Personality may be as fickle 
 as some of the Greek gods.” 
 
 Bowen Tillman was ready with a bit of 
 reminiscence: 
 
 “It all takes me back to the class room of 
 Borden P. Bowne,” he said. “His lectures on 
 ‘Personalism’ gave my mind its bent as far as 
 it has any bent in things philosophical. His 
 lectures were full of merciless light and all the 
 amazing ironic laughter of the mind. It was 
 tremendously good for a young man. And it 
 put firm ground beneath no end of feet.” 
 
126 TWELVE MERRY FISHERMEN 
 
 Waldo Bryant looked up at the moment. 
 
 “Professor Bowne would not have been satis¬ 
 fied with Professor Webb's attitude toward 
 Personal Idealism,” he said. “In fact, it seems 
 to me that Webb's work would gain much in 
 strength had he found it possible to accept 
 the position of philosophic idealism with per¬ 
 sonality as its ultimate fact. As it is with all 
 his fine work, he hardly escapes dualism at 
 last. You feel how it clips his wings when he 
 comes to consider the doctrine of immortality.” 
 
 Hunter Morrison followed next: 
 
 “I have been reading Webb too,” he said. 
 “It seems to me that he treats the new psy¬ 
 chology rather cavalierly. You can hardly 
 brush it aside with a majestic wave of the 
 hand.” 
 
 Benny Malone chirped up at the moment 
 with a veritable twitter in his voice. 
 
 “All this is tremendously solemn and im¬ 
 pressive,” he said. “As for me, give me Berg¬ 
 son’s Creative Evolution or give me death. I 
 like to live in a world where things can happen. 
 The materialists tie me up so fast in physical 
 laws that nothing can happen. The absolute 
 idealists tie me up so fast in the laws of logic 
 that nothing can happen. Then comes Henri 
 
PERSONALITY 
 
 127 
 
 Bergson with his declaration of independence. 
 I’m for him. I will be caught in no Webb of 
 mediaeval dialectic.” 
 
 “Toss out the pun,” interrupted Fletcher 
 Hilton, amid a chorus of groans. The way 
 of the punster was always hard among the 
 Twelve Merry Fishermen. 
 
 Coulton Moore now spoke: 
 
 “Benny has said something in spite of his 
 nebulous Webb,” he insisted. “Only I would 
 put it in another way. I’m only interested in 
 philosophy in order to find standing room for 
 life. And the pragmatists give me that. 
 Schiller and James give me what I need. Great 
 is pragmatism, and they are its prophets.” 
 
 “Go on to Einstein and wallow in relativ¬ 
 ity,” shot in Morris MacDonald. 
 
 James Clayton now spoke up in his thought¬ 
 ful way: 
 
 “It seems to me that some of us are not 
 making a distinction between things which 
 sound exciting and things which are exciting,” 
 he said. “Webb is all the while trying to 
 make room for the very freedom and initiative 
 which Malone and Moore want so badly. Only 
 he is trying to get it in a world which has a 
 sound basis of order underneath its freedom. 
 
128 TWELVE MERRY FISHERMEN 
 
 An aeroplane is wonderfully exhilarating, but 
 you would better not break too many laws 
 of physics as you go up in the air. Pragmatism 
 gives you freedom without law. The systems 
 of necessity give you law without freedom. 
 Webb so interprets life that you have room 
 for free decision in a stable and orderly world.” 
 
 “All of which has been said so well that I 
 have nothing to add,” declared Henry Alton. 
 
 Monroe Burton had said nothing during the 
 discussion. As the men broke into little groups 
 at the end of the meeting some one noticed 
 hovering on his face an inscrutable smile. 
 
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