MAR 3 1919 A <^Og|GAL %V^ ^. Division .S'X Section ^gy^;i^ /91S \ ESSAYS AND ADDRESSES RELIGIOUS, LITERARY AND SOCIAL BY PHILLIPS BROOKS LATE BISHOP OF MASSACHUSETTS EDITED BY THE REV. JOHN COTTON BROOKS NEW YORK E. P. DUTTON AND COMPANY 31 West Twenty-third Street 1895 CopjTight, 1894, By E. P. BUTTON & COMPANY. PEEFACE. A GREAT soul, like a mountain lake, appears at first solitary in its individual existence as it lies alone in all its beauty of depth and color, reflecting tlie distant sky above it. But, with the lake, from dwelling with it and growing daily familiar with its many phases, we find that it is in the mountains which surround it that its life gets its source, and that it is from reflecting them also and sympathizing with their changeful experiences, and fur- nishing a pathway from one to other of them that its beauty and its value are gained. So in its capacity both to receive and to contribute to the life about it lies the secret power of attraction which we feel in such a soul. This book is a loving attempt to exemplify this truth in the case of one who, while wonderfully beautiful and grand in his o\^^l sublime and solitary self in communion with things above, yet was the embodiment of human sympathy, who lived not only for the life of mankind, but in and by that life also, drawing his own ever-fresh life from it, reflecting its joys and sorrows in his own clear depths, and bringing each part of it closer to every other by his many-sidedness and breadth which touched and watered all. How real this truth was to him his own words, taken almost at random, tell us : ^' In every department of life, whether I look at politics, at government, at social life, and the relation of ethics thereto, whether I look at reli- IV PREFACE. gion, tliere is only one word that expresses the cord that binds the human race : that word is synlpath3^ Present and past religion seems to have been developing conditions under which s^nnpathy might work. The characteristic word of the past hundred years has been liberty. Liberty is a negative term ; the removal of obstacles, the setting free of conditions under which the essential and absolute and positive power of sj^mpathy, of the relation of man to man under the recognition of their brotherhood, should find its place and expression." The collection of Essaj's and Addresses here presented comprises all of which any record at all satisfactory has been preserved of Bishop Brooks's pubhc utterances out- side of the pulpit. Of necessity some are given in more or less fragmentary sliape as they were taken directly from his lijis, but these retain more even than the rest the peculiarly forcible forms of his extemporaneous expres- sion, so familiar to his friends, and so much a part of himself. The chronological sequence has been observed as far as possible as illustrating in an interesting manner the development of his thought. The indebtedness of the editor is gratefully acknow- ledged for cordial permission for the use of copyright, to the Boston Latin School Association, the trustees of Phil- lips Exeter Academy, Houghton, Mifflin & Co., Ticknor & Co., the Princeton Review, Bishop John H. Vincent, and Professor A. E. Winship. Christ Church Eectory, Springfield, Mass., July, 1894. J. C. B. CO^TEl^TS. ON RELIGIOUS TOPICS. PAGE ^ Essay, 1858. " The Centralizing Power of the Gospel." Epis. Theolog. Seminary, Alexandria, Va 1 ^ Essay, October, 1873. "Heresy." Clericus Club, Boston, Mass. 7 '^ Essay, November 12, 1875. "The Best Methods of Promoting Spiritual Life." Second Congress of Prot. Epis. Church, Philadelphia, Pa 20 '^ Essay, February 28, 1878. "The Teaching of Religion." Divin- ity School of Yale University, New Haven, Conn 34 Essay, March, 1879. "The Pulpit and Popular Skepticism." Princeton Eeview 61 Address, November 18, 1880. At Two Hundred and Fiftieth Com- memoration of the Foundation of the First Church in Bos- ton, Mass 82 Address, May 22, 1881. At Thirtieth Anniversary of Young Men's Christian Association, Boston, Mass 87 Address, October 27, 1881. "Liturgical Growth." Seventh Congress of Prot. Epis. Church, Pi-ovidence, E. 1 96 / Essay, October 7, 1884. "Authority and Conscience." Ninth Congress of Prot. Epis. Church, Detroit, Mich 105 Essay, 1885. "A Century of Church Growth in Boston." Memo- rial History of Boston, Mass 119 Address, October 14, 1885. At the Commemoration of the Seventy-fifth Anniversary of American Board of Commis- sioners for Foreign Missions, Boston, Mass 145 V Essay, April 5, 1886. " The New Theism." Clericus Club, Bos- ton, Mass 150 VI CONTENTS. PAGE Address, December 15, 1886. At Two Hundredth Commemora- tiou of Foundation of King's Chapel, Boston, Mass 162 Address, January 21, 1889. At Thirty-eighth Anniversary of Young Men's Christian Association, Boston, Mass 170 Address, January 16, 1890. At the Installation of Eev. Lyman Abbott, D.D., over Plymouth Church, Brooklyn, N. Y 178 Essay, June 2, 1890. "Orthodoxy." Clerieus Club, Cambridge, Mass 183 Address, November 13, 1890. "The Conditions of Church Growth in Missionary Lands." Church Congress of Prot. Epis. Church, Philadelphia, Pa 198 Essay, 1892. " The Teachableness of Religion." The Twenty Club, Boston, Mass 204 Essay. " The Healthy Conditions of a Change of Faith " 218 ON LITERARY AND SOCIAL TOPICS. Essay, 1859. "Poetry." Howard School, Alexandria, Va 234 Essay, August 31, 1869. "The Purposes of Scholarship." Phi Beta Kappa Society, Brown University, Providence, R. I. . 247 Essay, June 27, 1871. "Graduation." The Gannett School, Boston, Mass 273 Address, May 30, 1873. At the Dedication of Memorial Hall, Andover, Mass 283 Essay, December 27, 1874. "Milton as an Educator." Massa- chusetts Teachers' Association 300 Essay, July 7, 1875. "Courage." At Twenty-first Anniversary of Massachiisetts State Normal School, Salem, Mass 319 Address, February 22, 1881. At the Dedication of Public Latin and English High School-house, Boston, Mass 336 Essay, October, 1881. "Dean Stanley." Atlantic Monthly ... . 341 Address, May 30, 1882. At the Laying of Corner-stone of the Wells Memorial Working-men's Club and Institute, Boston, Mass 367 Address, November 13, 1883. " Martin Luther. " At Celebra- CONTENTS. VU PAGE tion by the Evangelical Alliance of the United States of the Foui" Hundredth Anniversary of his Birth, New York, N.Y. 375 Address, April 23, 1885. At Celebration of Two Hundred and Fiftieth Anniversary of Foundation of Public Latin School, Boston, Mass 393 Essay, March 4, 1886. " Biogi-aphy." Phillips Academy, Ex- eter, N. H 427 Address, July 21, 1886. "Literature and Life." Chautauqua Assembly, Framingham, Mass 454 Essay, October, 1886. " Henry Hobson Richardson." Harvard Montldy 482 Address, October 1, 1890. At the Dedication of the People's Institute, Eoxbury, Mass 490 Address, January 30, 1892. At a Meeting in Behalf of the Chil- dren's Aid Society, Philadelphia, Pa 497 Address, December 21, 1892. At Celebration by the New Eng- land Society of Brooklyn, N. Y., of the Two Hundred and Seventy-second Anniversary of the Landing of the Pilgrims, Brooklyn, N. Y 509 Essay. " The Public-school System." 519 Digitized by the Internet Archive in 2009 with funding from Princeton Theological Seminary Library http://www.archive.org/details/essaysaddressesrOObroo ESSAYS AND ADDRESSES. RELIGIOUS. THE CENTRALIZING POWER OF THE GOSPEL. (Episcopal Theological Seminary, Alexandi'ia, Va., 1858.) How wlien we once get witliin the sphere of a great truth we find all mental life seeking its center in it — thought and fancy, energy and faith, hope, fear, and specu- lation, all hurrying to the forum where their business is to be done and their fate decided. It is just as when we come near a great city we see life becoming more and more centralized every mile ; the scattered interests and pleasures and pursuits of \dUage life begin to look city- ward ; the great roads begin to run in long straight lines on to the distant center ; the little lanes creep on between their hedges striving the same way ; houses begin to take the city look ; men are working for city needs with an eye to the demands of city taste or necessity, and each new-comer falls into the great stream and is carried on to the market-place with the rest. And in spiritual no less than in mental hfe there lives the same deep power. Truth centralizes not Thought only, but Affection and WiU. The soul that lived for a thousand ends sees God's light for a moment, and begins to live for one ; the dissipated moral nature grows to a system round its central sun ; the aimless study of earth's schools is sanctified thenceforth, for it is a culture of a 1 2 ESSAYS AND ADDRESSES. soul for heaven, and Imman energy feels the strong finger of God's truth upon it, and stands up in the new dignity of holy zeal. Thus every truth that pretends to man's adherence cen- trahzes man's nature, and claims it all, and gives it all work to do ; and thus Christianity, if it claim to be a com- plete and not a partial system, for the redemption of our life must come with its central truth, broad enough and true enough to embrace and save it all. That truth it brings, and so its fii-st assumption and its highest glory is — Man's only help ; the concentration of the moral life in Christ ; the Intellect coming up to say, " Lord, teach me ; " the Heart bringing its tribute of loyalty and love ; the Will with bowed head echoing the first Christian ques- tion, " Wliat wilt thou have me do ? " ; Sorrow seeking for comfort, Faith for a resting-place, Hope for an assurance in the Immanuel, the visible Deity who came to save our race. The Intellect coming up to say, "Lord, teach me." There iz no truth from which even man's theoretical ad- herence hangs aloof as it does from this of the necessary submission of the whole intellectual manhood to the obedi- ence of Christ. God's plan has aU the wonderf id simphc- ity that makes His natural world so grand. In the center of our life stands the grand Christ-truth He has set up, the single fountain out of which all sin and all unclean- ness are to drink for healing. Every step that is not toward the fountain is toward the desert. Our work here, as everywhere, is with the tendencies of things. Let us understand this matter. God has ordained this world and another, and this world is a striving after that. Only one door stands open to connect the two : " I am the Way, the Truth, the Life." Now if God seriously meant that man might reach that Way and Truth, He gave him no faculty that might- not struggle for it. There is no sine- THE CENTRALIZING POWER OF THE GOSPEL. 6 cure in the soul's economy. Every power has its work to do, every capacity its gift to fill it, every motive its wheels to tm-n or shaft to drive in achieving finally the soul's great work; and so the fullest manhood of man's best development is sanctified by God's purpose of man's sal- vation. But when one coward faculty breaks off from the hard struggle, ignores the Christhood that says, '' By Me if any man enter in he shall be saved," begins to play with a theory instead of living by a truth, forthwith the " sim- plicity that is in Christ " is marred and mangled by the multiphcity that is in man. God's ban lies upon no fair exei-cise of the faculties of labor if they be but exercised as He directs. His whole omnipotence is pledged to make every Christian effort of those faculties effectual and strong. All heaven is working for us if we will, as the httle child digs his well in the sea-shore sand and then the great ocean comes up and fills it for him. And here lies all solved before us the problem of Profane and Sacred Study. Looking to this divine simplicity of the scheme of life, to Christ that saves, to God that blesses, no study is profane. Looking away from that central truth of Christ, there is no profaner work than Bible study. So long as the intellect owns allegiance, so long its work is full of piety and purpose, its Avhole development is a train- ing of the soul that is an heir of glory, against its corona- tion-day. Books become sacraments, schools are temples, and the mental life grows holy because its triumphs are sacrifices to the everlasting truth of Christ. If this be so, then how it brands the atheism that would substitute the frivolity of culture or the pedantry of ethics for this divinity of truth, that would go back from a Gospel to a Law, from a Law to an Instinct, from an Instinct to a Dream, disowning its bii-thright claim to the higher Chris- tian portion. And with the Intellect the Will and Heart must come. 4 ESSAYS AXD ADDEESSES. See how the new faith is tlie resurrection of the life, how the new purpose that concentrates ever}' power in the work of Christ binds the whole human natm-e closer to the Truth, and closer to its race. It binds it closer to the Truth. Theories and schemes and ceremonies grow tame and dead to the man who has looked the gospel in the face. Wliat ! with this new gravitation that I feel draw- ing me and drawing all creation to the center of oui* hfe, shall I turn away to the little forces that would drag me off to little aims ? Shall I trifle with this new power of believing ? For all moral carelessness lessens our capacity of faith — makes us not only less belie\ang but less able to believe, destroys as far as it can oiu* power to rest on testimony for truth. It is not only that some drops are spilled, but the cup itself is broken into uselessness. And most of all, we are conscious that it is growing harder and harder every day for us to believe; the conviction that- once brought faith inevitably does not bring it now, and the faith when it comes does not bless us as it once did with trust and peace. This is what the soul that has once felt the simplicity of Christ dreads most of aU, for it breaks that simplicity into the old fragmentary life again. " Give me a hope that points where my life's hope is point- ing, a light to shine upon the road that leads me Christ- ward. Let me ignore the system and the Church, the teacher and the book, that will not give me these." Tliis is the soul's new cry. This must be the world's cry if it ever sees salvation. Our hope is in this Christian radi- calism which through the myriad shows and seml^lances of human life goes down directly to the heart of things and seizes Faith and grapples Hope and clings to Charity, and says, " Lo, out of these shall grow a Christian Church for all the world, and out of these a Christian experience for me." Is there not something solemnly heroic in this one central purpose standing thus cahnly in the midst TEE CENTRALIZING POWER OF THE GOSPEL. o of the feverish anarchy of the Avorkl's million hopes and schemes ? So men were bartering and selling and eating and drinking, and the noonda}^ hubbub was loud and wild in Jerusalem of old, while the great agony of Calvar}- was working out the world's redemption. This new Christian simplicity is not perfect till it recog- nizes the world's hope in its own. Then there comes the true " liberality " of oui* religion. The man begins to iden- tify himself with the race, and wins a share in its collec- tive faith and power. He multiplies his life eight hundred millionfold. The world was made, and sun and stars or- dained, and salvation sent to earth alike for humanity and him. The history of the race becomes his experience, the happiness of the race his glory, the progress of the race his hope. He begins to say, ^^We shall do this and thus, win new secrets from nature and new truth from God," for this man goes hand in hand with humanit}^ down the highways of its life, till they stand together be- fore the throne of God in heaven. He says of Christ's truths : " I believe in these things because I know that they have helped my race. I look to them as I look to the sun with a faith that all these centuries of sunlight f()rl)id me to disown. I hear them from the Bible claim- ing my allegiance, as from all nature I hear God's truth demanding that I should give reason room to grow to faith and love." We talk much of a conservative Church and a progress- ive Chm-ch, of a true and a false philosophy of moral, social, and ecclesiastical life. Let us be sm-e no Church is soundly conservati\'e or positively and steadily advanc- ing, that no philosophy is Mise and no Christianity Chris- tian where the great Centralizing Power, the gra\dtation that liinds every particle of Church, and Life to Christ the Center, is robbed of its supremacy. We have tried to see how history, how morals, how the miracles of intellect, C ESSAYS JXD ADDRESSES. how the sweetest hopes of social culture and the gi*andest prospects of the world's great progress find their center in the manifested life of God as seen in Christ. Cut aloof from that, they are beautiful, but their beauty is frag- mentary and untrue. Linked by the Law of God to that, the Central Fact about which God has systematized His nioral world, they find their place and own their mission in working out obediently to it the ultimate perfection of the world, of the Church, and of the single soul. HERESY. (Clerieus Club, Boston, Mass., October, 1873.) It is hardly to be supposed that wlien oui* people Sun- day after Sunday pray to the good Lord to deliver them from all false doctrine, heresy, and schism, they have a very clear idea of what the sin exactly is which the second term in their prayer denotes. It is one of the terms which people are very apt to think they understand until they undertake its explanation ; then they find that their idea of it is very vague. The term itself has a certain obsolete- ness of sound, a certain flavor of that old-time quaintness, which many good souls hke in their religion. It inspires a gentle horror that is not unpleasant, and indeed seems to be a favorite sin for some men's minds to dwell upon, perhaps because its very vagueness saves them from the possibility, and so from the necessity, of bringing it very closely home either to their own or to their brethren's consciences and destinies. And yet with all this it is clear enough that there is something called heresy, which in all times has been dreaded and rebuked, and often violently punished. Scrip- ture begins the strain of objurgation, and it is heard still in the literature of to-day. Surely it will be well if we can study the meaning of the disgraceful term, the nature of the disgraceful sin ; and lest any one should think that we treat as vague and difficult that which is recognized to be perfectly simple and clear, let us justify our essay with this, as a sort of motto, out of St. Augustine : ''Not 0 ESSATS AND ADDEElSSES. every error/' he says, "is heresy, though every heresy which is blameworthy caimot be heresy without some error. What, therefore, makes one a heretic I tliink it is perhaps impossible, certainly very difficult, to comprehend in a regular definition." That certainly opens a promising field for study and discussion. It is one of those subjects which must be studied in connection with the Vfords with which they have always been identified. The word " heresy," then, as ever^^body knows, primarily means " choice." It is a subjective thing, an action of the will. Here at the very beginning its moral character is stamj^ed upon it. Per- haps it is not too soon to say that to trace that moral character always clinging to it obstinately, haunting it, and forever reappearing when it seems to have been lost, always determining its treatment and its limitations, will be the substance of tliis essay. Beginning, then, with this moral meaning, the word attains a secondary sense. It passes next to be applied to that which is the common choice of any group of thinkers who choose a certain thing. Here it becomes objective. It comes to mean a school of thought. As such at first it has no tone either of praise or blame. It is a vox media. This is its classic use. "We hear of the Stoic heresy and the Peripatetic heresy. In the same indifferent way it is used four times in the New Testament : " The heresy of the Pharisees," " the heresy of the Sadducees," " the heresy of the Nazarenes," " the most straitest heresy of our relig- ion." In all these passages there is no blame nor praise, only description. But any one can see how, just as soon as the thought of a clear and absolute authority in matters of faith, was introduced, the whole act of choice, or the selection of what the chooser pleased, instead of what the authority commanded, became a sin ; and so we come to four other passages in the New Testament, in which her- HERESY. 9 esy is distinctly spoken of with strong denunciation, and from wliicli the whole subsequent treatment of it has derived its tone. These passages need only be indicated. " After the way which they call heresy/' says Paul, " so worship I the God of my fathers." To the Corinthians he says : " For there must be heresies among you, that they which are approved may be made manifest." And again to the Galatians, " The works of the flesh are manifest, which are these," and then, classed with adultery, idol- atry, witchcraft, and drunkenness, comes "heresies," "of the which," he says, " I tell you . . . that they which do such things shall not inherit the kingdom of God." The fourth passage is from St. Peter, who says : " There shall be false teachers among you, who privily shall bring in damnable heresies, even, denying the Lord that bought them, and bring upon themselves swift destruction." To these must be added one other passage, where the word used is not "heresy" but "heretic," but it bears directly on our study. St. Paul writes to Titus : " A man that is a heretic, after the first and second admonition, reject; knowing that he that is such is subverted, and sinneth, being condemned of himself." These are the j^assages in which the Apostles speak by name of heresy. There is no time for any labored com- mentary on them. We can only state what seems to be the clear characteristics of the sin as it is here described. These characteristics are two. First, heresy is a term which has reference to ideas, and so is distinguished at once from schism, which relates to worship and discipline. This is clear in all the passages except the fii-st and sec- ond, in which, indeed, heresy seems to be almost identical Avith schism. The second conclusion from these passages is this, that heresy involves personal and wilful obstinacy. It is impossible to read them through and not see the dis- tinctness with which the heretic is blamed, not because 10 ESSAYS AXD ADDBESSES. he holds this or that opinion, bnt because he is conceived to hold it wilfully, in deliberate and impious rejection of its opposite, which he knows is the Word of God. His heresy is a " work of the flesh." He is said to be con- demned of himself. His sin stands side by side with the cruel and filthy actions that come from cruel and lustful hearts. Nothing can be further from the intellectual concep- tion of heresy which has prevailed and still prevails in the Christian Church, than this presentation of it as moral wickedness which stands out in the New Testa- ment. '-Look through the Epistles," says Dr. Arnold, " and you will find nothing there condemned as heresy but wliat was mere wickedness ;" and again he says : " I think that you will find that all the false doctrines spoken of by the Apostles are doctrines of sheer wickedness, that their counterpart in modern times is to be found in the Anabaptists of Miinster, or the Fifth-Monarchy men, or in mere secular High-Churchmen, or hjq^ocritical E^^an- gelicals ; in those who make Christianity minister to lust or to covetousness or ambition, not in those who interpret Scriptm'e to the best of their conscience and ability, be their interpretation ever so erroneous." As we leave the region of Scripture and come to the Fathers of the Church, it is evident enough that therfe is a growing tendency to measure heresy by its divergence as opinion from certain standards of Church doctrine, and not as will from a certain uprightness and puritj' of heart ; to really lose its character as sin and define it as error, however the treatment that belongs to sin alone still continues to be lavished on it. If the two could have been reasonably held to be identical, all would have been well. If there had been a clear settled line of Chris- tian truth, so manifest that no one could miss it except by obstinacy, so universal that all should know at once what REBESY. 11 was meant when men spoke of the Christian faith ; in one word, if the Quod semper, quod unique, quod ah omnibus, had been a fact of history instead of a dream of later theorizers, it would not have been difficult to vmderstand heresy. The intellectual divergence could not then have come without the moral wilfulness ; but as it is, they are continually coming separately, and bewildering the Fathers terribly. Heresy, with the New Testament denunciations of it in their ears, is always a moral term, and yet they are always trying to justify the attril^ution of it and of its penalties in circumstances where personal guilt is wholly out of the question. This perplexity haunts the writings of the Fathers. Tertullian, with his own hot, turbid logic, claims that "heretics cannot be Christians, because what they choose themselves they certainly do not take from Christ." After which statement one can understand how he held a good many other of his notions about the Holy Spirit and its action on the mind of man. Origen makes the fact of heresy depend on the size of the error that is held, which is certainly as arbitrary and hoj)eless a discrimination as any perplexed mind ever fled to for refuge. Jerome seems to recognize more distinctly the moral nature of heresy, though his language is not wholly clear, but at least he does not make it merely a departure from the Church. "Whoever understands Scripture other- wise," he says, "than the sense of the Holy Spirit de- mands, by which it was written, though he has not left the Church, yet can he be called a heretic, and is of the works of the flesh, choosing the things Avhich are worse," which sounds like Jerome. But the most interesting and thoughtful treatment of heresy among the Fathers, the most constant recognition of its essential morality, is found, as might have been 12 ESSAYS AND ADDRESSES. expected, in the writing's of Augustine. These are his words: ''He is an heretic, in my opinion, who for the sake of glory or power, or other secular advantages, either invents or embraces and follows new opinions. But he who believes men of this kind is a man deluded by a certain imagination of truth and piety." And again : "As to those who defend a false and wicked opinion with- out any self-will, especially if they have not invented it by an audacious presumption, but received it from their parents, who have been seduced and fallen into error, and if they seek the truth with care, and are ready to cor- rect themselves when they have found it, they cannot be ranked among heretics." I think this is an account of heresy at which many a modern dogmatist would hesi- tate. Certainly it keeps the great moral element plain and strong. Not that Augustine is always so clear. He says again: "Suppose that a man holds the opinion of Photin about Jesus Christ, believing it to be the Catholic faith, I do not call him a heretic yet, unless, after he is better instructed, he prefer to resist the Cathohc faith than to renounce the opinions he has advanced." Here the formal is seen pressing upon the moral conception of heresy, but even now he is far from the sublime rejection of the morality altogether, which good Bishop Fulgentius reaches when he triumphantly puts himself on record thus : " Good works, martyrdom even, serve nothing for the salvation of him who is not in the unity of the Church, so long as the malice of schism and heresy persevere in him." On the whole, then, we have the Fathers, while they depart from the simple moral conception of heresy which Paul and Peter held, while some of them lost its moral character entirely, yet for the most part clinging to it strongly, and trying to make it l^lend with the formal and dogmatic notions of heresy which were growing apace. HEEESY. 13 As Romaiiism becomes rampant, the definitions of her- esy become more and more unmoral. There is neither need nor time to multiply quotations, but let us come down a long way, and take one Romish writer, who gives a good round hearty desciiptiou of heresy Vv^hich is refresh- ing. Here we have the full-blown ecclesiastical theory of heresy, which is, after all, what a good many j)eople, An- glicans and others, are still dreaming about to-day. The Abbe Bergier writes in his theological dictionary as fol- lows : " Heresy is a voluntary and obstinate error, con- trary to some dogma of the faith." So far it sounds moral. But he goes on : '' How can we know whether the error is voluntary or involuntary, criminal or innocent, the result of vicious passions or defective light ? " His answer is in the true strain of Catholic reasoning. "First, as the Christian doctrine is revealed by God," he says, ''• it is a crime to wish to know it of ourselves, and not by the instrumentality of those whom God has set to teach it. Second, since God has established the Church or the bod}^ of pastors to teach the faithful, when the Church has spoken it is on our part an obstinate pride to resist theii' decision and prefer our light to tlieirs. Third, the j^assion which has led the leaders of sects and their partisans has been shown by the means which they have employed to establish their opinions." How familiar it all sounds ! Then he goes on again: "A man may deceive himself in good faith at first ; but as soon as he resists the Church, tries to make proselytes, forms a party, intrigues, makes a noise, he no longer acts from good faith, but from pride and ambition." This is the full-blown ecclesiastical no- tion of heresy. It was what, though in expressions that keep the air of morality among them still, the Council of Trent put into its catechism in these words : '^ A person is not to be called a heretic so soon as he errs in matters of faith : then only is he to be so called when in defiance of 14 JESS ATS AXn J DDF ESSES. the authority of the Church he maintains impious opinions with unyiekling pertinacity." The Reformation was the setting free of morahty and moral distinctions by the breaking up of arbitrary eccle- siastical definitions. And so it is not strange that heresy began to resume in Protestantism the moral coloring which it had almost lost. There appeared indeed a ten- dency to substitute dogmatic for ecclesiastical lines, and the writ de kaerefico comburendo was in force in England till the time of Charles II. Two Anabaptists suffered under Elizabeth, and two Ariaus under James I., for her- es_v. And yet one would hke to quote some of the clear- est and truest and most rational accounts of heresy that ever have been written, from some of the English Puri- tans, notably one by Robinson, the Pilgrim Father, a good, great man. These, however, we must leave. We want to come to a series of utterances upon the subject of oiTr essay, made by the liberal divines of the Chui'ch of England of the seventeenth century, which certainly come nearer in their statement of the moral character of heresy to the standard of the New Testament than anything else we know in Christian writers. If anything comes nearer we should rejoice to see it. Standing, as these men did, between the stiff ecclesiasticism and the extravagant Puritanism of their day, there came to them a very clear understanding of the relations which religious truth holds to the indi- vidual conscience and intellect. One thing was to them very evident : that words of personal blame, such as the New Testament lavishes upon heresy, could belong only to personal guilt, and the personal guilt could attach only to the action of the personal will. It is strange that so plain a truth should ever have been forgotten. It was good that it should be asserted once again. When John Hales is asked ''whether the Christian HERESY. 15 Church may err in fundamentals," he begins his answer by saying "that every Christian may err that will," other- wise there could be no heresy, " heresy being nothing else but wilful error." Chillingworth is veiy unmistakable in his assertion that there is no heresy unless the truth be clearly made kiiown to the heretic, and be by him delib- erately rejected. "Heresy we consider an obstinate de- fense of an error against any necessary article of the Christian faith." Stillingfleet holds "verv' strongly the opinion that mere diversity of opinion is no ground of heresy laying men open to the censure of the Church." "It is only the endeavor, by difference of opinion, to alienate men's spirit from one another, and thereby to break the society into fractions and divisions, which makes men lial^le to restraint and punishment." In all these passages, and many others like them, there is the strong assertion, the intense belief in personal responsi- bility and personal rights. The men are churchmen, with churchmen's calm and measm-ed ways of expression, but they are all verging toward, and almost merging into, that profound and lofty belief in the personality of relig- ion, with all its associated rights and duties, which the Puritan John Milton was at the same time uttering in his splendid pi'ose. He has brought the moral character of heresy to its completest statement. " Truih is compared in Scripture," he says, " to a streaming fountain ; if her waters flow not in a perpetual progression, they sink into a muddy pool of conformity and tradition. A man may be a heretic in the truth, and if he believes things onl}' because his pastor says so, or the assembly so determines, without knowing other reason, though his belief be true, yet the very truth he holds becomes his heresy." But much the most philosophical treatment of heresy in this century is found in the best works of Jeremy Tay- lor. In the "Liberty of Propliesying " he develops his 16 ESSAYS AND ADDRESSES. idea. It is simply that heresy being the opposite of faith, that moral character which is fundamental and essential in faith must be fundamental and essential in heresy as well. I venture to quote rather a long passage, which cannot well be divided. It will be no great hardship to listen to Jeremy Taylor. " For heresy," he says, " is not an error of the understanding, but an error of the will. And this is clearly insinuated in Scripture in the style whereof faith and a good life are made one duty, and vice is called opposite to faith, and heresy opposed to holiness and sanctity. . . . For as the nature of faith is, so is the nature of heresy, contraries having the same proportion and commensuration. Now faith, if it be taken for an act of the understanding merely, is so far from being that excellent grace that justifies us, that it is not good in any kind but in general nature, and makes the understanding better in itself, and pleasing to God, just as strength does the arm, or beauty the face, or health the body. These are natural perfections indeed, and so knowledge and a true belief is to the understanding. But this makes us not at all more acceptable to God, for then the unlearned were certainly in a damnable condition and all good schol- ars should be saved ; whereas I am afraid too much of the conti-ary is true. But unless faith is made moral by the mixtures of choice and charity, it is nothing but a natural perfection, not a grace or a virtue ; and this is demonstrably proved in this, that by the confession of ail men, of all interests and persuasions in matters of mere belief, invincible ignorance is our excuse if we be deceived,^ which could not be, but that neither to believe aright is commendable, nor to believe amiss is reprovable ; but where both one and the other is voluntary, and chosen antecedently or consequently, by prime election, or ex post facto, and so comes to be considered in morality, and is part of a good life or a bad life respectively. Just so HERESY. 17 it is in heresy. If it be a design of ambition, and making of a sect, if it be for filthy lucre's sake, as it was in some that were of the circumcision, if it be of pride and love of preeminence, as it was in Diotrephes, or out of peevish- ness and indocibleness of disposition, or of a contentious spirit — that is, that theu' feet are not shod with the prep- aration of the gospel of peace — in all these cases the error is just so damnable as is its principle, but therefore damna- ble not of itself, but by reason of its adherency. And if any shall say any otherwise, it is to say that some men shall be damned when they cannot help it, perish without their own fault, and be miserable forever, because of their own unhappiness to be deceived through their own simplic- ity, and natural or accidental but inculpable infirmity." This long quotation admonishes us that we must quote no more ; nor is it necessary. We have seen that there have always been three ideas concerning what constituted heresy: (1) the ecclesiastical idea, which measures heresy by its departure from a certain Church statement of be- lief ; (2) the dogmatical idea, whicli measures heresy by what it conceives to be a departure from the truth of Revelation ; (3) the moral idea, which conceives of heresy as a certain personal sin, consisting in the wilful adherence to some view of truth which a man prefers, in rejection of that which God makes known to him. If we pursued our study, it is evident enough that we should find all of these ideas in books much later than Jeremy Taylor. They are all familiar to us in the ordinary talk of our own day. When three men call another man a heretic, one of them means that he is in rebellion against the Church, another means that he is in error, and the third means that he is violating his own conscience, and wilfully shut- ting his eyes to light. And what I have been much struck with is, the per- sistency with which the moral idea has cluug to heresy 18 ESSAYS AND ADDIIESSES. in every age. It has always reappeared, even when the ecclesiastical or dogmatical idea seemed al)s()lntely tri- nmphant. The truth is, that only by the moral concep- tion of heresy can the heretic be Ijrought within the range of the New Testament, his heresy comited as sin, and he himself considered lial)le to such denunciations as Paul and Peter hea^) upon their heretic. Here, it seems to me, is the key to that strange spectacle that is seen through all history — good men picmsly burning their heretic breth- ren, and singing psalms as they put the fire to the fagots. There lias always been latent, I believe, in the honest per- secutor, a conviction of the wilfulness, the wickedness, the moral culpability of the poor wretcih who suffered for the denial of the virtue of a wafer, or the assertion of the unity of God. Men have first convicted their brethren of heresy upon the ecclesiastical or dogmatic grounds of their own times, and then slaughtered them with an easy conscience on the moral grounds of the New Testament. And does not the assertion of the moral character of heresy meet many of the practical difficulties which we have felt ourselves when we have been forced to estimate our fellow-men ? Heretic is a word of personal guilt. It had that tone when Paul used it, and it has kept it ever since. But I am sure that we have all felt, and perhaps reproached ourselves for feeling, how impossible it was for us in any real way to attach the notion of personal guilt to those who were called heretics in the ordinary uses of the word. We have been unable to feel any ve- hement condemnation for the earnest and truth-seeking Errorist, or any strong approbation for the fli^jpant and partisan Orthodox. There was no place for the first in the hell, nor for the second in the heaven, which alone our consciences tell us that the God whom we worship could establish. Speaking in the atmosphere of the New Testament, we cannot call the first a heretic, nor the HERESY. 19 second a saint, and our misgivings are perfectly right. The first is not a heretic, the second is not a saint. The first may be a saint in his error, the second, to use Milton's fine phrase, may be a " heretic in the truth." Unless we hold to the authority of the lufalUble Church, the ecclesiastical conception of the sin of heresy is impos- sible. Unless we hold that all truth has been so perfectly revealed that no honest mind can mistake it (and who can T)elieve that f ), the dogmatic conception of heresy fails. But if we can believe in the conscience, and God's willing- ness to enlighten it, and man's duty to obey its judg- ments, the moral conception of heresy sets definitely be- fore us a goodness after which we may aspire, and a sin which we may struggle against and avoid. In ordinary talk men will call him a heretic who departs from a certain average of Christian belief far enough to attract their attention. Men will speak of heresy as if it were synonymous with error. It may be that the word is so bound up with old notions of authoi'ity that it must be considered obsolete, and can be of little further use. And yet there is a sin which this word describes, which it described to Paul and Augustine and Taylor — a sin as rampant in our day as theirs. It is the self-will of the intellect. It is the belief of creeds, whether they be true or false, because we choose them, and not because God declares them. It is the saying, " I w^ant this to be true," of any doetriue, so vehemently that w^e forget to ask, " Is it true ? " When we do this, we depart from the Christian Church, which is the kingdom of God, and the disciple- ship of Christ. With the danger of that sin before our eyes, remembering how often w^e have committed it, feel- ing its temptation ever present with us, we may still pray with all our hearts, "From heresy, good Lord, deliver us." THE BEST METHODS OF PROMOTING SPIR- ITUAL LIFE. (Second Congi-ess of Protestant Episcopal Church, Philadelphia, November 12, 1875.) I AM asked to write of the best methods of promoting spiritual life. I take it for granted that it is the personal life that is referred to, the culture of the single soul. It is not the question of the sources and career of those great movements of spiritual life which agitate a whole community ; not the question of revival meetings and all the circumstances of religious awakenings ; but it is that old question of the soul asking itself, "■ How can I best live near to God ? " It is no question for controversies. I think, however mucli we differ upon other things, we can very largely come together here, and at this last meeting of our Congress seem to each other to be not merely members of the same Church, taking different views of our Church's life, but fellow-Christians fuU of one strong sympathy, one common desire to be more worthy of our Lord and live more truly the life of God on earth. There is something almost like the creak of machinery about our subject. We want to get that out and leave it all behind. There are no rules which, taken together, make up the directory by which one may live spiritually, and which may be called the method of spiritual life. Life makes its own methods. The very fact that it is vital promises for it variety. What I want to do, if I can, in this paper, is to indicate the true character of spiritual 20 METHODS OF FEOMOTING SFIEITUAL LIFE. 21 life in itself, and its true relations to this world iu wLicli "vve live. If we can understand these two things, rules will spring as naturally as the plant always springs when the good seed falls rightly into good ground, with fit differences in different fields. We start then with this, that the spii-itual life of man in its fullest sense is the activity of man's whole nature under the highest spii'itual impulse, viz., the love of God. It is not the activity of one set of powers, one part of the nature. It is the movement of all the powers, of the whole of his nature under a certain force, and so ^\dth a certain completeness and effect. This friend of mine is an unspii'itual man. What does this mean ? That there are some closets in his life which he has never opened ? One field of his nature that lies unemployed ? One kind of action that he never does ? No ; but it really means that behind all his actions there is at work, not the higher, but some lower force ; not the love of God, but the love of himself, or an interest in his brethren. To make him spiritual what must one do ? Not merel}^ open new cham- bers of life to him, so that, besides being what he is now, a thinker, a father, a lawyer, he shall be also a spiritual man, adding one more life to the many lives which he lives already. One must put behind all these lives some power of spiritual force and unity, by whose inflow they shall be altered, elevated, and redeemed. How to do this, how to bring all the life into connection with the spiritual force, and then to open it more and more completely to its power, this is the question of the methods of sj)iritiial life. It would seem, then, as if in the j^roduction and com- pletion of the spiritual man there were three points or stages which, in our thoughts at least, are capable of separation. There is the gathering of spiritual force out- side of a nature, seeking admission ; there is the admit- 22 ESSAYS AND ADDRESSES. tance of that force through the willing assent of the na- ture itself ; and then there is the occupation of the nature by the force, as it finds out the use of all its least machi- neries, and stirs the whole of it to action. It is like the way in which the sunlight enters youi- shuttered house each morning. There, too, there are three separable times — one while, the sun fully risen, the sunlight waits out- side ready to enter, but not yet in ; another when you open the window and fling the shutter back; and yet another while the admitted sunlight takes possession of your house, springs from object to object, and from room to room, and summons the color and the life back to the dull and sleepy things it touches. Or shall we say it is like the clear, distinguishable moments when the vital steam waits throbbing in its boiler, when you turn the screw that admits it to your engine, and when its force slowly spreads through all your engine's bulk till every great limb slowly heaves and every little needle trembles and tingles with the pervading life ? Now of the fii"st two of these thi-ee periods, so separable in our thoughts, but so blending in actual experience, we are not called upon to say much here. The force of all spiritual life is the love of God for man. Blindly or clearly known, a divine life over us, which cares for us, is at the beginning of spirituality in man. The Christian has the assurance of that love, made in the Incarnation, certified upon the cross, to put it past all doubt and make it infinitely full of powerful appeal to him. But g-uessed at by the blindest heathen or rejoiced in by the strongest Christian faith, that love of God is final in the history of spiritual life. Behind it man cannot go. Man does no more to bring it there where it stands waiting for him to let it in than he does to gather the morning light out of the midnight darkness and set it outside the closed shut- ters of his darkened house. The love of God for man is METHODS OF PROMOTING SPIRITUAL LIFE. 23 the fact that lies back of everything ; the lake on the calm summit of the hill above the clouds, out of 'which all the streams flow do"\vn. Aud so too of the act by which man opens his life to this love of God for him. It is the time when that love of God for him is responded to by a love of his for God. It is not ours to try the delicate and difficult untwisting of those cords of divine influence and human will which so cHng to and love each other. Enough that, tempted by God, a man does open his nature to this waiting love. That which had stood outside as persuasive fact comes into the life as powerful motive, and then the spiritual life is begun. We come then to the third period, the occupation of the nature by this spiritual force of the love of God : its grad- ual entry as motive into all the circle of the life. All that a man can do to make that occupation more complete is a method of spiritual life. What he can do seems to me to be really divisible under three or four very simple heads. He can, in the fii-st place, insist on cutting off and casting away those parts of his life into which it is impossible, by the very nature of the things, that this new spii-itual force should enter. - Here is the field of self-denial. He can give up every bad habit which is incapable of regen- eration and occupation by the Spirit of God. Then, turn- ing to those parts of his life which this new force can fill and use, he can do much to make them ready for its occu- pancy. This he can do by clearing and enlarging them, which means by attaining to the ideal conception of them, and by faithfully exercising them. Is it not true that any man makes his trade or occupation ready to be filled by the high motive of the love of God when he trains himself to look at his trade or occupation in its ideal, and, at the same time, is thoroughly conscientious in its duties ? The shoemaker who, ha\'ing opened his heart to God's love, 24 ESSAYS AXD ADDRESSES. comes soonest and fiJlest to find the work of Ms lap-stone and his bench touched and inspired by that motive will be the shoemaker who most conceives of his daily work as one connected with human comfort and strength, and who, at the same time, is most conscientiously faithful to its details. These things a man can do : he can resolutely abandon the sins which cannot be si3iritualized ; he can open all the channels of his life to spirituality by the study of the ideal, and by faithful work in every part of his living. One is the turning out of strangers ; the other is the preparing of the chambers for the entering guest. The one is negative, the other positive. When both are done, then the man who has learned in one little spot, the con- version spot of his nature, that God loves him, and who has there begun to love God, may look to see that new motive run into these newly opened chambers of his life, making the half -ready places completely ready by its pres- ence, freeing the half -freed machinery by its touch. Does this mean anything ? Is it capable of being made clear? I think it is. Here is your average religious man, spiritual in some regions of his life, in the region of prayer, in the region of worship. He wants to be more spiritual. How can he do it ? He can grow deeper in religious life only by becoming more widely religious. He can hold more of the Spirit of God by opening new sections of his life. Greater depth will come only with greater wideness. The true advance for that man to make is not simply to be more religious right there where he is religious already ; it is to be religious where he is irreligious now, to let the spiritual force which is in him play upon new activities. How shall he open, for instance, his business life to this deep power? B3' casting out of his business all that is essentially wicked in it, by insisting to himself on its ideal of charity or usefulness, on the loftiest conception of every relationship into which it brings him with his fel- METHODS OF PROMOTING SPIRITUAL LIFE. 25 low-man, and hj making it not a matter of his own w^liim or choice, bnt a duty to be done faithfully because God has called hhn to it. All of these can come only with a firm, devout conviction that God chose for him his work, and meant for him to find his sj)iritual education there. Doing- all these, in every department of his life, with the single intention that the love of God which is already in him may pervade and possess these regions of his activ- ity, is he not cultivating his own spirituality? Are not these the best methods of promoting spiritual life ? I dwell upon such thoughts as these because they seem to me to indicate the truly human method of seeking for spiritual growth. Do not catch me up upon the word. I mean the method which God has suited to the nature of His human creatures. It goes back for the warrant of spirituality to that first fact of humanity that, in the im- age of God, God created man. Starting with the intrinsic capacity of man to receive the life of God, all spiritual growth consists in the more and more complete reception of that life. For its reception the total nature must be opened to its widest. That nature is related to the world around it, to the tasks and pleasures which offer them- selves on every side. In the exercise of these relations from low and wicked motive it is opened to low and wicked life. In the exercise of these same relations from high and spiritual motive it is opened to high and spiritual hfe. That is the simple argument. In two words, it conceives of the spiritual vitahty as educated primarily in the spir- itual exercise of the ordinary relationship between a man and the world in which he lives, and as exhibiting its re- sults in the regeneration and purification of the essential qualities of humanity. I called it the human method. It stands apart from two other great conceptions of the pro- motion of the spiritual life. It is different from mysticism on the one hand, and from ceremonialism on the other. 26 ESSAYS AND ADDRESSES. The mystic, iu all liis varieties, thinks of holiness as some- thing to be cultivated not by the contacts of life, but by the pure contemplation of God, and the deeper and deeper realization of certain sacred relations between the soul and Him; and he looks for the manifestations of holiness in certain theosophic consciousnesses and conditions of soul, quite separate in kind from the peculiar movements of our human nature. The ceremonialist sees the true cul- tui'e of holiness in certain specified acts, in obediences which are technical and arbitrary, and looks for the re- sult of religion in some forms of professionally religious life. The Quaker, disowning sacraments altogether, and the devotee, seeing in the sacraments acts not simply representative of, but quite distinct from, the dependences and obediences of common daily life — these are the types. One with his devotion to the inner experience, the other with his consecration to the outward exercise ; both have departed from this human concej^tion of spiritual methods. One makes religion meditation, the other makes religion discipline — asceticism, in the meaning tliat is indicated by its derivation. But religion is more than either : it is life. The mystic and the ceremonialist indeed are in us all. There is no perfect education that has not both these ele- ments in it. All life opens into the machinery of cere- mony below, and into the abstractness of mysticism above ; but the ordinary, healthful, life-giving processes of the world go on, neither underground nor in the clouds, but on the earth in the light of day, and on the solid soil. So, all men who live the full life will have their hours of mystical experience, and will sometimes invoke the aid of arbitrary disciplines ; but theu' real culture will be in the daily duties of their hves, and will show its res^^lt in the deepening and strengthening of those primary qualities of humanity which all men recognize and honor. I cannot read the life of Jesus without feeling that it METHODS OF PROMOTING SPIRITUAL LIFE. 27 was to this human culture of the spiritual life that He was always leading. This was His constant struggle with Pharisee and Saddueee. Against the ceremonialist, who would have asked the proof of His holiness in punctilious obedience to the law of Moses, and the mystic, who would have demanded of Him utter separation from the things of sense. He came eating and drinking, and pointed for the proof of His mission to works of mercy and the daily intercourses of love. He asked men to own Him as their Lord, because He showed in their divine completeness the qualities, and filled with divine perfeetness the relations, of humanity. That was the power of the Incarnation. He appealed directly to the human heart to understand Him, with its native perceptions quickened by His presence. '' Have I been so long with you, and hast thou not known Me, Philip?" The testimony of holiness was to be in deepened humility, patience, truthfulness, love, the old primeval human graces. The Christian was to be the perfect man, wrought into the image of God again through the obedience of the Son of Man. That was Christ's power; and the Bible, again and again, takes the same tone, and makes the process of redemption to be the re- generation of man into his true self by the faithful use and treatment of the world in the obedience and love of G-od. Every perversion of practical religion has been by the loss of the idea of this human culture in one or other of the two directions of which I have spoken. Let me point out what seem to me to be some of the benefits which come from as complete an association as possible between the processes of spiritual growth and the natural duties and relationships of human life ; from the human culture of holiness by life, as distinct from the mystic culture by meditation and self -consciousness, and the ceremonial culture by discipline and formal rites. First, think of its continuity. In all artificial religious- 28 ASSAYS AND ADDRESSES. ness, all that is not bound to life, educated through life, and uttering itself in life, there are gaps and breaks. It is the sadness of every Christian experience ; the loveless times between the moments of ecstatic apprehension ; the total secularness between the points of religious perform- ance. One of two things must come : either that terrible separation between the religious and the secular regions of our life, which is the ordinary condition of religious people, or the hopeless attempt to narrow the life down to that limited range of feeling or behavior in which alone is any chance of religion contemplated. The Spirit of God, expected only at certain seasons and by certain doors, finds sometimes those doors closed, and no welcome waiting Him at any other. It is only when we know that any door capable of admitting any influence may admit the blessed influence of God, only then can we be hopeful of keeping the breadth and variety of life, and at the same time of always receiving the culture and the grace of God. Let only the western shutters be open, and we shall only see the setting sun. Let all the windows be unclosed and expectant, and from sunrise round to sunset there shall be no interval in the unbroken light. The sun, in the com-se of the day, will look into them all. And again, with this vital or human culture of holiness there belongs the thought of the variety of the spiritual life : fii'st its variety in the individual experience, and then the variety among the differing lives of various Christians. We have all read the biographies of mj^stics and ascetics, and felt how monotonous they were; and then we liave read the story of some human Christian, whose holiness was trained through the activities of a bus}^ life, and uttered itself in the deepened and purified human qualities, and how varied that seemed, what play and movement there was in it. The pietist's contempla- tions and the ceremonialist's rites are the same from day METHODS OF PROMOTIXG SPIIUTUAL LIFE. 29 to day, and in all men. They lose the rich, personal, rare, and true distinctions of mankind. Their methods of saint- hood give to-day no new character beyond yesterday, and the nineteenth centnry no difference from the foiu'teenth. But if religion be cultivated in the doing of our utterly different works, and declare itself in the renewal of each man's own personality, then every man and every age will utter the spiritual life in some vernacular and color of its own ; and each will bear witness of itself that it is Christ's, by the way in which Christ has emphasized its special character. And again, by becoming more bound in with human life the spiritual culture becomes more intelligible, and so more influential to the world around us. Our devotion, like our doctrine, seems utterly incomprehensible to half the men we meet. It seems to be perfectly technical — the thing for people of a certain make, as music is for men with ears for harmony, and painting is for men with eyes for color. There is hardly anything more trying to the Christian sense than the phrase " the religious public," as describing one set or section of the community. What could interpret this unknown life to men ? Nothing so strongly as a really human way of cultivating and living it upon the part of those other men who are called Chris- tians. To see that you are growing holy through contact with the same things that make them wicked, and that by being holy you bring to their true depth and luster those qualities which, faded and dull, they honor still among themselves, that is the strongest influence which can go forth from you to make your brethren rise up and go with you to God. But, perhaps, most of all it is the reality of the great life-culture of holiness that gives it its value. The spirit- ual experience grows so unreal to us. The earthly things we seek stand out so sharp and clear. The heavenly 30 ESSAYS AND ADDRESSES. things are so intangible and vagne. It is not enongli to point to tlie weakness of oui* spiritual natui-e. There is something wrong about our method, that to us, laymen and ministers, the dear and solemn things of God so often seem vague and intangible. Is it not largely that religion stands so far apart from life, that the methods of spiritual growth do not seem to lie in these common things and tasks of every daj^, and that the fruits of spiritual hfe — joy, peace, righteousness — do not seem to be the perfection of, but something quite of another kind from, the joy and peace and righteousness with which we are familiar among men? What is this world for, and what are these human rela- tionships trying to do ? Let me say, very earnestly, that that is the question which has underlain a very large part of the difficulties with which we have dealt this week. It is the sense that that question is not answered in our churches ; that the Church is not set forth to be the ideal of human being, which keeps the masses from our minis- try. It is the consciousness that the Christian life which they are expected to proclaim and train is artificial and unhuman that keeps many nol)le young men from our ministry. It is a technicalness creeping up from our fundamental conceptions of religion into our tunes and hymns that paralyzes our Church music. Nothing but a forgetfulness of the largeness of the ideal Christianity as a world-embracing power could have bred the vices or the dangers of our Church government. AU the narrow lim- itations of the great preaching power have then- deep- est root in some mechanical, unhuman notion of religious life. Out of this have come the false and superstitious notions of the Bible which complicate the question of revi- sion. And, remembering the discussions of this morning, it becomes us most seriously to inquire whether the Chris- tian's frequent forgetfulness of the true purpose of this METHODS OF PROMOTING SPIRITUAL LIFE. 31 earth and all the relations that grow out of it, as the min- isters of the spiritual cultm-e of humanity — his failure to claim for it its profoundest relations to his soul and God — has not had much to do with the starthng agitation of the question whether the earth has a purpose, and beyond this, whether that soul and that God, which claimed so little from and laid so little hold upon the great clear world and its relationships, were more themselves than dreams. The family, the social life, the school, the shop — we dread and deplore the godlessness that often seems to be taking possession of them. But has it no connection with the neglect or the refusal of rehgious men to see in them the true cultui"e places of their profoundest piety, and with their unwilHngness thoughtfully to ask if the religion which conceives of itself as an aggregate of such qualities as these places have no education for, is not erroneously, imperfectly conceiving of itself? The home, school, and shop must be here on the fairest hillsides and plains of the world for something. If we will not claim them for their best use, and by our use of them exalt them to their best explanations, we need not wonder at the low and godless explanations which men give of them. When we are willing to see in them the ministi-ations of God ; when men, asking us for the means of grace, are pointed, fii'st of all, to the duties and relations of their lives as the places where they will meet God, where they will find the deepest experiences, conviction of sin, utter humility, the need of Christ, and the ideal of holiness — then how the dead earth and all that is upon it will glow with a fire that no materialism can quench. Till then, so long as we fail to use the world for spiritual culture, no wonder it be dead ; and who cares whether the dead thing sprang from the hand of a creator or took shape out of chaos by a force as dead as itself ? 32 ESSAYS AND ADDEESSES. The final spiritual state of man is pictured as a heavenly city, a place of thousand relationships springing- out of his human nature. The training-place of his spu'itual life must be a city, a place of many relationships as well. And the soul touched by God must hear what Paul heard : " Gro into the city, and it shall be told thee what thou shalt do." Continuity, variety, influence, reality — these are the things after which om' spiritual life is hungering and thirsting. To grow spasmodic, monotonous, uninfluen- tial, unreal, is not this the familiar death of the spiritual life that saddens many a closet and many a church ? I know full well the shallow look which may be given to all that I have said. I know that I may have seemed to set forth a superficial gospel of activity and work, too thin to hold any of the deep joys or sorrows, the infinite fears and hopes of the human heart touched by the finger and slowly moving on into the life and peace of God. But I have not meant that, and I do not think that I have said it. I have not said superficially that to labor is to pray. Prayer lies behind all ; but I am sure that by the finite act of labor the infinite act of prayer is helped to its completeness, as the soul grows by the body's minis- tries to its perfect life. Labor which is conscious of min- istering to prayer — that is, of giving the soul deeper per- ceptions of God and of itself — grows proud of and rich in its mission. It catches much of the loftiness of prayer itself. It goes enthusiastically and buoyantly upon its way, sowing the spiritual life, as the disciples went up the road to Sychar to buy bread for Jesus while He sat wait- ing by the well. It is evident enough that for such a method of promot- ing spiritual life as I have dwelt upon there is no set of rules to be put forth. No manual of devotion and no practice of any drill will bring about that healthy relation to all life which shall make it all minister to godliness. METHODS OF PROMOTING SPIRITUAL LIFE. 33 Faithfulness in the work of men for the fear and love of God — what rules can one give for that except the rule of ceaseless vigilance and perfect humility ? But this is evi- dent, that if the Church in every age had bound the out- ward life to the inward experience, and declared righteous- ness to be the true culture of faith, she would have been wiser than she often has been for her children's spiritual life. And it is evident, too, that any revival of religion which deals only with the emotional experiences or with ritual forms, and does not preach the culture of faith by righteousness, has not revived religion into perfect, per- manent vitahty. And it is evident, too, that any man seeking to be holy who does not set liimself in close, live contact with the life about him stands in great danger of growing pious or punctilious instead of holy. No book or discipline that separates a man from human life truly cultivates his spirituality. The noblest book of devotion in our literature, the " Holy Living " of Jeremy Taylor, has its value here, that it is neither a rhapsody of mystical senti- ment nor a directorium of religious behavior ; but a simple, manly effort to bring the highest task to every spiritual motive and the highest spiritual motive to every task. The man of the world, as we call him, has the tasks but not the spii'itual motives. The Christian has the spiritual motives and is sometimes ready to think that that super- sedes and makes unnecessary the task. There comes the strange unfaithfulness which we often see in earnest re- ligious people, not the least often in ministers. But it is possible for the man full of God to meet the world full of God, and to find interpretations and revelations of his Master everywhere. The Chvistian finds the hand of [Christ in everything, and by the faithful use of everything for Christ's sake he takes firm hold of that hand of Christ and is drawn nearer and nearer to Himself. That is, I think, the best method of promoting spiritual life. THE TEACHING OF RELIGION. (Divinity School of Yale University, February 28, 1878.) A YEAR has passed away since I had the satisfaetion of meeting you liere before — a year iu which we have all been busy in doing or preparing to do the work of the Christian ministry. At its close I come back to you with a deepened sense of what a privilege it is to be a preacher^ and witli a renewed pleasure and gratitude in being al- lowed to address those who are making ready to preach. I come at the kind invitation of your faculty to speak to you on the teaching of religion. But I want to say at once that I should not venture to come unless I might be allowed to stand in precisely the same position toward you in which I stood last year. I am no professor deal- ing wisely with the philosophy of a great subject; nor scholar to interpret to you its history. I am simply a working minister, ready and glad, if they care to listen, to tell those who are almost ministers how the problems of religious teaching have presented themselves to my experience. I rely entirely upon the sympathy of our common work. It is more in suggestions than in contin- uous and systematic treatise that I shall give you what I have to say, and I can only promise you in recompense for your courteous attention that I will tell you frankly and honestly just how the work of teaching religion has seemed to me as I have labored in it. And we must begin with definitions which need not detain us very long. I am to speak about the teaching of 34 THE TEACHING OF EELKilOX. 35 religion. What is religion? Religion I hold to be the life of man in gratitnde and obedience and gradually de- veloping likeness to God. There are no doubt more sub- tle definitions to be given, but that is the sum of it all, as it stands out in the experience of men. For a man to be religious is for him to be grateful to God for some mercy and goodness, to be obedient as the utterance of his grati- tude, and to be shaped by the natural power of obedience into the likeness of the God whom he obeys. And the Christian religion — using the term not as the title for a scheme of truth but as the description of a character — the Christian religion is the life of man in gratitude and obe- dience and consequent growing likeness to God in Christ. A Christian, when I look to find the simplest definition of him which any thoughtful man can understand, is a man who is trying to serve Christ out of the grateful love of Christ, and who by his service of Christ is becoming Christ-like. It is not simply service, for service may be the mere slavery of fear, and that is superstition, not religion. It is not simply grateful love, for that may ex- haust itself as a mere sentiment. It is gratitude assured by obedience, obedience uttering gratitude, and both to- gether bearing witness of themselves and accomplishing their true result in character. The life of man in grati- tude, obedience, and growing likeness to Jesus Christ, as simple as that let us make and keep the definition of the religion in which we live ourselves, to which we tempt, in which we try to instruct our fellow-men. And now, upon this essential character of the religion which we wish to teach must depend, of course, the possi- bility and the way of teaching it. But notice first how out of vague or partial ideas about what religion is, there have grown up and have been always present among re- ligious men various views about the possibility of teaching religion and the general method by which, if such teach- 36 ESSAYS AND ADDRESSES. ing were possible, it must proceed. Such views in general are four. First, there is the disbeliever's ■view. I do not mean the man who disbelieves in religion, but the man who dis- believes in teaching it. Of the disbeliever in religion itself we can say nothing. He does not come in here. Of course he cannot believe in teaching that which is to him a fraud or a mistake. But there are many men, them- selves religious, to whom it seems a full impossibility to teach religion. Many of such men are thoroughly devout and earnest souls. Sometimes, I think, the very intense- ness of their personal experience makes it seem to them incapable of being shared. It seems as if every man's religion must come to him as theirs has come to them, direct from God Himself. In times like these of ours in which the institutional and traditional methods of religion are shattered and disturbed, there are many, I think, who, driven inward from the tumiilt and distress around them, realizing supremely the personalness of their own life with Christ, f eehng how little they were led to it or upheld in it by any outward influence, distrust such outward in- fluence for any man. There are parents who feel so about their children. " Let them be taught of God," says the devout father. " Let them find out for themselves," says the undevout father. " I cannot teach them," says each, "religion is unteachable. It is too personal. It is not like history or arithmetic. There is a notion of fate about it. The soul seems to be like the sea-shore rock at whose feet the tide is rising. No hand can bend the rock to drink the water. No hand can lift the water to the rock. Only the appointed time of the fidl tide can bring the two together." I must not stop now to speak about this first conviction of despair. It would not certainly be hard to point out the fallacy of such an exaggeration of the personal respon- THE TEACHING OE BELIGIOS. 37 sibility as woidd forbid au}' most kindly and sympathetic hand to help it see the task it has to do. It is like saying that you must not feed a child gratuitously because the full-grown man is bound to earn his own bread. The result is that he dies a baby. But pass on and see what are the suggestions which come from various persons who do believe that religion is teachable, and who undertake to teach it. One man, one class of men, taking the intellectual idea which be- longs preeminently to that word " teaching," think of re- ligious teaching as something purely intellectual. It is the hard method of the hard sort of Protestantism. It is the method of the catechism and the doctrinal sermon. We shall come in a few minutes to the description of what part it has to play in the full religious teaching of a man. Notice now simpty that it is partial, that it involves a very partial notion of what religion is. The idea that religion has been taught when certain truths have been imparted, that the church is a school-room in the narrowest sense, this idea, with the consequences that follow from it of the saving power of the tenure of right beliefs, was far more common once than it is now. It belongs to every era of confessions when special conditions lead to the m'aking of minute creeds. The very dislike which this idea excites in some men's minds, the violence with which they rail against it, is one sign that it is passing away. There is a certain condition of the ocean which is neither storm nor calm. It shows that there has been a storm where we are sailing and that it is over. And there are persons who suffer more with seasickness tliere upon the dying swell of an old storm than when the fury of the gale is all about them. So there are many wi*iters on religion who grow more excited over the honors or errors of some system of thought that is in decay than they do over the system which is vigorous and live around them. They are always 38 ASSAYS AND ADUli ESSES. full of indignation about the shade or aspect of orthodoxy which is just passing out of sight. And you can tell that an idea is obsolescent when it begins to vigorously stir those men's dislike. So it is now with the abuse of purely dogmatic teaching which we often hear. Next to the conception of religious teaching which thinks of it solely as the imparting of knowledge comes that whi(;h dwells entirely on the creation of feeling. This is the soft Protestant method as the other is the hard Protestant method. This is the method of the revivalist as the other is the method of the dogmatist. Two parish churches stand side by side in one of our great cities. In their pulpits are two men, both teachers of religion, both teachers of Christianity. In those churches are gathered two congrega.tions, two bodies of men and women who have l^ecome assigned to those two churches by the curi- ous, inexplicable, seemingly acicidental processes which do decide at what table different men shall eat the bread of life. In those two churches two distinctly different works are going on. In one, week after week, year after year, men are being taught certain ideas as if the work for which the church was built was done when they had learned them. In the other, week after week, year after year, men are being stirred up to feel certain feelings as if the work was done when they had felt them. Two Christian parents training their children, two Sunday- school teachers teaching their classes, two missionaries going out to India — everywhere there are these two con- ceptions, the intellectual and the emotional, side by side. And then another. With his eye fixed peculiarly on action, looking supremely at the outward life, more or less clear in his perceptions of its strong and subtle relations with the unseen but always cognizant first of that which is seen, comes the third teacher. To him the teaching of religion means the government of action. His method is TEE TEACHING OF BELIGION. 39 drill. No longer the lecture-room or the prayer-meeting, but now the practical sermon, the confessional, the scene of spiritual directorship, where one man tells another man just wliat he ought to do. You see how far we have come now from him whom we saw first so cognizant of the per- sonal rights and privileges of his brother's soul that he thought it impossible for man to teach his fellow-man religion at all. We have come now to another man who does not scruple to take the delicate machinery of his brother's life into his meddlesome hands and move it as he thinks he has learned from his own experience that human lives were made to move. Each successive method has invaded a little more the personality of the scholar with the personality of the teacher than the one that went before it. You overwhelm a man more when you flood him with your emotion than when you enlighten him with your wisdom. But you claim him most completely away from himself when you give him a law and say, '' Do this," " Do that," neither showing him the deep reason nor firing him with the warm impulse for doing it. These are the various conceptions which men have of Avhat it is to teach rehgion. I must pass by the idea of those who think that it is totally impossible, though I venture to hope that it may come out as we go along how even their supreme and often beautiful regard for the separate personal rights of every soul is wholly consistent with what we shall find that the teaching of religion really is. But take only the three who do believe that it is possible and who attempt it in their various ways. They stand everywhere side by side. The dogmatist, the revivalist, and the ecclesiastic, as we may freely call them. One trying to teach religion as truth, another trying to excite religion as feeling, and another trying to enforce religion as law or drill. There is no age where all three efforts are not all at work ; though every age has its pref- 40 ESSAYS AND ADDRESSES. erence and stamps itself with some peculiar character, is supremely dogmatic or emotional or legal. There is no church which, however it may be known by the one spirit, has not the others present in it in some less degree. They so belong together that they never can be wholly sepa- rated. And yet they are always getting out of perfect harmony and union, and the faults and failiu'es of the teaching of religion come of the partial conceptions of what religion is, of its conception either as simply truth, or as simply emotion, or as simply law. And what is religion? We come back once more to our definition : " Religiou is the hfe of man in gratitude and obedience and consequent growing likeness to Jesus Christ." Now see how out of each of these words a line starts out and runs to something behind itself, and see how all those lines meet in a person, Jesus Christ — "gratitude to," "obedience to," "likeness to Jesus Christ." Gratitude, obedience, resemblance — these are the windows through which the personality of Jesus Clu-ist conies to the personality of men. After all, then, our definition of religion is but a description of means and processes. There is something yet more essential, that to which the means minister, that for which they exist. The purpose at least of the awakening of gratitude and obedience is the bringing of Christ to men. Religion, the Christian religion — once again to give it a simpler because a pro- founder definition — is the life of Christ in the life of man, and the teaching of religion, of the Christian religion, in its largest statement, is the bringing of the life of Christ into the life of man. I speak from the point of view not of theory, but of practice. I speak as a working minister w^ho has sought, as every working minister must seek, for some conception of his work which should most completely cover all of its demands and most constantly summon all his powers to THE TEACHING OF BELIGIOX. 41 do it. Every man in every work needs some such con- trolling' idea under which all details of method can be harmonized. It keeps the largeness of a man's labor. It saves him from the danger of first thinking there is only one wa}^ to do his work, and then narrowing his work to the possibilities of that single method. And now what is this primary comprehensive conception of the religious teacher's work which grows in the mind of the Christian minister through many years of work ? I answer without hesitation. It is the personal conception. It is the notion that his task consists in bringing the personal Christ to the personal human nature, to the human soul. I am sure that the highest delight and the highest effect of a man's preaching comes just in the degree in which all the circumstances of his work — first its great perpetual de- partments, the instruction in doctrine, the awakening of feeling, the enforcement of law ; and then all its miniite details, the methods of preaching, the habits of study, the ways of parish government, the relationships to in- dividuals— all find their dignity, their interpretation, their urgency, and their harmony with one another, by being included in one simple conception of the total mission of the preacher which is never lost and n-ever allowed to grow dim, the conception of a personal introduction of person to person, of the teacher by ever}'- means in his power making real and influential the personality of Jesus Christ upon the personalities of the men whom he is teach- ing. Forgive me if I dwell on this, and tty, by mere re- iteration, to make you feel how important it seems to me. It is what I have come here to urge upon you. It is what to me makes the whole secret of a happy, earnest, and successful ministry. The minister who has reached and holds always the simplest picture of what his minis- try means, that he is to make the personal Christ known to men, in the same way, in the same sense, only with 42 ESSAYS AND ADDRESSES. infinitely more of responsibility and joy than that with which one man makes his brother know another man who has helped him and who he knows may help them both ; the minister to whom this picture of his work in life is always clear, to whom all the duties and circumstances of his ministry play within this picture, giving it vividness, but never making it confused and dim — he is the preacher in every land, in every age, who really teaches men relig- ion. It is that picture lying distinct in the preacher's mind that gives to many a sermon which seems most ab- stract its vividness and power. It is the absence of that picture that weakens and scatters the force of the ministry of mau}^ an able and earnest man, and makes his careful arguments wearisome, and his impassioned appeals like so much very distant thunder. Look at the ministry of the Lord Himself, and see how clear this is. Jesus preached Himself, not in the second- ary, modern sense of giving definitions of His nature, and theories of His history ; He set His self before men and . bid them feel the power that came out from Him to all who were receptive with that personal receptiveness which He called /h/7/i. All that was dimly but majestically real to men in what they knew of Grod's personal creatorship and personal governorship of the world, all that was familiar to them in their daily domestic experience of friendship, all this came to its clear and consummate ex- hibition when Jesus stood forth on that pedestal of Jew- ish life which seemed so obscure, and has proved to be so high, and uttered those sublime personal announcementb' of himself : " I am the Light of the world ; " ''I am the Bread of Life ; " "I am the Way, and the Truth, and the Life ; " " Come unto Me." We wonder sometimes at what there is in Christianity which there is not in the four Gos- pels. What is the difference between our Christianity and that of Christ's disciples? Doctrines, types of feeling, THE TEACHING OF RELIGION. " 43 standards of conduct, made tests of Christian life to such degi-ee that it seems almost certain that the Apostles of Jesus, for all that we know of them in the Gospels, could only dubiously and by a stretch of charity be admitted as members of an. evangelical church in America to-day. But the main difference is not in what has been added but in what has been lost. It is the weakening and dimming of the personal picture of the Gospels, with the consequent loss of the idea of loyalty as the test of Christian condi- tion, that has allowed the doctrinal, the emotional, and the legal aspects of Christian life, which all have their place within the personal idea, and, under it, live in absolute ' harmony, to come up into a prominence and often into a conflict which is nowhere in the Gospels. And when we pass outside the Gospels, when we come to the earliest Christian teachers, St. Peter, St. Stephen, St. Paul, the same character is there as clear as possible. They declare truth, they appeal to feeling, they challenge the conscience, they play on the whole range of human nature, but always everything is within the circuit and comprehension of the friendship, the mastery, the brother- hood of Jesus Christ. It is always the " simplicity that is in Chiist " that blends the multiplicity which is in Chris- tian teaching. The range and freedom of thought, emo- tion, action, is secured by the perpetual assured preemi- nence of the personal Christ. It is where the Spirit of the Lord is that there is liberty. Back and forth over land and ocean, up and down from beggar to prince, from prince to beggar, they go, telling men of Jesus and sum- ming up all their appeals in that one exhortation which no amount of cant and vulgar ignorance has ever yet suc- ceeded in robbing of its fine and beautiful attraction, *' Come to Him," " Come to Jesus." It would be interesting to trace the history of the teach- ing of Christianity and see how it pales or brightens ac- 44 ESSAYS AND ADDRESSES. cording as this personal character of it all is obscure or vivid. That I must not undertake to do, but all the his- tory of preaching would sustain the truth of the essential- ness of this personal element in Christianity. Indeed, the peculiar feeling with which in the best days of the min- istry Christian people have regarded their ministers, so different from that with which the superstitious savage honors the priest he fears, or that with which the scholar regards the teacher to whom he listens, that confidence blending respect and love which, so far as I know, is unlike what an}?- other disciple has for a,ny other teacher through the world — this seems to me to be one indication of the personalness of the religion which the minister teaches. He who brings me a truth has himself something of the sacredness of the truth he brings. He who kindles a feel- ing must always have something of the brightness or the sadness of the emotion he excites. He who enforces duty must have some of the dignity of the task which he de- clares. But he who makes me know a gracious and great Person who is to me thenceforth truth, love, and law to- gether, has something of the mystery and dearness and infiniteness of the Person whom he has made me know. And this has made the singular power which has belonged, among all true ministries of men to men, to the ministry of the Incarnation and the Cross. I am sure, if we could trace it, that the degree of the best feeling of various peoj^le toward various ministers would correspond very exactly with the degi-ee to which those different ministers realized themselves, and made real to their people the first great truth of Christianity, that Christianity is Christ. If you have this in your ministry, my friends, your min- istry must be strong, whether its strength be of a sort that men will recognize and j^raise or not. Without this, it cannot be strong, however rigid or however persuasive it may seem. It is the necessity of the preacher's work that THE TEACHING OF RELIGION. 45 it should know its best motive. In all works it is good, tion of Christianity. The personal conception is not trou- 76 ESSAYS AND ADDRESSES. bled with it, I may freely say, '' The friend whom I bid you to know a year ago, see, he is different, he is greater, wider, wiser, deeper than I thonght," and you may be all the more ready to see Him now because of the partial knowledge of Him to which it was my privilege to help you then. A personal relation offers the highest pic- ture of the combination of stability with progress, but an intellectual conception is always sacrificing stability to progress or else progress to stability. Again, in the prominence of the personal conception lies the only reality of Christian union, and if the division of Christians is a chief cause of skepticism anything that helps Christians into unity must minister to faith. I do »/•- not see the slightest promise in any dimmest distance of what is called the organic unity of Christendom on the basis of episcopacy or upon any other basis. I do not see the slightest chance of the entire harmonizing of Chris- tian doctrine throughout the Christian world, that dream which men have dreamed ever since Christ ascended into heaven, that sight which no man's eye has seen in any age. But I do see signs that, keeping their different thoughts- concerning Him and His teachings, men, loyal to Christ, owning His love, trusting His love, may be united in the only union which is realty valuable wherever His blessed name is known. In that union, and in that alone, can I find myself truly one alike with Peter and with Paul, alike with Origen and Athanasius and Augus- tine, alike with Luther and with Zwingle and with Calvin and with St. Francis and with Bishop Andrews and with Dr. Channing, alike with the prelate who ordains me and with the Methodist or Baptist brother who is trying to bring men to the same Christ in the same street where I am working. And no union which will not include all these ought to wholly satisfy us, because no other will wholly satisfy the last great prater of Jesus. TEE PULPIT AND POPULAB SKEPTICISM. 11 My one great compreliensive answer, then, to the ques- tion, What is the best method of dealing in the pulpit with popular skepticism ? is reall}^ this : make known and real to men by every means you can command the per- sonal Christ, not doctrine about Him, but Him ; strike at the tyranii}^ of the physical life by the i^ower of His spiritual presence. Let faith mean, make faith mean, trusting Him and trying to obey Him. Call any man a Christian who is following Him. Denounce no error as fatal which does not separate a soul from Him. Offer Hun to the world as He offered and is fore^^er offering Himself. I know that this is perfectly unsatisfactory. "Why, this is just what I would do," you say, " if there were not a skeptic in the land." Of course it is, and it may be that it is about time to say what I ought perhaps to have said when I began my essay, that I do not believe in, at least I do not know any way in which popular skepticism as such and by itself is to be dealt with in the pulpit. Tliat confession, I know, leaves but very little value in my essay. But I do think that the preacher who is conscious of skep- ticism, and counts it his duty to meet it and deal Avith it directly in his preaching, is sure to preach very differently and to reach very different results from Christ and His Apostles, and all the great preachers of all time. There- fore I have dared to dwell wholly on positive methods. He who is building up health is thereby conquering dis- ease. He who is preaching truth is thereby confuting error. He who is making men obedient to Christ is thereby rescuing them from their slavery to themselves, from their self-will and self-trust, which is the root and fruit of all the skepticism Avhich is really harmful. I think the men who confute skepticism are always the positive, not the negative men — not the men who disprove error, but the men who make faith. 78 ESSAYS AND ADDRESSES. And yet I would not be completely unsatisfactory if I can help it. And so before I close I would venture to state as briefly and clearly as I can ten things, which, as it seems to me, a preacher in his pulpit now may do to make the time in which we live less skeptical, and so to help forward the ages of faith which are sure some day to come, and are sure when they come to be ages of better faith than any which the ages past can show. 1. It is needful that our clergymen should be far more familiar than they are now with the character of the skep- ticism by which they are siu-rounded. The popular skep- ticism is one in source and reall}^ one in character with the skepticism of the schools and of the scholars. The minister ought to be acquainted with the newest develop- ments of thought, not in their details, not so that he can completely discuss them from the puli:)it, for that is impos- sible, and the attempt to do it only hurts the Christian cause and makes the Christian minister often ridiculous. But he ought to be so familiar with what men are think- ing and believing that he can know the currents of pres- ent thought, see where they cross and oppose, where they may be made to harmoinze with the thought of Christ. This familiarity is something which must be constantly kept up in the active ministry. But its foundations ought to be laid in the theological school. And here more than anywhere else one fears, I think, for the faithfulness with which our theological schools are doing their whole duty by their students and the times. I cannot doubt, as I look back, that many of our noisiest and most faithfid teachers have failed to realize how much their boys needed to be furnished with an understanding of the precise nature of the unbelief of the nineteenth century, and of the character of thought in which that unbelief would show itself among the people to whom those lioys when they were ministers would have to preach. The}' might THE PULPIT AND POPULJE SKEPTICISM. 79 have saved many of tlieir seliolars more than one anxious hour, and more than one emljarrassing surprise. 2. The second necessity is that every preacher shoukl clear up his own faith ; that each man should decide just what lie believes himself. Let us not be allowing men to think from what we sa}^ that we demand of them a faith which we have not ourselves. Let us triist truth. There is nothing so terrible as the glimpses that we get occa- sionally into a minister's unbelief, and sometimes the con- fusion which exists below seems to be great just in pro- portion to the hard positivencss of dogmatism which men see upon the surface. The most pitiable and powerless of all preachers is he who tries to preach doctrine which his own soul does not really believe and use. 3. And thirdl}^, the minister in days like these ought to make it his duty as well as his right to claim and express the fullest fellowship of faith with all believers, whatever Christian name they bear. There is need of the solidity of faith being made manifest. Let not religion come to seem to men the affair of a party. Let us insist that when the iiost is against us we will have nothing to do with the miserable business of making hits and flinging captious criticisms at one another. I think that hardly any man does more for popular skepticism than he wdio, while the world is trembling on the brink of atheism, spends his life in championing the shibboleths of his denomination. 4. We ought never to seem to have despaired of truth, and to have left the region of thought, and to have re- treated into organization and drill as safe refuges. This is just what ecclesiasticism and ritualism seem to the world to have done, and the world is largely right. This of all others is the time to keep Baptism and the Lord's Supper reasonable and spiritual and grandly simple, and to guard them from all suspicion of magic and mechanics. 5. Never forget to tell the young people frankly that 80 JiSSAYS AND ADDEESSES. tliey are to expect more liglit and larger developments of the triitli wliicli you give them. Oh, the souls that have been made skeptics by the mere clamoring of new truth to add itself to that which they have been taught to think finished and final ! 6. These are no times for trimming. He is weak to- day who does not preach the highest spirituality to the materialist, and the highest morality to the profligate. The unbelievers of to-day despise compromise, and love to hear the fullest truth. 7. We need to remember how irreligion has invaded religion, and to imitate its methods. It has got hold of the passions and enthusiasms of men, and there has been its strength. We must claim those passions and enthusi- asms for religion. No cold faith or preaching will reclaim the world. 8. The life of Jesus must be the center of all believing and all preaching. Not abstract, but personal, is the sav- ing power. "Behold the Lamb of God," "Behold the Man," those are the summons to which men will always listen. 9. The Chiu'ch must put off her look of selfishness. She must first deeply feel and then frankly say that she exists only as the picture of what the world ought to be. Not as the ark where a choice few may take refuge from the flood, but as the promise and potency of the new heavens and the new earth she must offer herself to men. 10. And tenth, above almost everything, to-day you and I must keep our means worthy of oiu* ends. Long enough have preachers asked men to believe in a pure and lofty truth which was administered in impure and sordid meth- ods. Down to the least argument we use, down to the least bit of church machinery that clicks in some Dorcas Society or guild-room, let the truth and dignity of God be felt. THE PULPIT AND POPULAR SKEPTICISM. 81 These are tlie ten. I dare not say that the preacher who tries to do all these things will change all the skep- ticism aroniid him into faith, bnt I am sure that he will live a very bra\^e, healthy, happy, useful life while he is busy in his struggle. For behind liim he will always feel the power of the great God and dear Lord for whom he worked, and he will know that, whether by him or not, that God and Lord must certainly some day assert His truth. And before him, however dark the great mass of un- belief may still remain, he will see single souls catching the truth and shining with a goodness and joy which must become new centers of faith. ADDRESS AT THE TWO HUNDRED AND FIF- TIETH COMMEMORATION OF THE FOUNDA- TION OF THE FIRST CHURCH IN BOSTON. (November 18, 1880.) I THANK yon very much for allowing me to say a few words, and I will lionestly try that they shall be very few. I should like to say something of the impression which this celebration of John Cotton makes upon one of his descendants. My connection with my very great grand- father is so remote that I may venture to speak of him without hesitation. I am so full of pleasure in life, and so full of the sense that that pleasure is very much in- creased by its being my happiness to hve in Boston, that I cannot but be grateful to him who had a great deal to do with my living at all, and a great deal to do with mak- ing Boston what it is for a man to live in. I am not sure that he would accept of his representative. I am not sure that if he saw me standing here and speaking any words in his praise, and knew exactly where I was standing, there might not be some words rising to his lips that would show that neither I nor you were wholly what he could approve. He might say prelatist, he might say heretic. He might call me by the first name, call both of us by the second name ; and yet that criticism, as we stand in the presence of his memory on this commemoration day, would make absolutely no difference. John Cotton, in the life into which he has passed, now looks deeper and THE FIRST CHUECH IX BOSTON. 83 looks mder, and we have a right to enter into communioii ■with the spirit of the man, and not simply with his spe- cific opinions or the ways in which he worshiped ; we may claim liim, at least, as one who w^ould honor oui' recogni- tion of him, as one whom we are at liberty to honor. It would be a terrible thing, it would narrow our life and make it very meager, if we had no right to honor and to di'aw inspu-ation from auy men except those we agree with and who would approve of us. As we look abroad thi'ough history and around through the world, I think sometimes that our noblest inspirations and our best teachings have come from the men who, when we com- pare our views mth theii's, are very far from us ; of whom, when we ask for their approbation of us, we have to beg with very hesitating lips. And so we may at least claim the privilege of Jolm Cotton that he shaU give us the inspiration of pajdng him our honor. And it seems to me that a man who stands, as this man stands, at the beginning of the history of a nation or a town, is an everlasting benefaction to the town or nation. It is an example that never can be exhausted. The way in which Washington stands at the beginning of the na- tional history and sends down a perpetual power, full of strength and Ijeauty , is the great t^-pical American instance of the way in which, at the beginning of the history of every town, of ever}- city, of every State, of every institu- tion, there will l)e these t^-pieal men. Our "Western States are gathering them now, just as oui- Eastern States gath- ered them two hundi-ed years ago ; and the earnest, faith- ful ministers and the consecrated men who are dedicating themselves to the building up of institutions in our West- ern land are going to pass into that perhaps mythical, but perhaps for that reason all the ti-uer and more genuine, admii-ation into which they who founded our institutions two hundred and fifty years ago have passed now. For 84 JESSAYS AND ADDRESSES. liis standing at the beginning of our history and sending us his inspiration perpetually we thank John Cotton. And I thank him, as a Church-of -England man, as a man loving the Episcopal Church with all my heart, I thauk him for being a Puritan. I thank him for giving me a renewed assurance of that which all history teaches me to believe, and that which my knowledge of God would make me belie"\re if no illustration of it were written in history, that God will not permit a Church to become cor- rupt, and degenerate, and unfaithful to its duties without sending a man who shall bear testimony against it and stir it to the regeneration of its life. The Church of Eng- land has no men to thank to-day more devoutly. Not her great scholars, her great orators, her noble teachers, her splendid missionaries ! She has no men to whom she ought to be more grateful to-day than to the Puritans who told her in the seventeenth century how degraded her life was becoming. But when I recall the name of this church, it fills me with still other feelings of gratitude. " The First Church of Christ ! " I think there is infinite suggestion, infinite poetry, in the thought of the first church of Christ in any land. If a man feels, as the disciples of Christ do feel, that all the earth is His ; if we believe that whatever ele- ments of good the savage lands have brought forth they have brought forth by the inspiration of His Spirit work- ing even where His name has been unknown, and that all these lands are Avaiting for the touch of the Christ they cannot recognize to be quickened into a life they have not guessed of yet — then what shall we think of that Church which stands perpetually bearing the proud record in its name that it was the first to bring the everlasting and universal Christ into a new section, a new district of the world ? Here, for the first time, when the First Church of Christ was started, that became possible which had TJSE FIBST CHURCH IN BOSTON. 85 been impossible before. No church cau stand here in Boston to the very end of time that must not humbly owe and pay its debt of gratitude to the First Church of Christy that set His name upon these hills and made the winds vocal with the new ideas of His gospel. The seventeenth and the nineteenth centuries belong wonderfully together. The seventeenth centmy was a time of deep rehgious conviction; the nineteenth century boasts itself of large toleration. It is perfectly natm-al to find, as we look into the history of the seventeenth cen- tury, that to deep conviction toleration was again and again sacrificed ; and as we look into the history of the nineteenth century, we can see we have not yet obtained such a large and symmetrical manhood that one is not still sacrificed to the other, and find again and again con- viction sacrificed to toleration. It would be a poor world to live in if it could get to the end of itself in nineteen centmies, and there were not others before us greater and better. That is one of the elements by which the future centuries will be made better ; we must look to the com- bining together in the same character of those elements which have existed in different centuries thus far. When absolute religious conviction shall abide side by side witli earnest toleration ; when men shall believe with all their hearts, as they believed in the seventeenth century, and at the same time be willing that other men shall believe differentl}', as they are now in the nineteenth century ; when toleration shall not be oppressed by conviction of religious truth ; and when private thought and belief with regard to religious truth shall make men all the more ten- der and jealous of the rights of other men's consciences — then there wQl come a century which, combining the bless- ings of the seventeenth and the nineteenth, shall make a nobler world to live in than we have seen yet — the time that has been prophesied, but has not yet come, when 86 2:55 J r^ AXD ADDSHSSES. merer and truth shall dwell together, when righteousness and peace shall kiss each other. That our celebration may help the coming of that day I am sm'C is the prayer of every one who joins in any of these commemoration services. ADDRESS AT THE THIRTIETH ANNIVERSARY OF THE BOSTON YOUNG MEN'S CHRISTIAN ASSOCIATION, MUSIC HALL, MAY 22, 1881. Mr. President, Ladies, and Gentleimen : It is both as a citizen of Boston and as a Christian minister that I re- joice most heartity in the privilege of being- here to-night, and saying a few words in recognition of the good work that the Christian Association has done, and is doing, and is going to do in the city of Boston. It belongs to an an- niversary occasion like this to recall the principles which underlie all the work of the association and are its in- spiration. Just as a birthday brings back to a man the ultimate fact of his existence, and makes him think of himself in those relations which, in the ordinary details of his life, he is very likel}^ to forget, so man}^ things in the work of the association which may be lost sight of to some extent in the multitude of its details come back to us on this anniversary occasion. We need to remember that the existence of this association is due to the applica- tion of certain principles, and we need to strengthen our- selves, and to say the words by w^hich we can strengthen those who have the administration of the affairs of the institution, in devotion to the principles which lie at the root of their work. I suppose the first feeling which at- taches to Christian Associations — this and multitude of others like it which are scattered all over our country, and, indeed, throughout a large part of the Christian world to-day — is a thought of safety. The idea of the 88 ESSAYS AND ADDRESSES. peril of luiman life grows as human life becomes more complicated. That idea of peril and danger is most of all associated with the large cities, where human life becomes complicated above all other places in the world. Life, which seemed to be so simple in the village — although I am not for myself sure that the perils of the city are larger than the perils of the village — yet becomes so much more complicated in the city than in the village that the j'^oung man who comes from the country into the city seems to be entering into perils and dangers which did not surround him when at home. It is the principle of Christianity and the Christian Church, and this great in- stitution and other Christian institutions, everywhere, to recognize that peril, and to stand as a guard over the safety of the young man who comes into the city. But when we say this, it seems to me that we want to recog- nize what the Christian idea of safety is. There is an idea of safety which is constantly creeping into the regions of Christianity that is not the true Christian idea of safety. There is an idea of safety which rests upon seclusion of a life and tries to keep a man by putting walls around him. The Christian idea of safety is a larger idea than that : the scheme of the New Testament is sah^ation. ^' I will show him My salvation " is the promise God has made to man through all the wondrous Book, both in the New Testament and in the Old. Now, try to put in the i)lace of the word " salvation " the word " safety," and see how you have taken the soul out of the New Testament, and the beauty that springs from it. The salvation of the New Testament is something vastly more than we put into the single word " safet3^" The salvation of the New Testament is something positive. We mean by the word " safety " something negative. The New Testament idea has this great principle in it, this is the soul of it — that the only way to bring about salvation for a man in this THE YOUNG MEN'S CHRISTIAN ASSOCIATION. 89 world, or any other world, is not by tlie building- of walls around liini, but by tlie putting of life within him. There ai-e two ideas which are associated with that word " safe- ty," with that whole class of words. We may think of a man saved from danger simply by being put where dan- ger cannot get at him. The idea of the Christian religion everywhere is something different from that, something vastl}' nobler than that. The saved man of the New Testament is a man so full of the Spirit of God, which is the true life of human kind, that he can go into the midst of danger and pass through it unhurt. The true idea of salvation, as it is given to us in the Bible, is the idea of a nuxn into whom there has been put, by the Lord of life, such a stream of continual and complete vitality that he walks through the midst of danger and casts the danger aside from him, as the sunbeam casts the cloud away when it is shining down upon the earth. Now, it seems to me that the great beauty of such an association as this is in that it is based, very largely, at least, upon the New Testament idea of salvation. It is not an institution which tries merely to build safeguards around the life of a j^oung man. It is a positive institu- tion in all its work. It tries to give a man the highest thoughts of life, the highest impulses of life. It is an educational institution and a working institution. It fills a man with ideas, and it fills a man with motives ; and these are the two things that keep the total man alive. A man perils intellect if he has not ideas ; a man perils morality if he has not high motives; and therefore, an institution which brings to him also work, supplying him with continual motives through contact with his fellow- men — that is an institution which really brings salvation to a man. The ship that sails forth upon the sea is anx- ious for its safety ; but if it were only anxious for its safety it would linger at the wharf, and be eaten up by 90 ESSAYS AXV ADDBESSES. the rot of time. Only as it strikes forth into the sea, and sails straight onward to its port, is its true safety and usefulness secured. The soldier going into battle trem- bles at the danger before him ; but he knows that the only escape from danger is to forget danger, and go right onward in his work. The man who looks forward in the world, and sees how thicldy human life is surrounded by the dangers of disease, finds himself filled with fear ; but the true man learns that not by guarding against disease, biit by filling himself full of health, by healthy work, he is really preserving himself from the dangers that are besetting him of pestilence on every side. So in this great, positive thought of salvation, in the idea of salvation not as a rescue from some punishment here or hereafter, but as the doing of the work of God, by the strength of God, the soul attains its highest life, and casts its dan- ger aside without even knowing it. This, it seems to me, is what the Christian world is coming to learn more aud more. The Christian world up to this time has dwelt very largely in the thought of what would happen to mankind if it were bad. There is now coming to man- kind and to the Christian world a revelation of the noble- ness of doing right. There is coming to the Christian world in the 3'eai-s before us a great manifestation of the glory of holiness that is goiug to make men almost sink out of sight the punishment of sin. This, it seems to me, is the real truth, the real promise that lies at the root of all this shaking of men's thoughts Avitli regard to the punishments of the other life. Men have not come to doubt that sin in this world, which is governed by a just God, must necessarily bring punishment ; but men are coming to doubt whether the fear of the punishment that sin is to bring is the God-ordained motive that is going to save men from their sin. Men are coming to believe more and more, and they will come to believe THE YOUNG MEN'S CHRISTIAN ASSOCIATION. 91 fnlly, that the real impulse which ought to be the salva- tion of mankind is the delight and glory of serving God with those powers which, as they go forth nnder his com- mandment, and are filled with his inspiration, more and more iDear witness to themselves as the true, active, iden- tifying powers of our human life. Now, it seems to me that here is the first thing we have got to congratulate ourselves upon in the existence and the progress and growth of this Christian Association in our city. It preaches salvation by preaching truth and by preaching work ■ by bringing men into the power of Him who is a Saviour, not because He l)uilds a wall around any soul which He takes into His service, but because He takes every soul that is willing to serve Him, and fills it with a divine hunger for truth, and a divine passion for good works and humanity, which will be the real salvation of the soul from error on the one side and from weakness on the other. It is, therefore, a saving institution. It repre- sents the saving power that is in the city. When one speaks of it so, he speaks of it very largely with reference to a single life. Let me say a word or two with regard to the power of such an association as this, and all this association represents, as it relates to the life of a community. No one can think of it merely with reference to those individuals who happen to be directly connected with it. I should be sorry to think that the Christian Association limited its good work to the eleva- tion of those whose names are written upon its muster- roUs. It represents a great power for good in the com- munity ever3^where. What the community needs are these two things — peace and elevation. The life of a community, the life of a man with his feUow-nian, halts and staggers, because it is fuU of animosities and dissen- sions on the one side, and because it grovels and is gross upon the other side. Just think of the life of anj^ society 92 JiSSAYS AND ADDRESSES. in the midst of which you live, and then think if you could take out of it the tendency to quarrel and the tendency to crawl, the tendency to separate man from his fellow-man and the tendency to bring a man to live among^ his lower passions, his lower thoughts, how it would spring up full of beauty in its true idea. Now, the Christian Church stands in the midst of the community, continually labor- ing for these two things. Do not tell me that the Chris- tian Church has again and again set herself as the foe of just exactl}' these two things. Do not tell me that again and again the Christian Church has been the very mis- tress and breeder of dissensions ; that again and again, with her superstitious and mercenar^^ theologies, she has degraded the life of man instead of elevating it. No man knows that better than the Christian minister and the student of Christian history. But any man who has given attention to the history of human thought knows that the noblest and the sweetest things are the most capable of corruption, and that everything tends to cor- ruption just in the opposite way from that in which its true perfection lies. The Christian Church has again and again preached and practised intolerance ; the Christian Church has again and again made herself a minister of superstition and degradation to mankind ; but yet it re- mains true that in the essential ideas of the Christian Church, and also in the great progress of her history through all her career, from the days of Jesus to these days in which we live, her great total tendencj^, the great sweep of her influence, taken as a whole, has been for the brotherhood of mankind and for the lifting of the human race to higher plains of life. It must be so, because the great idea of Christianity, the idea which Jesus preached, nay, the idea that Jesus was, was the sonship of mankind to God. He came to tell that, and to^tell it not simply in any gospel that He preached, but to tell it in His very THE YOUNG MEN'S CHBISTIAN ASSOCIATION. 93 life, in the deeper presence with which He shone with the divine Fatherhood Himself — He came to tell iis that man was the son of God. There can be no truth which shall ultimately raise humanity to its true height, which shall ultimately make every man know every other man as his brother, but a recognition of the divine Fatherhood that is over us all, and the gathering of all men into the fam- ily of God. Christianity again and again has wandered from that idea ; she has preached the selection of a few individuals as the favorites of God ; she has drawn lines instead of rubbing out lines ; she has bidden men make much of that which Christ, our Master, made very little ; but her essential ideas and her great, broad tendencies are all in the direction of the brotherhood of mankind under the Fatherhood of God, who stands at the head of the great family in which we all abide. You must always judge of a man, of a nation, of a community, of the Church, of humanity in general, not by special charac- teristics that have belonged to it in any particular ages, because every man and every institution are again and again false to themselves; but you must judge of them by the essential ideas which are involved in their very con- stitution, and by the broad tendencies and great move- ments which you discern in them. Many and many a man does mean things who, in his heart, is liberal, and Avho, in the long drift and. current and purpose of his life, is generous. And so the Christian Church stands as the representative of this great Fatherhood of God, although it has again and again disowned some men out of the family, and drawn its lines where God has sent it to rub out lines and make all mankind as one. As one looks around the world, and as one looks around our own land to-day, he sees that the one thing we need is personal character. The thing we need in high places, the thing whose absence is making us all anxious with 94 ESSAYS AND ADDIiESSES. regard to the progress of the country among those who hokl the reins of highest power, is not what we hold to be mistaken ideas with regard to pohcies of government, but it is the absence of lofty and unselfish character. It is the absence of the complete consecration of man's self to tlie public good ; it is the willingness of men to bring their personal and private spites into spheres whose ele- vation ought to shame such things into absolute death ; the tendencies of men, even of men whom the nation has put in very high places indeed, to count those high places their privileges, and to try to draw from them, not help from humanity and the community over which they rule, but their own mean, personal, private advantage. If there is any power that can elevate human character ; if there is any power which, without inspiring men with a super- natural knowledge with regard to policies of government, without making men solve all at once, intuitively, the in- tricacies of problems of legislation with which they are called upon to deal, without making men see instantly to the very heart of every matter ; if there is any power which could permeate to the very bottom of our commu- nity, which would make men unselfish and true — why, the errors of men, the mistakes men might make in their judgment, would not be an obstacle in the way of the progress of this great nation in the work which God has given her to do. They would make jolts, but nothing more. On in the course which God has appointed her to run she would go to her true results. There is no power that man has ever seen that can abide ; there is no power of which man has ever dreamed that can regenerate hu- man character except religion ; and till the Christian relig- ion, which is the religion, of this laud — till the Christian religion shall have so far regenerated human character in this land that multitudes of men shall act under its high im- pulses and principles so that the men who are not inspired with them shall be shamed at least into an outward con- THE YOUNG MEN'S CHRISTIAN ASSOCIATION. 95 formity with them, there is iio secimty for the great, final continuance of the nation. It is these powers, then — it is these powers that belong to Christianity, that belong to the Christian Church : the power, in the fii'st place, of making human life safe, or filling it with the highest motives and setting it to the liighest work ; the power, in the next place, of harmoniz- ing dissensions and of making men tolerant of one an- other as the common childi'cn of one great Father; and the power, in the third place, of elevating the whole plane of human character, so that men shall be in large part, and shall at least pretend to be throughout, unselfish, and de- voted to the interests of theu' fellow-men. There lies the hope of this community, of this country, of the world. I am speaking of Christianity ; I am speaking of the Chris- tian Church. How about the Young Men's Christian Association "? Unless this association be the simple repre- sentation of Christianity among us, in all its breadth and length — unless this association, however it may be specifi- cally organized, has a large tolerance and sympathy for every man who has a love and reverence for truth and is trying to be a servant of Jesus Christ, I have nothing to do with it. But because I believe it has that broad sj-m- pathy, because I believe that it is ready, with its pliable organization and with its large life, to move forward as God is moving the whole Christian Church, forward to larger thoughts and broader sympathies, therefore I am mth it heart and soul, and rejoice in ererything that promises for it yet greater work and yet greater prosper- ity in the future than it has in the past. May God bless it — bless it with a deeper consecration to His will ; bless it with a larger love for His Son, whom to love is, in the simple, literal meaning of the words, everlasting life ; bless it with a broader and yet broader sympathy with every work that any man in the name of Christ is doing to make the world better and to glorify God. LITURGICAL GROWTH. (Address at the Seventh Congress of the Protestant Episcopal Church, Providence, E. I., October 27, 1881.) I THINK, Mr. President, that the principle npon which we have based onr discnssion this evening- is this : Every- thing- mnst grow in its own sphere, and the growth of any especial thing depends upon the nature of that thing. It is therefore the nature of the Liturgy which must deter- mine liturgical growth. About a year ago I had the opj^ortunity of attending service, after having just landed in England, in a church in Liverpool. I found the church crowded with people, and discovered, what my American ignorance had not known before, that it was the day on which was especially cele- brated the anniversary of the coronation of the Quefen. When the sermon came, the venerable clergyman preached upon the growth of the nation diu-ing the forty A-ears which had elapsed since the Queen came to the throne. He pointed out to us the growth of England in political and social advantages, in commercial wealth, in the vari- ous arts and sciences, and by and by he came to that which it was absolutely necessary he should preach upon in a church — the gi'owth of England in the matter of religion ; and he told us that it might be supposed from a great deal we had read in the newspapers that while England had grown everywhere else and in everything else, she had become less religious. He said he was happy to assure us that that was not the case, and he proceeded to give us 96 LITURGICAL GROWTH. 97 the reason why it was apparent that she had advanced in religion, as well as in every other great interest of human life — namely, that whereas forty years ago the black gown was used in many pulpits, it was now almost never seen, but the sui'plice had taken its place ; in the second place, that while formerly the choral service was considered the especial mark of a peculiar class, it was now almost uni- versally used in English churches. On these grounds the gentleman asked us to reassure our faith, and to believe that England was going, not backward, but forward, in the belief and practice of Christianity. That seemed to be a very parody upon the whole idea of liturgical growth. One's mind went l^ack to the wondrous progress that had been made in Christian thought during those forty years. One thought how the Christian faith had put itself forth in large works for brother-man, in all the different depart- ments of his need, and then found himself brought down to believe in the progress of Christianity, not because of these great new relations of the human mind to Christian truth, but because the black gown had been superseded by the surplice, and because the choral service had taken the place of the plainer ritual of those earlier days ! That leads us prettj?- much to our idea, of which I began to speak, of the principle upon which we shall judge of liturgical growth at all. Liturgical growth is not growth in the amount of liturgy, nor is it an increase in the pre- dominance of special kinds of liturgy. Liturgy — that is, the use of stated forms of worship — has its assigned pur- pose, and by that alone is to be guided. It is an instru- ment, and not an end. It is a means, and not the final purpose to which the means is directed. And any growth in the adaptation of the Liturgy to the" uses for which it is designed — for bringing man's mind into larger contact with truth, man's soul into deeper love for the Saviour, man's will into more complete submission to the will of 98 JESSAYS AND ADDRESSES. God — that is litui'gical growth, and nothing else is. That is true growth of litui'gy in the Chiu'ch of Christ. Litm'- gical growth may be of all sorts and kinds. If the dimi- nution of the amount of liturgy is going to accomplish this great purpose, then its dindnutiou is litm-gical growth. If liturgical enrichment is to accomplish this piu-pose, then that is liturgical growth. If the flexibility, the open- ness, the largeness of the union of liturgical principles with the other great principles of worship is going to ac- complish this purpose, then the larger the uuion of that idea with the others which have always existed among Christian men and women, the greater and truer is litur- gical growth. The Liturgy of our day stands somewhat in the grand and august position of the heir of some great estate in some European country, where the honors and emoluments which belong to the ancestors come down to later generations. The Liturgy which is inherited from the far-off ages of the past walks among the men of its own time as the privileged and responsible heir of all the centuries. He walks among the men of his own time as one who has received a precious inheritance. He stands between the past and the present ; but always his truest duty is toward the present, and not toward the past. His duty is to bring out of the past only that which is going to be of real use and value right here in the present. The sentiment of the country sweeps away instantly, sooner or later, with its wise indignation, any mere inheritors of the past who accept no function with reference to the present. But the sentiment of the country, however democratic, is ready to accept any representative of past generations and their richness which accepts as its only function the duty it has to perform to the times in which it is set to live. This is the only principle we can possibly apply to the problem of liturgical growth. We apply this more especially to our own Church. LITURGICAL GROWTH. 99 What, tlieu, are tlie ways in which liturgy, or inherited forms of worship, fixed and stated, which have come to us from the older times, do become of larger use in the present, and fulfil the conditions which our own times imperatively demand? Certainly one means is by flexi- bility. One means is by openness to change. It seems to me that when we have once fixed such an idea' of what it means, there can be no question as to the continual power of the Christian Church to change the forms which it has received from the Christian generations which have gone before. We can see where the difficulty comes, and where the value and importance of absolute fealty to htm*- gical princij^les applies itself to liturgical special forms, and methods which have come down to us from the past. Oui' dear old professor down at Alexandria, Dr. Sparrow, used to have a special question with which he used to eom^ront some of the classes that came under his tuition. His question was this : " Are positive institutions in gen- eral as purely positive as particularly positive institu- tions?" The "positive institution in general" has in re- ligion a positiveness which does not belong to the par- ticular positive institution in which it is for a little time embodied. Therefore it is that we are to rejoice in such action as was taken in our last General Convention for the establish- ment of a commission for the enrichment of our Liturgy. I do -not feel so deeply as my dear friend who intro- duced that resolution feels the value of the results which are immediately to come from it. But I feel as deeply as he the desirableness that there shoiild be established — and • I value that resolution because it seems to me to establish — the absolute liberty at any time for a change of the ser- vices, in free and immediate adaptation to the conditions in which we find ourselves placed at any moment of the Church's life. Nothing could be worse than to have set- 100 ESSAYS AND ADDRESSES. tied down upon onr Prayer-book the palsy of changeless- ness. I should almost be ready, even if I saw no possi- bility of change for the better — even if I feared change for the worse — to change for the purpose of establishing the desii-ableness, the possibility, of the liberty of change. I do not believe our Liturgy is flexible enough, when, in the memory of those who have been in our Church cer- tainly for not a great many years, there have been a large number of intelligent, thoughtful, conscientious, faithful ministers and laymen of this Church who have left our communion and established a communion of their own, because the Church in which they lived was absolutely un- willing to allow them the disuse of one word between the covers of the Prayer-book. It is not flexible enough so long as it is possible for such a thing as that to take place. Do you say that the Reformed Episcopal Church left our body and established themselves as an indepen- dent Church for other reasons as well ? Grant it. I do say, however, that all the history of that seceding body bears witness to the very strong presumption, amounting almost to a certainty, that if our Church had met them with a cordial willingness that they should disuse one word in one service of the Prayer-book, and say that they meant by that disuse a doctrine which our Church by no means excommunicates persons for believing, but which multitudes of us hold, feeling that it can be comprehended within the use of this word, and stand unchallenged, they would have continued in membership with us to this day. And so long as that state of things exists — a circum- stance unexamiDled in ecclesiastical history — our Church is stamped with the stigma of inflexibility, and is unde- serving of the great claims which are constantly put forth in its behalf. The other point with regard to the true principle of liturgical growth is this : that the principle of liturgism, LITURGICAL GROWTH. 101 the use of stated and appointed forms, can never be able to do tlie full work of the Church of Christ unless it be in sympathy with the larger, fuller, freei', more extem- poraneoas forms of worship Avhich belong in the hearts and souls of men. I do not believe that, whatever use we make of the Liturgy, and however much our souls may be wrapped up in the beauty of the liturgical principle, it is possible for us to do it justice unless we put it in union with larger and freer methods of worshij), and let it call them into its service. Just exactly as authority never did its full work unless it was in continual relation to the freedom and the willing obedience of those over whom it ruled ; just as organization, while it is the great power by which society lives, only lives as it continually welcomes to its aid spontaneity; so the liturgical principle is never going to do (done the great work of ministering completely to the use of all kinds of men under all sorts of circum- stances. It has shown, again and again, its weakness and incapacity, and put the Chui-eh into a position in which it ought not to have been put before the great world of reasoning men. When, some ten years ago, the great city of Chicago was in flames, and the news came to the General Conven- tion of our Church, then holding its triennial session, that this dreadful calamity was transpiring, moved by a pro- found sense of the impotency of human help, and by that spirit of supplication for divine interposition which pre- vailed through all our land, our Houses of Convention voted that they would suspend their work and go to prayer. What did they do ? They knelt down together and read the Litany ! It does seem to me that in tlie minds of the people who looked at that scene, tlie fact of their feeling compelled to resort to the use of this stated form must have ax)peared in the light of a certain sign of bondage — that a Church, when called upon to pray for a 102 ESSAYS AND ADDllESSES. burning city, should have considered it necessary to use a form of prayer in which ahnost everv other kind of hu- man woe is laid before God except the woe of a burning town. It goes straight in the face of the common sense of mankind ; and however j'ou and I, familiar with the thought embodied in the forms ecclesiastically provided, are able to put ourselves in sympathy with the spirit and intention which may underlie the words of the prayers which are appointed to be used, no Church is ready to present itself before the country and ask the people to accept its methods of worshij) so long as that picture which I have placed before you stands upon its historic ]3agc. And if the same thing were to occur again to-day, our Church has no other picture to paint upon the pages of the present. When the story of our President's sick- ness, and afterward the ncAvs of his death, crossed the ocean the other day, and excited that wonderful sympathy there which has been so often referred to, even the inflexi- bility of the English Church had to break away from its conventionalities, and, somewhere or other, crowd into its services some sort of a form of prayer specially adapted to the exigency of the hour. They had to pray for Presi- dent Garfield ; and it was necessary to place a new prayer in the English Litiu'gy, in order that our country and its stricken President might be prayed for in England. If to- morrow the sad news came to us that England's Queen was seriously ill, and that the great sorrow which so re- cently came to our land was in any way threatening that dear mother-land, we have got to violate the j)rinciples of our Church and the genius of the liturgical principle, in the absoluteness with which it is forced continually upon us, before we could offer up our prayers for the honored sovereign of that beloved nation. Now, my friends, it does seem that all such absolute and required use of set forms of prayer is a simple proof LITURGICAL GROWTH. 103 of a lack of faitli in the Liturgy. It seems to me that there is something strange in this. We believe, and de- clare our belief, in every way, before the world, that the litiu'gical method of worship, in the glowing forms which have come down from the past, ha\dng the sub- lime authority of all the Christian ages for its sanction, is something which, by its intrinsic excellence, so re- commends itself to all people that if they once use that they will never want to use anything else. We embody those forms in our Book of Conmion Prayer, and then we go to work and guard our clergy, who are supposed to be in the heart of the fascination of that Prayer-book, with all sorts of rules and prohibitions, lest perchance they should go out of this sheepfold, in wliich we believe it is the passion of the whole world to keep itself. It shows a lack of faith in our own Prayer-book, or we could trust to its intrinsic excellence, without put- ting prohibitions around it. It argues a lack of faith in the men whom we have ordfdned, and "whom, in welcom- ing them into the communion of our Church, we believe to be full of the spirit of that Liturgy. Certainly, when our Church stands before the world and makes the great, grand claims that it is making all the time — that it has opened its gates so ^^dde that any Christian man who wants to come in and worship may do so ; that it offers the only methods by which this Christian land, if it woidd come into our communion, might live and worship as one united Christian nation — it is absolutely impossible that it shall consistently claim that, so long as more and more, by stricter and stricter prohibitions, it rules out one of the eternal forms in which the human soul, not simply in its privacy, but in the company of those of kindi'ed purpose, will approach its God. The aspirations of our Church are to the habits of our Church like the old oak to the flower-pot. The aspirations are too big for the 104 i:SSAYS AND ADDEESSES. habits in whicli tliey are now trying to live. Sooner or later the aspirations have got to break the halnt, or the habit will stifle the aspirations. The fiower-pot has got to break nuder the pressm*e of the growing oak, or the growing oak has got to die, or else live perpetually stunted within the j^oor flower-pot which it values more than its own life. I believe in ritual with all my heart. I beheve in ritual just exactly as the artist believes in and uses his art. I am a Ritualist, and I am unwilling to give so good a name to any sect or party in our Church. I am a Ritual- ist, and just because I am a Rituahst, and because I be- lieve that we have the noblest Ritual, I wish to see that Ritual become most effective in commending itself to the hearts of all men ; I am willing to trust that Ritual in largest union with all the devotional usages of men about us, because I believe it has a persuasive power, which will attach to itself the extemporaneous worship of those who have once been brought under its influence, and will make it a loftier thing than it has been ordinarih' among those who have liad no such influence as liturgical worship to shed upon it. Therefore I state earnestly my behef that one of the great necessities for the growth of the Litm-gy in our communion is the breaking in upon the exclusive- ness of set forms of worship, and the giving of large free- dom and liberty to laity and clergymen, bishops, priests, and deacons, when the occasion calls for it and their souls move them, to go to God, in their churches, at their altars, at their prayer-desks, and pour out their supplications to the Almighty Being for the very tilings they need, instead of being compelled to go in some roundabout way and pray for a thousand other things, and trust Omniscience to know the thing that is in then* hearts. AUTHORITY A^D CONSCIENCE. (Ninth Congress of Protestant Episcopal Church, Detroit, Mich., October 7, 1884.) In tlie Appendix to the " Apologia " Cardinal Newman writes thus of the Church of Rome and the Church of England : " Then I recognized at once a reality which was quite a new thing with me. Then I was sensible that I was not making for myself a Church by an effort of thought. I needed not to make an act of faith in Her. ... I looked at Her — at her rites, her ceremonial, and her precejyts; and I said, This is a religion; and then, when I looked back upon the poor Anglican Church, for which I had labored so hard, and upon all that appertained to it, and thought of our various attempts to dress it up, doctrinally and estheticaUy, it seemed to me the veriest of nonentities. Vanity of vanities, all is vanity ! " They are earnest and pathetic words. And they are words which never could have been written by any man except one who judged a church wholly by the standard of mitlior- itij. They mean that he who has been seeking for a Church has sought a body clothed with tlie power of in- fallibly declaring what is true. It is not strange that to one who so sought a Church, the Chm-cli of England must have seemed a very nonentity. The only wonder is that to a man seeking with such a definition in his mind any religious body in the world should have seemed to really be a Church. The words of Newman bring us face to face with the 105 106 ESSAYS AND ADDEESSES. gist of the whole matter, which I state at once as it ap- pears to me. AngHcau Protestantism, attempting to rival Rome on her own groimd, to do for the world what Rome claims to do, to live by the method of authority, must always be a nonentity, a failure. Aughcan Protestantism, attempting to do another thing, to treat the soul in another way, to pro\dde for the world another ciUtm-e, to educate and appeal to the human con- science, has before her the power of mimense usefulness and power. We, who cannot with Newman choose the Church of Rome, may say either of two things : we may deny her claim of inf aUibihty and look elsewhere for what we cannot find in lier ; or, taking broader ground, we may maintain that it is not of the nature of a Church to be an infallible oracle of truth at all ; that such an oracle does not exist on earth; that Christ did not mean it shoidd exist ; that the true notion of a Chui-ch is of a home for struggling men, aU seeking truth together, each helping all the rest, the past teaching the present, the j)resent correcting the errors and adding to the wisdom of the past, all aided in the search by one great Spirit, all loyal to one Master, whom to know is everlasting hfe, but whom not one, not aU, have yet known perfectly, and each ac- cepting what truth he comes to accejDt on the appro^'al of his own conscience given to the evidence which it has offered to his mind and heart. He who maintains that the Church is this opens at once the question of authority and conscience. We begin mtli this, that behind all man's knowledge of truth must always he truth itself, perfect in its own completeness and known perfectly to God. There are three pictures of the way in which that truth might be attained by man. The first is by an infallible oracle estabhshed as God's mouthpiece on the earth. The second is by the individual search of every single mind working AUTROEITY AND CONSCIENCE. 107 absolutely by itself. The thii'd is by each mind working conscientionsly, yet always using the experience of other minds, past and present ; always working and living as part of a great whole, yet always finding the ultimate sanction of every truth for it nowhere short of its own intelligent assent. I am speaking solely of the religious search for truth, and therefore, of course, in either of the three methods God is the som^ce of truth, and all truth can come only from Him to man. But I assume also that God at no moment withholds any truth from any man who is in the position and condition to receive it. Of these three methods Rome frankly and cordially pro- claims the first, and clearly enough she designates where the oracle is to which the truth-seeker must go to find infallil)ility. Almost all the Christianit^y which has re- jected Rome has still been haunted by the si:)ecter of in- fallibility, and a large part of it has very gradually come — much of it is very far from coming yet — to see that the whole conception of an infaUible and oracular utterance of God upon the earth is neither necessary for the salva- tion of manldnd, nor in harmony with the genius and spiiit of the Christian gospel, nor sustained by the expe- rience of man. The general body of Protestants tried to find infallibility in the Bil)le until criticism said to them, in tones that they could not mistake, ''It is not there." The Anglican Protestant made more of an infallible Church, till the increasing earnestness of an age which bred such men as Newman forced to her consciousness the fact that if the Church of England were an oracle at all, she was an oracle without a mouth, that no aj)paratus of liturgical exactness or deliberative synods coidd supply her with that which she had not by nature — a tongue to utter the truth which all men are to accept as true. Most natural is this craving for infallible and complete knowledge resting on indisputable authority. Our Lord's 108 ESSAYS AND ADDRESSES. disciples sought it of our Lord, and could not believe tliat in Him who said, " I am the Truth," all truth was not con- sciously and completely held. But Jesus did all that words coidd do to set them right. " Of that day and that hour knoweth . . . not the Son but the Father," He re- plied, as if He would distinctly say that the power of l^erfect knowledge was not necessary for the perfect man. What then ? It surely cannot be necessary for the perfect Chiu'ch. Let this idea, that somewhere on the earth there is to- day a being or a possible group of beings which otherwise than by the great methods of devout thought and study and experience may come to and possess the knowledge of truth, of such truth, for instance, as the character of the Bible, or the destiny of man, or the true method of the conduct and organization of the Church — let such an idea as that, I say, be lifted absolutely from the minds of Christian men ; let the whole idea of Church authority save as the contribution of material which is to be freely criticized and used by the conscience and intelligence of men be swept away and disappear, and think what vast gain of vigor and reality and so of light must come ! Just see what some of the gains must be. 1. The notion that alisolutely identical belief is essential to identity of Christian faith and life must be dissipated, and the community of many men of many minds must shape itself in actual existence, as it now hovers before the dreams of men dissatisfied with sects and schisms. Into that notion of the need or the possibihty of identical belief many waves of influence have been eating their way for years. But that notion must be shaken from its foundation once for all as soon as the dogma of infalli- bility is broken down. In proportion as the search for a seat of infallibility occupies the attention of a Church, the oneness of many men of many minds must grow weak AUTROEITY AND COXSCIEXCE. 109 within her. A Church bound to the doctrine of authority cannot be a comprehensive Church. A Church conscious of infallibility could have no Church Congress. 2. Again, the Chiu-ch freed from the dogma of infalli- bility— and I hold that the dogma of authority is mean- ingless unless it involves a practical infallibility — would enter upon the culture of personal character which be- longs to freedom, and to freedom only. "Wliat shall I believe regarding this truth ? " " How shall we organize this institution and conduct this rite ? " The answer to those questions I must seek either in old authorities which have settled them long ago past all appeal, or I must seek them in my own present intelligence used at its best and freest. If I seek it in the first way, I exercise my power of antiquarian research and my power of submission. If I seek it in the second way, I exercise my conscience and my will, my prudence, my charity, my honor for the past, my greater honor for the future, my honesty, my fairness, in a word, my character, and my humanity, and that is better. You see it is not a question of what truth a man shall hold, but of Iww a man shall hold all truth. Greater than my holding this truth or that, is the way in which all truth is held by me. The one way of holding truth, if it were perfect!}^ successful, ends in acquisition, and the other way makes character. And because directness and simplicity are not merely noble parts, but also powerful means of character, I say, in the third place, that because those qualities would be set free hy the disenchantment of the Christian mind from the notion of infallibility, therefore such a disenchantment would be great gain. What tor- tuous sophistries, what reasoning in circles, what following out of hopeless lines, this search after the seat of infal- hbihty has involved ! Universalit}'', antiquity, consent. These are the notes of truth, said Vincentius of Lerins. 110 ESSAYS AND ADDRESSES. Quod semper, quod iihique, qnod ah omnibus. How often we have heard it ! I confess that nutil very lately I had never read through the " Comnioiiitoriuni " of the monk of Gaul. I doubt if many who are strongest and loudest for the Vineentian Canon have ever read it yet. I venture to commend it to their reading, for it is very eloquent and clever. But it is most of all noteworthy for the magnifi- cent unconsciousness and constancy with which it travels in a circle and Avitli which it begs the question. There arc not many books which can surpass it in these points. A universality which fixes its own limits of space, an an- tiquity which decides for itself just at what point in his- tory the development of truth must stop, and a consent which expressh' announces that it is limited to those who were '• suis quisque temporilms et locis in imitate comimmionis et fidei 2)ermauentes" these, surely, while they may confirm the believer who wants to be confirmed in his comfortable faith, can have little to say to a critical and unbelieving world, can bring no assurance to an honest and perplexed inquirer. And yet to such straits as these of old Vincentius are all men reduced who, not acknowledging the localized infallibility of Rome, search elsewhere for an absolute authority in tlie Church of Christ. One of om* o^vn bish- ops hunts it through a course of lectures to young stu- dents of theology, and, convinced that it is not in the pope, nor in the councils, nor in the episcopate, finds it filially in the '' ecmnenical mind," which is the Vineentian Canon over again, and which can by no possibility make itself known except b}^ an atmospheric influence or by a show of hands. Another of our own bishops, in an amaz- ing letter, declares that the practical infallibility lies in the present English translation of the Bible, no word of which, he says, " can be touched either by criticism or by skepticism without disloyalty to the Church, danger to AUTHORITY AXD COXSCIEXCE. Ill the tnitli, and liai-in to souls," not even if the touch he dreads be simply put forth to remove from the New Tes- tament a text of whose spuriousness there is not a shadow of reasonable doubt. Ah, no ; any dogma of infallibility resident in the Chm-ch, upon which some people would reh' for the Church's motive power, is too heavy a load for the Church to carry. It is like the old trouble in managing balloons which has never yet been conquered. The ma- chinery with which men have tried to proj)el and steer the balloon has always proved so heav}' that it has brought the Avhole thing tuml)ling to the ground. Let us leave infallibility to the Church newspaper, where it belongs. The Church nuist know that God treats error in this world just as He treats poverty. He sweeps it off by no one fiat of omnipotence. He knows that some day it must go. It has the seeds of its death in itself. He bids men fight with it and kill it. He gives them the perpetual help of His Spirit of Light. But as He has opened no stream of flowing gold where poverty may go and gather an instantaneous supply for every need, so He has estab- lished no oracle of indisputable truth where ignorance may find at once an unerring answer to every question. Tlirough the ever more skilful use of the natural powers which God has given him — a use always seeking and always receiving the inspiration of God's present Spirit — so in the midst of all sorts of doubts and blunders man must struggle on to the final victory alike over poverty and over error. And if we lay aside — not sadly and reluctantly, but gladly and as getting rid of an incumbrance — if so we lay aside the notion of infallible authority, then what re- mains"? I answer, Individualism. Let us not fear that name of which some people have such terror. Let us not fear the thing which that name represents. Individual- 112 ESSAYS AND ADDRESSES. ism is the assertion of the personal life, with its rights, its responsibilities, and its needs, as the central object of the final pnrpose of the world. The religion of the Son of Man cannot, must not ignore or be afraid of that. There are many units, but the unit of hundreds and the unit of tens are built out of and exist for the unit of the one. It can live without them, but they cannot live without it. The old Rome forgot the jjersonal life in government. The new Rome has forgotten it in rehgion, and we know the mischief and the sufferings of both. There is no hope for the world but in a healthy individuahsm. And individualism in matters of thought means private judg- ment. Private judgment ; that is another word of which we must not be afraid. It may help us not to be afraid of it if we ask ourselves whether there is really any such thing as judgment which is not private. I know of no such thing. The man who chooses the authority to which he will unhesitatingl}^ submit must choose by private judg- ment if his act is to have any reality and power. The Church invites me to the most stupendous act of private judgment when she bids me allow her claim to infallibil- ity. Probably the most impressive and influential act of private judgment about religious things which has taken place in all this century was the decision which took John Henry Newman to the Church of Rome. But just here comes in all that is true — and that is very much — in the current laudations of authority and depre- cations of individualism. The individual does not stand alone. Backed by the past, surrounded b}^ the present, with the world beside him, nay, with the world, in the great old Bible phrase, " set in his heart," it is his right, his (h\tj, his necessity, to feed himself out of all, while yet to his own personal conscience must come the final test. His true individualism is not the individualism of AUTHORITY AND CONSCIENCE. 113 Robinson Crusoe, but the individualism of St. Paul. Here is the difference between the second and the third of the methods of attaining truth of which I spoke. To use authority /or evidence; to feel the power of reverend beauty which belongs to ancient goodness ; to distrust ourselves long when we differ from the wisest and the best ; to know that the whole truth can and must come, not to the one man, but to the whole of humanity ; and to listen to that whole as it groans and travails with its yet unmastered truth — to do all this and yet to let ourselves call no con- viction ours till our own mind and conscience has accepted it as true — that which is really the great human truth after which the theories of Church authority are search- ing— that is the genuine relation, I take it, of the eon- science to authority. And that has nothing in it of the spirit of slavishness or death. It ought to be remembered that the subjects to which authority may be applied are various, and that to each of them it must apply different^. In general the subjects of authority are three — facts, dogmas, and rites. Let us look at each a moment. 1. Facts must be taken on authority. The story of the Gospels, the acts which Jesus did, the words which Jesus said — these must be taken on the word of those who saw and heard them first, and of the men who heard them from their fathers age after age. That is the Avitness of the Churcli. That is the testimony of history. Wliere is the duty of the private judgment there f Clearly enough, it is in the free use of criticism. The authenticity of rec- ords, the possibility of mistake, the intrusion of prejudice, tlie partialness of view — these are the fields for conscien- tious labor. The man who seeks to do it for himself ought to be encouraged. The man who helps his breth- ren to do it, or who tries to give them the results which it has reached, ought not to be blamed or silenced by 114 ESSAYS AND ADDRESSES. public opinion or by bishop, however what we choose to call the peace of a congregation may be disturbed. 2. And as to dogmas — what are they ? A dogma I take to be a truth packed for transportation. As the primitive man gathers the rich living fruit in some tropical forest, and it is dried and packed away and put on board the ship and sent half around the world, and then unshipped, unpacked, and its infolded life made once more live and active as it becomes food or medicine for living men of far more complicated lives and needs than they had who gathered it ; so truth is gathered and compressed in dog- ma, but the dogma must be opened into truth again, and unfold its native life in richer forms of power before it can be either spiritual medicine or spiritual food. Author- ity is the ship in which the dogma sails. I get my dogma from authority as I get my package from the ship. But it is the soul, the conscience, which turns the dogma back again to truth. No soul can feed on dogma, as no man can eat the package which is landed on the wharf. Au- thority VLVdiy bring Avhat dogma has been given it to bring. Only the dogma which can be opened into truth can live. Only the truth which the soul appropriates gives life. Authority is responsible for safe packing and safe trans- portation, but the real living part of the process is when, after the unpacking has taken place, the conscience tries to turn the dogma which it has received back again into truth. 3. And what shall we say about rites and ceremonies "? The final warrant of any rite or ceremony must be in its joerceived utility. The two great rites which are alone essential to the Christian Church, the sacraments of Baj)- tism and the Lord's Supper, coming with the most august authority, that of our Lord Himself, could ihey have been what they are to-day to thousands of souls, even with the command of Christ behind them, if they had rested all AUTHOEITT AND CONSCIENCE. 115 these centuries solely upon the great foundation of the Lord's commandment, and had not entered into living association and witness of themselves to millions of souls which have found in them strength and grace and growth f It is needless to ask whetlier the soul ought to keep them solely on the authority of Christ's command, even with no perception of their utility. He who made the sacraments made them such that they must help the souls which use them rightly. But two things we certainly may say : fli'st, that the perpetual demand of souls for the witness of util- ity in the sacraments has always had and must always have great power to keep the sacraments pure and simple, to keep them from becoming superstitious or fantastic; and secondly, that every other rite and ceremony what- soever, whatever be the authority it brings, every form of ecclesiastical organization and procedure whatsoever, must ahvays in the long run come inexorably to the test of spiritual usefulness, and must stand in or fall out of tlie Church's use of them by that. Of all the consequences of this magnifjdng of the con- science over authority we may be well aware, and yet not be afraid but very glad to welcome them. The great value of it is that it must give a character of constant freshness and perpetual renewal and progress and hope to religious thought and life. We hear much to-day about the new theology. It is not a name, it is not a thing to fear. If man is really gi-owing nearer to and not farther away from God, every advancing age must have a new theology. One may freely use that term, the new theol- ogy, just as he freely speaks of the new astronomy and the new chemistry. The stars and the elements existed long before and lie far beyond all man's knowledge of them. But man, with his faculty of knowledge, grows capable of receiving ever richer revelation of the skies and of the earth. God and God's ways of grace, the Bible 116 ESSAYS AND ADDIi ESSES. and its truths of incarnation and redemj)tion and eternal life, are fixed facts entirely independent of man's know- ledge of them. They would shine on like the stars even if no man looked. The principle of authority not merely emphasizes their fixity, but insists also that the mind of man must stand in an ever-fixed relation to them. The principle of conscience, accepting- their fixity, recognizes and values the element of ever-advancing humanity, and in its ripening power expects, not new truth, but new knowledge of truth, to be emerging from the sea of ignorance forever. The principle of authority looks back ; the principle of conscience looks forward. Since aU truth in all times is one, it must be that all earnest men who look for truth in any one direction must often be the means of pointing out Avhere truth lies in other directions than that in which they look. Thus, no doubt, the champions of j^ure author- ity have often enlarged religious thouglit. Columbus sailed to find the Old World, and he found the New. This we must joyfully grant, Ijut none the less we may believe that the enthronement of authority as the regal principle in Christian thought is very dangerous. It tends to kill enterprise ; to cultivate sophistry ; to perjietuate error ; to magnify machineries and little things, and to hinder the progress of mankind. Every real question goes deep and fixes its roots about the heart of things. I am sure that the question which we are to discuss this evening goes very deep and involves the whole nature of religious truth. Are the truths of religion, the truths and doctrines of Christianity, outside and wholly foreign things, ha\ing no essential belonging with the soul of man, not anticipated there, brought in entirely from anotlier world, and lying, when once there, like the jewel in its setting, with no vital relations be- tween them and the soul in which they lie ? If so, the AUTHORITY AND CONSCIENCE. 117 principle of authority must be the great principle in the imparting of Clu'istian truth. On the other hand, is Chris- tianity the fiiMlment of man's best hopes, the answer to man's deepest needs ? Is essentialness and not arbitrari- ness its soul and genius? Is redemption the perfection of humanity in its own human lines ? Is the Church the ideal human society ? Does Christian truth lie in the soul which it has entered like the seed in the field, each made for each ? Is Christ the Lord of man ? Is eternal life the deepening of the present life and not merely its substitu- tion by another life some day ? If the answers to all these questions must be strong affirmatives, then the conscience, not the authority, must be the final appeal; in the con- science, not in authority, must he the final warrant of all Christian truth. All real questions settle themselves. What if it should appear that this question of ours, the question whether authority or conscience is to produce faith, settled itself most conclusively by its gradually growing evident that authority by its very nature cannot produce faith, because that which authority produces when it has done its per- fect work is, in the nature of things, not faith, but only assent? This, I believe, is the profoundest truth ui)on this subject, and the real key of all the matter. It is not a question whether you will carve your statue with a chisel or a brush, because statues are not carved with brushes, but with chisels ; because that which a brush makes is not a statue but a picture. So, to say that faith henceforth must be made by authority would be to say that henceforth there can be no more faith ; that the Christian Church is dead. But it is not dead. It is a living Church, still receiving messages and inspirations from, nay, rather still feeling within itself, the moving Spirit of its Master, still liable to error, still able to distinguish truth from error and its 118 ESSAYS AXD ADDRESSES. Master's movements from its own self-will and from the enemy's delusions ouly by the faithfid use of its own con- secrated faculties, by its present conscience judging each present problem in the brightest and purest light it can command. Such is the living Church, in which our souls must live. Has such a Church no dangers? Indeed, it has count- less dangers, but its very dangers are alive and hopefiQ in comparison with the dead and hopeless dangers of a Church which, under the strong power of authority, com- mits itself to a half -developed, a half -recorded, and a half- imderstood past. A CENTURY OF CHURCH GROWTH IN BOSTON. (Memorial History of Bostou, Mass., 1885.) The Rev. Joshua Wingate Weeks was a minister of the Church of England, and a missionary of tlie Society for the Propagation of the Gospel in Foreign Parts, settled at Marblehead, in Massachusetts. In the year 1778 he wrote to the society an account of " The State of the Epis- copal Churches in the Province of Massachusetts Bay, New Hampshire, etc." Of the churches in Boston he wrote : " Trinity Chiu'ch in Boston is still open, the pray- ers for the king and royal family, etc., being omitted. The King's Chapel is made use of as a meeting-house by a dissenting congregation. The French have received leave from the Congress to make use of Christ Church for the purposes of then* worship ; but the proprietors of it, having notice of this, persuaded Mr. Parker to preach in it every Sunday in the afternoon, b}^ which means it remains untouched. ... In a word," he adds, " our eccle- siastical affairs wear a very gloomy aspect at present in that part of the world." What Mr. Weeks thus wrote in 1778 was mainly true two years later, in 1780, at the point where I begin to sketch the history of the Episcopal Chm-ch in Boston for the last hundred years. In the meantime the Rev. Stephen C. Lewis, who had been chaplain of a regiment of light dragoons in the armj^ of General Burgoyne, had become the regular minister of Christ Church ; but the congrega- tion of the Old South were stiU worshiping in the King's 119 120 ^^^jr^ AND ADDRESSES. Chapel, and the Rev. Dr. Samuel Parker was in charge of Trinity. These were the thi-ee Episcopal parishes in Bos- ton in the year 1780 : the King's Chapel, with its honse of worship on Tremont Street, Christ Church in Salem Street, and Trinity Church in Summer Street. The King's Chapel had been in existence since 1689, Christ Church since 1723, and Trinity Church since 1734. It is not difficult to see what it was that made '' our ecclesiastical affairs" wear such a '' gloomy aspect in this part of the world " in the daj^s which immediately followed the Revolution. To the old Puritan dislike of episcopacy had been added the distrust of the English Church as the Church of the oppressors of the colonies. Up to the be- ginning of the Revolution the Episcopal Church in Boston had been counted an intruder. It had never been the Church of the peoj^le, but had largely lived upon the patronage and favor of the English governors. The out- break of the Revolution had found the Rev. Dr. Henrj^ Caner rector of King's Chapel, and the Rev. Dr. William "Walter rector of Trinity. Both of these clergymen went to Halifax with the British troops when Boston was evac- uated in 1776. In one of the record-books of King's Chapel Dr. Caner made the following entry: "An unnatural rebellion of the colonies against His Majesty's government obliged the loyal part of his sub- jects to evacuate their dwellings and substance, and take refuge in Halifax, London, and elsewhere ; by which means the public worship at King's Chapel became sus- pended, and is likel}^ to remain so until it shall please God, in the course of His providence, to change the hearts of the rebels, or give success to His Majesty's arms for suppressing the rebellion. Two boxes of church plate and a silver christening-basin were left in the hands of the Rev. Dr. Brejaiton at Halifax, to be delivered to me or my order, agreeable to his note receipt in my hands." A CENTURY OF CHUIiCH GROWTH IN BOSTON. 121 At Christ Church the Rev. Dr. Mather Byles, Jr., re- signed the rectorship on Easter Tuesday, 1775, meaning to go to Portsmouth in New Hampshire ; but poUtical tumults making that impossible, he remained in Boston, and performed the duty of chaplain to some of the regi- ments until after the evacuation. At Trinity alone was there any real attempt to meet the new condition of things by changes in the Church's worship. The parts of the Liturgy having reference to the king and the royal family were omitted, and this was the only sign which the Ej^is- copal Church in Boston made of any willingness to ac- commodate herself to the patriotic feeling of the times ; and even with her mutilated Liturgy the associations of her worship with the hated power of England still re- mained. No doubt the few people who gathered in Trin- ity Church during the Revolution were those whose sympathy Avith the cause of the strnggling colonies was weakest and most doubtful. As one looks at her position when the war is closed he sees clearl}^ that before the Episcopal Church can become a powerful element in American life she has before her, first, a struggle for ex- istence ; and then another struggle, hardly less difficult, to separate herself from English influences and standards, and to throw herself heartily into the interests and hopes of the new nation. Of how those two struggles began in the country at large, when the Revolutionary War was over and our inde- pendence was established, there is not room here to speak except very briefl}'. It was the sprouting of a tree which had been cut down to the very roots. The earliest sign of life was a meeting at New Brunswick, in New Jersey, in 1784, when thirteen clergymen and lajnnen from New York, New Jersej', and Pennsylvania came together to see what could be made of the fragments of the Church of England which were scattered through the now indepen- 122 jlSSAYS jxj) addresses. dent colonies. The same year tliere was a meeting held in Boston, where seven clergymen of Massachusetts and Rhode Island consulted on the condition and prospects of their church. The next year there was a larger meeting held in Philadelphia — what may be called the first con- vention of the Episcopal Church in the United States — when delegates from seven of the thirteen States were assembled. This was on September 27, 1785. Evidently the fragments of the Church had life in them, and a ten- dency to reach toward each other and seek a corporate existence. From the beginning, too, there evidently was in many parts of the Church a certain sense of oppor- tunity, a feeling that now was the time to seek some en- largement of the Church's standards which would not prob- ably occur again. Under this feeling, when the time for the revision of the Liturgy arrived, the Athanasian Creed was dropped out of the Prayer-book. The other changes made were mostly such as the new political condition of the country called for. These changes were definitely fixed in the convention which met in Philadelphia in 1789. But before that time another most important question had been settled. There could be no Episcopal Church in this country without bishops, and as yet there was not a bishop of the Episcopal Church in the country. In the colonial condition vari(^us efforts had been made to secure the consecration of bishops for America, but political fears and prejudices had always prevented their success; but no sooner was independence thoroughly estabhshed than a more determined effort was begun. In 1783 the Rev. Dr. Samuel Seabury was sent aljroad by some of the clergy- men of Connecticut to endeavor to secure consecration to the episcopate to which they had elected him. After fruitless attempts to induce the authorities of the Church of England to give him what he sought, he finally had recourse to the non-juring Church in Scotland, and was A CENTURY OF CHUECH GROWTH IX BOSTON. 123 consecrated at Aberdeen, on November 14, 1784. He re- turned at once to America and began to do a bishojj's work. The first ordination of an Episcopal minister in Boston, which must have been an occasion of some inter- est in the Puritan city, was on March 27, 1789, when the Rev. John C. Ogden was ordained in Trinity Church by Bishop Seabury. Meanwhile, farther south, a similar attempt was being made to secui'e Episcopal consecration from the Church of England, and with better success. On February 4, 1787, the Rev. Dr. William White of Philadelphia and the Rev. Dr. Samuel Provoost of New York were conse- crated bishops in the chapel of Lambeth Palace. Thus the Episcopal Church in the United States found itself fully organized for its work. On May 7, 1797, the Rev. Dr. Edward Bass of Newbnryport was consecrated in Christ Chm'cli, Philadelphia, to be bishoj) of the diocese of Massachusetts ; and the churches of Boston became, of course, subjects of his episcopal care. It inust have been a striking, as it Avas certainly a novel, scene when Bishop Bass, on his return to Boston after his consecration, was welcomed b}^ the Massachusetts Convention, which was then in session. He was conducted in liis robes from the vestry of Trinity Church to the chan- cel, where he was addressed in behalf of the members of the convention by the Rev. Dr. Walter, now returned from his exile in Nova Scotia, and made rector of Clirist Church. The bishop responded "in terms of great modesty, pro- priety, and affection." Some time after, the Episcopal churches in Rhode Island, and subsequently those in New Hampshire, placed themselves under his jurisdiction. It had not been without reluctance and a jealous un- willingness to surrender their independence that the churches in Massachusetts had joined their brethren in the other States to accomplish the reorganization of their 124 i:SSJYS AND ADDRESSES. Church ; but in the end two of the Boston churches be- came identified with the new body. To Dr. Parker, in- deed, of Trinity Church, a considerable degree of influence is to be ascribed in liarmonizing difficulties, and making- possible a union between the two efforts after organized life which had begun in Connecticut and Pennsylvania. Before, however, the General Constitution of the Epis- copal Church was agreed upon, in Philadelphia, in 1789, the oldest of the three parishes in Boston had changed its faith and its associations, and begun its own separate and peculiar life. It w^as before the Revolutionary War was ended, and while their house of worship was still used by the congregation of the Old South, in September, 1782, that the wardens of King's Chapel — Dr. Thonlas Bulfinch and Mr. James Ivers — invited Mr. James Freeman, a young man of twenty-three years of age, then living at Walpole, to officiate for them as reader for six months. He was a native of Charlestown, had received his early education at the Boston Latin School, and had graduated at Harvard College in 1777. At the Easter meeting, April 21, 1783, he was chosen pastor of the chapel. The invitation, in reply to which he accepted the pastorate, said to him : '' The pro]3rietors consent to such altera- tions in the service as are made by the Rev. Dr. Parker, and leave the use of the Athanasian Creed at your dis- cretion." The new pastor and his people soon grew warmly at- tached to one another; and when, in the course of the next two years, Mr. Freeman told his parishioners that his opinions had undergone such a change that he found some parts of the Liturgy inconsistent with the faith which he had come to hold, and offered them an amended form of prayer for use at the chapel, the i^rojjrietors voted, February 20, 1785, that it was necessary to make some alterations in some parts of the Liturgy, and ap- A CEXTUBY OF CHVECH GROWTH IX BOSTON. 125 pointed a eommittee to report such alterations. On March 28th the committee were ready with their report, and on June 19th the proprietors decided, by a vote of twenty to seven, ''that the Common Prayer, as it now stands amended, be adopted by this chui-cli as the form of prayer to be used in future by this chiu'ch and congre- gation." The alterations in the Liturgy were, for the most part, such as involved the omission of the doctrine of the Trinity. They were principall}'^ those of the cele- brated English divine, Dr. Samuel Clarke. The amended Prayer-book was used in the chapel until 1811, when it was again revised, and still other changes made. Thus the oldest of the Episcopal churches had become the fii'st of the Unitarian churches of America ; and now the question was how she stiU stood toward the sister- churches with whom she had heretofore been in commu- nion. Her people stdl comited themselves Episcopalians. They wanted to be part of the new Episcopal Church of the United States. Many of them were more or less un- easy at the lack of ordination for their minister. In 1786 Mr. Freeman appUed to Bishop Seabuiy to be ordained ; but Bishop Seabury, after asking the advice of his clergj^, did not think fit to confer orders upon him on such a profession of faith as he thought proper to give, which was no more than that he believed the Scriptures. Mr. Freeman then went to see Dr. Provoost at New York. The doctor, who was not yet a bishop, gave Mr. Freeman some reason to hope that he would comply %\'ith his wishes ; but in the next year, when the wardens of the chapel sent a letter to Dr. Provoost, who in the meantime had received consecration, "to inquire whether ordination for the Rev. Mr. Freeman can be obtained on terms agreeable to him and to the proprietors of this church," the bishop answered that, after consulting with his council for ad\T.ce, he and they thought that a matter of such importance ought to 126 ESSAYS AND ADDRESSES. be reserved for the consideration of the General Con- vention. This ended the effort for episcopal ordination, and on November 18, 1787, after the usual Sunday evening ser- vice, the senior warden of the King's Chapel, Dr. Thomas Bulfinch, acting for the congregation, ordained Mr. Free- man to be " rector, minister, priest, pastor, teaching elder, and public teacher " of their society. Of course so bold and so unusual an act excited violent remonstrance. A protest was sent forth by certain of the original proprie- tors of the chapel, to which the wardens issued a reply. Another protest came from Dr. Bass of Newburyport, Dr. Parker, of Trinity Church, Mr. Montague, of Christ Church, nnd Mr. Ogdon, of Portsmouth in New Hamp- shire ; but from the day of Mi-. Freeman's ordination the King's Chapel ceased to be counted among the Episcopal churches of Boston. There still remained some questions to be settled with regard to the bequest of Mi-. WiUiam Price, the founder of the Price lectureship, of which the King's Chapel had been the original administrator. These questions lingered until 1824, when they were finally dis- posed of by the arrangement between the King's Chapel and Trinity Church, under which these lectures are still provided by the latter. It was a severe blow to the Church, which was with such difficulty struggling back to life, that one of the strongest of her very few parishes should thus reject her creed and abandon her fellowship. The whole transaction bears evidence of the confusion of the ecclesiastical life of those distracted days. The spirit of Unitarianism was ah*eady present in many of the Congregational churches of New England. It was because in the King's Chapel that spirit met the clear terms of a stated and required liturgy that that Church was the first to set itself avow- edly upon the basis of the new belief. The attachment A CENTURY OF CRUBCH GROWTH IX BOSTON. 127 to the Liturgy was satisfied by the retention of so much of its well-known form ; and the high character of Mr. Freeman, and the profound respect which his sincerity and piety and learning won in all the town, did a great deal to strengthen the establishment of the behef to which his congregation gave their assent. Clu-ist Church and Trinity Church alone were left — two vigorous parishes — to keep alive for many years the fire of the Episcopal Clnu'ch in Boston. In 1792 Dr. Walter returned to Boston, and became rector of Clu'ist Church, where he remained until his death, in 1800. In the same year (1792) the Rev. John Sylvester John Gardiner be- came the assistant of Dr. Parker at Trinity Church. Dr. Gardiner's ministry is one of those which give strong character to the life of the Episcopal Chui-ch here during the century. Born in Wales, and in large part educated in England, he was the true Anglican of the eighteenth century. For thirty-seven years he was the best-known and most influential of the Episcopal ministers of Boston. His broad and finished scholarship, his strong and posi- tive manhood, his genial hospitality, his fatherly affection, and his eloquence and wit, made him through all those years a marked and powerful person, not merely in the Church, but in the towns. After the year 1790 the Diocesan Conventions of the Episcopal Church in Massachusetts became regular and constant. They were generally held in Boston — their religious services mostly in Trinity Church, and their business sessions usualty in Concert Hall. The business which they had to do was very small, but every year seems to show a slightly increasing strength. In 1795 the Rev. Dr. Parker and Mr. William Tudor were sent as delegates to the General Convention which was to meet in Phila- delphia in the following September, so that the Church in Massachusetts had now become entirely a part of the 128 ESSAYS AND ADDRESSES. General Church throughout the land. In 1797 a com- mittee was sent to Samuel Adams, the governor, to ask him not to appoint the annual fast day in such a way that it should fall in Easter week, in order that it might not "wound the feeliugs of so many of the citizens of this commonwealth as compose the bod}- of the Protestant Episcopalians." In various ways one traces the slow growth of the Church ; yet still it was a very little body. In 1800, at the meeting of the convention of the diocese, " in the library in Franklin Place," it was only five clergy- men, of whom one was the bishop, and six laymen that made up the assembly. In 1803 Bishop Bass died, after an administration which was full of good sense and piety, but which had not enough energy or positive character to give the Church a strong position, or to secure much promise for its future. The only other man who had stood at his post during the Revolution — the man to whom, as his suc- cessor. Dr. Gardiner, said of him in his funeral sermon, "must doubtless lie attributed the preservation of the Episcopal Church in this town " — Dr. Samuel Parker, of Trinity Church, was chosen to be the successor of Bishop Bass ; but he died on December 6, 1804, before he had performed any of the duties of his office, and the diocese was once more without a bishop. Indeed, in these early days it was not by any special oversight or inspiration of the bishops that the Episcopal Church was growing strong. It was by the long and faithful pastorship of the ministers of her parishes. Such a pastorship had been that of Dr. Parker. For thirty-one years Trinity Church enjoyed his care. " I well remember him," writes Dr. Lowell, of the West Church, "as a tall, well-proportioDcd man, with a broad, cheerful, and rubicund face, and flowiug hair; of fiue powers of conversation, and easy and affable in his manners. He was given to hospitality, and went about A CENTURY OF CHURCH GROWTH IN BOSTON. 129 doing good." He, too, was a man of the eigliteentli cen- tury, not the nineteenth ; but he was thoroughl}^ the man for his own time, and the Episcopal Church in Boston will always be his debtor. In the year after Bishop Parker died another of the long and useful pastorates of Boston began in the succession of the Rev. Asa Eaton to the rec- torship of Christ Church, where he remained until 1829. It was not until 1811 that it was found practicable to unite the Episcopal Church in Massachusetts with the same Church in Rhode Island and New Hampshire, under the care of the Rt. Rev. Alexander Viets Griswold, who was consecrated bishop of what was called the Eastern Diocese. With Bishop Griswold a new period of the life of the Episcopal Church in Boston may be considered to begin — a j)eriod of growth and enterprise. Up to this time the Church had been struggling for life, and grad- ually separating itself from the English traditions which had haunted its thought and hampered its usefulness. It had been a weak, and in some sense a foreign, Church, Now it had grown to considerable strength. Its ministers were true Americans. It prayed for the governors and Congress of the Union with entire loyalty. It took, in- deed, no active part in the speculations or the controver- sies of the daj^ Its ministers were not forward in theo- logical or political discussion. It rested with entire satis- faction upon its completed standards, and contributed no active help to the settlement of the theological tumults which were raging around it ; but it was doing good and growing strong. It had won for itself the respect and confidence of the communit}^ ; and when the first returns are made from parishes to the Diocesan Convention in 1812, the two Boston churches report a considerable inim- ber of communicants. Christ Clnirch has GO, and Trinity Church has 150, and on the great festivals as many as 300. The second period, the period of growth and some en- 130 ESSAYS AND ADDEESSES. terprise, may be said to extend from 1811 to 1843, The earliest addition to the nnnibev of chnrches, which had remained the same ever since the departure of King's Chapel, was in the foundation of St. Matthew's Church, in what was then the little district of South Boston. That picturesque peninsula, which now teems with crowded life, had in 1816 a population of seven or eight hundred. In that year the services of the Episcopal Church were begun by a devoted layman, Mr. John H. Cotting, and two years later a church building was consecrated there liy Bishop Griswold. The parish has passed through many vicissi- tudes and dangers since that day ; but it has always re- tained its life and done good service to the multitudes who have gradually gathered around it. In 1819 another new parish began to appear, formed principally out of Trinity Church ; and on June 3, 1820, the new St. Paul's Church in Tremont Street was conse- crated by Bishop Grriswold, assisted by Bishop Brownell of Connecticut. The first rector of the new parish was the Rev. Samuel Farmer Jarvis, a native of Connecticut, an ecclesiastic of sincere devotion to his Church, and a scholar of excellent attainments. St. Paul's Church made a notable and permanent addition to the power of episco- pacy in the city. Its Grecian temple seemed to the men who built it to be a triumph of architectural beauty and of fitness for the church's services. "The interior of St. Paul's," so it was written while the church was new, " is remarkal^le for its simplicity and beauty ; and the mate- rials of which the building is constructed give it an in- trinsic value and effect which have not been produced by any of the classic models that have been attempted of bricks and plaster in other cities. The erection of this church may be considered the commencement of an era of the art in Boston." On its building committee, among other well-known men, were George Sullivan, Daniel Web- A CENTURY OF CHURCH GROWTH IX BOSTON. 131 ster, David Sears, aud William Sliiiiimin. When it was finished it had cost $83,000. The parish leaped at once into strength, and in 1821 it reports that "it has 90 com- nmnicants, and that between 600 and 700 persons attend its services." In 1824, when Boston had reached a popu- lation of 58,000, the four Episcopal Churches whicli it contained numbered in all 63'4 communicants; certainly not a great number, but certainly an appreciable propor- tion of the religious connn unity. In 1827 Dr. Alonzo Potter succeeded Dr. Jarvis at St. Paul's, and he brought with him that broad, strong intel- lect and noble character and earnest zeal which made him all his life one of the very strongest powers in the Epis- copal Church of the United States. In the same year the Rev. George W. Doane, who was afterward the successor of Dr. Gardiner at Trinity, came to be his assistant. These were both notable additions to the Church's minis- try in Boston. They were men of modern character; they put new life into the now well-established Church. The very drjmess of the tree when it was brought hither from England had perhaps made it more possible to trans- plant it safely ; but now that its roots were in the ground, it was ready for more vigorous life. In quite different ways, with very dissimilar characters and habits of thought. Dr. Potter and Dr. Doane represent, not unfitly, the two great tendencies toward rational breadth and toward eccle- siastical complexity, which were beginning to take posses- sion not merely of this church, but of all the churches. The Rev. John H. Hopkins, who in 1831 became the assis- tant of Dr. Doane at Trinity, was another of the strong characters who showed the Church's greater life. Another name of great interest in the Church history of Boston appeared in 1829, when the Rev. William Cros- well came from Hartford, a young deacon just ordained, to succeed Dr. Eaton at Christ Church. Dr. Eaton's min- 132 ESSAYS AND ADDRESSES. istry had been long and nsefnl. He had established, in 1815, the first Sunday-school which ever existed in this region. His parish had no donbt already begun to change with the changes of the city's population ; but when Mr. Croswell came there it was still strong, and though his most remarkable ministry was to be elsewhere than in Christ Church, his coming there marks the first advent to the city of one of the most interesting men who have ever filled its Episcopal pulpits. The slow addition of parish after parish still went on. In 1830 Grace Church, which had been struggling with much difficulty into life, aj)pears at last as an organized parish, and is admitted into union wdth the Convention. At first the new congregation worshiped in Piedmont Square, and then in Bedford Street. It was not imtil 1836 that its new stone church in Temple Street was fin- ished and consecrated. In Roxbury the first movement toward the establishment of an Episcoj)al church began to appear as early as 1832 ; and after worshipiug for a while in a building called the Female High School, the new parish finished and occupied its sober, serious stone structure on St. James' Street in 1834. Its first rector was the Rev. M. A. DeWolf Howe, who is now the bishop of the diocese of Central Pennsylvania. While these new parishes were si^ringiug into life the old parish of Trinity was building its new house of worship, which was to stand until the great fire should sweej) it away in 1872. The solid, battlemented Gothic church, which for so many years stood and frowned at the corner of Summer and Hawley Streets, was consecrated on November 11, 1829. The next year Dr. Gardiner, for so many years the hon- ored minister of the parish, died in England, where he was seeking his lost health, and Dr. Doane became rector of Trinity Church in his stead. In these years also another man appears for the first A CENTUBT OF CHURCH GROWTH IN BOSTUX. 133 time, who is afterward to liold a peculiar place in the life of the Church in Boston, to be, indeed, the rej^resentative figure in its charitable work. It is the Rev. E. M. P. Wells, who is in charge of the House of Reformation Chapel at South Boston. Indeed, now for the fii'st time there began to be a movement of the Episcopal Chui"ch toward the masses of the poor and helpless. Up to this time it had been almost altogether the Church of the rich and influ- ential. It had prided itself upon the respectability of its membership ; but in 1837 St. Paul's, which had now passed into the earnest and fruitful ministry of the Rev. John S. Stone, had a mission school of between sixty and eighty scholars on Boston Neck, and there was a free church in the eleventh ward-room in Tremont Street, and Mr. Wells had his work at South Boston. The movements were not very strong nor very enduring, but the^' showed a new spirit, and were the promises of better things to come. In 1840 there were the beginnings of two new parishes. The Church at Jamaica Plains was as yet only a mission of St. James's in Roxbury, and was under the charge of the rector of that church till 1845, when it secured a min- ister of its own. In Charlestown a few Episcopalians met in the Congregational Church, and organized a parish under the charge of the Rev. Nathaniel T. Bent. The corner-stone of their building was laid in 1841, and the building was finished the next year. Both of these par- ishes were named St. John's. Thus, in 1843 there were in what is now Boston seven Episcopal parishes. In that year Bishop Griswold died. When he was chosen bishop in 1811 there were only two parishes, and besides this increase in the number of organ- ized churches there had begun to be, as we have seen, some movement of missionary life. These thirty-two years had been a period of growth and quiet enterprise. There had been no marked stir of active thouciit ; men 134 ESSAYS AND ADDRESSES. had believed and tanglit much as tlieir fathers had before them. There liad been no dispntes or controversies abont faith or worship ; bnt all the time a fuller and fuller life was entering into the whole Church. The evangelical spirit, wLich was the controlling i^ower of the Church of England, ruled the parishes here, and inspired the system which under the churchmanship of the eighteenth century had been so dead. Of all this time the type and represen- tative is Bishop Griswold. He stands, indeed, at the head of the active history of the Church in Massachusetts, to give it, as it were, its true kej^-uote — somewhat as Bishop White stands at the start of the Episcopal Church in the United States at large ; or, we may say, perhaps, as Wash- ington stands at the beginning of the history of tlie na- tion. He had the qidet energy which the times needed, a deep and simple piety, a si")irit of conciliation which was yet full of sturdy conscientiousness, a free but reverent treatment of Church methods, a quiet humor, and abun- dance of ''■ moderation, good sense, and careful equipoise." He had much of the repose and peace of the old Anglican- ism, and yet was a true American. He had patience and hope and courage, sweetness and reasonableness in that happy conjunction which will make his memory, as the years go by, to be treasured as something sacred and saintly by the growing Church. The third period in the history of the Episcopal Church in Boston, reaching from 1843 to about 18G1, is not so peaceful as the last. Before Bishop Griswold died the signs of coming disagreement had appeared ; and even before it w^as felt in this country, a new and aggressive school of Church life had taken definite shape in England. This is not the place to write the history of that great movement which, wnthin less than fifty years, has so changed the life of the English Church. In 1833 the first of the so-named " Tracts for the Times " w^as issued at A CENTURY OF (UlUCH GllOJl'TH IX BOSTON. 135 Oxford, and from then iintil 1841 the constant succession of treatises devoted to the devek^pment of what became known as Tractarian or Pnseyite ideas kept alive a per- petual tumult in the Church of Engiand. Led by such men as Dr. Pusey and John Henry Newman, the school attracted many of the ablest and most devoted of young Englishmen. The points which its theology magnified were the apostolical succession of the ministry, bajitismal regeneration, the eucharistic sacrifice, and Church tradi- tion as a rule of faith. Connected with its doctrinal be- liefs there came an increased attention to Church cere- monies and an effort to surround the celebration of divine worship with mystery and splendor. This great movement — this catholic revival, as its ear- nest disciples love to call it — was most natural. It was the protest and self-assertion of a partly neglected side of religious life ; it was a reaction against some of the dominant forms of religious thought which had become narrow and exclusive ; it was the effort of the Church to complete the whole sp>here of her life ; it was the expres- sion of certain perpetual and ineradicable tendencies of the human soul. No wonder, therefore, that it was jjow- erful. It made most enthusiastic devotees ; it organized new forms of life ; it created a new literature ; it found its way into tlie lialls of legislation ; it changed the aspect of whole regions of education. No wonder, also, that in a place S(^ free-minded and devout as Boston each one of the permanent tendencies of religious thought and expres- sion should sooner or later seek for admission. Partly in echo, therefore, of what was going on in England, and partty as the simidtaneous result of the same causes which had produced the movement tliere, it was not many years before the same school arose in the Episcopal Church in America ; and it showed itself first in Boston, in the organ- ization of the Church of the Advent. The first ser\'ices 136 JiSSATS AND ADVIiESSES. of tliis new parish were held in an upper room at 13 Mer- rimac Street, on December 1, 1844. Shortly ai'ter, the con- gregation moved to a hall at the corner of Lowell and Causeway Streets, and on November 28, 1847, it took pos- session of a church in Green Street, where it remained until 18G4. Its rector was Dr. William Croswell, a man of most attractive character and beautiful purity of life. We have seen him already as minister of Clnist Church from 1829 to 1840. After his resignation of that parish he became rector of St. Peter's Church, Auburn, N. Y., whence he returncnl to Boston to undertake the new work of the Church of the Advent. The feature made most promi- nent l)y its founders with regard to the new parish was that the church was free. Tliis, combined Avith its more frequent services, its daily public recitation of Morning and Evening Prayer, an increased attention to the details of worship, the lights on its stone altar, and its use of altar-cloths, were the visible signs which distinguished it from the other parishes in town. By this time the poor and friendless population of Bos- ton had grown very large, and the minister and laity of the Church of the Advent, in common with those of the other parishes in the city, devoted much time and atten- tion to their visitation and relief. Bishop Griswold, before his death, had feared the influ- ence of the new school of churchmanshi]), and had written a tract with the view of meeting what he thought to be its dangers ; but the duty of dealing with the new state of things in Boston fell mostly to the lot of his successor. In the year 1842 the Rev. Dr. Manton Eastburn, rector of the Church of the Ascension in New York, had become rector of Trinity Church in Boston, and had been conse- crated assistant bishop of Massachusetts. That interest- ing ceremony took place in Trinity Church on December 29, 1842. On Bishop Griswold's death, in 1843, Bishop A CEXTUIiY OF CHUECH GROWTH IN BOSTON. 137 Eastburu succeeded him, and iu his Convention Address of 184-1 we find him ah'eady lifting* up his voice against "certain views which, having made their appearance at various periods since the Reformation, and passed away, have been again brought forward in our time." Tliese remonstrances are repeated ahnost yearly for the rest of the bishop's life. On December 2, 1815, Bishop Eastburn issued a pastoral letter to the clergy of his diocese in which he recounts his disapprobation of "various offensive in- novations upon the ancient usage of our Church," which lie had witnessed on the occasion of a recent episcopal visit to the Church of the Advent. On November 24, 1846, he writes to Dr. Croswell that he cannot visit the parish officially again until the offensive arrangements of the church are altered. These utterances of the bishop led to a long discussion and correspondence, which lasted for the next ten years. On November 9, 1851, Dr. Cros- well died very suddenly, and Bishop Eastburn's discussion was continued with his successor, the Right Rev. Horatio Southgate. It was not until December 14, 1856, that the parish received again the visitation of its bishop ; and in his report to the Diocesan Convention in 1857 Bishop Eastburn explains the change in his action by saying that " the General Convention having passed during its session in October last a nev/ canon on episcopal visitations, I appointed the above-mentioned day, shortly after the close of its sittings, for a visit to the Church of the Advent, for the purpose of administering confirmation." This closed the open conflict between the bishop and the parish. In 1864 the Church of the Advent moved from Green Street to its present building in Bowdoin Street, where it was served, after Bishop Southgate's de- parture in 1858, by the Rev. Mr. Bolles. Upon his resigna- tion, in 1870, the parish passed into the ministry of mem- bers of an English society of mission priests, known as the 138 ESSAYS AND ADDRESSES. Brotherhood of St. John the Evangelist, aud in 1872 the Rev. Charles C. Grafton, a member of that society, became its rector. In 1868 it began the erection of a new chnrch in Brimmer Street, which is not yet completed. The pe- culiarities of faith and worship of this parish have always made it a prominent and interesting object in the Church life of Boston. But during these years of conflict the healthy life and growth of the Church were going on. In 1842 began the long and powerful rectorship of the Rev. Dr. Alexander H. Vinton at St. Paul's Chm-ch. For seventeen years his min- istry there gave noble dignity to the life of the Church in Boston, and was a source of vast good to many souls. His work may be considered as having done more tlian that of any other man who ever preached in Boston to bring the Episcopal Church into the understanding, the sympathy, aud the respect of the j)eople. His vigorous miiid and great aequii'ements and commanding character and earnest eloquence made him a most influential power in the city and the Church. He was met as he first came to St. Paul's liy a deep religious interest, which was only the promise of the profound spiritual life which will al- ways make the years of his ministry here memorable and sacred. He remained in Boston until 1858, when he removed to Philadelphia ; but in later life, in 1869, he returned to his old home, and was rector of Emmanuel Church till December, 1877. As these pages are being- written he has just passed away, lea\dng a memoiy which Avill be a perpetual treasure to the Church. He died in Philadelphia on April 26, 1881. In 1843 the growth of the city southward toward the Neck was marked by the organization of the new Church of the Messiah in Florence Street, which, under the min- istry of the Rev, George M. Randall, sprang at once to useful life. The parish worshiped for a while in a haU at A CENTURY OF CHURCH GROWTH IX BOSTON. 139 the corner of Washington and Common Streets. The corner-stone of the new church was laid November 10, 1847, and the church was consecrated August 29, 1848. In 1843 the mission work of the Rev. E. M. P. Wells, which afterward became so well known, and which was never wholly abandoned till his death, began at what was called Trinity Hall, in Summer Street. About the same time the Rev. J. P. Robinson began a mission for sailors in Ann Street, which for many years excited the interest and elicited the generosity of the Episcopalians of Boston, and which still survives in what is called the Free Church of St. Mary, for sailors, in Richmond Street. In 1846 an in- dividual act of Christian generosity provided the building of St. Stephen's Chapel in Purcliase Street, the gift of Mr. William Appleton, where Dr. Wells labored in loving and humble sympathy and companionship wdtli the poor until, on the terrible night of November 9, 1872, the great fire swept his church and house away. He was a remarkable man, with a genius for charitj^ and a childlike love for God. Meanwhile a parish was slowly growing into life in the populous district of East Boston. St. John's Cluu-ch was organized there in 1845. After many disappointments and disasters it finished and occupied its house of worship in 1852. In 1849 St. Mary's Church in Dorchester was added to the number of suburban churches. In 1851 St. Mark's Church, at the South End, finds its first mention in the record of the acceptance of its rectorship by the Rev. P. H. Clreenleaf, who had just resigned the charge of St. John's Church in Charlestown. The next year this new church bought for itself a cliurch building, which it afterward removed to Newton Street, and in which it is still worshiping. In 1856 the Rev. Dr. Thomas R. Lambert T)egnu his ministrj' in Charlestown, and the Rev. William R. Babcock came to Jamaica Plain, succeeded in 1876 by 140 ASSAYS AXI) ADDRESSES. the Rev. S. U. Shearman. In 1868 Bishop Eastbnrn re- signed the rectorsliip of Trinity, and was succeeded in 1869 by the Rev. PhdUps Brooks. In 1860 the Rev. Dr. William R. Nicholson became rector of St. Paul's Church, and the Rev. George S. Converse of St. James's. These were years fuU of life — a life which, if it some- times became restless and controversial, flowed for the most part in a steady stream of zealous and ever- widening work. The traditions wliich had bound the Chm'cli almost exclusively to the rich and cultivated were cast aside. It had accepted its mission to all classes and conditions of men. The number of communicants increased. In 1847 there were about two thousand in the churches of what then was Boston, and men whom the city knew and felt and honored were preaching in the Episcopal pulpits. With the year 1860 begins the latest period of our his- tory. A new Boston Avas growing up on the Back Bay ; the country was just entering on the great struggle with rebellion and slavery ; and the fixed lines of theological thought were being largely broken through. All of these changes were felt in the fortunes of the Episcopal Church in Boston. On March 17, 1860, a meeting of those who were desirous of forming a new Episcopal church west of the Public Garden was held at the residence of Mr. William R. Lawrence, 98 Beacon Street. The result of this meet- ing, and the others to which it led, was the organization of Emmanuel Church, and the erection of its house of worship in Newbui-y Street, which was consecrated April 24, 1862. The parish held its services, before its church building was finished, in Mechanics' Hall, at the corner of Bedford and Chauncy Streets. Of this parish the first rector was the Rev. Dr. Frederick D. Huntington, who had long been honoralily known in Boston, first as the minister of the South Congregational Church, in the Uni- tarian denomination, and afterward as the Plunnner Pro- A CEXTUBY OF CHUBCH GROWTH IX BOSTON. 141 fessor of Christian Morals and Preacher to the University of Cambridge. It was in view of his leaving his Unitarian associations and seeking orders in the Episcopal Chnreli, and in expectation of his becoming its rector, that the parish of Emmannel Chnrch was organized. Dr. Hunting- ton was ordained deacon in Trinity Church, on Wednes- day, September 12, 1860, Bishop Burgess of Maine preach- ing the sermon. On the next Sunday he took charge of his new congregation, and his ministry from that time until he was made bishop of the diocese of Central New York, in 18G9, was one of the most powerful influences which the Episcopal Church has ever exercised in Boston. Under his care Emmannel Chni'ch became at once a strong parish, and soon put forth its strength in missionary work. It founded in 1863 a mission chapel in the ninth ward, from Avhich came by and by the Chapel of the Good Shepherd, which now, with its pleasant building in Cortes Street, is an independent and useful parish church. In 1860 St. Matthew's Church in South Boston, which had for twenty-two years enjoyed the wise and gracious min- istry of the Rev. Dr. Joseph H. Clinch, was left without a rector, by his resignation ; and in 1861 the Rev. Dr. J. I. T. Coolidge was chosen to supply his place. Dr. Coolidge, like Dr. Huntington, had been a Unitarian minister, and had onlj' a short time before received ordination in the Episcopal -Church. In 1861 St. James's Church, Roxbury, estal)lished a mis- sion chapel on Tremont Street, which, under the charge of the Rev. Mr. Converse, became a few years later an in- dependent parish named St. John's. In 1877 St. James's Church, now under the ministry of the Rev. Percy Browne, again manifested its energetic life by the establishment of another mission chapel, in Cottage Street, in Dorches- ter, which is called St. Anne's Chapel. In 1867 St. Mary's Church in Dorchester began a mission in Milton Lower 142 ESSAYS AND ADDRESSES. Mills, wliicli lias grown into a distinct parish, bearing the name of All Saints. In 1875, after Dr. Vinton had snc- ceeded Dr. Hnntington as rector of Emmanuel Church, his assistant, the Rev. B. B. Killikelly, founded a mission at the West End of Boston, which, bearing the name of the Free Church of the Evangelists, is now under the care of Trinity Church. In 1875 a mission at City Point was organized l^y the Rev. John Wright, rector of St. Matthew's Church. In 1873 a new mission grew up in the part of South Boston called Washington Village, which is known as Grace Chapel, under the charge of the Board of City Missions. All these are signs of life and energy. Only once has a parish ceased to be. In 18G2 the Rev. Dr. Charles Ma- son, rector of Grace Church, died. He has left a record of the greatest purity of life and faithfulness in work. After his death the parish of Grace Church became so feeble that at last its life departed. Its final report was made in 1865. Grace Church had been in existence almost forty years. These last years also have seen great changes in the personal leadership of the parishes and of the Church. Bishop Eastburn died September 12, 1872, after an epis- copate of thirty years ; and his successor, the Rev. Dr. Benjamin Henry Paddock, was consecrated in Grace Church, Brooklyn, N. Y., on September 17, 1873. After Dr. Randall was made Bishop of Colorado, in 1865, the Rev. Pelham Williams became rector of the Chiu'ch of the Messiah, and he was succeeded in 1877 by the Rev. Henry F. Allen. In 1877 Dr. Vinton gave up the rector- ship of Emmanuel Church, and in 1878 the Rev. Leighton Parks became his successor. The Rev. Henry Burroughs became the rector of the venerable Christ Church in 1868, and the Rev. WiUiam Wilberforce Newton succeeded the A CEXTUnT OF CHUIiCH GBOWTH IX BOSTOX. 143 Rev. Treadwell Waldeii as rector of St. Paul's Cliiircli in 1877, followed in 1883 by the Rev. Dr. F. Courtney. Very gradually, and hy imjjereeptible degrees, tlie par- ishes of Boston have changed their character during this hundred years "vvhich we have been surveying. Their churches have ceased to be mere places of worship for the little groups which had combined to build them, preserv- ing carefully the chartered privileges of their parishioners. They have aspired to become religious homes for the com- munity, and centers of religious work for the help of all kinds of suffering and need. Many of the churches are free, opening their pews W'ithout discrimination to all who choose to come. Those which are not technically free are eager to welcome the people. In places which the influ- ence of the parish churches cannot reach, local chapels have been freel}^ built. Besides the parish life of the Episcopal Church in Bos- ton, and the institutions which have grown up under dis- tinctively parochial control, the general educational and charitable institutions of the Church should not be left unmentioned. For many years the project of estabhshing a Divinity School of the Protestant Episcopal Clnu'ch at Boston had been from time to time recm-ring. In 1867 a very generous gift of Mr. Benjamin Tyler Reed secured wdiat has so long been wanted ; and the Episcopal Divin- ity School of Cambridge was founded on a strong basis, which insures its perj)etuity. Since that time other liberal gifts have increased its equipment, and it is now^ one of the best pro\dded theological schools in the countr}'. The Church Home for Orphans and Destitute Children, which is now situated at South Boston, was founded in 1855 by the Rev. Charles Mason, who w^as then rector of Grace Church. St. Luke's Home for Convalescents, which has its house in the Highlands, was established originally 144 ESSAYS AND ADDRESSES. as a j^arisli charity of tlie Church of the Messiah, during the ministry of the Rev. D. Pelham Williams, hut it is now an institution of the Church at large. The great fire of November 9 and 10, 1872, destroyed two of the Episcopal churches of Boston : Trinity Church, in Summer Street, and St. Stephen's Chapel, in Purchase Street. St. Stephen's has not yet been rebuilt. Trinity had already begun the preparations for a new church before the fire, and the new buildings on Huntington Avenue Avere consecrated on Friday, February 9, 1877, by Bishop Paddock, the consecration sermon being 2:)reaclied by the Rev. Dr. Vinton, then rector of Emmanuel Church. These are the principal events which have marked the history of the Episcopal Church in Boston during tliis last period of the century. There are within the present city limits 22 churches and chapels, with 5675 communicants, and 4249 scholars in their Sunday-schools. And these last twenty years have been full of life and movement in theological thought. The Tractarian Re- vival of 1845 has passed into its more distinctively ritual- istic stage ; and the broader theology, which also had its masters in England, in such men as Dr. Arnold and the Rev. Frederick D. Maurice, has likewise had its clear and powerful effect upon the Episcopal Church in Boston. A lofty belief in man's spiritual possibilities, a large hope for man's eternal destinies, a desire for the careful and critical study of the Bible, and an earnest insistence upon the comprehensive character of the Church of Christ — these are the characteristics of much of the most zealous pulpit teaching and parish life of these later days. ADDRESS AT THE COMMEMORATION OF THE SEVENTY-FIFTH ANNIVERSARY OF AMERI- CAN BOARD OF COMMISSIONERS FOR FOR- EIGN MISSIONS. (Boston, Mass., October 14, 1885.) I BRING to 3^011, sir, and to this meeting, the cordial, respectful, affectionate, and g-ratefnl greeting- of the Board of Foreign Missions of the Protestant Episcopal Church. I am sorry it should have fallen to my lot to bring this greeting, but only because I should far rather it would have been brought by one who officially, and in full spirit as well, represents the missionary enterprises of the Chu)*ch to which both he and I belong. Let me say, then, at the very outset, that the Board of Missions of oiu' Church, which has its central sitting in New York, especially in- vited Bishop Paddock, the bislioj) of this diocese, who by the very fact of his being the bishop of this diocese is a member of the Board, to be the bearer of the congratula- tions of the Board and of the Church which he and I rep- resent, to this convention. And I know how earnestly Bishop Paddock desired he might do so, and how abso- lutely impossible he found it, owing to engagements which he could not break. I appear, therefore, at his request, to speak, not for myself, but for him and for our Board and for our Church. And how shall I bid this convention such a gi-eeting as our Church would like to bid ? I said I wanted to bid it a cordial and affectionate and respectful and a grateful greeting. And it is a feeling of gratitude, my friends, 145 14G ESSAYS JlXD ADDEESSES. that must predominate in the soul of any one who brings a greeting from the body lie represents to snch a body as this, which represents the whole hf e-work of the American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions. I donbt not, if I could unfold the history of many of oin- Epis- copal missionaries, those who have acted as the represen- tatives of our Church chndng the last foi'ty or fifty years, I should find in their personal history the inspiration which has come from the work this Board has done, and from the lives of the missionaries this Board has sent forth. I doubt not that, if I had come prepared with a history of our Board and its statistics, I should present a story which would at every point be suggestive of the inspiration which has been given to it by the zeal and the work of the American Board. I cannot but feel that while one speaks as a representa- tive of his own Church, and does most earnestly bring tlie greeting of that Church, and desires to have it under- stood tliat throughout the length and the breadth of that Church there is most grateful greeting for the work your Board has done, yet when these two Boards meet as we do now, through you in your organized meeting and through me as a representative of our Board, we should greet each other with sympathy and kindness as members of a connnon order, all animated with a common purpose. I speak, therefore, not merely for the Episcopal Church, but I speak for American Christianity when I declare the profound gratitude we all feel for the American Board and the work it has done through all these years. The American Board was the first, and must forever stand in history as having been the first, organized body in this country that broke the bonds of the self-contained religion and emerged from the mists that enveloped American Christianity and looked abroad and saw the world as the field. It was an inevitable necessity, as any AMERICAN BOAIiD FOB FOREIGN MISSIONS. 147 one who reads our history can see, that at the first we should have beeii especially devoted to the estabhshmg of the Christian work and the spreading of the gosj)el in our own land. But any one looking from above upon what was happening and was going to happen in America must have waited expectantly for the day when American Christian enterprise would reach abroad and would not be satisfied with staying at home. The body that did first thus look abroad and see the world waiting for the call to foreign missionary work that Christianity in America could not always fail to hear, must always deserve the profound respect and gratitude of those who come after. Let Christian missions grow to be what they will ; let them depart ever so far from tlie lines of work which were laid out at the organization of the American Board ; let them go as far as they will into lauds which the American Board never contemplated entering upon — no missionary will ever go forth from America who will not go in the track that your organization has marked out. We know well enough that the day must have come, if the churches which established this Board had not been faithful to their diity, when American churches would have heard the call and been aroused by the irrepressible spiiit of their love for their Master to have entered this field of foreign mis- sionary work. But that Board which did it stands forever entitled to receive the profound gratitude of all who care for missions. This is one cause of the gratitude which I bring you. Shall I not say, also, that there is a profound ground of gratitude here that you have during these seventy-five years — three quarters of a century — borne wonderful wit- ness to the power of the Christian faith ? Yoii have set forth before the people of this country and of the world the power that belongs to earnest, determined, and conse- crated effort blessed of God. And I believe the work of 148 ESSAYS AND ADDIii:SSES. this Board of Missions has been an inspiration to the country in a great deal else besides missionary work. That there should be in this country any body of men wlio would declare their profound faith in the unseen and eternal Spirit, and who would declare their faith by sucli personal consecration, scattering their members all over the world and pouring forth the means of those vrho staj'ed at home like a very river of plenteousness, tliat must have had a powerful influence, that has had a power- ful influence outside of missions, outside of the Church, outside of professed Christianit}'. The work that you have done for spiritual life and in showing the reality of spiritual things deserves and receives the profoundest personal gratitude of all those who care for such things. Shall I say, again, it seems to me that the testimony that an organization such as this has borne in seventy- five years of its history to the essential connection of the idea of missions with active Christianity deserves our grateful recognition? We have seen during all these years a deepening of the religious thought of our people. We have seen God lead us into those broad fields of specu- lation where we once thought it was unwise or unsafe to go. We have seen the books of criticism opened and ex- amined freely. We have seen those things which seemed essential to Christianity again and again shown to be only incidental to Christianity. We have seen how al)Solutely simple essential Cln-istianity is. The Church has not merely continued to send forth her missionaries, but the more her field has been widened the more her spuituality has increased ; the more boldly she has faced every truth that God has declared to her, so much the more has the missionary spirit thriven, so mucli the more and more tlie Church has thriven, and the more zealous have been its members to send the truth to all their brethren through- out the world. When we anticipate the ever-broaden- ing and ever-simplifying Christianity, when we think how AMEEICAX BOARD FOR FOREIGX MLSSIOXS. 149 many tilings which have been regarded as essential have been bnt incidental, shall we not anticipate without fear that the more Christianity becomes simplified and better known, the more Chiistianity becomes Clu'ist, and Chris- tian living becomes simply and purely the folloAving of Christ, that the missionary spiiit shall grow and grow, develop and extend, until in the progress of the simplify- ing of the Christian faith shall at last come the conversion of the world ? These thoughts are general thoughts which are sug- gested in my mind as I find m^^self privileged to bring the greeting of one Chi-istian body unto another. And, my brethren, that is a very sacred and serious thing to do. Let me close what I have to sa}' with this thought : We thank you for all these reasons which I have mentioned, but the real root of our gi'atitude is in something simpler than all these — it is because we are all brethren in Christ. We know that all men are God's childi'en ; that the most neglected and degi*aded creature in this world is a child of God ; that, therefore, we are brethren of every one of God's creatures on every highest mountain and in every deepest valley, and in the farthest island of the sea. And because you have reached thousands upon thousands of these our brethren, and given them the message which has been their salvation, we thank you. For every poor heathen that you have converted, for every soul that you have led back to the Father of all our souls, for every darkness into which you have pom-ed any hght, because that darkness was our darkness, because our Christianity was incomplete while those dark places existed, and be- cause they were om' brethren to whom you told the story of salvation, we thank you. For all these causes of thank- fulness, as well as many others which I might enumerate, I bring you the cordial and respectful and affectionate and grateful greeting, not only of our Board of Missions, but of the whole Episcopal Church. THE NEW THEISM. (Clerieus Club, Boston, Mass., April 5, 1886.) I TAKE this title " The New Tlieism " because it seems to imply that whatever return men may be making to a faith in God is part of that same belief in Him which has pos- sessed the human soul in all its generations. The words seem to express the double notion of permanence and change. We talk of '^ the new chemistry," and we want to indicate only that the old science has turned a new face to mankind and invited men to her secrets by novel ways. We talk of " the new orthodoxy," and we mean that the old conception of a great human faith has ap- propriated to itself new elements, and cast itself into a new form. So when we speak of any present religious conviction or tendency as a new theism, the expression is meant at once to bind the present to the past, and also to set its face toward the futm-e. Theism is as old as man, as old as God. The new theism, then, can only be the reassertion from new points of view, and after momentary obscuration of denial, of that conviction of God which has run through all human thought. Solomon brings into the new temple the sacred vessels which have made the old tabernacle holy. They stand in new and more splendid places, they are put to novel and richer uses, but they are the same vessels still, and the essential sacredness which is in them is not altered. While the new temple was being built and before the ark and the consecrated vessels were brought into it, we 150 THE NEW THEISM. 151 may well imagine that there was a iDeriod in which the thought and enthusiasm of the people of Jerusalem were concentrated on the gorgeous building which was to con- tain but did not yet contain the sacred things, and that the old house in which they still stood was more or less neglected. So while a new system of thought in which the truth of God is ultimately to be enslii'ined is rising into shape, it is not strange that men's eyes should be fixed absorbingly on it, to some neglect of the old taber- nacle in which still stands the certainty of Deity. The time comes when the new scheme of thought and know- ledge claims for itself the divine consciousness of man, and the holiness Avhich belongs to all times or to no time comes in to give richness and meaning to the latest struc- ture raised b}' the intellect of man. That is the time of a new theism. Such a time seems to be dawning upon us. There are indications more or less clear that the scientific and philo- sophical systems whose stately building we have all been watching with the profoundest interest are at last becom- ing ready for the thouglit of God and are beginning to claim it. At such a time there will be many things worth observing. Both those who have always kept the faith of theism and those who, having seemingly departed from it for a while, are now returning to it, will offer some curious phenomena. On the one hand, the new theists will have a disposition to talk as if they had discovered God, per- haps almost as if they had created Him, and they Mall take the old theism under their charge with a somewhat irritating condescension. The stream which has departed from the main current and returns to it again is always fond of trying to look as if it were the main cun-ent, and the i-eal main current were simply a side stream which ran into it. So the new theism magnifies the aspects of the Deity which have most to do with its habits of thought 152 JESSAYS AND ADDRESSES. as if they were the essence of the theistic idea. On the other hand, it is curious to see how the men whose belief in God never has been sliaken welcome the returning wanderers. There is sometimes a shout of triumph, a victorious " I told you so," an outburst of partisan com- placency. Sometimes there is a smile of pity, as if the whole excursion had meant nothing but mere wilfulness, as if the vagrants were returning, having rediscovered the multiplication table, which nobody ought ever to have doubted. Sometimes there is a sigh of relief, as if untold misgivings in their own hearts were quieted, and they could once more go to sleep in peace because the childi'en were at home. Surely there are finer and more reasonable positions for both sides to take. At least those who have never ceased to be theists may well set themselves to ask what those who have wandered for a time outside of theism are bring- ing back with them, when they come for the enrichment of the theistic faith to which they return. My friend by my side becomes an unbeliever. He goes perhaps far away out of my sight. He lives in regions of thought into which I as a believer cannot enter. By and by some morning I lift up my eyes and see him coming back. I run to welcome him. But will not my first question be, as he enters into the old domain, what he has gathered since he went away which shall make the old home richer for his wanderings, now that he has returned ? It would seem to be a very foolish and self-spiting churlishness which out of false dignity would refuse to ask that ques- tion. Tom Touchey, in the Spectator, who "plagued a couple of honest gentlemen so long for a trespass in breaking one of his hedges till he was forced to sell the groimd it inclosed to defray the charges of the prosecu- tion," is no unfair type of such kind of refusal. The idea of God is too large for any man to say that he has grasped THE NEW THEISM. 153 it all. It is too pervasive for any region of thought into which honest speculation may carry a man to be fruitless of some characteristic developments of it. There are indeed some experiences in which the return to belief seems to be not through the special study and knowledge out of which the unbelief has come. Take the interesting biography of Ellen Watson, the disciple of Clifford, who, after giving up all Christian faith, returned by and by to a trust in God and a life of devotion which was very rich and beautiful. I suppose the fact with re- gard to her really was that she never really did reject the- ism, but simply seemed for a time to find her hfe full and complete without it. What she contributed to faith then on her return was simply a new testimony to the old truth that " Nor man nor natiu'e satisfy Whom only God created." But other books bring the testimony of other lives, in which the new theism is the direct issue of the lines of thought in which the thinker first departed from the Christian faith. There are two such books in our own neighborhood to which we may direct our observation : one is John Fiske's " Idea of God as Affected by Modern Knowledge " ; the other is Francis EllingAvood Abbott's " Scientific Theism." It is not of the argument of those liooks that I want to speak, but of the results at which they finally arrive. Any one who believes in spiritual processes which will not report themselves to the reason may well believe that underneath the science of the one and the metaphysics of the other there are powers at work of which the books themselves are not aware. But it is the results to which the books come that are most interesting. The results of the two books are sub- stantially the same. Both totally reject materialism. 17)4: JiSSAYS AXD ABDBESSES. Both are vehement against Paley and the old argument from design. Yet both beheve in a teleological principle in the universe more subtle and more impressive than that which found its sufficient illustration in the mechan- ism of a watch. Both preach the immanence of the creative and regulative power. Both hesitate and draw back from an assertion of the personality of Deitj^ and steady themselves by vigorous railings against anthropo- morphism. Some books get their interest from their processes, and you do not care for their conclusions. The value of other books lies in their conclusions, and their processes are of small account. Of this latter sort of books is Abbott's " Scientific Theism." The science is not very satisfying, but the theism at which it seems to arrive is well worth our stud}^ He holds the universe per se to be infinitely intelligible. That is the burden of his argument — the noumenal as distinct from the phenomenal relation of things and their relations. He holds that the intelligibil- ity of the universe involves the intelligence of the universe. And so he asserts that the universe per se is infinitely in- telligent. He puts these facts together, and "the third truth follows with irresistible certainty that the universe per se is an infinite self -consciousness." We can hardly help l:)eing puzzled here and wondering whether, in spite of all his previous argument, which has been laboriously dragging up the object out of the depths of the subject, he has not at last lost his hold on his prize and seen the object once more disappear in the subjective depths; but that is not our present point. We are not dealing with his metaphysics. Surely the result at Avhieh he finally arrives — the universe per se an infinite self-consciousness — delights us with its alnindance of vitality. It is all alive. It has entirely escaped from the death of material- ism. It is fuU of meaning. It is no machine, Fate, Chance, THE XEW THEISM. 155 and Providence, as common^ depicted, tlie working of a far-off power on a foreign stnff through the long arm of law. Here stupid explanations disappear, " The universe is to be conceived," so Abbott writes, " as an organism all of whose life and growth are strictly immanent " — every- thing is instinct and flung wide open to knowledge — " the only unknowable is the non-existent," he declares. Is this pantheism ? "If all forms of monism are necessarily pantheism, then scientific theism is necessarily pantheism," he says, "for it certainly holds that all is God and God is all ; but if pantheism is the denial of all real j^ersonality, whether finite or infinite, then most emphatically scientific theism is not pantheism, but its diametrical opposite. Tele- ology is the very essence of purely spiritual personality. There is no such thing as an unconscious teleology." These are strong v/ords. Their disclaiming of impersonality is as complete as is their rejection of the Personality in whose hands the universe is pictured as lying by the ordinary religious thought of men. The other book, ^^dtli many differences of method, comes to the same result. Fiske pictures the result to which by slow evolution we have arrived as "the recognition of the eternal God indwelling in the universe, in whom we live and move and have our being." What is this but the infinite self-consciousness of the universe per se, on the one hand not inconsistent with absolute monism, and on the other hand capable of having personality attributed to it in virtue of the streaks and signs of purpose which it shows? And Fislce connects this assertion of cosmic theism as distinct from anthropomoi-phic theism directly with man's renewed intimacy with nature. The old Augus- tinianism has caught the political and governmental con- ceptions of Rome. We Athanasians, whether in the old nature-worships or in this modern cosmic theism, are drinkiuff at the fountains in the hills or readino: the nivs- 156 ESSAYS AXD ADDRESSES. teiy of the stars in the sky. The result with Fiske again is a universe quivering with energy. " The infinite and eternal power that is manifested in every pulsation of the universe," he declares, " is none other than the living God." A "quasi-psychical nature" only can he find it in his thinking-power to attribute to this Deit}', but the life which His indwelling gives to the universe is felt in every recognition of His presence, every utterance of His name. I name these two books not because they are the great- est and the best, but only because they are the nearest and the most familiar. In the result at Avhich they arrive they represent well enough that part of the thought of the time which is turning its face toward i;heism. That there is such a turning there can be no doubt. What John Fiske tells of himself, of how the truth that man's educa- tion is the final cause of creation, after hovering long in the background of his consciousness suddenly flashed upon him two years ago like a revelation, has been true of many a mind in relation to the idea of God. Here come the wanderers back. They have strayed far. They have been deep into tlie darkness. They come back with earnest faces, not remorseful, not regretful for their wanderings ; ready, no doubt, to believe that it was God Himself who sent them into the wilderness of agnosti- cism, that they might bring back thence something which shall make the theism more true and rich than much the- istic thought had grown to be. What is it that they bring ? In one word, is it not that which we have found bursting forth from these two books ? It is the sense of the liveness of the universe. If the be- lief in the personality of God has often had a tendency to separate the Governor from the world, to segregat-e vital- ity in Him and leave the world a dead machine, is it not true that that divine truth of the personality needs from THE NEW THEISM. 157 time to time to be batlied and refreshed in the trnth of universal life lest it become too hard and dry ? The doctrine of the Trinity is a protest against the hard, tight person aln ess of the conception of God which thinks of Him as a big individual, with definite limits to His nature, and almost to a visible frame in which He lives. The doctrine of the Trinity is an attempt to give richness, variety, mystery, internal relation, abundance, and free- dom to the ideas of God. Unitarianism has got the notion of God as tight and individual as it is ])Ossible to make it, and is dying of its meager Deity. The new theism, filled with the sense of a divine life in the very being of the universe, furnishes that bath of a great general concep- tion into which S23ecial doctrine must now and then be plunged for the renewal of its truth and freshness. That the Incarnation, the bringing of the divine idea out of its distance into our human life, so rescued and refreshed that idea, every Christian Jew, e^-ery John and Andrew, must have known in his existence. In the same way upon a different side the truth of the liveness of the universe fulfils for us the trnth of God. The Incarnation brought into union with God's supremacy the saeredness of man. There may be a yet unreached though often anticipated theism which shall bring into union with God's supremacy the liveness of the world. Of course we ask at once whether this is mere panthe- ism. In the midst of thoughts like these what becomes of the personality of God ? We can see how it is in dan- ger of being drowned and lost. We can see how it often is submerged. The new theism in the minds of many men who hold it is nothing but old pantheism. Never- theless we are struck by seeing how those who teach it are eager to assert that it is not pantheism. The more they reject the personality of God as it is ordinarily be- lieved, the more they assert that God is personal in a 158 ESSAYS AND ADDRESSES. sense wliicli seems to tliem more true. " Our experience," says Fiske, " does not furnish the idea of a personality which is not narrowly hemmed in ])y the inexorable bar- riers of circumstance. We therefore cannot conceive such an idea. But it does not follow tliat there is no reality answering to what such an idea would if it coidd be con- ceived." What a shrinking from the pantheism which seems just at hand is in these words ! Surely we Chris- tians ought to understand how one feels who sees panthe- ism close at hand and yet di-aws back from it and will not be a pantheist. For the New Testament is always j ust on the brink of pantheism, and is oidy saved from it by the intense personality of Jesus and His overwhelming injunc- tion of responsibihty. Surely He gives us reason to be- lieve that there is a real possibility of holding both to- gether, the personality of God and the divine life in the universe. Nor need we refuse to feel the help of a true anthropo- morphism because anthropomorphic representations have been so often false and crude. The noblest of earthly natures must alwa3^s furnish the type for our conception of that which is above the earthly. Thought will always stand upon the highest hilltop for its spring into the heavens. The Scripture statement that man is made in the image of God will always tempt man's soul to run back along the line of creation and seek to know the Pattern by the copy. At least man will always feel that to seek to know God by the irratioual parts of nature and call him Force, must be less true to Him and worthy of Him than to seek to know Him b}^ the higher reasonable parts of nature and call Him, as John Fiske hesitatingly calls Him, "Infinite Personality," however we may be aware as we use the word that it is ovei-full of the asso- ciations of our ordinary manhood. Certainly the protest against anthropomorphism must THE NEW THEISM. 159 lead us to this — to a deeper study of wliat the manhood really is which may help us to conceive of God. It must compel us to throw out of our idea of man those things which are only accidents of his life and not essential parts of it. As I try to know God by man, I may become aware that all the tumult of passion, all the meannesses and jealousies and spites and torpidities and sins are intruders in my human nature, that nothing reall}^ belongs to the human idea except that whicli, glorified and multiplied and spiritualized, may be lifted up and thought of God. And it is good for us that by such questions as the new theism is full of the whole question of personality should be reojjened in men's minds, and that they should be forced to think of it in larger ways than they have l>een used to apply to it. It has grown very tight and selfish. It has partaken of the littleness of the individual liuman crea- ture. See, for instance, how hard it is for many people to form any real conception of the personality of man, of an intelligence and will lielonging to the whole human race inclusive of all but distinct from each of the intelli- gences and wiUs of men. To most x^copl^ probably the colossal man, the aggregate human personality, seems to be only a figure of speech. And yet that is the personal- ity, I imagine, from which a true anthropomorphism must set out to imagine God. The man which is made in the image of God is manhood. Not this man or that man save as he is an utterance of the universal manhood. Not this man or that man with his partialness and fixed sim- plicity, but the universal manhood with its nniltitudinous- ness, its self -related and various internal life, its movement and ever-opening vitality, its oneness yet its multitude, its multitude within its oneness — that is the man which was made in God's image and by whose study the image of God may dimly open again upon the soul. We create first an artificial simplicity for our individual life, and we IGO ESSAYS AXD ADDRESSES. assert that outy in sucli an individuality as that is there a real personality. The first enlargement of such a nar- row conception as that is in the necessity of conceiving of the personality of man. The next is in the even deeper necessity of conceiving of the personality of God. The new theism finds itself face to face with that necessity. It hesitates about the i^ossibility of solving the difficulty and reaching the conception which yet it sees that it cannot do without. The religion of the New Testament stands ready with its clear utterance of that divine personality long known and realized. As it offers to the new theism the definiteness and positiveness of its Christ, may it not hope to receive again from it something of the largeness and breadth which the very definiteness of its Christhood is always in danger of losing f In the seai-ch for the '^ In- finite Personality " may not the old theism give to the new its vividness of personal beliefs, and may not the new theism give to the old its realization of Infinity ? There are times when you want to loosen men's thought of God as there are times when you want to tighten it. All loosening is preparatory to a better tightening by and by ; but for the moment it is a loosening and not a tighten- ing that you want. You bid a child open his hand so that he may get a better hold. Or is it not like a ship that lies frozen in a sea of ice ? She stands solid and firm, and is in no danger of sinking. In the spring the ice begins to melt, and the ship is afraid. The hold of the frozen water upon her seems to be giving way. But "when the melting is complete, she finds herself surrounded and held up by the same element, only now unfrozen and offering her not only safety, but the chance to go freely on her waj'. So is man's faith in the personality of God when it has been allowed to come into free relation to the liveness of the universe and the endless mystery of the development of nature. THE NEW THEISM. 161 And so have we not reached some notion of the direc- tion from which the wanderer will return from his wan- derings and of what it is that he will Ining- with him when he comes ? I have mentioned two books merely because they seem to lie very naturally in our way. But the dis- position which they illustrate is not confined to them, nor is it to be read only in the fields of thought to which those books belong. In ethical culture, in social life, in the regions of mj'stical and psychical research as well as in metaphysics and in the science of nature, the same per- vading sense of tlie vitality of the universe is felt. A new sense of purpose, a deeper teleology, is filling the frame of life. Effort is crowding itself upon the idea of energj^, and God more than force is becoming the word in all men's lips. Is it not true that with such a retiu'n of the tide the pools of faith which have been standing in the hollows of the rocks must be filled with new freshness and brought into a new union with the universal sea of human life and thought? The thing which this great inflow of nature half moralized and half personalized needs is to attain a complete morality b}' which alone can come a complete personality. That the religion of the ages has to give. Its continual assertion of God as the source of duty must give substantial clearness to this universe, which thus far seems in the new theism almost to reel and tremble with the intoxication of its immanent Deity. The word of David must be the story of what is to come : " He com- manded, and it stood fast." When that has come may we not look to see the great idea of God made no less clear and yet truly infinite ? May we not look to see a Christ in whom the whole need of all the living world shall find their satisfaction f May we not look to see a Church which shall truly express the meeting of the whole of manhood with the whole of God and the perfect satisfaction of the human and tlie di^'ine ? ADDRESS AT THE TWO HUNDREDTH COMMEM ORATION OF THE FOUNDATION OF KING'S CHAPEL, BOSTON, MASS., DECEMBER 15,1886. During the past seventeen years I have owed a great many of the pleasures which I have enjoyed to my con- nection with Trinity Church. I owe the privilege of be- ing here to-day, and the fact that I am the rector of that church, to a certain scene which took phice on a bright April morning in the year 1734, when Mr. Commissary Price, who was then rector of King's Chapel, went down to the corner of Summer Street and Bishop's Alley aiul laid the corner-stone of Trinity Church. One year after that time, at the same place, in the building which had been erected during the 3'ear, the services of Trinity Church were inaugurated by a service held and a sermon preached by the same Mr. Commissary Price ; and the life of the new church at once began, under the rectorship of Rev. Addington Davenj^ort, who up to that time had been in some way associated with the services in King's Chapel, but who then became the first minister of Trinity Churcli. And so our histories are bound together. Mr. Davenport is now to us a very dim and misty per- son, but everything that we leai'u of him is altogether to his credit ; and he gave at once to the services that were held at Trinity Church and to that new parish a very dig- nified and honorable position. He stands to us now mainly as a link to connect the lives of the two parishes, and to let us feel that we belong to the same line of 162 THE FOUNDATION OF KING'S CHAPEL. 163 succession to wliich the parisliioners of King's Chapel belong. When one has a happy life, he feels thankful to those who gave liini a chance to live that life. And when a parish has lived the hapjDy life which Trinity Chui-ch has lived, while trying in its way and time to do some useful work, it is thankful to those who gave it the beginning of its existence and the opportunity to do that work ; and so we are thankful to those from whom you sprang, and from whom we sprang, that they founded Trinity Church in that year 1734. I have tried to think what is the real relationship be- tween the King's Chapel of to-day and the Trinity Church to which you have given your invitation. It is not easy to fasten it. It is not simply that you are the mother- church and we are the daughter-church. It is something like the relation which has come to exist between the life of our own country and the life of the England across the seas. We talk in a pleasant way about England being the mother-country and of this country of ours being the daughter-country ; but when we come to examine this and to study the relationship, we find that we have not stated it exactly as it is. The England of to-day is not the mother of which the United States is the daughter. The England of to-day and the United States of America are sister-nations ; and the mother of us both lies two cen- turies back — in the rich life of the seventeenth century, out of which we and so much of the best of English life have sprung. England is the daughter Avho has remained at home ; we are the daughter who has gone abroad. We are not her daughter, and she is not oiu* mother. So it is — is it not ? — with reference to the relation which exists between your parish and the parish which I have the pleasure of representing. We are both the children of that peculiar English life — the life of the English 104 ESSAYS AND ADDRESSES. Churcli transported to tliis land and planted here — which has been so fehcitously described to us this afternoon. You are daughters of that history ; we are daughters of that history, not of a daughter-parish. Let us look for a moment on the face of our mother. She does not shine in the history of America. The at- tempt to establish the English Church in the colony of Massachusetts in those older days w^as not a successful, happy, nor shining part of our history ; and yet I am sure that there was something that passed from it into the mental, ecclesiastical, social, and perhaps even the politi- cal life of America which it would be a pity to have lost. Our mother, the English Church, trying to establish her- self in the colonies, came somewhat awkwardly, as might have been expected. She tried to plant herself in the midst of an antagonism that made her awkward and un- graceful in her coming. But she did bring with her sometliing of that profound reverence for the past, some- thing of that deep sense of religions order, something which she had clung to as the true form of devotion, some- thing which had all the respectability of form and com- munion which characterized the life of the English Church tln'oughout her history and experience in the old land. The trouble was that she came and remained a foreigner ; and just as soon as the foreigner was no longer to be tolerated, she passed out of the life which had been grad- ually acquiring its own national character. The beauty of her life was that these two children she left behind — King's Chapel and Trinity Church — were thorouglily American, in spite of her old associations and her un- fortunate life in a foreign land. She stamped upon those two congregations a distinctively American character. I do not learn — though those who are wiser than I am may correct me — that the congregation of King's Chapel was largely broken up by that exodus in which the rector of THE FOUNDATION OF KING'S CHAPEL. 165 King's Chapel departed, carrying so mueli with him that was representative of her history. Certainly the body of the congregation remained, and perpetuated the life which has residted in the history whicli has come from that day to this. And 1 do feel proud that the congregation of Trinity was the only congregation of the Ej)iscopal Church anywhere in this neighborhood which did so deeply retain association with the life of the colonies and the cause with which they were identified that she had their spirit of in- dependence, that she preserved her service throughout the whole of the Revolutionary War, and that she formed the nucleus around which the life of the Episcopal Church was gathered after the war had closed. So our mother the English Church at least succeeded in this, that she made others American, if she did not become American herself. She succeeded in inspiring that spirit which must always be cherished — that while the great Christian faith is one everywhere throughout the world, it is one part of Christian duty, and must be one element of a church's successful life, to identify herself with the national life in the midst of which she lives; that she shall sympathize with every national misfortune and wrong, and shall always be ready to rejoice in the pro- gress of true usefulness and the larger happiness of the nation in which she belongs. I congratulate King's Chapel that its history has been a patriotic history from the Ijeginning to the end. There was no lack of patriotism so long as she sprang from and associated herself with the life of the colonies in the days of the Revolution. From that time she has had her typical men among the noblest, purest, holiest in our American pulpit. She has been ever ready to catch the spirit of every new cause — not rash of imj)ulse, not throwing her- self into the stream of every enthusiasm of the hour, but always ready to sympathize deeply with every Avrong of 166 ESSAYS AND ADVEESSES. tlie land, and to help every right which was striving for assertion. And when the great crisis of om' history came, she sent her yonng men — none nobler, none more nnmer- ons, from any city or conntry congregation — she sent her 3'oung men into the field ; and there they bore testimony to the life which they had learned to live here at home. It is a great thing for a church thus to have been asso- ciated with a nation's life — always ready to meet each new emergency which called it to its work, always ready to be even a little beforehand by a general recognition of that which was coming, and by preparing her children by the fundamental teaching of righteousness and truth that they should be ready when the time arrived. One looks back over this history of two hundred years ; and it is full of such associations as this — the imagination has so much room to wander in ! One of the things to rejoice in on a great occasion like this is that this Chapel has stood for two centuries, imbibing such a multitude of personal experiences, representing such countless souls that have passed out of the world of living men and women and are now with God ; that she has striven with issues, some of which have been settled, and others which have developed into larger issues, Avhicli have claimed in their turn the souls of men ; that she has stood, genera- tion after generation, for the simplicity, the dignity, the majesty, and the worth of the Christian religion and the Christian ministry; that she has had such men in her pulpit, men full of the spirit of Christian faith, righteous- ness, and love ; men who, to the congregation which lis- tened to them, have represented something more than the truth the}' preached — the dignity of Christian manhood and the sweetness of human character. It is a great thing that a pulpit should represent, not simply a gospel, but a man ; not merely a truth, but a character ; not merely doctrines which people are to believe, but also a ministry THE FOUSlJATIOy OF KING'S CHAPEL. 1G7 wliicli should gain the respect of young men generation after generation ; that it shoukl teach men to believe the truth that the Christian ministry is indeed the noblest occupation, the grandest profession, in which men can engage. When the time shall come, as it certainly will come, that young men shall know that truth ; when there shall run through our schools and colleges a new percep- tion, that, great as are the glories which belong to other occupations — and I would not undervalue them — there is none that can compare with those attaching to the preach- ing of the gospel to the children of God — then the voices that have thrilled from the pulpit of the King's Chapel shall have a testimony to bear which shall deepen the im- pression of that truth as it comes home to the minds of young men. It shall l^ear testimony to the way in which that truth has been gloriously manifested in the lives and characters and speaking experiences of those men who have stood here ; who from the very fact of being here have preached the nobleness of life, the richness of the pursuit of truth, the worthlessness of everything that does not somehow fasten itself to the law of Clod, the brotherhood of mankind, and the assurance of a universal Fatherhood. One of the beauties of such a day as this is that it takes up a long history, and gathers it together within the em- brace of gi-eat principles. History develops itself here and thei'c in a vast multitude of incidents and in scattered ways. These commemorative days take the multitude of the events of history and gather them up together, and infold them in the great principles which have been ruling through them all, and in which they must all find their explanation. It has been intimated here this afternoon that the his- tory of King's Chapel has been a varied one ; that men have differed in opinion ; that there have been discussion 168 ESS ATS AND ADDEESSES. and dispute. It would not be a true picture of the thiidc- ing Christian worhl if it had been otherwise. It wouki not have been a true life of the Church if it had not rep- resented men differing from other men with reference to the things which l)elong, not to the surface, but to the very depth and substance of our faith. Let us set our- selves, friends — we who belong to the common Church of Christ — let us set ourselves against the false teaching of the times that would disparage theology. Let us set our- selves against the false sentiment that woidd sj^eak of theological discussion as if it were a thing of the past, a blunder in its day, and something which the world has outgrown. When the world ceases to theologize — to seek for the deepest and inmost truth with regard to the in- nermost nature of God — there has fallen a palsy ujion it. Let us rejoice that the history of this church represents the thought of earnest men who have again and again differed from one another because they have thought and felt deeply about divine things. God has never left the minds of His children unstirred. But while they have differed from one another, let us rejoice in this — that we are looking back upon the history of men who were ear- nestly seeking after truth. And as that history gathers itself into our Christian consciousness to-day, let us rejoice that it lets us believe that God has vaster purposes in the history of this and of all His churches than those who have worked faithfully on tliese problems are able to understand. Who believes to-day that the things which took place in the beginning of this century have come to a final result ? Who believes that the changes which took place in connection with this church and its re-formation at the close of the Revolutionary War have come to their final culmination ? Who does not feel, as he stands at the close of these two hundred years and looks back upon the past, the necessity of believing that God out of these many THE FOUXDATIOX OF KING'S CHAPEL. 169 3'ears will bring ricli results in the future ; that the prob- lems which have been reasoned have not yet been solved ? Who is not ready to rejoice in every disturbance of the past, so far as it has been the work of good and earnest men striving to get at the truth of God and Jesus Christ f . How shall we prej)are ourselves for tliat future ? Not by reviving old disputes, but by recognizing the earnest- ness which entered into those disputes — by consecrating ourselves in personal obedience to that Christ whose nature, earnestly studied, has led men apart from one another, as the}^ have tried to understand that which is beyond the understanding of men only because it is in- finite and cannot be reached by their intelligence, not because it is denied to their study by any wall of prohibi- tion. It seems to me that -auj one wdio looks back on the past and recognizes in history the great providence of God in His dealings with men — so much deeper than men have begun to comprehend — simply wants to say to any church, speaking for his own as he speaks for others : Let us go and seek that Christ, that infinite Christ, whom we have not begun to know as we may know Him — that Christ who has so much more to show us than He has shown ; that Christ who can show Himself to us only as we give ourselves in absolute obedience to Him. May that Christ receive from us, in each new period of our history, more complete consecration, more entire accep- tance of Him as our Master ; and so may we receive from Him rich promises of new light, new manifestations of His truth, new gifts of His Spirit, which He has promised to bestow upon those who consecrate themselves to Him in loving obedience, unto the end of time and through all eternity ! If one may turn a greeting to a pra3^er, may I not ask for yovi, as I know you ask for all of our ch arches, a more profound and absolute spirit of consecration to our Master, Christ, that in Him, and only in Him, we may seek after and come to His ever richer life ? ADDRESS AT THE THIRTY-EIGHTH ANNIVER- SARY OF THE YOUNG MEN'S CHRISTIAN AS- SOCIATION, BOSTON, MASS., JANUARY 21, 1889. I couxT it a great privilege to be allowed to join with General WaUver in speaking of the institutions that in this neighborhood have become established, and I rejoice to have the institution with which I am connected among them. It is some years since the Institute of Technology gave to us its welcome. As Trinity Church established itself here, as the Institute of Technology came, and as one by one the growing group increased, we have rejoiced that the recognition of what man had to do for himself and for his fellows found its expression here. And this gives a certain exhilarating and inspiring picture of the largeness of man's conception of the work that he has to do both for himself and for his brother-men. Every institution finds some pai'ticular day on which it particularly exercises itself and expresses its influence. I suppose that on this day this association, finding itself subdivided through all the things that it has to do during the year, gathers itself up and thinks what it is. It is for its history, as well as for its present condition, that it has to be thankful. Anybody who has known the history of the Young Men's Christian Association looks back upon the good men who have given so much care and thought to it ; looks back upon the number of homes that it has built, till at last it has clothed itself with the full richness of this beautiful building in which we are to-night ; looks ■ ' ■ . 170 • ■ ;, c :■• . ■ . THIETY-EIGHTE AXXIVEBSARY OF Y. M. C. A. 171 back upon and remembers its conveniences, its metliods, its experiments, upon the ways in which it has striven to make its life effective in the life of the city ; and remem- bers the almost countless numbers of young men who, scattered now in all parts of the land, look back to the Young Men's Christian Association of Boston as the source of much of their first inspiration. Let us think for a few moments about this institution, and what it means as the representative of the condition (as we may say) to wliich the city, and the age, and the world has reached just in the position in which we are now standing. An institution comes in its true time, and cannot come before its time ; and it passes away after a time, and it is good that it should pass away. We can- not think about the institutions that have been in history and ceased to be, as if they were all blunders and mis- takes. Institutions ai'e to the rehgious life of man what the leaves are to the trees. You cannot bring them out till the springtime conies ; you cannot take them away till the winter approaches. So you cannot bring an institu- tion out of the life of man till the life of man has reached that place where it calls foj-th that institution ; and so you cannot keep that institution on the life of man, really, after its work has been completely done. Therefore the interesting thing is to see how there is, beneath and be- yond all the institutions of mankind, the great religious life of humanity within these things that are perpetually changing, like the green and unfolding leaf of the tree. There comes out in the different institutions, which are as the masses of leaves which express the ever-growing life of the tree of humanit}-, this same identical life with which it has been full from the beginning. There are certain great things which all institutions have expressed from the very beginning, and must ex- press to the end, which, although they put on different 172 ESSAYS AND ADDEESSES. forms, are the same. What are they? Man and his na- ture, and those things which make him the being that he is. Man has not changed from the beginning. Man has been always the same. And in man there has always been the consciousness of a higher power : man has felt it more or less dimly and more or less clearly. Now he has rejoiced in it, and now he has been sorry for it, but man has been always conscious that there was something greater than himself. And in all the range of religious Christian history, besides the essential life of God and the continual life of man, there has alwaj^s been the life of the Christliead ; that is, the recognition of how God and man are bound together. These are the things that never change, that never cease to be, that never began to be, except at the beginning of our human life : the life of Christ, which represents, which declares, the perpetual union between God and man, the way in which God is forever uttering Himself in love, and man may forever utter himself in obedience. Every institution may rep- resent this. The institution which stands with its great tower just opposite this institution, our institution farther down the street, where we try to bring our people close together for the worship of God, and this institution, with all its relations of pai't to part — all these and all other institutions are l3ut the particular forms in which these ideas come forth in different ages and in different men. No other institution has any genuine hfe that is not a representation of the life of man, or God, or the Clirist- head. So every rehgious institution, and every institu- tion whieli in its highest view is capable of being called a religious institution, is the true manifestation of this perpetual life, of man's life, and the God-life, and the Christ-life, that is filling the whole world fi'om the Ijcgin- ning to the end. And then we look at each age and time, and see Avhat THIUTT-EIGHTH AXXIVEESAET OF Y. M. C. A. 173 institution, what phase of life, each has called forth. In what form may we look for the life which the present time should produce ? Now, an institution such as this must answer the con- ditions of the time, or it has no business to be. It never would have come into the vigorous life which it has to- day, it would have failed of the object in which it has been growing during the year, if it was not suited to the times. May we consider the meaning of the times, and see what sort of religious institution this ought to produce ? There are certain conditions that might declare what sort of an institution will be the religious institution of the latter part of tliis nineteenth century. And there are three great characteristics of religion to- day that everybody recognizes : First, the humanizing of it, as it may be called — that is, the way in which it has in these latter days burst the shell in which it lived for many years, and became, what it has not been in other days, the property of all men. When the priesthood lost its power, when the Christian Church became no longer simply a body of men with j)eculiar forms, doing certain things which no other men were supposed to do ; when it ceased to be the clergyman's Church, and recognized itself, as it is recognizing itself to-day, as simply the great aggregate of all men who love their Clod and love their fellow-men — a great change took place, which showed that a new time had come, and that the institution which represented that time should be different from the institutions of medieval times. The modern Cluirch is different from the medieval Church, in that it no longer takes its vota- ries from certain men, but says that in every man who loves God and his fellow-men is found as true a minister of Christ as any ordained preacher. What a great change is that ! 174 ESSAYS AND ADDRESSES. Another change has come into the Christian Chnrch in modern times. It is the distinct recognition of things as sacred which have not been regarded as sacred : not cer- tain acts which are technically religions acts, bnt every- thing that relates to man ; man in his completeness, the whole man, has got to he religious, has got to be touched by religion. This, and more than this, the conception of religion has to add to it. Man must be religious ; that is, must be bound to the highest forces under which he can possibly live the whole man into subjection. The third of the great changes that religion has under- gone is, that it now constitutes itself, not simply a func- tion of man's life, able to believe and worship, but also as the aggregate result of all these things. It is bound to work and influence the world in which it lives, each relig- ious generation leaving the world, not full of the myste- rious incense of prayers that it has prtiyed, but leaving the world better in every part of its life, made to be better, and to live more for the religious life that has been in it in any generation when that generation passes awa\'. These are three things which constitute the character- istics of the religion of our time. Its greater humanness extends what it believes to every man ; its larger concep- tion of sanctity finds its operation in fields that used to be counted secular ; and its conception of work, of labor to be carried on and effect to be produced, find expression in its practical activities. To go back : Every institution that springs out of this time must embody these things, or it is not a ti'ue insti- tution. Every institution that calls itself religious now must find in itself the j^ower of the religion of this day. What shall this be? A true recognition of religious things, which belongs not simply to any priesthood but to all religious men — the right to count everj^thing sacred by which man can be made a more complete being, and THIRTY-EIGHTH AXXIVEESARY OF Y. M. C. A. 175 the recognition of man's work as the final function of re- ligious life. What shall we say of the Young Men's Christian Asso- ciation if, in the influence that goes forth from these walls, every young man is taught that he is a priest of God ; that other men are to be reached by him ; that God is to shine through him, no matter what may be the special form of the activity that makes his life transparent ; if within these walls, with not simply a chapel, but with a library, with the museums in which the pictures of the good works of saints shall be an inspiration, in the gymnasium, where men's bodies are trained— through all there runs one spir- it, so that it is a Young Men's Christian Association from the turret to the foundation-stone, so that no part of it is secular, so that its gj'mnasium and its library are sacred, from its prayer-meeting-room to its amusement-room ; if, again, there is entii-e recognition of its spirit, every part for devotion, if the great final purpose of it all is work, influence, and effect and operation to be produced — then this is a true Christian institution, this is a development of a Christian age. It declares the ripened religion of the woi-ld in the form in which it has taken its manifestation, from the simple influence of a few years ago to the beau- tiful building of to-day, through all the religious ideas of its builders and founders. I have no fear of that which some good men have feared, when they have asked about the Young Mens Chris- tian Association, of its interference with the Churches of Christ. It is the Church of Christ. There is no question of the hand interfering with the heart. Each is a minis- ter to the other. It is not simply that they have one spirit and divided functions, so that we shall say that the churches are the heart and that this institution is the hand ; but Church and institution both have heart-power and hand-power in them, each of them, and thev are as 17G ESSAYS AXD A V DRESSES. close as one part of the life can be to the other part of the life. If I were to group together all the tilings that I have tried to picture to you, and remember that religion is nothing in the world but the highest conception of life — the word that is to express this all, the word that is to carry forward men as they come to believe in it, what shall it be ? In every department of life, whether I look at politics, at government, at social life, and the relation of ethics thereto, whether I look at religion, there is only one word that expresses the cord that binds the human race : that word is sympathy. Present and past religion seems to have been developing conditions under which sjanpathy might work. The characteristic word of the past hundred years has been Liberty. Liberty is a nega- tive term — the i-emoval of obstacles, the setting free of conditions under Avhicli the essential and absolute and positive power of sympathy, of the relation of man to man under the recognition of their brotherhood, should find its place and expression. This is a great year. Suppose you look back and think what the year 1789 was. Suppose you draw back the curtain, and what wotild j'ou hear and see ? You would see the last downfall of t}Tanny, and the first manifesta- tion on this new continent of the power of rejjresentative government, which is the power of organized sympathy and human brotherhood. You would see the National Assemljly gathered in France, and, before the year was over, the Bastile in ruins. And you would see George Washington being inaugurated the first President of the United States. In the sight of these two events in the year 1789, you have most correctly the meeting of the old and the new : that which was ready to perish, all that feudal life which we dare not believe had not its purposes in the providence of God, but which had done its work THIRTY-EIGHTH ANNIVFAISABY OF Y. M. C. A, 111 and was to pass away ; and, coining reverently into the presence of that angnst American, you would have that symbol of the future — who took the rulership of the na- tion with every assertion that he took it as no personal privilege, but as the representative of the men who had called him to be President. Let us believe that this institution, and all which are flourishing to-day, are those which are expressing, and must more and more express, the sympathy which is cur- ing more and more the evils of social life ; which is mak- ing harmonious the differences of our commercial life, and entering more and more into the obstructed ways of secular life, which is coming to elevate manhood in its relations. Am I talking too largety, examining too great ques- tions, when this is only an anniversary meeting of the Young Men's Christian Association ? No man ever, and no institution ever, did anything great, anything worth doing, anything that was a feeble apology for existence, unless it felt moving at its heart the spii'it of the world, the spirit of its time, the Spirit of the Christ, who in every developing power is the Holy Spirit itself, nnd brings to completer and completer fulfilment that human life which He saved and which He forever renews. Therefore cultivate the power of s^nnpathy, because it is the spirit of your age and of the coming age. Think of none of its developments as impossible ; do not forsake them to gaze simply upon the i)ast or the present, but in your own j^ersonal life, and in the institution which you love, and which has done such good work in our city, and every city, extend out from the center : that does the good work, for the city must do it for the world. May you ever rise and expand in youi- work of sympathy, making ever}' anniversary more glorious than the last. ADDRESS AT THE INSTALLATION OF REV. LYMAN ABBOTT, D.D., OVER PLYMOUTH CHURCH, BROOKLYN, N. Y., JAN. 16, 1890. From the moment when we met this morning, my friends, every one of us has realized how impossible it was for us to look forward wdthout looking back. It is so in every great and critical moment, in ever}^ moment which brings to a focus that which has been, and then opens up the prospect and the promise of that which is to be. But it has been especially so here ; and as I stand for a very few moments where I count it a very great privilege to stand, in the place in which he has so often stood whom we counted the foremost preacher of Amer- ica and of our land and of our times, I cannot help feel- ing with what beautiful fitness our minds have ever been turning from the bi-ight prospect which is opening before this church to the bright promise in history which lies behind it. You have had in Plymouth Church the great- est preacher of America and of our century, and, whatever has been said with regard to the abundance of his power and the vast diversity of his gifts, it seems to me that the feeling which we have to-night — that we have had all to- day as we have thought of him — has been the simplicity and the power that belonged to him, and it is in tlie sim- plicity of the past and in the simplicity of the future that the great power of Plymouth Church abides. Mr. Beecher was many things, but he was in everything the Christian preacher ; and the one greatest of all things, it seems to 178 THE INSTALLATION OF BET. LYMAN ABBOTT. 179 me, wliicli this land, .has to thank him for is that he has borne testimom^ — a testimony which shall be heard for- ever— to the greatness and dignity of the Christian preach- ership. I do not mean simpl}^ by the uttering of sermons, though they were fine, and no sermons have been heard that were like his ; but he has declared that everything the Cliristian minister does in every department of his work, whether it be in the administration of charity, in the management of parochial machinery, in the adminis- tration of the Christian sacrament, in everything he is the Christian preacher manifesting the power of the Christian j)reachersliip and the administration of the Christian gos- pel. In everything he is maldng felt upon mankind the power of the eternal Christian truths of the fatherhood of God aud the sonshij) of mankind, of the love of heaven and of the possibility of earth, and that which we look forward to is the regeneration of the Christian ministry in its great preaching-power. Whatever yoiu* new pas- tors shall find to do, they shall be j)reachers forever and continually; and, therefore, any one who in any degree and in any place is struggling with the work of Christian preachership rejoices in the past and for the future, and is thankful for what to-da}^ we have been prepared to look forward to and believe is to be. The one thought that is upon my mind to-night is the power of that Christian preachership, which, with the abundance of the ways of its exercise, always concentrates itself in this great power of the human voice by which the man always attaches his soul's belief to other souls, which, making it their belief, shall find in it the power of their life; but having its essence in tliis, that the Christian preacher must have his nature open upon both sides — upon the one side to God, and upon the other side to man. All missing things are to be supplied by truth and the God who comes through truth to men. All commu- 180 ESSAYS AND ADDRESSES. nication between God on one side and human nature and its needs on tlie other side is of the essence of the Chris- tian preachership. And so it is in the great preachership of the past and in the rich preachersliips of the future that we rejoice that we are able to stand here and con- gratulate Plymouth Church to-day. It seems to me the one thing we want to assure our- selves of, my friends, is tliis, that there is no problem be- fore the Christian Church and the world, however puz- zling it may be, however it may seem to be puzzling to the most ingenious of our thoughts, that does not really, must not really, find its solution ultimately in the increased energy and power, the increased energy and strength, of the Chi'istian ministr}^, and most largely the Christian preach(irship. What are the problems that are before the Church to- day? I would not think for one moment that there is anything strange in the fact that I should have the privi- lege of standing before you to-night, that there should be anything strange that a man calling himself by one Chris- tian name should say Godspeed to a brother of another name as he starts forth on the great road of a ministry like this. But we do know how men whose "hearts are one are separated in their divided lives ; we do know how denomination draws itself apart from denomination, each bearing its different name and waving it upon its banner as if it were the sign of a separation, and not of a common loyalty to a great Master and a common cause. Is there anything that is going to bring our broken Church to- gether and make it one great body of Jesus Christ ? With all my heart I believe it is nothing but a deeper fidelity within the Church, a more complete energizing of every one of these particles of the Church. It is not by arrange- ments, it is not by pronunciamentos, it is not by constitu- tions, it is not by conventions ; but when every part of THE IXSTJLLATIOX OF EEV. LYMAN ABBOTT. 181 the Church shall be fired by the furnace of its spirit with consecration to the Master, with love of His truth and with entire love of the souls of men, there shall be noth- ing left of the disunion, the disruption, of Christendom ; but the great Christian comniuuion shall build itself with the perfect fidelity of the entire inspired Church. And what is another question that is before us perj^et- ually f It is the question of the separation of dogma and life. Men are driven foolishly to say on one side that dogma is everj'^thing, and on the other, that life is every- thing. As if there could be any life that did not spring out of truth ! As if there could be any truth that was really felt that did not manifest itself in life ! It is not by doctrine becoming less earnest in filling itself with all the purity of God. It is only b}^ both dogma and life, doctrine and life, liecoming vitalized through and through, that they shall reach after and find another. Only when things are alive do they reach out for the fulness of their life and claim that which belongs to them. What is another problem that is before us ? The rela- tion of the Christian Church to this great human world. It is not separate from it. It has no business here excej^t when it represents the ideal of that life which is in reality all around us. The Christian Church is nothing except a specimen of that which all humanit}'' ought to be strug- gling to be. The Christian Church, if it completely real- ized itself at this moment, would be nothing except the fulfilment of that which is the possibility of all mankind. Let the Christian Church, then, be energized; let it l)e full of its virtuous spirit ; let it be animated with all the love of truth, the love of God and of the world, and then how it shall reach out and claim in unsuspected places those things which belong to it ! Wherever there is the power of God, wherever there is the wisdom of God — that is to say, wherever there is the essential Christ, the Christ 182 JiSSATS JXD ADDIiESSES. tliat is manifest and historic in the sonl — the Church shall send forth its claim and say, '' That belongs to ns." One of the strangest and richest phenomena of the future is going to be the Christian Church finding herself where she least expected to find herself ; but she will find it not b}^ less believing, but by more believing, in herself and in the power of the Christ whom she serves. It is because these vast problems are pressing upon the souls of men ; it is because of the separation of Christian from Christian under different names ; it is because of the separation of doctrine from life, as if those Avere antago- nists which are part of one living whole, neither of them having- any real existence except as it is welded to the other ; it is because the Church stands off from the world when she ought to be forever claiming the world and finding the power of her own life in that humanity of Avhich she simply represents the divine ideal, the purpose and the ultimate perfection ; it is l)ecause these are the great questions that are on the soul of man to-day, the questions which once settled the world shall have come to tlie fulness and completeness of its life ; it is because of their earnest ministry, the consecration of devoted men — that Ave rejoice to-day to see tAvo consecrated men giving themselves in this great field, sanctified by all the past and opening out of all the past such a rich and glorious future; "that we rejoice to see them consecrating them- seh^es and receiving the cordial Avelcome of the Churches as they begin their work. The next tAA^entA^ years of the Christian ministry may be something in this AA'^orld such as no ministry has been in any twenty years of the past. For the next twenty years, and many more yeai's to come, if it pleases Him, may God's blessing rest upon these brethren of ours AA-ho to-day are made the ministers of Plymouth Cliurcn. ORTHODOXY. (Clericus Club, Cambridge, Mass., June 2, 1890.) In Sir Plenry Taylor's drama, " Edwin the Fair," Frid- stan. Bishop of Lichfield, and Leofwyn, Bishop of Lin- coln, are discnssing tlie arrogant behavior of Dunstan, the Abbot of Glastonbnry. '• This is not right," says Lich- field. " No, nor canonical," answers Lincoln. It is a truly ecclesiastical response. It refers the matter instantly to a judgment-seat distinct from that which the universal conscience knows. It seems to count that second judg- ment-seat the most important. At any' rate, it considers the ^'erdict of the general tribunal to be distinctly strength- ened by the special judgment of the Church's law. One might have put up with the things being " not right," but that it should be also not canonical put it entirely beyond the pale of tolerance. "Right" and "canonical" are words applying to be- havior. The corresponding words applying to belief are " true " and " orthodox." When one man says of any statement, " That is not true," and another voice rej)lies, " No, nor orthodox," once more we have the two tribunals, one which is recognized by all men, the other which in- volves initiation, and which is familiar only to a few. And once more we are set to wondering which of them is in the speakers' mind the most important ; once more at least we feel that in the mind of the last speaker the second judgment makes a distinct addition to the first. It is good 183 184 ESSAYS JXD ADDEESSES. tliat the statement should be true. It is better still that it also should be orthodox. Let us make some attempt to see iu what relation the two words and the ideas which they represent stand to one another. It is one of the cases in which etymolog:y fails us. Merely looking at their forms, the two words are identical, except that one is short and simple Saxon and the other is long and lumbering Greek ; they both describe the same qualities of conformity to essential verity. But they must have some different tone and meaning, or they would not both be used. If truth and orthodoxy were always identical in shape and size and color, the presentation of both of them before our eyes would be a useless repetition. The Bishop of Lincoln must add something when he responds, " No, nor ortho- dox," to the Bishop of Lichfield's " This is not true." And no doubt in the very forms of the words there is an indi- cation of the difference. Orthodoxy or straight opinion has in its very sound a suggestion of standards of judg- ment, of conformity, and therefore of possible nonconform- ity to some embodiment or expression of the essential ver- ity. We feel in it the ideas of acceptance and approval, of that which is relative to the thought and convictions of men as well as of that which is absolute with its fixed nature in itself. This is the distinction between ortho- doxy and truth — the presence of this personal element. Orthodoxy is accepied truth, and all the questions of by whom, and when, and where the acceptance has been made fly open the moment that we say the word. The old Fathers who made the word '' orthodoxy " seem to have made another corresponding word, a delightful word, "kadodoxy," which has not maintained its place. Instead of it the distincth' personal word, '' heresy," has become the familiar opposite of orthodoxy. There is sig- nificance in tliis if it indicates how truly the personal ele- ORTHODOXY. 185 ment is in the whole conceptiou, though it has forced the declaration of itself more on the negative than on the positive side. We define orthodoxy, then, to be truth as accepted and registered by authority. As soon as we say this, and re- member how much of truth there is which man does not know, and so cannot accept or register, we see at once that orthodox}^ must be less than the absolute truth, and begin to discover what must be the kind of relation which exists between them. If man's acceptance and registra- tion of truth is perfectly correct so far as it goes, and simply incomplete, then truth and orthodoxy lie like two concentric circles, the circle of orthodoxy within the circle of truth and a ring between them, into which, when ortho- doxy is falsely allowed to confuse itself with truth, the mind enters with misgiving, sometimes almost by stealth, as if it had no business there. This is the region where often the very existence of the idea of orthodoxy does most harm. If that Avhicli is accepted as true is not merely imper- fect, but absolutely incorrect, then another evil comes. The circles tlien are not concentric, and however small the circle of orthodoxy may be, it overruns the line of truth, and the man who is most orthodox, l)y the very intensity of his orthodoxy most earnestly believes a false- hood and breathes its essential poison. It is conceivable, somethnes, no doubt it has happened, that the center and whole circumference of orthodoxy lies outside of the circle of truth. Then belief becomes death and not life, and reverence is the degradation and not the exaltation of the soul. This is the difference of orthodoxy from truth in the matter of size and situation. But quite apart from this, and even more important, is its difference in color. That which is believed because it is orthodox is beheved in a 186 ES:SA1,S jyV ADDRESSES. different way from precisely the same thing beheved be- cause it is true. And if it is of consequence not merely what we believe but how we believe, then the mechanical- ness and dryness and selfishness and fear with which we believe the orthodox must ever stand in contrast to the freshness and enthusiasm and freedom and self-forgetful- ness and hope with which we believe the true. We understand, of coui'se, that the conception of ortho- doxy comes in wherever men are capable of seeking and of holding truth. Every science has its orthodoxy as well as theology. Art has its orthodoxy, declaring itself in royal exhibitions. Literature has its orthodoxy, and builds its French academies. The orthodoxy of language in embodied in the Standard Dictionary. The orthodoxy of dress and society is what we know as fashion. The Massachusetts Medical Society sets forth the local ortho- doxy of the healing art. The party platform is the ortho- doxy of politics. In ever}^ region truth attained and truth attainable are the two presences, and the less is forever lifting up its voice and claiming to be the greater. According to the fineness of the material it deals Avith will always be the evil which any evil principle can do. And so the mischief of orthodoxy, mistaking itself for truth, will be most mischievous of all in Christianity. That the principle of orthodoxy has its rightful place and use is clearly enough manifested in the New Testament. When Paul bids Timothy " Hold fast the form of sound words which thou hast heard of me," he is clearly enough declaring that for immediate use the truth so far as it is at present known may and must cast itself into a definite and availai)le expression, but his prayer in the next chap- ter, " The Lord give thee understanding in all things," is not therefore a meaningless or hopeless prayer. When Jude exhorts liis hearers that they should " earnestl_v con- tend for the faith which Avas once delivered to the saints," ORTHODOXY. 187 he is bej^oud all doubt asserting that there is an accepted substance of the religion which he and they believe. But no one surely reads that overbui'dened text aright who does not ever hold in his remembrance that the faith of which Jude speaks is more moral than doctrinal, more personal than abstract, and that being the word of life it can be effectively contended for only as it is constantly expected to open new richness in the advancing relations to the life of men. In that great text truth and orthodoxy meet and blend, not by the limiting of truth to that wliich the disciple has ah'cady consciously' appropriated, but by the enlargement of orthodoxy till it potentially pos- sesses all that is included in and to be unfolded from the Word of God, the Christ who is the inexhaustible posses- sion of the Christian and the Chui'ch. On the other hand, the evil disposition of orthodoxy was never more perfectly displayed than when St. John himself said to the Lord, ''Master, we saw one casting out devils in Thy name, and we forbade him, because he followeth not us." I am not prepared to trace the history of the idea of orthodoxy and to see how it has given its harm and help in all man's search for knowledge, and in all the life and progress of the Church. Everywhere it comes to this : that the desire of orthodoxy dwells on the secondary tests and uses of truth, and not upon the absolute e\adence and essential value of the truth itself. It thinks of truth as a possession and as an instrument, not as a being whose very existence is the subject of congratulation and delight. Let us see what some of the ideas and impulses are W' liicli this character will import into the preservation of orthodoxy, but which have little or no place in the pui*e search for truth. 1. It mil make much use and ^vi'ong use of the princi- ple of authority. Authority as a contriliution to personal 188 ESSAYS AXn ADDRESSES. judgment is always good. Authority as a substitute for personal judgment is always bad. The first difficulty, though not the deepest, Hes of course in the impossibility of finding the authority in whom reliance can be placed. The determination of men that the}' will find such an authority results in what ? Either in the arl^itrary cloth- ing of a certain man or group of men with a trustworthi- ness to which a careful study of their history can give no sanction, or else in the amazing blindness which catches out of the mouth of some foolish Vincentius of Lerins a definition which seriously ajiplied would describe no single article of actual or possible belief, and goes about talking of Quod temper ithique, et ah omnihus, as if there really was a practical^le canon of judgment infolded in those pre- cious words. But the real troul)le with authority is that even if the oracle were found, the thing wdiich its utter- ances would inspire in the mind would not be real belief. It would not have present reality and force. Authority builds its system of truth as if it were a bridge resting on piers, not as if it were a road with the solid earth under it all the way along. There are long stretches in which if a pier long past, or a pier far ahead, gives way, the traveler is drowned. The traveler is always in the power of the future and the past. There is no solid earth at the mo- ment under his feet. The Psalmist's jiromise that " truth shall flourish out of the earth" is net fulfilled to him. The system of orthodoxy living upon the principle of authority loses the clear conviction of the present Christ, and trembles with a sense of impiety when it feels itself moved to say that we now are the authoritative Church as much, nay, more, than the Cluirch of any most revered of the old centuries. 2. Again, the idea of orthodox}^ is always haunted and hindered by the sense of the need of immediate iitility of truths. This is one of the secondary notions concerning OliTHODOXY. 189 truth wliicli it is all right to remember for a while, and which then it becomes quite necessary to forget. To re- member it wlien it ought to l)e forgotten defeats the very purposes of its remembrance. Truth is always useful, but to insist that truth shall report itself every evening at yom* counting-house and prove its usefulness and take its wages, is almost certain to turn truth into a, hypocritical lie. And so we find that the lower orders of the Church's workers, the mere runners of her machinery, have always been strictl}' and scrupulously orthodox. While all the Church's noblest servants, the}^ who have opened to her new heavens of vision and new domains of work — Paul, Origen, TertuUian, Dante, Abelard, Luther, Milton, Cole- ridge, Maurice, Swedenborg, Martineau — have again and again been persecuted for being what they truly were, unorthodox. Genius is never orthodox, and genius is a very useful thing, just because it does not set out to be useful. And those of us who lay not the least claim to genius nmst often claim the privilege of genius, and cease to ask whether a truth is useful and simply ask whether it is true. 3. It is evident enough here that the idea of wiitii must associate itself with the idea of orthodoxy. If unity is thought of as consisting not in sympathy of pur]30se but in identity of ideas, it must be that the limited circle of ideas in which it is possible that men should agree will be counted the true range of human thought, and all excur- Lmipathetic thoughtfulness of the man who believes in his country but thinks for him- self, and so is always bringing an intelligent disagree- ment or an intelligent assent as a real contribution to his country's policy. Why do I saA^ this here, to those who are not and who will not be politicians ? Because I honor you who all the way from one to twenty years have been teaching children 330 ESSAYS AND ADDBESSES. liow to think. Because I know that in the humblest school- room where 3^ou teach j^ou cannot give the j-oungest child the most rudimentary idea of independent thinking, that he is neither to accept things because everybody says them, nor to deny tilings because everybody says them — you cannot sow the seeds of bright, brave thinking in any young- mind, but the whole country is the better for it. For intellectual bravery, big though the name be, may be taught in the kindergarten, and the higher j-ou go in public life the more you need its influence and feel its loss, I am speaking to scholars, to those who read books, per- haps to those who sometimes vn-ite them. Permit me, then, to speak of another field in which the courage of thought is needed — the field of letters. There is such a thing as literary courage. Here, again, we perhaps find the thing best by noting its deficiencies. We learn what the courage is which is wanting by seeing the cowardice which abounds. Who is there that reads many books or that hears much tallvi about books without seeing that writers and critics both are governed l)y other people, not by themselves ? The author is "vvi'iting what he thinks other peoi^le want. The critic is praising what he thinks other j)eople like. Here again both kinds of slavery oc- cur, the compliant and the defiant. There is the author who writes to satisfy the public taste, and the critic who flings his decisions right in the face of the public judg- ment. In both alike conventionality is master. There was never any great book made in either way. The true literary courage consists in a man's saying what he has to say in such style as he believes best fitted to its character — not saying it because it is popular, certainly not saying it because it is unpopular, but saying it because it is true, and saying it as he think;s that special truth needs to be said. Does that seem very simple and commonplace ? If COURAGE. 331 it seems so to you, just think over tlie books that come hurrying from the press. What was the purpose of that novel ? Why should it have been written at all, and who made the stilts on which this lofty and conceited style strides on from page to page ? What set that cynic snarl- ing through his long lines of captious rhyme? Every- where the stamp of some false standards is on the short- lived things. They creej) along the shores and hold on b}' the timid sides of conventionality. How seldom comes a book that with broad freedom strikes out like a swim- mer and neither di'ifts with the waves nor buffets them for their own sake, but strikes across them to a worthy and absorbing purpose. Then turn to Shakespeare, Mil- ton, Wordsworth, and you know the difference. There is courage. Those men wrote their truth in their truth's own best way. Matter and manner both were theirs. ISTo man but they was at their work. Therefore we have " Hamlet," and '' Paradise Lost," and " The Excm'sion." Not tliat a man must be regardless of his age and of the circumstances about him in order to have real cour- age. The boldest swimmer, he who is most determined to master the current and not drift with it, will be the ver}^ man to study it most closel}- . You must know your servant even more than you need to know your master. One of the most subtle and interesting of all studies in literature is to see tlie delicacy and vigor of the relation- ship that exists between e^^ery really gi'eat writer and the age he lives in. Shakespeare, Milton, Drjalen, Words- worth, Tennyson, they are all specimens of this, of the way in which a really great man gets from his time its influence, assumes its character, writes in it as he never could have wi'itten in any other time than that, and yet is never overcome by its timidities. This is the difference of the great and little writers of any age, just as it is the difference between the large and little lives in any society. 832 ESSAYS AND ADDRESSES. A large man lives in a social system and is helped by all its spiiit. A little man lives in tlie same system and is always afraid of violating its letter. So a brave author moves with his time and is inspired by it, while a tunid author lies under his time and is crushed by it. I am siu*e that the habit of review-reading is hostile to literary com^age. To read what some man, a critic by profession, has said about a great live book, this, which is so often recommended to our young people, and which we are all so jubilant o^^er as a splendid way of saving labor, is probably as unstimulating and unfertilizing a process as the human mind can submit to. It makes the judg- ments technical and formal. It sets us all to wTiting books or judging of them with reference to other books that have been already written and judged, not with im- mediate reference to truths and thoughts. To the passion for review-writing and review-reading which has possessed our time, belongs, partly as cause, but more largely as effect, the critical and captious temper w^hich is all around us, and of which many of us are so wonderfully proiid. No ; read books themselves, and not men's talk about them. To read a book is to make a friend. To read a review is to be introduced to a passing stranger. Better one good book read in a' year than all the torrent of re- viev/s that roU on endlessly from month to month. In the book, if it is worth your reading, you meet a man — you go away full of his spirit — if there is anything in you he will quicken it. In the review you meet a system. The book makes you brave and full of courageous and ambitious independence. The review makes you timid and afraid of blunders. To make a cordial sympathy between their scholars and good books, to make young people know the souls of books and find their own souls in knowing them, that is the only way to cultivate their Uterary courage, and that it is the joy of eveiy teacher COUBAGE. 333 who has flesh, Hood, and a soul to do. O teachers, find this courage for yourselves, that yom* scholars may not be cowards where it is most of all needful for students to be brave. I have spoken to you, then, of courage. It is one and the same thing everywhere. The firmness with which one stands upon the hopeless deck before the doomed ship goes down, the persistency with which a man claims that the right is best whatever voices clamor for the wrong, the intelligence with which you think your own thought straight through the confusion of other thinking men, the independence of the conscientious politician, the delight of the writer in doing his own work, of the reader in form- ing his o^\n judgments, they are all at their root one and the same thing. One gracious and another stern, they are all made up, like the black coal and the sparkling dia- m.ond, of the same constituents. Let me recount in brief what those constituents are. First of all, there is the power of being mastered by and possessed with an idea. How rare it is ! I do not say how few men are so mastered and possessed : I say how few men have the power so to be. The fine and simple capacity for it which belongs to youth being once lost, how few men ever attain the culture by which it is renewed. But without it there can be no courage. Without some end set clear before you, what chance is there that you can shoot your arrow strong and straight ? It does not need that you should be blind to all the difficulties that lie between. Recklessness is no part of courage. When Cromwell and his men gave the sublime pietui'e of heroic coui'age which illuminates Eng- lish history, it was not that they undervalued the enor- mous strength of what they fought against ; it was that they saw righteousness and freedom shining out beyond, and moved toAvard their fascinating presence irresistibly. Courage, like every other good thing, must be positive, 334 ESSAYS AND ADDRESSES. not negative. If the college president coiirageonsly makes his college fresh and strong, it is not that he does not see the strength of old inertia, but he sees the ideal and the possibility of the true college blazing beyond it all. So train your children to be capable of the doniiniou of ideas. As you build a house for its inmate, so build their minds for princij)les. Even before the idea comes, t;each them that it is coming, and so make them expect their true master. And to do tliis there must be, in the second place, a freedom from self-cousciousness. Self -consciousness is at the root of every cowardice. To think about one's self is death to real thought about any noble thing. Let me quote you a famous old story which seems a parable : '' The beautiful Lady Diana Rich, daughter of the Earl of Holland, as she was w^alking in the garden at Kensington before dinner, met with her own apparition, habit and everything, as in a looking-glass. About a month after, she died of the smallpox. And 'tis said that her sister, the Lady Isabella, saw the like of lierseK also before she died. A third sister, Mary, was married to the first Earl of Breadalbane, and it is recorded that she also, not long after her marriage, had some such warning of her ap- proaching dissolution." Such is the old tradition of the house of Holland, Is it not a parable ? Does not he who sees himself die? Does not the mind that dwells upon itself lose just that fine and lofty power of being mastered by a principle ? The most courageous men I ever knew, if they were marked by any one thing were marked by this, that they forgot themselves, that they were free fi-om self-consciousness. So no clinging garments of their self- hood hindered them in running to the goal. And there is one thing more, which is simijlicity. The elaborateness of life makes cowards of us. It is not the bigness of the sea, but the many mouths with which it COURAGE. 335 mocks liis feebleness, that makes the strong swimmer grow afraid and sink. We want to find some one thing which we are sure of, and tie our lives to that, stand strong on it to buffet off our fears. When Hannibal was besieging Rome, some man in the besieged city gave cour- age to the rest by purchasing for a large sum the plot of ground outside the walls on which the tent of the invad- ing general was pitched. It was a brave deed. He be- lieved in Rome. That one thing he was sure of. With dogged obstinacy he believed that Rome w^ould conquer. Some one sure thing, made sure of early in our life, kept clear through all obscurity — that is what keeps life sim- ple, that is what keeps it fresh and never lets its bravery go out. To be able to obey ideas, to be free from self-conscious- ness, to be simple — these ai-e the secrets of courage. Teachers, it is your privilege to live a life where all these elements of courage may be most richly cultivated. It is our lot, 0 fellow-teachers, to live a life where all these elements of courage are most in danger. Danger and chance together make the richest life. The highest moun- tain-top is that which wears as a coronet the clouds through which it has to pierce. Quern nuhila victa coronat. I re- joice with you upon what you know better than I do, the need and the culture of courage in the teacher's hard and useful life. ADDRESS AT THE DEDICATION OF PUBLIC LATIN AND ENGLISH HIGH SCHOOL-HOUSE, BOSTON, MASS., FEBRUARY 22, 1881. I SHOULD be very sorry, sir, at tliis late hour, to under- take to treat of the relations of religion to science. I lieard, several hours ago in this meeting, some excellent remarks that were made upon that subject, and I think I must leave to the thoughtfulness of this great assembly the garnering up of the noble and wise things that were said to us by the principal of the Latin School. I want to speak only a few moments, if I can restrain myself so. It is all very well to talk about the magnifi- cence of this new building. It is magnificent — and we are thankful for it ; but to me there is something infinitely sad and pathetic this morning in thinking of our old Latin and English High School-house standing empty and deso- late down in Bedford Street. I cannot get it out of my mind. I cannot, as I look around iipon the brilliancy of this new building, forget what that old building has done. I cainiot help thinking of it almost as a person, and won- dering if it hears what we are saying here. I cannot help thiidving that from the top of the old brown cupola it looks across the length of the city and sees the pinnacles of this new temple which is to take its place. I cannot help thinking that, even through its closed and dusty windows, it is hearing something of the triumphant shouts with which its successor's walls are ringing. I canjiot help wondering what it thinks about it all. 336 BOSTON LATIN AND ENGLISH HIGH SCHOOL. o37 But when I know, letting tliat old scliool-lionse stand before me foi* a moment in personal shape — when I know what a dear and earnest old creature it was, when I know how carefully it looked after those who came into its cul- ture and embrace, when I know how many of us will always look back to it, through the whole course of our lives, as the place where were gathered some of the deep- est inspirations that ever came to us, I cannot but think that tlie old school is noble enough and generous enough to look with joy and satisfaction upon this new build- ing that has risen to take its place. And as the old year kindly and ungrudgingly sinks back into the generations of the past, and allows the new year to come in with its new activities, and as the father steps aside and sees the son who bears his nature, and whom he has taught the best he knows, come forth into life and till his place, so I am willing to believe that the old school rejoices in this, its great successor, and that it is thinking (if it has thoughts) of its own useful career, and congratulating itself upon the earnest and faithful way in which it has pursued, not only the special metlwds of knowledge which have belonged to its time, but the lynrposes of knowledge, which belong to all time, and must pass from school-house to school- house, and from age to age, unchanged. The i^erpetuity of knowledge is in the perpetuity of the purposes of knowledge. The thing which links this school- house with all the school-houses of the generations of the past — the thing that links together the great schools of the middle ages, and the schools of old Greece, and the schools of the Hebrews, where the youth of that time were found sitting at the feet of their wise rabl^is — is the per- petual identit}^ of the moral purposes of knowledge. The methods of knowledge are constantly changing. The school-books that were studied ten, twenty, thirty 3'ears ago have passed out of date ; the scholars of to-day do not 33S ESSAYS AND ADDBESSES. even know their names ; bnt the purpose for which onr school-books are studied, the things we are trying to get out of them, the things which, if they are properly taught and studied, the scholars of to-day do get out of them, are the same ; and so across the years we clasp hands with our own school-boy days. And there is to be the perpetuity of knowledge in the future. One wonders, as he looks around this new school- house, what is to be taught here in the years to come. He is sure that the books will change, that tlie sciences will change, that new studies will be developed, that new methods of interpretation will be discovered, that new kingdoms of the infinite knowledge are to be opened to the discerning eye of man, in the years that are to come. He knows it is impossible for any man to say what will be taught in these halls a hundred j^ears hence ; but yet, with that unknown development he is in deep sympathy, because he knows that the boys of a hundred years hence, like the bo\s of to-day, will he taught here to be faith- ful to the deep purposes of knowledge, will be trained to conscientious study, to the love of kuowledge, to justice and generosity, to respect for themselves, and obedience to authority, and honor for man, and reverence for God. That is the link iDctween the school-house that stood be- hind the King's Chapel and this; and that is the only thing that in the years to come wiU make these schools truly the same schools that they are to-day. When the Duke of Wellington came back to Eton after his glorious career, as he was walking through the old quadrangle he looked around and said, " Here is where I learned the lessons that made it possible for me to con- quer at Waterloo." It was not what he had read there in books, not what he had learned there by -s^Titing Greek verses, or by scanning the lines of Virgil or Horace, that helped him win his great battle ; but there he had learned BOSTOX LATIX AND ENGLISH HIGH SCHOOL. 339 to be faithful to present duty, to be stroug, to be diligent, to be patient, and that was why he was able to say that it was what he had learned at Eton that had made it possible for him to conquer at Waterloo. And the same thing- made it possible for the Latin and High School boys to helj) win the victory which came at Gettysburg, and under the ver}^ walls of Richmond. It was the lessons which they had learned here. It was not simply the lessons which they had learned out of books ; it was the grand imj^rint of character that had been given to them here. The Mohammedan says, " The ink of the learned is as precious as the blood of the martyrs." Our English High School and our Latin School have had " the ink of the learned" and '-the blood of the martyrs" too. They have sent forth young men who have added to the, world's wisdom and to its vast dissemination ; they have sent forth young men who have laid down their lives that the country might be perpetual, and that slavery might die. I have always remembered — it seemed but a passing- impression at the moment, but it has never left me — how one day, when I was going home from the old Adams School in Mason Street, I saw a little group of people gathered down in Bedford Street ; and, with a boy's curi- osity, I went into the crowd, and peeped around among tlie big men who were in my way to see what they were doing. I found that they were laying the corner-stone of a new school-house. I always felt, after that, when I was a scholar and a teacher there, and ever since, that I had a little more right in that school-house because I had hap- pened, by that accident of passing home that way that day from school, to see its corner-stone laid. I wish that every boy in the Latin School and High School, and every boy in Boston who is old enougli to be here, who is ever going to be in these schools, could be here to-day. I hope they ?A0 ESSAYS AXD JDDEESSES. will hear, in some way or otlier, throngli the echoes that will reach them from this audience, with what solemn and devout feeling we have here consecrated this building to the purposes which the old building so nobly served, and in the ser\dng of which it became so dear to us all : to the preservation of sound learning, the cultivation of manly character, and the faithful service of the dear country, in whatever untold exigencies there may be in the years to come, in which she will demand the service of her sons. DEAN STANLEY. {Atlantic Monthly, October, 18S1.) When Dean Stanley, on tlie IStli of July, was drawing near his deatli, he asked that his hrother-in-law and life- long friend, Dr. Vaughan, might preach his funeral sermon in Westminster Abbey, " because," said he, " he has known me longest." He chose the friend who had knoAvn him all his life to speak of him. There was nothing in all that life which he would have concealed ; and he knew that it was oidy as that life was treated as a whole, and its continual characteristics sui'veyed in their develop- ment from boyhood to the mature age in which he then lay dying, that he could l)e fifty understood. This, which is true of all men, was sj)ecially true of Dean Stanley. When he came to America, in 1878, he was wholly taken by surprise by the welcome with which he was received. His friends themselves were unj^repared for any such enthusiastic interest in one who was known only as a writer of books and as an ecclesiastic of a for- eign establishment. Men and women of all classes seemed to greet him as if he were their friend. It must liave meant that in his books there was that power, which not many books possess, of making those who read them know their author as a man — of making his personal life and charac- ter real and vivid to them. Therefore, they thronged the churches where he preached, and even the streets in which he walked, not merely to hear his words, but to see him. And there can be no doubt as to what was the personal 341 342 ESSAYS AND ADDRESSES. impression wliicli men had of him. Ten years ago a wise writer in the Conteinpovari) Rerieiv said, " If we were to attempt a description of Dean Stanley's characteristics, we shonld name first and chief of all his intense love for the light." That word describes the passion of his life. The insatiable cnriosity, the eagerness to acqnire and to impart intelligent conceptions, accompanied by an abso- lute moral clearness, a wonderful single-mindedness, and a sympathy and fairness which never failed — these, which are the elements in which light lives and grows, were what we all delighted to discover in him while he Uved, and what we delight to remember now that he is gone. His living and learning and working was like the shining of a star. "It is no task for stars to shine," and so with him all that he did seemed eas}^, as if it were but the natural and spontaneous utterance of what he was, the effortless radiance of a nature which was made to gather and to utter light. Intelligence shone in the refined alert- ness of his face — which, by the way, has never found sucli good representation as in some of the photographs that were taken in America. His style had a crystal clearness, Avhich showed his thought distinctly. His very walk was quick and eager, as if he must find what he sought. It is no wonder that many men have instantly applied to him Matthew Arnold's famous phrase, "sweetness and light." And the Spectator could use of him an expression which would l)e ridiculous if it Avere used of almost any other pulilio man, and declare that his death "leaves the public with a sense of having lost something rare and sweet." In due time there must come a Life of Stanley which, if it be wortliily written, will be one of the richest records of the best life of our century, and one of the most attrac- tive pictures of a human life in any time. His large asso- ciations and continual activity and ceaseless correspon- dence must have left most precious materials for such a DEAN STANLEY. 343 book. If there were only another Stanley left to write it ! Let us here recall its simplest outline. He was born, as he used to love to recall, in 1815, the year of Waterloo, and received his name of Arthur from the great duke of whose renown all England then was full. His father was the brave and clear-sighted Bishop of Norwich, who stood with Whately in the House of Lords when one of the first petitions was presented on the subject of subscription, who was the friend of Arnold and asked him to preach his consecration sermon, and whose life his son has written with a son's affection and the admiration of a kindred soul. To his mother Arthur Stanley dedicated his "Jewish Church," in recollection of " lier firm faith, calm wisdom, and tender S3'mpatliy " ; and of her, too, he has written delightfully in the same volume that portrays his father's life. When he was fourteen years old, in 1829, he went to Rugby, and was one of the first pupils of his father's friend. His " Life of Dr. Arnold," which is perhaps the liest biography of our time, is the truest record of what Rugby was to him. There is one passage in it which, as we read it, still lets us see the boy sitting beneath that pulpit in the Rugby chapel, with his eyes fixed upon the teacher, and gathering into his open heart "an image of high principle and feeling," which found in him a true mirror and was never blotted out. In 1834, when he was nineteen years old, Stanley went to Oxford, and there spent four 3^ears in the midst of the intense religious excitement of those days. He went forth from his student life laden with the honors and prizes of the university. Then he became a fellow and tutor. Later he was made the secretary of the Oxford University Commission. In 1845 he was chosen to be select preacher to the university. Five years later he became a canon of Canterbury Cathe- dral, and in 1852 he made the journey to the East, the record of which is in the glowing pages of his " Sinai and 344 ESSJTS AXD JDDEESSES. Palestine." In 1853 lie was appointed Regius professor of ecclesiastical history at Oxford, and to his labors in that chair we owe the " Lectures on the Jewish Church " and the "Lectures on the Eastern Church," which have opened the doors of the Old Testament and of the early Church to hosts of readers. In 1862 he went to Palestine again with the Prince of Wales, and the " Sermons in the East" recount the lessons of that journey. In 1863 he was made Dean of Westminster, and began to wear that title by which he will always be best known — the titb which he loved above all others. It was a bright and happy life. And it was constantly productive. Besides the books already named, there were piiblished in 1847 the " Sermons and Essa^-s on the Apos- tolic Age " ; in 1855, the " Commentary on the Epistles to the Corinthians " ; in the same year, the " Historical Memorials of Canterbury " ; in 1867, the " Historical Me- morials of Westminster Abbey" ; in 1870, the "Essays on Church and State," which has been well described as " the epic of the Thirty Years' War in the Church of England " ; and in 1877 " Lectures on the Church of Scotland," which, as Bishop Ewing wrote, " show a marvelous acquaintance with Scotch facts and their bearings." And last of all there was his most interesting volume on "' Christian In- stitutions," which was hardly issued when he died. These marked the great current of his life and study. And around them, no less characteristic and full of his char- acter and spirit, like sj^ray flung up b}^ the impetuous aud eager stream, there gathered a cloud of lectures, sermons, reviews, and articles of every kind, bearing perpetual wit- ness to the activity of his mind, the wide range of his learning, and the quickness of his sympathy with life. And now, what were his characteristics as they were indicated in this life and w^ork ? First of aU, as we have said, there was the love of light. No man ever loved COURAGE. 329 acts of public men. But it is cowardice. It is the dis- position of one part of our people to fall in with current ways of working, to run witli the mass, and of another part to rush headlong- into this or that new scheme or policy of opposition merely to escape the stigma of con- servatism. Neither the conservative nor the radical has the monopoly of cowardice. Neither timidity nor reckless- ness is really brave. No man on any side is truly brave in thought Avho is listening for other people's voices either to assent to or to contradict them. There is a class among us, a growing class, I think — a class Avliich all our educational machinery ought to do much to increase — which, not standing aloof from demo- ci-atic life and hating our institutions, but thoroughly a part of them, thoroughly believing in them, still is deter- mined to think freely. Our education is missing its best work unless it ij3 furnishing to those whom it trains just snch strong standing-ground in the midst of our popu- lar turmoil — a ground where man may stand and see the power of the people and yet not jdeld up his judgment to them, see the folly of the people and yet not be driven into contempt of them, but think his own thought still aud bring the results of his independent thinking to cor- roborate or to correct the chance judgments of the caucus or the street. The thorough-going partisan and the bitter, captious cynic are both cowards. The loud and indiscrim- inate applause of one, the other's miserable sneer, both are contemptible beside the open, sympathetic thoughtfulness of the man who believes in his country' but thinks for him- self, and so is always bringing an intelligent disagree- ment or an intelligent assent as a real contribution to his country's policy. Why do I say this here, to those who are not and who will not be politicians °? Because I honor you who all the way from one to twenty years have been teaching children 330 ESSAYS AND ADDRESSES. liow to think. Because I know that in the humblest school- room where you teach you cannot give the youngest cliild the most rudimentary idea of independent thinking, that he is neither to accept things because everybody says them, nor to deny things because everybody says them — 3'ou cannot sow the seeds of loright, lirave thinking in any young mind, but the whole country is the better for it. For intellectual bravery, big though the name be, may be taught in the kindergarten, and the higher you go in public life the more you need its influence and feel its loss. I am speaking to scholars, to those who read books, per- haps to those who sometimes write them. Permit me, then, to speak of another field in which the courage of thought is needed — the field of letters. There is such a thing as literary courage. Here, again, we perhaps find the thing best by noting its deficiencies. We learn what the courage is which is wanting by seeing the cowardice which abounds. Who is there that reads many books or that hears much tallv about books without seeing that writers and critics both are governed by other people, not by themselves ? The author is wa-iting what he thinks other people want. The critic is praising what he thinks other people like. Here again botli kinds of slavery oc- cur, the compliant and the defiant. There is the author who writes to satisfy the public taste, and the critic who flings his decisions right in the face of tlie public judg- ment. In both alike conventionality is master. There was never any great book made in either way. Tlie true literary courage consists in a man's saying what he has to say in such style as he believes best fitted to its character — not sa3dng it because it is popular, certainly not sajdng it because it is unpopular, but saying it because it is true, and snyiug it as he think:s that special truth needs to be said. Does that seem very simple and commonplace ? If COURAGE. 331 it seems so to you, just tliiuk over the books that come hiuTyiug from the press. What was the purpose of that novel ? Why should it have been written at all, and who made the stilts on which this lofty and conceited style strides on from page to j)age ? What set that cynic snarl- ing through his long lines of captious rhyme? Every- where the stamp of some false standards is on the short- lived things. They creep along the shores and hold on by the timid sides of convention aht}^ How seldom comes a book that with broad freedom strikes out like a swim- mer and neither drifts with the waves nor buffets them for their own sake, but strikes across them to a worthy and absorbing purpose. Then turn to Shakespeare, Mil- ton, Wordsworth, and you know the difference. There is couragei Those men wrote their truth in their truth's own best way. Matter and manner both were theirs. No man but they was at their work. Therefore we have "Hamlet," and "Paradise Lost," and "The Excursion." Not that a man must be regardless of his age and of the circumstances about him in order to have real cour- age. The boldest swimmer, he who is most determined to master the current and not drift with it, will be the very man to study it most closeh'. You must know your servant even more than you need to know j^our master. One of the most subtle and interesting of all studies in literature is to see the delicacy and vigor of the relation- ship that exists between every really great writer and the age he lives in. Shakespeare, Milton, Drydeu, Words- worth, Tennyson, they are all specimens of this, of the way in which a reaUy gi*eat man gets from his time its influence, assumes its character, writes iu it as he never could ha^'e ^\Titten in any other time than that, and yet is never overcome by its timidities. This is the difference of the great and little writers of any age, just as it is the difference between the large and little lives iu any society. 332 ESSAYS AND ADDRESSES. A large man lives in a social system and is helped by all its spirit. A little man lives in the same system and is always afraid of violating its letter. So a brave author moves with his time and is inspired by it, while a timid author lies under his time and is crushed by it. I am sm-e that the habit of review-reading is hostile to literary courage. To read what some man, a critic by profession, has said about a great live book, this, wliich is so often recommended to our young people, and which we are all so jubilant over as a splendid way of saving labor, is probably as unstimiLlating and unfertilizing a process as the human mind can submit to. It makes the judg- ments technical and formal. It sets us all to writing books or judging of them with reference to other books that have been already written and judged, not with im- mediate reference to truths and thoughts. To the passion for review- writing and review-reading which has possessed our time, belongs, partty as cause, but more largely as effect, the critical and captious temper which is all around us, and of which many of us are so wonderfully proud. No; read books themselves, and not men's talk about them. To read a book is to make a friend. To read a review is to be introduced to a passing stranger. Better one good book read in a year than all the torrent of re- views that roll on endlessl}^ from month to month. In the book, if it is worth your reading, you meet a man — you go away full of his spirit — if there is anything in you he wiU quicken it. In the review you meet a system. The book makes you brave and full of courageous and ambitious independence. The review makes you timid and afraid of blunders. To make a cordial sympathy between their scholars and good books, to make young people know the souls of books and find their own souls in knowing them, that is the only way to cultivate their Uterary courage, and that it is the joy of every teacher COURAGE. 333 who has flesh, "blood, and a soul to do. 0 teachers, find this courage for yourselves, that youi* scholars may not he cowards where it is most of all needful for students to he hrave. I have spoken to you, then, of courage. It is one and the same thing everywhere. The fii-mness with which one stands upon the hopeless deck before the doomed shij) goes down, the persistenc}^ with which a man claims that the right is best whatever voices clamor for the wrong, the intelligence with which you think your own thought straight through the confusion of other thinking men, the independence of the conscientious politician, the delight of the writer in doing his own work, of the reader in form- ing his own judgments, they are all at theu* root one and the same thing. One gracious and another stern, they are all made up, hke the black coal and the sparkling dia- mond, of the same constituents. Let me recount in brief what those constituents are. Fii'st of all, there is the power of being mastered by and possessed -odth an idea. How rare it is ! I do not say how few men are so mastered and possessed : I say how few men have the power so to be. The flue and simple capacity for it which belongs to youth being once lost, how few men ever attain the culture by which it is renewed. But witliout it there can be no courage. Without some end set clear before you, what chance is there that you can shoot your arrow strong and straight ? It does not need that you should be blind to all the difficulties that lie between. Recklessness is no part of coui'age. When CromweU and his men gave the sublime picture of heroic courage wliich illuminates Eng- lish history, it was not that they undervalued the enor- mous strength of what thej' fought against ; it was that they saw righteousness and freedom shining out beyond, and moved toward their fascinating presence irresistibly. Courage, like every other good thing, must be positive, 334 ESSAYS AND ADDBESSES. not negative. If tlie college president courageously makes his college fresh and strong, it is not that he does not see the strength of old inertia, hut he sees the ideal and the possil^ility of the true college blazing beyond it all. So train your children to be capable of the dominion of ideas. As you build a house for its inmate, so build their minds for principles. Even before the idea comes, teach them that it is coming, and so make them expect their true master. And to do this there must be, in the second place, a freedom from self-cousciousness. Self -consciousness is at the root of every cowardice. To think about one's self is death to real thought about any noble thing. Let me cpiote you a famous old story which seems a parable : " The beautiful Lady Diana Rich, daughter of the Earl of Holland, as she was Avalking in the garden at Kensington before dinner, met with her own apparition, habit and everj^hing, as in a looking-glass. About a month after, she died of the smallpox. And 'tis said that her sister, the Lady Isabella, saAv the like of herself also before she died. A third sister, Mary, was married to the first Earl of Breadalluine, and it is recorded that she also, not long after her marriage, had some such warning of her ap- proaching dissolution." Such is the old tradition of the house of Holland. Is it not a parable ? Does not he who sees himself die? Does not the mind that dwells upon itself lose just that fine and lofty power of being mastered by a principle ? The most courageous men I ever knew, if they were marked by any one thing were marked by this, that they forgot themselves, that they were free from self-consciousness. So no clinging garments of their self- hood hindered them in running to the goal. And there is one thing more, which is simpHcity. The elaborateness of life makes cowards of us. It is not the bigness of the sea, but the many mouths with which it COURAGE. 335 mocks his feebleness, that makes the strong swimmer grow afraid and sink. We want to find some one thing whicli we are snre of, and tie oiir Hves to tliat, stand strong on it to bnffet off onr fears. When Hannibal Avas besieging Rome, some man in the besieged city gave cour- age to the rest by purchasing for a large sum the plot of ground outside tlie walls on which the tent of the invad- ing general was pitched. It was a brave deed. He be- lieved in Rome. That one thing he was sure of. With dogged obstinacy he believed that Rome would conquer. Some one sure thing, made sure of early in our life, kept clear through all obscurit}' — that is what keeps life sim- ple, that is what keeps it fresh and never lets its bravery go out. To be able to obey ideas, to be free from self-conscious- ness, to be simple — these ai-e the secrets of courage. Teachers, it is your privilege to live a life where all these elements of courage may be most richly cultivated. It is oui" lot, O fellow-teachers, to live a life where all these elements of courage are most in danger. Danger and chance together make the richest life. The highest moun- tain-top is that Avhich wears as a coronet the ch)uds through which it has to pierce. Quern nuhila vida coronat. I re- joice mth you upon what you know better than I do, the need and the culture of courage in the teacher's hard and useful life. ADDRESS AT THE DEDICATION OF PUBLIC LATIN AND ENGLISH HIGH SCHOOL-HOUSE, BOSTON, MASS., FEBRUARY 22, 1881. I SHOULD be very sorry, sir, at tliis late liour, to under- take to treat of the relations of religion to science. I heard, several hours ago in this meeting, some excelleut remarks that were made upon that subject, and I think I must leave to the thoughtf ulness of this great assembly the garnering up of the noble and wise things that were said to us by the principal of the Latin School. I Avant to speak only a few moments, if I can restrain myself so. It is all very well to talk about the magnifi- cence of this new building. It is magnificent — and we are thankful for it ; but to me there is something infinitely sad and pathetic this morning in thinking of oiu* old Latin and English High School-house standing empty and deso- late down in Bedford Sti-eet. I cannot get it out of my mind. I cannot, as I look around upon the brilliancy of this new building, forget what that old building has done. I cannot help thinking of it almost as a person, and won- dering if it hears what we are saying here. I cannot help tliinking that from the top of the old brown cupola it looks across the length of the city and sees the pinnacles of this new temple which is to take its place. I cannot help thinking that, even through its closed and dusty windows, it is hearing something of the triumphant shouts with which its successor's walls are riuging. I canjiot help wondering what it thinks about it all. 336 BOSTON LATIN AND ENGLISH HIGH SCHOOL. .)o/ But wlien I know, letting tliat old scliool-lionse stand before me for a moment in personal shape — when I kuoAV what a dear and earnest old creature it was, when I- know how carefully it looked after those who came into its cul- ture and embrace, when I know how many of us will always look back to it, through the whole course of our lives, as the place where were gathered some of the deep- est inspirations that ever came to us, I cannot but think that the old school is noble enough aud generous enough to look with joy aud satisfaction upon this new build- ing tliat has risen to take its place. And as the old year kindly and ungrudgingly sinks back into the generations of the i)ast, and allows the new year to come in with its new activities, and as the father steps aside and sees the son who bears his nature, and whom he has taught the best he knows, come forth into life and fill his place, so I am wilhng to believe that the old school rejoices in this, its great siiccessor, and that it is thinking (if it has thoughts) of its own useful career, and congratulating itself upon the earnest and faithful way in which it has pursued, not only the special iiietJiods of knowledge which have belonged to its time, but the lyurposes of knowledge, which belong to all time, and must pass from school-house to school- house, and from age to age, unchanged. The perpetuity of knowledge is in the perpetuity of the purposes of knowledge. The thing which links this school- house with all the school-houses of the generations of the past — the thing that links together the great schools of the middle ages, and the schools of old Greece, and the schools of the Hebrews, where the youth of that time were found sitting at the feet of their "w-ise rabbis — is the per- petual identity of the moral purposes of knowledge. The methods of knowledge are constantly changing. The school-books that were studied ten, twenty, thirty years ago have passed out of date ; the scholars of to-day do not 338 ESSAYS AND ADDRESSES. even know tlieir names ; but the purpose for which onr school-books are studied, tlie things we are trying to get out of them, the things which, if they are properly taught and studied, the scholars of to-day do get out of them, are the same ; and so across the years we clasp hands with our own school-boy days. And there is to be the perpetuity of knowledge in the future. One wonders, as he looks around, this new school- house, what is to be taught here in the 3-ears to come. He is sure that the books will change, that the sciences will change, that new studies will be developed, that new methods of interpretation will be discovered, that new kingdoms of the iuflnite knowledge are to be opened to the discerning eye of man, in the years that are to come. He knows it is impossible for any man to say what will be taught in these halls a hundred 3'ears hence ; but yet, with that unknown development lie is in deep sympathy, because he knows that the boys of a hundred years hence, like the bovs of to-day, will be taught here to be faith- ful to the deep purposes of knowledge, will be trained to conscientious study, to the love of knowledge, to justice and generosity, to respect for themselves, and obedience to authority, and honor for man, and reverence for God. That is the link between the school-house that stood be- hind the King's Chapel and this ; and that is the only thing that in the j'ears to come will make these schools truly the same schools that they are to-day. When the Duke of Wellington came back to Eton after his glorious career, as he was walking through the old quadi'angle he looked around and said, " Here is where I learned the lessons that made it possible for me to con- quer at Waterloo." It was not what he had read there in books, not what he had learned there by writing Greek verses, or by scanning the lines of Virgil or Horace, that helped him win his great battle ; but there he had learned BOSTON LATIN AND ENGLISH HIGH SCHOOL. 339 to be faithful to present duty, to be strong, to be diligent, to be patient, and that was why he w^as al)le to say that it was what he had learned at Eton that had made it possible for him to conquer at Waterloo. And the same thing made it possible for the Latin and High School boys to help win the victory which came at Gettysbuj'g, and under the very walls of Richmond. It was the lessons which they had learned here. It Avas not simply the lessons which the}' had learned out of books ; it was the grand imprint of character that had been given to them here. The Mohammedan says, " The ink of the learned is as precious as the blood of the martyrs." Our English High School and our Latin School have had " the ink of the learned" and "the blood of the martyrs" too. They have sent forth young men who have added to the world's wisdom and to its vast dissemination ; they have sent forth young men who have laid down their lives that the country might be perpetual, and that slavery might die. I have always remembered — it seemed but a passing impression at the moment, but it has never left me — how one day, when I was going home from the old Adams School in Mason Street, I saw a little group of people gathered down in Bedford Street ; and, with a boy's curi- osity, I went into the crowd, and peeped around among the big men who were in my way to see what they were doing. I found that they were laying the corner-stone of a new school-house. I always felt, after that, when I was a scholar and a teacher there, and ever since, that I had a little more right in that school-house because I had hap- pened, by that accident of passing home that way that day from school, to see its corner-stone laid. I wish that eveiy boy in the Latin School and High School, and every boy in Boston who is old enough to be here, who is ever going to be in these schools, could be here to-day. I hope they 340 ESSAYS AND ADDIl ESSES. will hear, in some way or other, through the echoes that will reach them from this audience, with what solemn and devout feeling we have here consecrated this building to the purposes which the old building so nobly served, and in the serving of which it became so dear to us all : to the preservation of sound learning, the cultivation of manly character, and the faithful service of the dear country, in whatever untold exigencies there may be in the years to come, in which she will demand the service of her sons. DEAN STANLEY. {Atlantic Montlihj, October, 1881.) When Dean Stanley, on the 18th of Jnh^, was drawing near his death, he asked that his brother-in-hiw and hfe- long friend, Dr. Vanghan, might preach his funeral sermon in Westminster Abbe}^, " because," said he, " he has known ]ne longest." He chose the friend who had known him all his life to speak of him. There was nothing in all that life which he would have concealed ; and he knew that it was only as that life was treated as a whole, and its continual characteristics siu'veyed in their develop- ment from boyhood to the matiu'e age in which he then lay djdng, that he could be fitly understood. This, which is true of all men, was specially true of Dean Stanley. When he came to America, in 1878, he was wholly taken by surprise by the welcome with which he was received. His friends themselves were unprepared for any such enthusiastic interest in one who was known only as a writer of books and as an ecclesiastic of a for- eign establishment. Men and women of all classes seemed to greet him as if he were their friend. It must have meant that in his books there was that power, which not many books possess, of making those who read them know their author as a man — of making his personal life and charac- ter real and vivid to them. Therefore, they thronged the churches where he preached, and even the streets in which he walked, not merely to hear his words, but to see him. And there can be no doubt as to what was the personal Ml 342 ESSAYS AND ADDRESSES. impression which men had of him. Ten years ago a wise writer in the Contemporanj Rei'ietv said, " If we were to attempt a description of Dean Stanley's characteristics, we shonld name first and chief of all his intense love for the light." That word describes the passion of his life. The insatiable cnriosity, the eagerness to acquire and to impart intelligent conceptions, accompanied by an abso- lute moral clearness, a wonderful singie-mindedness, and a sympathy and fairness which never failed — these, which are the elements in which light lives and grows, were what we all delighted to discover in him while he lived, and what we delight to remember now that he is gone. His living and learning and working was like the shining of a star. " It is no task for stars to shine," and so with him all that he did seemed easy, as if it were but the natural and spontaneous utterance of what he was, the effortless radiance of a nature which was made to gather and to utter light. Intelligence shone in the refined alert- ness of his face — which, by the wa}', has never found sucli good representation as in some of the photographs that were taken in America. His style had a crystal clearness, which showed his thought distincth'. His very walk was quick and eager, as if he must find what he sought. It is no wonder that many men have instantly applied to him Matthew Arnold's famons phrase, " sweetness and light." And the Spectator could use of him an expression which would be ridiculous if it were used of almost any other public man, and declare that his death " leaves the public Avith a sense of having lost something rare and sweet." In due time there must come a Life of Stanley which, if it he worthily written, will be one of the richest records of the best life of our century, and one of the most attrac- tive pictures of a human life in any time. His large asso- ciations and continual activity aiul ceaseless correspon- dence must have left most precious materials for such a DEAN STANLEY. 343 book. If there were ouly another Stanley left to write it ! Let us here recall its simplest outline. He was born, as he used to love to recall, in 1815, the year of Waterloo, and received his name of Arthur from the great duke of whose renown all England then was full. His father was the brave and clear-sighted Bishop of Norwich, who stood with Whately in the House of Lords when one of the first petitions was presented on the subject of subscription, who was the friend of Arnold and asked him to preach his consecration sermon, and whose life his son has written with a son's affection and the admiration of a kindred soul. To his mother Arthur Stanley dedicated his "Jewish Church," in recollection of " her firm faith, calm wisdom, and tender sympathy " ; and of her, too, he has written delightfully in the same volume that portraj^s his father's life. When he was fourteen years old, in 1829, he went to Rugby, and was one of the first pupils of his father's friend. His '' Life of Dr. Arnold," which is pei-haps the best biography of our time, is the truest record of what Rugby was to him. There is one passage in it which, as we read it, still lets us see the boy sitting beneath that pulpit in the Rugby chapel, with his eyes fixed upon the teacher, and gathering into his open heart ''an image of high principle and feeling," which found in him a true mirror and was never blotted out. In 1834, when he was nineteen years old, Stanley went to Oxford, and there spent four years in the midst of the intense religious excitement of those days. He went forth from his student life laden with the honors and prizes of the university. Then he became a fellow and tutor. Later he was made the secretary of the Oxford University Commission. In 1845 he was chosen to be select preacher to the university. Five years later he became a canon of Canterbury Cathe- dral, and in 1852 he made the journey to the East, the record of which is in the glowing pages of his " Sinai and 344 ESSAYS AND ADDRESSES. Palestine." In 1853 he was appointed Regius professor of ecclesiastical history at Oxford, and to his labors in that chair we owe the " Lectures on the Jewish Church " and the " Lectures on the Eastern Church," which have opened the doors of the Old Testament and of the early Church to hosts of readers. In 1862 he went to Palestine again with the Prince of Wales, and the " Sermons in the East" recount the lessons of that journe}-. In 18G3 he was made Dean of Westminster, and began to wear that title by which he will always be best known- — the title which he loved above all others. It was a bright and happy life. And it was constantly productive. Besides the books already named, there were published in 1847 the "■ Sermons and Essays on the Apos- tolic Age " ; in 1855, the " Commentary on the Epistles to the Corinthians " ; in the same year, the " Historical Memorials of Canterbury " ; in 1867, the " Historical Me- morials of Westminster Abbey " ; in 1870, the " Essays on Church and State," which has been well described as "the epic of the Thirty Years' War in the Church of England " ; and in 1877 " Lectures on the Church of Scotland," which, as Bisho}) Ewing wrote, " show a marvelous acquaintance with Scotch facts and their bearings." And last of all there was his most interesting volume on " Christian In- stitutions," which was hardly issued when he died. These marked the great current of his life and study. And around them, no less characteristic and full of his char- acter and spirit, like si)ray flung up by the impetuous and eager stream, there gathered a cloud of lectures, sermons, reviews, and articles of every kind, bearing perpetual wit- ness to the activity of his mind, the wide range of his learning, and the quickness of his sympathy with life. And now, what were his characteristics as they were indicated in this life and work ? First of aU, as we have said, there was the love of light. No man ever loved DEAN STANLEY. 345 more to look facts in the face, and to know the exact and certain truth. " Let us be firmly persuaded," he wrote, " that error is most easily eradicated bj^ estaljlishing truth, and darkness most permanently displaced by diffusing lig'ht." There is no clearer illustration of this love of light than in his eager and impassioned insistence that the revision of the translation of the Bible should have the help of all the best scholarship of England, in what- ever creed or church it might be found. His speech in Convocation, when it was proposed to reject the help of a Unitarian which had already been iindted, is a fine utter- ance at once of intelligent judgment and of chivalrous courtesy and justice. And it is interesting to see always who are the men whom he loves most, the men of whom he speaks with the most spontaneous affection. Always they are the men of light. It is "the clear-headed and intrepid Zwingle," who, he says, " anticipated the neces- sary conclusion of the whole matter" of the efficacy of the eucharistic rite. It is the liberal theologians of the seventeenth centiuy to whom he always turns back for the best patterns of religious thought in England. We of America may well love to remember how he treasured the friendship of one of our own men of light, whose loss we are still freshly mourning. " Dear Dr. Washburn ! " he wrote this spring, "how well I remember preaching in that great Calvary, and my visit to him in the latter da\'s of my stay in New York. He was of ^ that small transfigured baild whom the world cannot tame' — the band of Falkland, Leighton, Whichcote, Arnold, Maurice, Peace be with him ! " Again, there is the specialness of the method of all Dean Stanley's work, the way in which he approached all truth through, history. It has often been said of him that lie was no metaphysician, and that he had no turn for ab- stract thought. Nobody saw this, and nobody has said it, 346 ESSAYS AXD ADBIlESSIiS. more clearly tlian himself. When he was asked to write an introdnction to Bunsen's " God in History," he replied : *'I hesitated, among other reasons, because it relates so largel}^ to philosophical and abstract questions, on which I do not feel myself competent to enter.'' Truth has manj^ doors, and he would enter it tlu'ough that to which his feet most naturally turned. This recognition of the spe- cialness, or, if we please, the limitation, of his power had much to do with the effectiveness, and also with the peren- nial freshness, of his life. On the steamer at New York, when he was leaving iVjnerica, he was asked whether he was not weary with his most laborious journey. But he answered, " No ; I have declined to see anything in which I was not interested. Kind friends have asked me to go to see factories, and many other interesting things for which I did not care ; but I have confined myself to things which I did care for, and so I am not tired." So it was all his life. He worked as he was made to work and as he loved to work, and so the last page that he "vvi'ote was as fresh and unwearied as the first. He is everywhere and always the historian. If he wants to define a doc- trine, he traces its history. If he makes a i)age glow like a picture with some description of natural scenery, it is always as the theater of lunnau action, or as a metaphor of human life, that he describes it. Of pure love for na- ture for its own sake he shows but little. lu his volume of "Addresses iu America" there are three beautiful pic- tures from nature, but it is noticeable that in each case the pictm-e is drawn with reference to hunum life. He described Niagara ; but it was because he saw in its mist and majesty an image of the future of American destiny. He told of a maple and an oak which he saw growing together from the same stem on the beautiful shores of Lake George ; but it was because there seemed to him to be in them a likeness of the unbroken union of the bril- DEAN STANLEY. 347 liant, fiery maple of America and the gnarled and twisted oak of England. He pictured tlie effects of sunrise on the Alps ; but it was the rise of true and rational religion among men that he wanted his hearers to see in Ms ma- jestic words. Everywhere his eye is upon man. He is always the historian, because in the simplest and most literal sense he is ahvays the jjhilanthropist, tlie lover of man. And it is not only men, but man, tliat he loves ; nay, it is mainly man. He loves men for the sake of man, for their contribution to and their share in humanity. There- fore it was that he could care most earnestly for men in whose special arts and occupations he personally had no share or interest. To him the}^ were all pai-t of the great human drama, full of divine meanings. He could preach in the Abbey of the greatness of a great naturalist, although he was no student of natural science ; or of a great musi- cian, though he had no taste for music ; or of a great nov- elist, although he could not read his novels. Sometimes his eulogies have seemed to some men to be indiscrimi- nately lavished, but we must have the sight, which he never lost, of the endless human procession, ever moving on ; each faithful liuman being, famous or insignificant, bearing his gift, great or small, intelligible or unintelligi- ble to his brethren, yet all accepted and laid up in the vast temple of the divine purpose, to which they move, in which they slowly disappear. We must have this sight before we can understand or judge his judgments of his feUow- men. One rejoices to think how full of poetry the world must have been to him. A walk in London or Jerusalem must have been crowded with memory, and fear, and hope, and love. The unexjn-essed, half -conscious joy of life to one who carries such a mind and eye must be something of which the multitude of us know nothing. 3-18 ESSAYS AND ADDRESSES. And while we gi-aiit its specialness, while we see the need of other methods for the entire mastery of truth, let us acknowledge the greatness and beauty of the historic method, of which Dean Stanley gave such a noteworthy example. In the turmoil of a 2)riori reasoning, in the hurly-burly of men's speculations about what ought to be, let us welcome the enthusiastic student of what is and of what has been. The gospel in the ages must always be part of the same revelation with the gospel in the Bible and the gospel in the heart. "We cannot afford to lose the softening and richening of opinions by the historic sense. The ecclesiastical historian and the systematic theologian must go hand in hand. " The word of the Lord which was given in the Council of Nicasa," says Athanasius, '' abideth forever," but the personal History of the Council, which Dean Stanley has so wonderfully told, is part of the word of God which comes from tliat memorable assemblage to all the generations. The catholicity and charity for which Dean Stanley's name has become almost a synonym is wortliy of being carefully studied, in order that its full greatness may be known. Some men's toleration of those who differ from them is mere good-nature and indifference. Other men's toleration is the mere application of a theory, and is quite consistent with strong personal dislikes. In the Dean of Westminster the eatholicity which so impressed the world and drew the hearts of all good men to him was the issue of a lofty conception of the Church of Christ, combined with that instinctive love for man of which we have been speaking ; and heart and mind were perfectly united in it. Therefore the public and the private life were in com- pletest harmony. It is well known with what a generous hospitalit}^ the doors of the deanery stood wide open. Older men tell how, in older days, tlie Stanley rooms at Oxford were eagerly thronged with all who had any desire DEAX STANLEY. 349 to seek the light which filled them ; but what we know best, and what will always be remembered by multitudes as tlie}^ pass in sight of the little dark door, hidden away where yet so many pilgrims found it, under the cloister arch as you pass through to the Jerusalem Chamber, is the open welcome which at the deanery in Stanley's time was always waiting for whoever brought anything of love for truth or interest in noble things. "I love all who love truth, if poor or rich, In what they have won of truth possessively ! " That was the spirit of the place, and evidently before such a spirit no enmity could stand. Dean Stanley was a strange instance of a man who was dreaded and disliked in hundreds of rectories and homes in England for the ideas which he held, or was supposed to hold, but who had not a personal enemy in all the world. When he was made Dean of Westminster, Christopher Wordsworth, who was one of the canons of the Abbey, publicly protested against the appointment. When he died, the same Chiis- topher Wordsworth, now Bishop of Lincoln, bating noth- ing of his disapproval of the Dean's opinions, bore most affectionate testimony in Convocation to the richness and nobleness of Stanley's character. All this means something. It means that Stanley had the power of going himself, and of compelling the men who dealt with him to go, down to those deeper regions of life and thought where men of different opinions may find themselves in a true sympathy. Therefore his catho- licity was real. Men did not meet at the deanery in an armed truce, but in a deeper brotherhood. When Stanley Vent and lectured to the Scotch Presliyterians, or to the American Methodists or Baptists, it was a real thing. He carried to all of them the truth on which their truths rested. He taught the Scotch out of Chalmers, and the 350 ESSAYS AND ADDRESSES. Methodists out of Wesley, and the Congregationalists out of Dr. Robinson. " As certain also of your own poets have said," he seemed to be always repeating, as if in the highest and truest and most poetic utterance of each man's faith he rejoiced to find the essence of the common faith of all. In one of the last articles which he wrote there is an estimate of Newman, Pusey, and Keble which, without in the least losing the clear discrimination of their opinions, is wondei-fully full of appreciative honor for the men; and hardly anj^ page in all his writings glows with more generous enthusiasm than that, in the same article, in which he records the oj)i30sition of the Liberal party in the Churcli of England against the at- tempt to put down the Tractarians in 1844. The volume of "Essays on Church and State" is a book which every religious student ought to read, for it contains his three- fold plea for liberty — liberty for the Evangelical, the Rationalist, and the Ritualist ; a liberty for which he pleads in the name of that large conception of the Church of Christ which would be mangled if any one of these representatives of the three great perpetual tyj)es of relig- ious life were persecuted or expelled. It is evident that a catholicity as positive as this could not rest in mere sentiment. There was always an enthu- siastic chivalry waiting, sleeping on its arms, and ready to spring up at the slightest cry of oppression or unfair- ness, and utter itself in word and deed. How we shall miss his voice ! Whenever meanness or bigotry lifted its head we knew that we should hear from Stanley. When the atmosphere grew heavy we looked for the lightning of his speech. In 1866 Convocation undertook to de- nounce Bishop Colenso for his theological writings, and to confirm his deposition. As one reads the speech of Stanley, one can see him on his feet in the midst of the bishop's enemies. The small figure, great with iudigna- DEAN STANLEY. 351 tion, seems to dilate before us. He takes possession of our synipatliies, as liis words took possession then of the real heart of England. He says in the plainest language how absolutely his method of studying the Bible differs from Colenso's. He emphasizes his plea by a disclaimer of personal association. But he pleads for free speech and for light. " The Bishop of Natal gives us more than he can ever take from us by the testimony which is thuf rendered to all the woi-ld that the power of thought and speech is still left to us, even in the highest ranks of our hierai'chy. This is worth a hundred mistakes that he may liave made about the author of the Pentateuch." He tells Convocation that among living prelates and clergymen of the Church of England there are hundreds and thousands who hold the same principles as Bishop Colenso, " against whom you have not proposed and dare not propose to institute proceedings." Among these he describes himself. Then he cries out, ''At least, deal out the same measure to me that you deal to him ; at least judge for all a right- eous judgment. Deal out tlie same measure to those who are well befriended and who are present as to those who are unbefriended and absent." It would be hard to find a truer chivalry than that. It would be hard to say what nobler use could possibly be made of privilege and power and prosperity than thus to hold them like a shield over the oppressed and helpless. Something of the same chivalry appears in his contin- ual assertion of the worth of goodness outside the visible church and the formal associations of religion. He, liv- ing deep in those associations, and loving them with all his heart, is watchful and jealous lest any wrong should be done to that larger working of the Spirit of God which no organization can express. So he pleads for the sacred- ness of secular life. So he even becomes the champion of a depreciated age of liistory, and in the article which I 352 ESSAYS AND ADDRESSES. have already quoted chivalrously stands up for the despised and dishonored eighteenth century. There is a chivalry in prayer. There is a kind of prayer in which the man who prays seems to value the privilege of his spiritual life mostly because of the hope which it gives him for the darkest and most hopeless of God's chil- dren. Such a prayer as this is one which the Dean of Westminster wrote very lately for one of the days of the Church year for which the Liturgy provides no collect : "O Eternal Spirit, through whom in every nation he that feareth God and worketh righteousness is accepted before Him, enlighten our hearts, that we may know and ]3erceive in all nations and kindreds of people whatsoever there is in any of them of true and honest, just and pure, lovely and of good report, through the Word which light- eth every man, Jesus Christ our Lord." It is certain that the religious life and teaching- of Dean Stanley have given immense support to Christian faith in England. In Convocation, just after he died, the Arch- bishop of Canterbury spoke of him thus : " There are, in a great community like ours, a vast number of persons who are not members of our own or of any other church, and there are persons whose temptations are altogether in the direction of skepticism ; and my own impression is that the works of the late Dean of Westminster have con- firmed in the Christian faith a vast number of such per- sons." That is a noble record in such days as these. To discriminate the essence of Christianity from its accidents ; to show the world that many of the attacks on Christian faith are aimed at what men may well be in doubt about, and yet be Christians ; to lead the soul behind the dis- putes whose battle-ground is the letter, into the sanctuary of the Spirit; to bid the personal loyalty to a divine Mas- ter stand forth from the tumult of doctrinal discussion as the one vital power of the Christian life — this is a work DEAN STANLEY. 353 for the defender of the faith which is full of inspiration, and makes multitudes of men his debtors. Stanley's last volume, his " Christian Institutions," does this with won- derful clearness and power. What Christian faith and worship really are stand forth in that book in most calm and majestic simplicity. As we read it, it"is as if we heard the quiet word spoken which breaks the spell of ecclesias- ticism, and the imprisoned truth or principle wakes and stands upon its feet and looks us in the eye. The flush of life comes back into the hard face of dead ceremonies, and their soul reveals itself. Bubbles of venerable super- stition seem to burst before our eyes ; and we feel sure anew, with fresh delight and hope, that not fantastical complexity, but the simijlicit}^ of naturalness, is the real temple in which we are to look for truth. The great Chris- tian faith of the future wiU honor the lifelong teacher of such rational Christianity as that high among the servants and saviors of the religion of Christ in England in these days of doubt, high among the faithful souls who, in the midst of perplexity and disbelief, refused to despair of the Church of Christ. Nor was it for mere concession that the religion of the Dean was noteworthj^ His whole woi-k was constructive. He was the most conservative of radicals. In 1863, when he bade farewell to Oxford that he might go to Westmin- ster, these were his last words to the young men of the university : ''Be as free, be as liberal, be as courageous, as you will, but be religious, hecause you are liberal 5 be devout, hecause yon are free ; be pure, hecause you are bold ; cast away the works of darkness, hecause you are the children of light ; be humble and considerate and for- bearing, hecause you are charged with hopes as grand as were ever committed to the rising generation of any Church or of any countr3^" Any man who talks about him as if the essence of his life and work were destructive 354 ESSAYS JXD ADDIiESSES. lias yet to learn what destruction and construction mean — has yet to master that great truth which Stanley him- self thus nobly states : " We sometimes think that it is the transitory alone which changes; the eternal stands still. Rather, the transitory stands still, fades, and falls to pieces ; the eternal continues by changing its form in accordance with the movement of advancing ages." It woidd be hard to name any man in these days who has given clearer proof of a true love for the Bible than Dean Stanley. On a quiet summer Sunday evening, as you sat in the thronged Abbey, in that minghng" of the dajdight from without and the church's lamps Avithin which seemed to fill the venerable place with a saci-ed and yet most familiar beauty, and saw, by and by, as the ser- vice advanced, that small live figure move, during the music of the chant, to the old lectern, and read the chap- ter from the Old Testament ; as you heard the eager voice lose all its consciousness of time and place as it passed on into the pathos of the story; as, at last, there rang through the great arches the wail of the great Hebrew monarch, " 0 my son Absalom ! my son, my sou Absalom ! would God I had died for thee, O Absalom, my son, my son ! " — as thus, for the instant, the Dean thrilled himself and filled the trembling souls of those who heard him with the passion of the king, you felt yourself in the pres- ence of a love and reverence for the Book of God which was deep and true just in projiortion as it was free from superstition and full of intelligence. " And oh, to think," says Canon Farrar, " that we shall never hear him read again, with such ringing exultation, the Song of Deborah ! " And when we hear the Bishop of Gloucester and Bristol tell how, in the Revision Committee, the Dean would often plead for the preservation of an " innocent archaism " in the English text, we catch a glimpse of his love for the familiar words of the old Ncav Testament Avliich appeals to the hearts of multitudes of Euo-lish Cliristians. DEAN STANLEY. 355 The first and iudispensable condition of the Bible's power is that the Bible should be ahve. A dead book. Hke a dead man, slays no dragons. And to how many readers Dean Stanley's works have made the Bible live ! How many eyes, fastened upon his pages, have seen gi'ad- uall}' issuing through the thin substance of the half-mj'th- ical Moses or David, in whom they once tried to believe, a real Moses or David — as real to them as Moses was to Miriam, or David was to Joab — and have found, perhaps to their siu-prise, that it was in those real human Hves, in men and women troubled, tormented, loving, hating, sin- ning, repenting, 3'et all doing something to make possible the days of the Son of man which were to come — that it was in such human lives as these that the true revelation of God to man in the Old Testament was contained. How many a reader of Stanley has felt the truth of these words of the Dean himself : " Can aii}^ one doubt that the charac- ters of David and Paul are better appreciated, more truly loved, by a man like Ewald, who ai)preciates them with a 13rof ound insight into their language, their thoughts, their customs, their histor}-, than by a scholastic divine from whom the atmosphere in which the king and the apostle moved was almost entirely shut out?" It would be little if the work of Stanley had simply clothed the Bible for man\' readers with a fascinating interest. It is surely a debt for which the Christian world is grateful that he has called forth for multitudes its sacredness and power, and made it for them the Book of Life. Nor can there be any doubt that in this vividness and sacredness which filled the life of the Bible and all human life for him, there lay the time secret of that prevailing silence in his writings with regard to the things on wliich theologians ordinarily dwell most, which has so frequently been observed and questioned. The miracle of life to him was everywhere. So trul}^ was the hand of God apparent in the building of the nations, in the guiding of 356 ESSAYS AND ADDRESSES. the stream of history, and especially in the education of character and in the moral progress of the world, that in these great phenomena he found the truest signs of his religion; and the extraordinary manifestations of divine power, while they always wakened in him an awe peculiar to their own mysteriousness, while they were dwelt upon in the silence which often marks the deepest reverence, were never made the chief objects of his study, nor the supports on which his faith relied. '' Let us recognize," he said, "that the preternatural is not the supernatural, and that, whether the preternatural is present or absent, the true supernatural may and will remain unshaken." " Not by outward acts, or institutions, or signs of power, but by being what He was, has the history of Jesus Christ retained its hold on mankind." The life of Christ was a life " sacred and divine, because it was supremely, super- humanly, and transcendently good." Wlien he went to Patmos and wrote that account of the island which will always make the vision of the Apocalypse more vivid and intelligible to any one who reads it, it was still the vision- seer more than the vision on which his mind was dwelling, and he closes his account by saying, "We understand the Apocalypse better for having been at Patmos. But we can understand the Gospel and Epistles of St. John as well in England as in Patmos or in Ephesus, or even in his own native Palestine." Surely a faith like this, to which all ground is holy and all days are the days of Christ, and man lifted to moral nobleness and purity by God is the great miracle, is better than a faith which only looks afar off, and finds the Avorld of men around it and the present day in which it lives barren and destitute of God. It is hard for us Americans to enter fully into an under- standing of that idea of the national Church, of religion as a true function of the Christian State, which Stanley DEAN STANLEY. 357 learned from his great teacher, Dr. Arnold, and which pervaded all his thinking all his life. But when he comes himself to state the spiritual meaning of his idea, he takes us into his sympathy at once. '' The connection of the Church with the State is," he says, '' merely another form of that great Christian principle — that cardinal doctrine of the Reformation, which is at the same time truly cath- olic and truly apostolical — that Christian life and Chris- tian theology thrive the most vigorously not by separation and isolation and secrecy, but by intercommunion with the domestic and social relations of man — in the world, though not of it." There is no low Erastianism in that high interpretation. And we always must remember that Arnold, deeply as Stanlej^ honored him, was not the only influence that had shaped his thought. The profounder and more spiritual X'hilosophy of Frederick Maurice was freely felt and owned. It is really the Church-and-State theory of Arnold, inspired and glorified by Maurice's doc- trine of the Kingdom of Heaven, and the ongoing of the redemptive life of man in Christ, and both of them made clear and familiar by his own historic sympathy and never-failing love for man, that one feels at the heart of Stanley's hope for his country and for the world. No one who heard it will ever forget the benediction wliich Dean Stanley uttered at the close of the service at which he preached in Trinity Chm-cli in Boston, on the 22d of September, 1878. He had been but a few days in America. It was the first time that he had looked an American congregation in the face. The church was crowded with men and women, of whom he only knew that to him they represented the New World. He was for the moment the representative of English Christianity. And as he spoke the solemn words, it was not a clergy- man dismissing a congregation : it was the Old World blessing the New ; it was England blessing America. The 358 ESSAYS A^^l) aduuesses. voice trembled, while it grew rich and deep, and took every man's heart into the great conception of the act that filled itself. The next morning he met a gather- ing of clergymen at breakfast, and as they separated, the room for an instant growing qniet and sacred, he said, '' I will bid you farewell with the benediction which I pronounced yesterday in Trinity Church, and Avhich it is my habit to pronounce on all the more important occa- sions in the Abbey." And then again came the same words, with the same calm solenniity. When he stood where now he himself lies buried, and had watched tlie dear remains of his wife — to lose whom from his sight was agony to him — committed to the ground, he lifted up himself at the close of the service, and with a clear voice uttered this same benediction. And once again, for the last time, when he lay waiting for the end in the deanery. Canon Farrar tells us how, after he had received the com- munion, the voice of the dying Dean was heard feebly blessing his friends, and blessing the world that he was leaving, with the same benediction, which meant so much to him. Wherever he went, whatever he did, he carried a benediction with him. The personal charm of Dean Stanley, in public and in private, was something which everybody felt who came into the slightest association with him. Indeed, it seems, as we have intimated, to have been felt even by those who never saw him, and who knew him onty through his books and by the piiblic record of his life. It was the charm of simple truthfulness, of perfect manliness, of a true sympathy with all forms of healthy human action, and of a perpetual pictiu-esqueness, which was enhanced by the interesting positions which he held, but was inde- pendent of them, and had its real being in his person- ality itself. If he had been the humblest country parson instead of being Dean of Westminster, he would liave ear- DEAN STANLEY. 359 ried about the same charm in his smaller world. It was associated with his physical frame, his small stature, his keeu eye, his rapid movemeut, his expressive voice. The very absence of bodily vigor made the spiritual presence more distinct. And the perfect unity of the outer and the inner, the public and the private life, at once precluded any chance of disappointment in those who, having been attracted by his work, came by and by to know him per- sonally, and at the same time gave to those whose only knowledge of him was from his writings and his public services the right to feel that they did really know him as he was. His preaching was the natural expression of his nature and his mind. It was full of sympathy and of historical imagination. Apart from the beautiful simplicity of his style and the richness of illustrative allusion, the charm of his sermons was veiy apt to lie in a certain way which he had of ti-eating the events of the day as parts of the history of the world, and making his hearers feel that they and what they were doing belonged as truly to the history of their race, and shared as truly in the care and govern- ment of God, as David and his wars, or Socrates and his teachings. As his lectures made all times live with the familiarity of our own day, so his sermons made our own day, with its petty interests, grow sacred and inspired by its identification with the great principles of all the ages. With the procession of heroism and faith and bravery and holiness always marching before his eyes, he sum- moned his congregation in the Abbey or in the village church to join the host. And it was his power of histor- ical imagination that made them for an instant see the procession which he saw, and long to join it at his sum- mons. Such a life as we have tried to describe, a life so full of faith and hope and charity, could not but be a very happy o60 ESSAYS AND ADDRESSES. life. All his friends know — indeed, all the world which has watched him knows — how that life has been changed since his wife died, in 187G. Lady Angusta Stanley — of whom her husband wrote upon her grave that she was "for thirty years the devoted servant of Queen Victoria and the Queen's mother and children, for twelve years the unwearied friend of the peoj)le of Westminster, and the inseparable partner of her husband's toils and hopes, uniting many hearts from many lands, and drawing all to things above " — left the home to Avhicli her life had given such brilliancy and sweetness ver}^ desolate and empty when she died. And yet, with all his most pathetic sor- row, there was a richness in his memory and thought of her after her death that was not destitute of happiness. '^ I shall be there when he takes people round the Abbey. I shall be associated with all his Avorks." So she had said when speaking of her grave. And some fulfilment of her hoiie, some coiistant sense of sj^iritual company, gave a peculiar beauty to the last years of the servant of God, as he still lingered till his work was done. The feeling of Dean Stanley toward Westminster Ab- bey and his treatment of the duties and privileges which belonged to him as the head of that venerable sanctuary have been full of poetry and beauty. They have made the last seventeen 3'ears of his life a poem by themselves. Westminster Abbey represented to him the religious life of England ; and in its abundant suggestiveness he found illustrations of all his best hopes and ideas of humanity and of the Church. More and more his whole life cen- tered there. In 1865, before the Society of Antiquaries, pleading for the restoration of certain neglected parts of the great building, he sai,d, imitating the line of Terence, '■^ Decanus Westmonasteriensis sum; nihil ^Vestmonasteriense a yne aJienum pnto.^^ To walk through the Abbey Avith the Dean Avas like DEJX STJXLET. 361 walking through antiquity with Plutarch; only it was a Christian Plutarch, and a Plutarch full of the ideas and aspirations of the nineteenth century, as well as tlie mem- ory of all other centuries, with whom you walked. Now he stopj)ed by the tomb of Edward the Confessor, in the center of the Abbey, and told of " his innocent faith and sympathy with the people," which give the childish and eccentric monarch such a lasting charm. Now he paused before the often-mutilated monument of Andre, and had a Ivind word both for the ill-fated victim and the great captain who reluctantly condemned him. Now, in the center of the nave, he would let no one pass the grave of Li\angstone without reverence. Now, in the poets' cor- ner, he stood beneath the quaint memorial of "rare Ben Jonson," and told the fantastic stories of his burial and of the strange inscription. Then, in Henry VII.'s chapel, he would point to the Duke of Buckinghamshire's monu- ment, and recount how a too scrupulous dean had made the famous inscription heathen, because he could not have it made Christian in just the words he wished, and so, "rather than tolerate suspected heresy, admitted the ab- solute negation of Christianity." A moment he would linger by the spot where Cromwell's body lay for three years, till the silly rage of the Restoration dragged it away. And just beyond that grave, in the chapel where the Duke of Montpensier, the younger brother of Louis Philippe, king of the French, lies buried, there is the stone beneath which he now sleeps himself, and which for years he never approached without a change in the step whielj any one walking by his side could feel at once. The anxiety of the Dean of Westminster that all the people of England, as far as possible, should know the Abbey; the intense interest with which he led comj^anies of working-men and working-women through its aisles and chapels ; the responsibility which he felt for the exe- 362 ESSAYS AND ADDRESSES. ciition of his office as the guardian of its dignity and the judge of who should be admitted to its courts for AvorshijD or for burial — all these show in how lofty a way he loved it. It was no toy for him to play with. It was no museum of bric-a-brac antiquity. Nor was it a pedestal for him to stand on, nor a frame to set off the picture of his life. It Avas the image of the sacredness of history and of God's ways in England, which he was set to keep, as the high- priests of the Jews were set to keep the Books of the Kings and of the Chronicles. When he was willing that the monument of the French Imperial Prince should be received into the great assembly, it was not a certificate of the prince's greatness nor an indorsement of imperialist ideas which was intended. It was simply that the death of one who might be called the last of the Bonapartes in the service of England seemed to the Dean a picturesque event, worth}^ to be written on the stone taljlet of history which was in his keeping. When he refused the use of the Abbey for an official meeting of the Lambeth Con- ference in 1867, it was because he could not see in that assemblage a fair, impartial utterance of English Chris- tianity. When he invited Max Miiller to lecture in the Abbey upon Christian missions, it was his testimony to the truth that the laity really are the English Church, and that by lay intelligence and thoughtfulness, as well as by the special methods of knowledge which are oj^en to the clergy, the questions of religion must be approached and answered. " So long as Westminster Abbey maintains its hold on the affections or respect of the English Church and nation, so long will it remain a standing proof that there is in the truest feelings of human nature and in the highest aspirations of religion something deeper and wider than the partial judgments of the day and the tech- nical distinctions of sects — even than the just, though it may for the moment be misplaced, indignation against DEAN STANLEY. 363 tlie errors and sins of our brethi'en." In words like these we have the true key to liis treatment of the great na- tional trust, which he never mentioned without a most impressive seriousness. It is interesting to see, in his dehghtful work upon the Abbey, what are some of the incidents in the history of the great chui-ch which seem to give him pecidiar pleasure. He commemorates the fact that " William Caxton, who first introduced into Great Britain the art of printing, exercised that art, a.d. 1477 or earlier, in the Abbey of Westminster." Again, he recollects with pleasure that the injunction under Edward VI., which commanded tlie sale of the brass lecterns and copper gilt candlesticks and angels " as monuments of idolatry," was coupled with a direction that the proceeds should be devoted "to the library and the bujdng of books." Both of these satis- factions are characteristic of the light-lover. While he records the execrations which the gigantic and obtrusive monument of James Watt has provoked from architec- tm-al enthusiasts, yet he himself is reconciled to it by remembering "what this vast figure represents — what class of interests before unknown, what revolutions in the whole framework of society, equal to any that the Abbey walls have yet commemorated." When he was installed as Dean, the passage in the service which most startled his ear as the oracle and augury of his new work was that in which it is prayed that the new-comer may be enabled to do his best " for the enlargement of God's Church." On December 21, 1869, the consecration to the see of Exeter of " the worthy successor of Ai-nold at Rugby, Dr. Tem- ple, who, after an opposition similar to that which no doubt would have met his predecessor's elevation, entered on his episcopal duties mth a burst of popular enthusiasm such as has hardly fallen to the lot of any Enghsh prelate since the Reformation," is joyously recorded by his sym- 364 ESSAYS AND ADDRESSES. pathizing friend. Everywhere there was that same broad satisfaction in the highest uses to whicli his great charge could be put which was uttered in ahnost the last articu- late words which were taken down unaltered from his failing sj)eecli — words in which he passed most naturally from the thought of his own personal life to the thought of the Abbey in whicli he had lived. " The end has come," he said, "in the way in which I most desired it should come. I could not have controlled it better. After preaching one of my sermons on the Beatitudes, I had a most violent fit of sickness, took to my bed, and said immediately that I wished to die at Westminster. I am perfectly happy, perfectly satisfied ; I have no misgivings." And again, a little later on : " So far as I knew what the duties of this office are supposed to be, in spite of every incompetence, I yet humbly trust that I have sustained before the mind of the nation the extraordinary value of the Abbey as a religious, liberal, and national institution." However men have questioned other burials in the Abbey, there is no doubt about his right to be buried there. He has given the venerable structure a deeper meaning, and therefore a deeper sacredness, to countless minds. His use of the building of many centuries for the best purposes of this latest century in which he lived is a true picture of how he tried to make the unchanging Church of Christ a real and living servant of this modern time, with its changed needs and thoughts. The short and hurried visit of Dean Stanley to the United States in 1878 will be long remembered here. It is not too much to say that more than any Englishman of distinction who has visited this countrj^ he entered into sympathetic understanding of its life. He came as an historian and as an Englishman. When he stood upon the hill at Plymouth, and took in with wonderful distinct- ness the whole scene of the landing of the Pilgrims ; when DEAN STANLEY. 365 he made his pilgrimage to Channiiig's grave; when he stood upon the spot of Andre's execution, and conceived the beautiful inscription which he afterward wrote out for the monument to be erected there — always he was the historian and the Englishman, loving to trace in the first settlement of the country, and in the struggle for inde- pendence, and in the growth of liberal and humane Chris- tian thought, the tokens in the New World of that same trusty human character which he at once shared and hon- ored in the mother-country. But always, besides being the historian and the Englishman, he was also the prophet and the man ; ready and glad to recognize that, for the State and for the Church and for the race, God had ap- pointed a work here in America which could be done only here, and so honoring our country not simply as the issue of great histories in the past, not simply as the echo on new shores of a life which he respected and loved at home, but as the minister of unknown works for God and man in the great future, as containing the promise and potency of sorts of life in the days to come which she alone could furnish. The sketch of America which he wrote in a magazine article on his return was very remark- able for its observation and thoughtful insight. More than ever, since that visit, the deanery and the Abbey have been open to Americans. And in all the last ser- vices in which he took part there, from the day of the murderous assault upon President Garfield, prayers were offered in the Abbey, by the Dean's direction, that the life of the American President might be spared to his nation and the world. As we close this rapid survey of Dean Stanley's life, can there be any doubt what are the lessons which he would wish to have it teach ? Must not the first certainly be this : that Christ is the Lord of human historj^, and that in His gospel ai]d His Church, ever more broadly 3GG i:SSJYS AND ADBEESSES. and spiritually conceived, lies the time hope of hnman l^rogress and the true field of hnman work? And is not the second this : that hnman existence is full of crowded interest, and that simplicit}^, integrity, the love of truth, and high, unselfish aims must make for any man in whom they meet a rich and happy life ? These lessons will be taught by many lives in many languages before the end shall come ; but for many years yet to come there will be men who will find not the least persuasive and impressive teachings of them in Dean Stanley's life. The heavens will still be bright with stars, and younger men will never miss the radiance which they never saw. But for those who once watched for his light there will always be a spot of special dai-kness in the heavens, where a star of special beauty went out when he died. ADDRESS AT THE LAYING OF CORNER-STONE OF THE WELLS MEMORIAL WORKING-MEN'S CLUB AND INSTITUTE, BOSTON, MASS., MAY 30, 1882. The corner-stone is laid, and I know that as it has been laid your hearts with ours have asked that God's bless- ing might be upon it and upon the ceremonies iu which we have participated. We believe that this building for working-men is for the good of the city of Boston. We believe that this institution, while it sums up all the inspi- rations that have gone before, is also full of the promise of the morning and the springtime that is yet to come. In the deep and earnest sense that only in the love of God could we fitly plant and found an institution such as this, there lies its hope — in its profound righteousness. In the earnest sense that only with the name of Christ written upon the corner-stone and upon its toj) stone can it succeed, we earnestly look forward for a fruitfid future for it. I cannot help thinking, I have been thinking all day, as I have walked about these streets and found the city full of the stir of some strange emotion, that there was a cer- tain fitness that we should come here and in the closing hours of this Decoration Day lay the corner-stone of the Wells Memorial Working-men's Club and Institute build- ing. There is a singular fitness in the choice of this day — this day in which our whole people lift up their voices and praise the men who years ago gave their lives for the 367 368 ESSAYS AND ADDRESSES. salvation of our country, for the abolition of slavery, and for the putting down of the rebellion. We rejoice that upon such a day as this we may come and take onr places here in this building, while garlands are being strewn npon the graves of departed heroes and within sound of the music that sings their praises, and lay the corner-stone of this institution ; so that the flowers that grateful hearts heap above the soldiers that have long been dead, and the fragrance of this that we are do- ing, mingle together not nngratefnlly. We have a great united country to-day ; we have a great free country, in which men may come together for the best objects for which men strive, thanks to those men who laid down their lives so long ago that the young- est of those who listen to me now do not remember them. But surely all of you have heard from your fathers that within the lifetime of this generation there have been men who did not value life while their country was in danger, and who went willingly to lay it down for their country's salvation. It would mean very little if our work here to- day began here ; if we did not know that they who have fought and died simply made our work possible ; if it were not possible that we could look upon our work sim- ply as an extension of their work ; if it were not possible that we could look upon this building as simply the battle- field that comes after their battle-field. Tlie same great work which was done by the soldiers in the war, the same great work that has been done by all great and bi-ave men, is still being continual^ done by men in the new inspiration in the work of our own times. For the great battle that goes on through the ages is a battle that is never finished, but is always being fought. Each new victory but opens a new campaign. The work that one set of men does only throws open the door so that other men may come in and do work THE WELLS MEMOBIAL CLUB AND INSTITUTE. 3G0 which must look to the same sources of inspiration and have the same sort of strength. You who are to do the work which will be done in this institution are engaged in the same battle. You are to fight the same battle that they fought who laid down their lives for the country during the great war which we re- member. Just as during that war when the army came to a river one corps which could do the special work of budding bridges or laying down pontoons were sent for- ward, and when they had done their work retired, and the men with their arms, with their horses, with their artil- lery, came pressing on and went over the bridge which the corps had buOt, so one generation of men does its special work and passes on — this special work which more or less lingers afterward in history — then the next gener- ation comes to do like work, to carry on the same cam- paign, to follow in the same untu'ing way, winning per- haps less extensive renown, a less glorious record on the page of history, but just as clear, just as honored, and just as loved in the eye of Him who looks at the real essence of our work and cares not whether men call it glorious or obscure. What is the battle that is to be fought here ? In the inspiring words of your president's address it has already been explained to us. The battle that is to be fought out in this building he made plain to us when he bade us think of those things that are to be cultivated here, when he bade us remember that in sobriety, in intelligence, in industry, in skill, in thrift, there lay the great salvation of the working-men ; when he told us that the enemies of the working-man were intemperance, the yielding to his lusts, the giving up of those things which are of infinite value for those which are of immediate value ; unskilful- ness, the willingness to do things in a poor, meager, and shambling way instead of doing them in the best and finest 370 ESSAYS AND ADDRESSES. way in which they can be done, unthriftiness, the lavish hand that flings far and wide that which it were best to keep — these are the things that are the real enemies of the working-men to-day, and tlie enemy of the working- man in America is the enemy of America. Just as truly is the enemy of American liberty the vices wliich beset our working-men as were those men who a quarter of a century ago lifted up their hands against the government. And far more insidious, far more difficult to conquer. With these enemies the great conflict is to be fought, not only in tliis but in every institution like this, and in the lives and homes of the working-men throughout our land. To us, holding these views, the laying of tlie corner-stone to-day, it seems to me, is the sounding of the bugle call that summons the army into existence that is to fight against our great modern enemies. You, working-men of Boston, must set your faces against those great enemies of whom I have spoken — intemperance, slotlifulness, unskilfuhiess, and the rest. It is because this building is to be used for the education and the training of the soldiers for this new army in this coming war that we rejoice in the laying of this corner- stone to-day. There is another enemy, of lighter weight it sometimes seems, and yet which does certainly strike at the vitals of the working-man. The dark and heavy brooding care whicli rests upon their lives. The way in which cheerful- ness seems to be driven out of their experiences, the way in which discontent becomes fastened in their minds — here is one of the enemies of the working-man against which this club sets its face. With its great army of cheerfulness it sets itself against the dreadful attacks that this enemy, care and wretchedness, is always bringing upon our working-men. Against uncheerfulness, against unthriftiness, against wretchedness and poverty this chib THE WELLS MEMORIAL CLUB AXD INSTITUTE. 371 sets its face, and every appliance about whicli "vve have heard something this afternoon is but the detail of the way in which the soldiers are to be equipped in this great fight. There is something else which occurs to rae as forming an analogy between the old war which has been fought and the new war which we are now waging. There was a part of that old war which involved no blame on either side. There was more done than the putting do^Ti of a rebellion which we believed to be wi'ong. There was the solving of problems which had become ver}- difficult, prob- lems which especially perplexed our national life, and as we see them now it seems that they could not have been solved except in some such great struggle as that through which we passed in those four dreadful years. It is so still. There are hard questions besetting all the work- shops in the land, questions about the relations of the poor man to the rich man, and of the rich man to the poor man ; questions about the relations of capital to labor and labor to capital. These things, which employ the best thoughts of our times, must find their ultimate settlement in the lives of the two great classes, and the way in which they are adjusted to one another in this life ; and if the working-men of our country can live worthier and nobler lives they not merely will do something to con- quer the enemies I have just been speaking of, but they will do something to help to the solution of these great problems that seem to loom up with such danger in the future. They will do something to make more true the relations between the two great classes, the rich and the poor, though, thank God, there is no fixed barrier between them, because the poor man of to-day is the rich man of to-morrow, and the rich man sometimes becomes poor, so that there can be no permanent or serious danger to the community in which these two classes will always be. 372 ESSJTS AXD ADDEESSES. This building would mean little if simply the working- men of Boston in the future years might come and have a good time here. It would mean little, surely, if they should rest content in the discussion of such Cjuestions as the tenure of the working-man's work. But we will not let our wishes or our hopes stop short of the belief that in this work, in this house, and in the occupations that belong to it, there must be some sort of light thrown upon the puzzling and bewildering questions of our social lives, of the relations of class to class, of the way in which men here in God's great world are to live and work together harmoniously, notwithstanding their different conditions. If I be right in this view, and if the war which was tliought to be finished seventeen years ago is not finished yet, but has come down to us, is still going on to-day, and we enter into our part of it in this new experience, which is inaugurated with this building, then this certainly is a memorable day. We learned in our war that ultimately the great power of victory must always rest, not in the mere equipment of the army, not in the mere advantage of position, not in the mere rapidity of the movements of the troops, but the ultimate salvation of the country must depend upon the character of the soldier himself. If that were true in that old war it is certainly tnie in this new war of which we are speaking now; we may be equipped as completely as we please, we may make our aj^pliances as efficacious as our skill can make them, Imt unless the men who are actually to do the fighting with the enemies of the country — idleness, iutemperance, selfishness, that prevails throughout our city — unless these men be noble, manful, consecrated men, all our appliances will fail. It is because we believe that the men who have under- taken this work are such consecrated, manl.y, noble, lofty- minded, and religious men that we have vast hopes for a great future before us to-day. If the old times needed THE WELLS MEMORIAL CLUB AND INSTITUTE. 373 men of iron, the new times, with their new tasks, need finer men, men of finer temper, in whom snbtler elements have been mixed, men who have been tried in hotter fires. If the old times needed men of iron, the new times need men of steel. If it was a hard thing to go and serve one's country in the fields of South Carolina and Virginia, it is a harder thing for the working-man to do his duty now, by himself, by his country, and by his city, and by his race, in the toils which are consecrated in this building whose corner-stone we have just laid. Therefore we ask God's blessing to-day, not simply upon the building, but upon the men who ai-e to live within it. We ask that that God from whom alone can come true joy may come and make this place one of abundant happiness ; that that God through whose power alone men can learn completely to control their appetites may come and make this house the house of temperance ; that that God who is the true Teacher of His children may come and make men anxious to do tlieii- work in the most skilful and thorough way ; that that God who is Father of us all may teach us how to live our daily lives, looking up and looking down, and helping all alike and smoothing the path of life for all. The enemies that we have got to fight are before us on the field in this ncAV battle — all Boston is full of them. Intemperance, sloth, selfishness, are here before us, and the great question with aU such institutions as this is whether they can possibly overtake them, whether they can fight them before they have ravaged the field, and turn them back and drive them away. Some of us can remember how from the Rappahannock up through Maryland, into the very heart of Pennsylvania, Meade chased the invading forces of Lee over the fields. We remember the two days of Gettysburg, how" the Fed- eral army on the first day just held its ground and how on the second dav the tide of invasion was turned back ! 374 ESSAYS AND AVmiliSSES. It was a critical time. We had been chasing the enemy, who had got the start, and the fight was with an enemy upon the soil where it had already secured its position ; and when the tidings came that Lee was turned back into Maryland, the whole country lifted, up its voice in cheers and thanksgiving. So you will find that, however you may go forward in tlie good work, the enemy is on the soil before you, that intemperance and ignorance and unthriftiness and infi- delity and irreligion and selfishness have possession of the field here in Boston now. God grant that you and those who come up afterwards may be the men fitted for the occasion, able to take your place here and to do the work that tliose men began twenty years ago upon the field of Cxettysburg. Where is the Rej-nolds, where is the Meade, that is to lead the army in this new and redeeming fight against the enemj^ that has already possession of the soil ? We do not trust in them because we see them, but because we believe, as we used to in the old daj^s of war, that our cause is God's cause ; because, therefore, we believe that God wiU raise up the men to do the work ; because we believe He has called men and set them into the front of this work, which, however mighty it may be among the multitudinous vices of our city, we look upon with vast, earnest hope ; because we believe that God is behind it do we to-day look forward and dare to anticipate a great future, a great usefulness, and a great success for the Wells Memorial Working-men's Institute. May God our Father's Nessing rest upon it ; may it draw in more and more the sympathj^ of the working-men of the city in the years that are to come, and may we afterward look back to this day, when we laid this coruer-stone, thankful that there was in our time faith and hope enough in men and in God to start an institution such as this. MARTIN LUTHER. (Address at Celebration by the Evangelical Alliance of the United States of the Four Hundredth Aiuiiversary of his Birth. New York, November 13, 1883.) The noblest moiiiiment of modern Eui'ope stands in the old town of Worms, erected fourteen years ago in memory of the man who was born in Eisleben at nine o'clock on the evening of the 10th of November, 1483, four hundred years ago last Saturday night. In the cen- ter of the group stands the stately effigy of Martin Luther overtopping all the rest, and around liim are assembled the forerunners, the supporters, and the friends of him and of the Reformation, which must always be most as- sociated with his name. Savonarola, Wickliffe, Huss and Waldo, Frederick the Wise and Philip the Magnanimous, Philip Melanehthon and John Reuchlin, the city of Augs- burg with her palm-branch, the eitj- of Magdeburg mourn- ing over her desolation, and the city of Spires holding forth her famous protest — all of these sit or stand in im- perishable bronze around the sturdj^ doctor who was the master of them all. That monument at Worms but represents and utters the vivid memory in which the great Reformer is held not merely in Germany, but through aU the world of Protestantism. The approach of the anniversary of his birth has been greeted v/ith an overwhelming welcome. The old German towns in which he lived have reproduced in pageants and processions the pictures of his life. His unforgotten face has come back once more to a. thousand 375 376 ESSAYS AXD ADDRESSES. homes. His books have been re-read. His faults and virtues have been re-discussed. His place and power in history ha^-e been estimated anew ; and the whole great portion of the world which has been blessed through him has thanked God once again that he was born. At such a time the voice of the Protestants of America could not be silent. It has not failed to speak in many ways, and now to-night we have assembled at the sum- mons of the Evangelical Alliance to do honor to the mem- ory of Martin Luther, and to think together of what he was and did. We are to think of one of the greatest men of human history. I say advisedly one of the greatest men ; for at the outset we ought to realize that it is the personality of Luther, afire with great indignations, believing in great ideas, writing books which in some true sense are great books, doing great, brave, inspiring deeds, but carrying all the while its power in itself, in his being what he was — it is the personality of Luther whicli reall}^ holds the secret of his powder. It is he that men hate and love with ever fresh emotion, just as they loved and hated him four centuries ago. His books were burned, but the real ob- ject of the hate was he. His pamphlets, scattered broad- cast over Germany, were read and j^raised and treasured, but the real love and loyalty and looking up for power was to him. Indeed, the name and fame of Luther com- ing down through history iinder God's safe-conduct has been full of almost the same vitality, and has been at- tended by almost the same admiration and abuse, as was the figure of Luther in that famous journey whicli took him in his rude Saxon wagon from Wittenberg to Worms when he went up to the Diet ; and at Leipzig, Niirnberg, Weimar, Erfurt, Gotha, Frankfiirt, the shouts of his friends and the curses of his enemies showed that no man in Germany was loved or hated as he was. MARTIN LUTHER. 377 It is this vigorous and personal manhood which is the strength of Luther, and if we analyze it a little we can see easily enough out of what two elements it was made up, or, more properly, perhaps, in what two channels it ran and made its strength effective. Both are distinct- ively religious. There are two sentences out of two para- bles of Jesus which describe indeed the two components of the strongest strength of all religious men. One is this, from the parable of the vine3^ard : " When the time of fruit grew near, the lord of the vineyard sent his ser- vants to the husbandmen that the}' might receive the fruit of the vineyard ; " and the other is the cry of the returning prodigal : " I will arise and go to my father." Put these two together into any deep and lofty soul (3^ou cannot put them into any other), and what a strength you have ! The consciousness of being sent from God with a mission for which the time is ripe, and the con- sciousness of eager return to God, of the great human struggle after Him, possessing a nature which cannot live witliout Him — tlie imperious commission from above and the tumultuous experience within — these two, not inconsistent with each other, have met in all the great Christian workers and reformers who have moved and changed the world. These two lived together in the whole life of Luther. The one spoke out in the presence of the emperor at Worms. The other wrestled unseen in the agonies of the cloister cell at Erfm-t. The broad and vigorous issue of the two displayed itself in the exalted but always healthy and generous humanity which, with pervasive sjanpathy, filled and embraced all the hunumity about it, not as persuasions or convictions — that would not have worked any such result — but as the living forces which exalted and refined and consecrated and enlarged a nature of great natural nobility and richness. So it was that the sense of the divine commission and the profound- 378 ESSAYS AND ADDRESSES. ness of the human struggle created the Lnther who shook the thrones of pope and C^sar and made all Europe new. You need only look into the faces of Hans Luther and his wife Margaret, which hang, painted by Lucas Cranach, in the Luther Chamber at the Wartburg, and you will see how you have only to add the fine fire of a realized com- mission and a remembered struggle to the rugged German strength of the father and the human sweetness in the mother's eyes, and you will have the full life of their great son. It was in conformity to this fundamental character of Luther's greatness, his large humanity inspired by the consciousness of his mission and the depth of his personal struggle after God, that he found his true place among the great Reformers, as theu* leader, and yet as one who needed the supplementing help of others to make up the total work. Every complete and permanent religious movement will have its moralists, its mystics, its theolo- gians, its ecclesiastics, and its politicians. Of these char- acters Luther really possessed only the first two. He was not proper]}^ a theologian ; John Calvin was that. The English reformers were ecclesiastics. Zwingle was the politician. But Luther was the moralist and the mystic. Direct, eternal righteousness, and the communion of the soul with God, these were the powers by which he lived, the prizes for which he fought. When, with his soiil indignant against poor Tetzel and his wi'etched indul- gences, he nailed his theses on the church-door at Witten- berg, he was the moralist. It was for righteousness that he spoke out. And it was to Tauler and to the Theologia Germanica, the mystic oracles, that he always, among all writers, gave his love and looked for his inspiration. These are the universal human elements of religious strength and character. The theologian may be far sepa- rated from humanity, the mere arranger of abstract ideas. MARTIN LUTHER. 379 The ecclesiastic may be quite unhuman too, the manager of intricate machineries. But the man who is truly mor- alist and mystic must be full of a genuine humanity. He is the prophet and the priest at once. He brings the eter- nal Word of God to man, and he utters the universal cry of man to God. Nothing that is human can be strange to him, and so nothing that is human can count him really strange to it. David, Isaiah, John the Baptist, Paul — nay, let us speak the highest name, Jesus, the Christ Him- self— these elements were in them all. Grace and truth, faith and conscience, met in them and made their power. These elements united in our Luther, and so it was, as the result of them, that he inspired humanity and moved the souls of men and nations as the tide moves the waves. If the opposite had not been sometimes suggested, it would seem needless to say that the movement which we associate witli Luther was preeminently and essentially religious. It reached out to many most various interests of man. It enlisted all of men's strongest motives in its aid. It made the electors of Saxony and the landgrave of Hesse its servants. It sent out the translated Bible as the standard and source of German literature. It laid the deepest foundations of German unity. It was so wide that Avhen last year Haeckel the Darwinian, the apostle of the newest science, described in glowing eidogy, at Eisenach, before the naturalists of the nineteenth century, the triumphs of the great English scientist, he could find no stronger statement than to say that Darwin had carried on the work of Luther and that evolution was the new reformation doctrine. Luther himself never forgot his love for learning, and carried his Plautus and his Virgil with him into the cloister. All this is true. And yet the soul and power of Luther and of his Reformation was religion. The service of God and the communion with God, these made his conscious strength. The very gro- 380 i:SSATS AND ADDUESSES. tesque and almost horrible intensity with which he hated the hiiniauists, the disciples of the renascence who were not, or whom he thought not to be, religious, shows liow he made religion the center and heart of all. " Erasmus of Rotterdam," he cries, " is the vilest miscreant that ever disgraced the earth." " He is a ver}' Caiaphas." '^ When- ever I pray I pray for a curse upon Erasmus." Erasmus was no pagan, but he was not Christian enough for Lu- ther, therefore he won these terrible denunciations. To take religion out of the Protestant Reformation is to take the sun out of the sunshine ! And then again, writers dispute about whether the Ref- ormation belonged to Luther or Luther to the Reforma- tion. They ask whether he created the great change which came, or only led it, as the first wave which the in- coming tide drives before the other waves on to the beach is the leader of the rest. It is a useless question. Little indeed and very transitory the Reformation would have been if it had been any one man's work. The work of a great man cannot be so separated from the humanity of which he forms a part, in which as well as for which he is laboring, which moves and conquers in him. Luther himself, with his double relation always realized — Luther himself, the man of sympathy with man and of j)i"ayer to God — Luther would ever be the last to claim that he cre- ated any great movement of humanity under the will of God. And yet if ever one man's personality was promi- nent and powerful in a great crisis, it was his here. Once at Weimar he found Melanchthon very ill. His ej^es were dim, his tongue faltering, his understanding almost gone. "Alas," complained Luther, "that the devil should have thus uu strung so fine an instrument." Then he knelt down beside his sick friend and prayed. Then he stood up beside his friend and cried, "Be of good courage, Philip ; you shall not die." " It is God's delight to impart MAETIX LUTHER. 381 life, not to inflict death." " Trnst in the Lord, who can impart new Hfe." When Mehmchthon gets well, what physician dwelling on the power of nature, what Christian praising the power of God, wiU exclude the power of Lu- ther's healthy personality, of his robust, majestic manhood, from its share in the restoration of the gentle scholar? And as he gave life to Melanehthon, so he gave it to the religion of the gospel, sick almost to death and very full of desolation and despair. If v>-e look for a few moments at the causes which Lu- ther especially loved and for which he spent his life in batthng, we shall see, I tliink, how his loyalty to them confirms what I have just been saying. He is the cham- pion of two great truths : the freedom of the human in- telligence, and of justification by faith. These are the watchwords on his banner. With these two war-cries ringing from his trumpet he has come in masterful strength down the ages. Let us look at them both. What was it Luther meant when in the face of pope and council he insisted that the human intelligence must be freed? "Unless I be con- victed of error by the Scriptures or by powerful reasons, neither can nor will I dare to retract anything. Here stand I. I can do no otherwise, God help me." Oh the power and revelation of that word. Dare ! It was the serious utterance of a brave, religious, human soul. So it has appealed to all human souls always. But it was the utterance of a soul conscious of God and of its own mysterious self. " I dare not retract," it said. It was no outburst of wilfulness. The two compulsions, the com- pulsion to tell God's truth to men and the compulsion to come near to God Himself, held him so fast that he could not escape. There was no wilfulness. It was not that he woiild not be the slave of authority. He did not dare to be. It was not so much that he refused the obedience of 382 ESSAYS AND ADDEESSES. meu, as that he gave himself heart and soul to the obe- dience of God. True, he had not escaped from the old belief that there must be somewhere on the earth an in- fallible utterance of the will of God ; and when he revolted against pope and council, he clothed the Bible with the oracular authority which had belonged to them ; but all the time behind the Bible lay the intense conviction of the rights and claims of his own conscience and his own soul, the moral and the mystic sense, which keep life nobly free in the devout acceptance of supreme authority. And Luther's bibliolatry was always of a spiritual and reason- able, never of a mechanical and superstitious sort. And then think of his favorite dogma — justification by faith. Tetzel came peddling his indulgences in Witten- berg market-place. "Buy one of these," he said, "and God will bless you. God's minister in Rome, Leo X., as- sures you of it." Disguise, explain, soften it as you will by all the subtle commentaries of the Romish doctors, that was what the peasants of the Elbe country under- stood when the eager monk offered them the precious piece of paper and reached his hand out for their money. Against that the whole soul of the moralist and mystic rose in protest. • The moralist declared that it was not true, and that to promise that God would give for money those blessings which belonged only to character and goodness, was to degrade morality and oj^en the floodgate to all wickedness. The mystic took a still deeper tone. To him the whole picture of man bargaining with God was an abomination. God and the soul are infinitely near to each other. God is in the soul. The soul also is in God. In a great free confidence, in perfect trust, in the realization of how it belongs to Him, in unquestioning acceptance of His love, the soul takes God's mercy and God's goodness into itself in virtue of its very belonging to Him. Not by a bargain as when you buy your goods MARTIN LVTHER. 383 across the counter, but b}^ an openness and •willingness which realizes the oneness of your life with God's, as when the bay opens its bosom to the inflow of the sea, so does your soul receive the grace of God. However he may have stated it in the old familiar forms of bargain, this was Luther's real doctrine of justification by faith. It was mystic, not dogmatic. It was of the soul and the experience, not of the reason. Faith was not an act, but a being — not what j^ou did, but what you were. The whole truth of the immanence of God and of the essential be- longing of the human life to the divine — the whole truth that God is a power in man and not simply a power o\'er man, building him as a man builds a house, guiding him as a man steers a ship, this whole truth, in wdiich lies the seed of all humanity, all progress, all great human hope^ lay in the truth that justification was by faith and not by works. No wonder that Luther loved it. No Avonder that he thought it critical. No w^onder that he wTote to Melanchthon, hesitating at Augsburg, "Take care that you give not up justification by faith. That is the heel of the seed of the Avoman which is to crush the serpent's head." As we see thus the moralist and mystic meeting in the most powerful personality of modern histor}^, what shall we say? Is it not true that every powerful humanity which shall profoundly affect the life of men and open new futures for the race must bear united in itself these elements of power ? All the great human forces become the servants of the man who carries in himself the powers of righteousness and the power of communion with God. Just as the three chief political friends of Martin Luther were Frederick the Wise, John the Steadfast, and Philip the Magnanimous, so these three qualities in man, wisdom and steadfastness and magnanimity, will always be the willing friends and servants of him wdio brings the spirit 3f^4 ESSAYS AND ADDRESSES. of ■aucoiupromisiug- righteousness and the spirit of devout communion with the Infinite and the Eternal to claim their loyalt}'. If his be a great nature he ^vill do great things. If he come at the turning of the tide he will stand forever as one of the cardinal figm-es of history ; but whether his personal genius be great or small, whether he come in the darkness or in the light, the man who is passionate for righteousness and who loves God will do things of the first and finest sort, and will leave his influ- ence, read or unread, upon the story of his race, for he alone is truly human. He alone holds his soul open Ijoth to God and man. He alone catches and repeats the true •power, human and divine, of Jesus Christ. The stars in their courses fight for him. He is in league with the eter- nal order and the eternal light. Tlie empire of Charles V. may fall to pieces, the learning of Erasmus may grow obsolete, the splendor of Leo may become tawdry, the theology of Calvin may be disproved, but the humanity of Luther, strong with the enthusiasm of righteousness and the pi'csent love of God, will be a spell to hold the hearts of men when many more than four centuries shaU have passed away. One more word while I speak thus in general of the large humanity of Luther as the true secret and substance of his power. A large humanit}' is many-sided, and must have its genial and gracious and domestic exhibitions as well as its awful warnings and imperious commands. The vdnd that shakes the forests sings its wordless songs through the sweet and pathetic strings of the harp in the house window. If it was true humanity that thundered its determination "to enter Worms although as many devils should set at me as there are tiles upon the house- tops," it was the same humanity which loved to play be- side the Christmas-trees with little children, which turned the cloister of Wittenberg into a Christian home, which MARTIN LUTHER. 385 talked the language of the (iommou folk and would not refuse the humblest of their idioms a place in his transla- tion of the Word of God, which kept the human painter Lucas Cranach by his side to turn his thoughts to pictures, and which ran over with melodious hymns that have be- come the lyrics of his people's life as a fountain overruns with water. Moses and David both — what a true son of man he was ! We saw how he could thunder with most uncomely rage at Erasmus. None the less he could sink down in weariness and cry pathetically beside the grave of one of his old brother-monks at Erfurt. ■' How calml}^ he sleeps, and I," he went to Worms saying — "I will cou- fess yet in Behemoth's mouth between his great teeth." But they who sat and Avatched in the next room the night before he stood in the presence of the Diet heard the great sobs which shook his mighty frame and the passion- ate prayers with which he called out to God for help in weakness. He was the father, the creator of a literature, and yet no writer was ever less the literary man. He never wrote but for a purpose. '' His prose," saj^s Richter, " is a half battle." Whether the story on the Wartburg be a true tale or a false legend, he was always throwing his inkstand at the devil. In that devil he believed with a child's simple faith and a brave man's, nay, a true saint's, fearlessness. He was a supernaturalist for whom nature was all the more dear and interesting because of the great forces which he felt working in it. In him was that after which Christianity is alwaj's struggling, that of which Christ is the pattern and the consummation, a humanity which was all the more human because of its immediate and uninterrupted consciousness of Divinity. Some men are events. It is not what they say or what they do, but what they are, that moves the world. Luther declared great truths ; he did great deeds ; and yet there is a certain sense in which his words and deeds are valu- 38 G ESSAYS AND ADDRESSES. able only as they sliowed him, as they made manifest a son of God living a strong, l)i'ave, clear-sighted human life. It is thus that I have spoken of him so far, feeling his presence still through the deep atmosphere of these four hundred years. It is not certainly as the founder of any sect ; more, but not mostly, it is as the preacher of certain truths ; but most of all it is as uttering in his very being a reassertion of the divine idea of humanity, that he comes with this wonderfully fresh vitalit}^ into our modern days. But, when we set ourselves to look at it more in its de- tails, what a life of word and work it was through which his spirit found its education and sent forth its force into the world ! His father, the Thuringian miner, lived in the little town of Mansfeld, and out of the hills he won with constant toil the money to send his bright, sturdy little boy to school. The young Luther got his earlier education at Magdeburg and Eisenach. When he was eighteen years old he went to the University at Erfurt and studied classics and philosophy. And then there came the change. Some sudden shock, perhaps the sick- ness of a friend, perhaps the storm of thunder and light- ning, sent him into the Augustinian cloister and he be- came a monk. His old father protested, but it did no good. Buried out of sight for the next three years, he wrestled for his soul's life. The fiercest mental strug- gle went on in his solitary cell. '^ I tormented myself to death," he said, " to make my peace with God, but I was in darkness and found it not." Then he was sent to Wittenberg to teach in the new university. The fire was in his heart. The unsatisfied restlessness filled his soul. Then he went up to Rome and saw, as all the world re- members, how there was no satisfaction for him there. As he came back, now twenty-nine years old, the light bega.i to dawn. The Bible revealed its heart to him. MARTIN LUTREB. 387 " The just shall live by faith " seemed to ring out to him the divine answer to all his agonies and doubts. Then, five years later, Tetzel came with his indulgences, and Dr. Martin Luther walked down the old main street of Wit- tenberg and nailed his Reformation theses on the door of the Castle Church on All Saints' Eve, the 81st of October, 1517. There they are to-day on the door of the same church cast in perpetual bronze. Think what a j'outli that was ! What a great preparation for a life ! Three scenes stand out in it forever : the meadow just outside of Erfurt where, in the fury of the storm, with the light- ning striking at his feet, he resolved that he woidd be a monk; the Augustinian convent where he fought over tlie new-found Bible for his soul; and the church-door where he nailed up his theses against the indulgences of the po})e. The scenes of resolution, of struggle, and of first decided action — the tliree Epij)hanies of every open- ing life of power. The year 1517, with which the first period ends and the second period begins, was the explosive year of Luther's life. Then the nuiterials met after their long prepai-ation and the flash came. After that the fire spread rapidly. The events came thick and fast. In 1518 came the Diet of Augsburg, where he met the Cardinal Legate Cajetan and ended his discussion by an appeal '' from the pope ill- informed to the pope to be better informed." The next year came the great debate with Eck at Leipzig, where Luther finally denied the superiority of the Roman Church and became indeed the leader of the German nation against Italian domination. Upon this followed his two pamphlets, his '' Address to the Christian Nobility of the German Nation " and his " Babylonian Captivity of the Church," which rang like trumpet-blasts through Germany and Christendom. The next year he was excommunicated by the pope, and solemnly burned what he called "the 388 ESSAYS AND A DDE ESSES. execrable bull of Antiebrist " outside the gate of Witten- berg, lu 1521 be stood alone Avitb tbe truth and God upon his side before the Imperial Triliunal at Worms. Then came his friendly imprisonment at the Wartburg, where he translated the Ncav Testament in that sacred room, as if here, " with mere heaven and the silent Thu- ringian hills looking on," so Carlyle says, " a grand and grandest battle of one man versus the devil and all men was fought, and the latest prophecy of the eternal was made to these sad ages that yet rnn." Thence he escaped, summoned by a cry of his people, which he could not re- sist, in the fierce peasant insurrections ; and by and by, in a lull of that wild struggle, he married. The emanci- pated monk married the emancipated niin, and the happy and busy family life, teeming with work, ringing with song and laugh and children, began in the old grim clois- ter rooms at Wittenberg. These eight years from 1517 to 1525 make the center and the power of the great Re- former's life. As we turn the leaf upon which they are written we turn from medieval into modern history. Be- fore them all is fantastical and strange, full of half-lights not easy for us to understand or follow. After them all is full of motive and meaning which we can comprehend. Indeed, there are two truly cardinal men : Martin Luther in this century in Germany, and Oliver CromweU. in the next century in England, on whom more than on any others the great gates seem to turn and open which let the race through from the Old World into the New. And to the great scenes of history are added in this central period of Luther's life these three : the field close to the gate of Wittenberg where he burned the Inill ; the bishop's palace at Worms where he faced the Diet ; and the room at the Wartburg where he translated the New Testament and whence he escaped out of the keeping of his too can- MARTIN LUTHER. 389 tious friends with his life in his hands to go and save his perplexed and suffering people. A long and busy twenty-one years remained before the end came, and he died in 1546, at the same Eisleben where sixty-three years before he had been born. They were years full of work and struggle, years also full of prayer and faith. It is not necessary to trace them in detail. There are some things about them not wholly pleasant to trace. More and more the growing Reformation mixed itself up with politics and statecraft — and for the political side of reformation Luther cared but little. The discus- sion about the Lord's Supper with the light-loving Swiss Reformer Zwingle came, and Luther never showed so badly as in that debate in the picturesque old castle at Marburg. He was overbearing there. He clung in the letter. He would not pass into the Spirit. And he was not thorouglily true. The moralist and mystic was not wholly ready for the hour. Indeed, in all these years there is a lurking sense of reaction and timidity. He is not all the man he was. And yet they were rich years. The people were upon his soul, and his soul was very near to God. " Tlie Warning of Dr. Martin Luther to his dear Germans," so reads the title-page of one of the hundred pamphlets which came pouring from his press at Wittenberg. It was the title-page of this last volume of his life. The mountain which had stood so long, rich with deep verdure, catching the sunshine, bearing the fii'st brunt of the storms, casting abroad its bounteous shade, sending refreshing waters down on all its sides into the valleys, sometimes also volcanic and fiery, grew perhaps calmer, colder, more unworldly as the snows of winter gathered on its head ; but it was the crown of the great landscape still ; it gave dignity' to all the life about it ; it caught the sunshine and bore witness of the heavens to 390 ESSAYS AND ADDE ESSES. the end. On a journey of peacemaking and of friend- ship, Luther was taken very ill, and died on the 18th of February, 1546. Almost his last words before he passed into the perfect presence of the God whom he had loved and served so long were words of faith and hope, the words of his Master, the words of the Cross : " Father, into Thy hands I commend my spirit." The man who dies with those words on his lips and in his heart goes forth to do the work of God in the immortal life, goes also forth in influence upon the earth among the coming generations of mankind. So Luther went when the long weary work was over and he lay at last calm and dead at Eisleben. What shall we say of that great march- ing of his soul, that power of his influence which has had so much to do with the making of the modern world? He was the great Reformer. Is then the world reformed ? He W' as the great Protestant. Is then his Protestantism a failure or a success ? The answer to that cpiestion must depend upon what we mean by Protestantism and what is the standard b}^ which we judge success. If we are fool- ish enough to think of Protestantism as a power which tried to take the place of Rome and govern manldnd after the same false fashion in which that spiritual tyrant had aspired to bo the mistress of the world ; if we let ourselves think that Pi'otestantism is a fixed set of doctrines claim- ing infallibility and refusing all prospect of development, and that for Protestantism to succeed is for her to bring and hold all men together in loyalty to lengthy creeds and in submission to a central ecclesiastical authority — then certainly Protestantism has failed, as it ought to have failed. But we have not so read the hope which Luther spread as with the very finger of the morning opening the skies for a new day, before the world. Surely the Protestantism has not failed which for four centuries at least has held the tja-anny of Rome in check and filled MARTIN LUTHER, 39] the earth with such a live intelligence and so much of the spirit of freedom that even if Rome should again become the mistress of the world she could not be the blind and brutal Rome of which Leo boasted and with which Luther fought. But there is more to say than that. These centuries of Anglo-Saxon life made by the ideas of Luther answer the question. The Protestantism of Milton and of Goethe, of Howard and of Francke, of Newton and of Leibnitz, of Bunyan and of Butler, of Wordsworth and of Tennyson, of Wesley and of Channing, of Schleiermacher and of Maurice, of Washington and of Lincoln, is no failure. We may well dismiss the foolish question and with new pride and resolve brighten afresh the great name of Protestant upon our foreheads. Have we not seen to-day something of what Protestant- ism really is — the Protestantism which cannot fail ? Full of the sense of duty and the spirit of holiness there stands Luther — moralist and mystic. Conscience and faith are not in conflict but in lofty unison in him. Through him, because he was that, God's waiting light and power stream into the world and the old hes wither and humanity springs uj)oii its feet. Ah, there is no failure there ! There cannot be. The time will come — perhaps the time has come — when a new Luther will be needed for the next great step that humanity must take, but that next step is possible mainly because of what the Monk of Wittenberg was and did four hundred years ago. There is no failiu-e there. Only one strain in the music of the eternal success — fading away but to give space for a new and higher strain. It may be that another Luther is not hkely. It may be that the freer atmosphere in which the world is hence- forth to live ^\dll give no chance for such explosions as in the sixteenth century burst open the tight walls of papal 392 ESSAYS AND ADDRESSES. power. Perhaps not by the apparition of one great leader, but by the steady upward movement of the insjjired whole, the future great advances of humanity are to be made. No man can say ; but this at least is sure, that the great principles of Martin Luther's life must be the principles of every advance of man on to the very end. Always it must be by a regeneration of humanity. Always it must be by the power of God filling the soul of man. Always it must be religious. Always it must be God summoning man, man reaching after God. Always it must be the moralist and the mystic, conscience and faith meeting in the single human hero or in humanity at large, which makes the reformation. And however it shall come, all human progress must remember Martin Luther. Every reforination until man comes to his perfection will be easier and surer because of this great Reformer whom we have been honoring, for whom we have been thanking God, to-day. Every return of man, rebellious against sin or worldliness or false authority, into a more simple and devout obedience to the God to whom he be- longs, will remember with gratitude and find strength in remembering brave Martin Luther. The echo of the shouts which rang at Wittenberg while the poj)e's bull was burning, the echo of the trumpets which the watch- man on the tower blew when Luther entered into Worms, will be heard, if men listen for them, in the farthest and latest of the ever-repeated chimes which, until the Light and the Lord have perfectly possessed the earth, shall again and again " Eiug out the darkness of the world, Eiuor in the Christ that is to be." THE BOSTON LATIN SCHOOL. (April 23, 1S85.) Mr. President, and Brethren of the Latin School Association : A great public school wliich has lived to celebrate its two huudred and fiftieth anuiversary must sm'ely have a story of wliich it need not be ashamed. It may well fling wide its doors and invite the congratula- tions of the world, for it has entered for an appreciable period into the world's history. Its arc on the great circle is long enough for the eye to see. It evidently has pos- sessed a true vitality, and had to do with perpetual prin- ciples and the continual necessities of man. For, lo ! it has hved through the changing seasons. It evidently was no creature of the air. It must have had its roots in the unchanging ground. It stands before us in that pecuhar richness of old age which belongs alike to old trees and old schools, forever fresh with the new leaves of each new spring, growing stronger as they grow older, with ever sturdier grasp upon the soil. There is nothing which the world has to show which is two hun- dred and fifty years old that more deserves the thankful congratidations of its friends and children than an old school, all the more strong and alive for its venerable age. A quarter of a millennium ! Let us think for a moment how long a period of time that is. It is time enough for the world to turn a new face to her sister-stars. It is a time long enough for a new order of government, a new religion, a new kind of man, to appear and to become 393 394 ESSAYS AXD JDDEESSES. familiar ou oiir planet. It is a time long enough for a new continent to be discovered and settled, and for men almost to forget that there ever Avas a time when its shores were unknown. It is two hundred and fifty years from the crowning of Charlemagne to the battle of Hastings, from William the Conqueror to the Black Prince, from Robert Bruce to Queen Elizabeth, from Oliver Cromwell to General Grant. It is a quarter of a millennium from Chaucer to Milton, or from Shakesj)eare to Tennyson. Is it not manifest how the world may change in such a period as separates the reign of Master Pormort from the reign of Master Merrill in ovir Boston Latin School ? When an institution has covered so long a period of time with its continuous life, it becomes a bond to hold the centuries together. It makes most picturesquely evi- dent the unit}^ of human life which underlies all the variety of human living. One of the values of this anniversary occasion hes in this, that in the unbroken life of ovir great mother the lives of all her childi'en claim brotherhood with one another. You and I are feUow-students and schoolmates with the little Indians who came in our wil- derness to claim their privilege of free tuition, when Bos- ton hardly reached as far as Winter Street, The little Puritan of the seventeenth century and the little Rationalist of the nineteenth look each other in the face, and understand each other better because they are both pupils of the Latin School. Nay, I am not sure but even more than that is true. Who can say that in the school's unity of life the boys of the centuries to be, the boys who will learn strange lessons, play strange games, and ask strange questions in the Latin School in 1985, are not in some subtle way present already as compauions and as influences to the boys who are to-day standing on the narrow line of the present, between the great expanses of the past and future ? THE BOSTON LATIN SCHOOL. 393 It is safer, and so it is wiser, that ou this anniversary evening we should deal more with the past than with the futiu'e, and be more historians than prophets ; yet never forgetting that no man ever deals truly with the past, when he tiu-iis his facie that way, who does not feel the future coming into life behind his back. Let us remem- ber, then, that the history of our school covers the most of three centuries, and that it began to be just at the time when what we may most truly call the modern life of our English race had at last, after many struggles, become thoroughly established. It is good to be born at sunrise. It is good for a man or an institution to date its life from the days when an order of things which is to exist for a long time in the world is in the freshness of its j'outh. Such a time was the first half of the seventeenth century. Then were be- ing sown the seeds whose harvests have not yet all been reaped. The eighteenth century which followed, and the nineteenth century in which we live, were both infolded in that gi-eat germinal century of English life. As I have read the history of oiu* school, it has appeared to me that there was a true correspondence between the periods of its career and the three centuries through which its life has stretched. One evidence of what a vital institution it has been, of how it has responded to the changing life around it, of how it has had its changing, ever appropriate ministry to render to that changing life, has seemed to me to lie in this : that its history di\ddes itself into three great periods, marked by three of its most illustrious teacherships, and corresponding in a striking way to the three centuries, the seventeenth, the eighteenth, and the nineteenth. It is in the light of that correspondence, which I am sure you will see is no idle fancy of my own, that I shall ask you to consider the history of our vener- able school to-night. Happil}', her annals have been so 396 ESSAYS AXD ADDRESSES. faithfully gathered by a few of her devoted sons, and so fully displayed in the historical account which has been or will sliortly be spread before all her children, that I am not called upon to write her history. I need only try, availing myself freely of the results of theii' indefatigable labors, to show w^ith what broad and simple readiness she has caught the spirit of each passing time, and done her duty by them all. The institution which grows naturally in its own atmo- sphere and soil grows unobserved. It is the flindu jug- gler's artificial mango-tree whose growth you watch, see- ing each leaf put forth. The health}^ rose-tree no man sees as it opens its healthy buds to flowers. Only you look out some morning, and there it is. So it is with the Latin School. It was a natural and necessary fruit of the first life of New England ; and that very fact makes its beginning misty and obscure. The colony under Win- throp arrived iu the Arabella, and founded Boston in 1630. On the 4th of September, 1633, the Griffin brought John Cotton fi"om Lincolnshire to Boston, full of pious spirit and wise plans for the new colony with which he had cast in his lot. It has been suggested that possibly we owe to John C'Otton the first suggestion of the first town school. Certainly we owe some other of the early things of the town to him. He brought the Thursday Lecture and the Market-Day in the Griffin with him. And it is evident that iu his old city on the Witham he had been actually interested in the growth of a school which, in some of its features, was not unlike the one which in the second year after his arrival was set up in the new Boston. However this may be, here is the town record of the 13th of the second month, 1635. It is forever memorable, for it is the first chapter of our Book of Genesis, the ver}^ cradle of all our race : "At a general meeting upon publique notice ... it was then generally agreed upon that our THE BOSTON LATIN SCHOOL. 397 brother Philemon Porniort shall be intreated to become scholemaster, fur the teaching and nonvtering of children among' us." It was two hundred and fifty yccxrs ago to- day, just nineteen years after the day when William Shake- speare died, just seventy-one years after the day when he was born. How simple that short record is, and how unconscious that short view is of the futiu-e which is wrapped up in it ! Fifty-nine thousand children who crowd Boston pub- lic schools to-day — and who can count what thousands yet unborn f — are to be heard ciying out for life in the dry, quaint words of that old vote. By it the first educa- tional institution, which was to have continuous existence in America, and in it the public-school sj^stem of the land, came into being. Philemon Pormort, the first teaclier of the Latin School, is hardly more than a mere shadow of a name. It is not even clear that he ever actually taught the school at all. A few years later, with Mr. Wheelwright, after the Hutch- inson excitement, he disappears into the northern woods, and is one of the founders of Exeter, in New Hampshire. There are rumors that he came back to Boston and died here, but it is all very uncertain. One would say that it was better so. This was no one man's school. It was the school of the people, the school of the town. Dim, half- discerned Philemon Pormort, wdth the very spelling of his name disputed, with his face looking out u])on us from the mist, or rather with the mist shaping itself for a mo- ment into a face which we may call his, merely serves to give a sort of human reality to that which would otherwise be wholly vague. Around the shadowy form of Philemon Pormort hovers the hardly less mistj^ figure of Daniel Maude, sometimes blending with it as possible assistant, sometimes sepa- rating from it as rival and successor — " a good man, of a 398 ESSAYS AND ADDBESSES. serious spirit, and of a peaceable and quiet disposition." He, too, disappears northward after a wliile, and goes to be the minister in Dover, in New Hampshire. In his place came Mr. Woodbridge, of whom even less is known than of his predecessors, and after him Robert Woodman- sey, who ruled for twenty years, from 1650 to 1670. He, too, has faded to a shadow, leaving- room for a picture, only the least trifle clearer, of Benjamin Thomson, of whom it is known that he wrote verses, which have given liim a humble place among our earlier New England poets. They were not light or buoyant rhjanes. None of the poems of those days would please our ear to-day. These were no gay or careless song-birds, whose music breaks forth now and then in the morning- of national hfe. Indeed, there is a strange lack of the gaiet}' of sunrise in all those earliest New England days. The dawn of our history was not fresh and dewy. It was rather like the breaking of the daylight over a field where the battle which passed with the sunset of yesterday is to be opened again with the sunrise of to-day, and the best of its nmsic is rather like the hoarse beating of drums than like the songs of birds. Pormort, and Maude, and Woodbridge, and Wood- mansey, and singing Thomson — these fill with theu' ghostly shapes the vague, chaotic, almost prehistoric period of our school. And yet under these men the school got itself weU established and became a certain fact. It was not what in these days we call a free school. The great idea of education offered without cost to all the town's children at the town's expense had not j'et taken shape. It needed long and gradual development. The name " free school " in those days seems to have been used to characterize an institution which should not be restricted to any class of children, and which should not be dependent on the fluctu- ating attendance of scholars for its support. It looked forward to ultimate endowment, like the schools of Eng- THE BOSTON LATIN SCHOOL. 399 land. The town set apart the rent of Deer Island, and some of the other islands in the hai'bor, for its help. All the great citizens, Governor Winthrop, Governor Vane, Mr. BelHnghani, and the rest, made generous contribu- tions to it. But it called also for support from those who sent their children to it, and who were able to pay something ; and it was only of the Indian children that it was distinctly provided that they should be "taught gratis." It was older than any of the schools which, in a few years, grew up thick around it. The same power which made it spring out of the soil was in all tlie rich ground on which these colonists, unlike any other colonists which the world has ever seen, had set their feet. Roxbury had its school under the Apostle Eliot in 1645. Cambridge was already provided before 1643. Charlestown did not wait later than 1G3G. Salem and Ipswich were, both of them, ready in 1637. Plymouth did not begin its system of public instruction till 1663. It was in 1647 that the General Court enacted that resolve which is the great charter of free educatio]i in our commonwealth, in whose preamble and ordinance stand the immortal words : " That learning may not be buried in the grave of our fathers, in Church and Commonwealth, the Lord assisting our en- deavors, it is therefore ordered that every township in this jurisdiction, after the Lord hath increased them to the number of fifty householders, shall then forthwith appoint one within their town to teach all such children as shall resort to him to ^viite and read." There can be no doubt, then, of our priorit3''. But mere priority is no great thing. The real interest of the begin- ning of the school is the large idea and scale on which it started. It taught the children, little Indians and all, to read and write. But there seems every reason to suppose that it taught also the Latin tongue, and all that then was 400 ESSAYS AND ADDRESSES. deemed the higher knowledge. It was the town's only school till 1682. Side by side on its hnmble benches sat the son of the governor and the son of the fisherman, each to take the best that he could grasp. The highest learn- ing was declared at once to be no privilege of an aristo- cratic class, but the portion of any boy in town who had the soul to desire it and the brain to appropriate it. So simply, so unconsciously, there w^s set up, where the School Street of the days to come was not even yet a country road, this institution, whose exact like the world had never seen, and which had in itself the germs of free commercial rivalry and republican government and uni- versal suffrage and all the wondrous unborn things. The most valuable, perhaps, of all things which this new public school represented was that which we may well hold to constitute the greatest claim of the public-school system in all time to our affection and esteem. It repre- sented the fundamental idea of the town undertaking the education of her children. It is in the loyalty, the grati- tude, the educated notion of obedience to the town which has trained them. It is in the dignity and breadth and seriousness which the sense that their town is training them gives to their training that the advantage of the public-school boys over the boys of the best private schools always consists. And this was already present from the day that the doors of the first public school were opened, two hundred and fifty years ago. The boys of Pormort and of "Woodmansey were dimly conscious of it, and it had influence on them. Who was it that had built their school-house 1 Who was it that had laid out their course of study and arranged their hours "? Who was it that set them their lessons and heard their recitations ? Whose were the sacred hands that flogged them ? Who was it that sat, a shadowy form, but their real ruler and friend, behind the master's awful chair? It was their town. THE BOSTON LATIN SCHOOL. 401 That is the real heart of the whole matter. That is the real power of the public-school system always. It edu- cates the thought of law and obedience, the sense of mingled love and fear, which is the true citizen's true emotion to his city. It educates this in the very lessons of the school-room, and makes the person of the state the familiar master of the grateful subject from his boyhood. Such has been the power of our Latin School for two centuries and a half. Thus, then, the school is in existence, and now appears the first of the three great masters of whom I spoke who have given it its cliaracter. Now its history comes forth from the mist, for in the year 1670 Ezekiel Cheever be- comes its master, with his long reign of thirty-eight years before him. The time will come, perhaps, when some poetic brain will figure to itself, and some hands, alert with historical imagination — perhaps the same which have bidden John Harvard live in innnortal youth in Cam- bridge— wiU shape out of vital bronze what sort of man the first great master, Ezekiel Cheever, was. It will be well worth doing, and it will not be hard for genius to do. Whoever knows the seventeenth century will see start into life its typical man — the man of prayer, the man of faith, tlie man of duty, the man of God. Already, when he came to teach the school in Boston, the wild tumult of the Restoration was engulfing social life in England, but it had not readied these quiet shores, or it had been beaten back from against our solemn rocks. The men here were Cromwell's men, and none was more thoroughly a man of the first half of his century than Ezekiel Cheever. He had been born in London, in 1614, and had come first to our Boston when he was twenty-three years old. He did not tarry here then, but went on to New Haven, where he taught scholars, among whom was Michael Wigglesworth, the fearful poet of " The Day of Doom." Thence he came, 402 ESSAYS AXD ADDRESSES. hy and by, to Ipswich, then to Charlestown, and he was a mature Puritan fifty-six years okl before, with solemn ceremony, he received from the great men of the town, on the sixth day of November, 1670, the keys of the school- liouse, and became the master of the Latin School. He lived in the school-house, and received a salary of sixty pounds a year. For this he evidently felt that he accepted grave responsil)ility. It was not onl}^ to teach these boys Latin. Latin was merely an instrument to life. And so all those conceptions and those rules of life which English Puritanism had beaten out perhaps more clearly and pre- cisely than any other religious system which ever ruled the thoughts of men — all these filled and were blended with the classic education of his school. He prayed with the boys one by one when he had heard their lessons. He not merely educated their minds, but he wrestled for their soids. He wrote two books, his famous '^ Accidence," which for a century held the place of honor among Latin school-books, and his " Scripture Prophecies Explained," which reverently but confidently lifted the veil from the eternal things. Probably the second book, no less — nay, much more — than the first, lay near his heart. He was called — perhaps some of my modern hearers may not at- tach very clear notions to the name, but we are sure that he would have treasured it among his choicest titles — he was called by Cotton Mather " a sober chiliast." The next world for him was always brooding over and flowing through this world. We can well believe that it was the eternal terror^ and no mere earthly ra,ge, which was bm-n- ing in his eye when his scholar, the reverend Mr. Samuel Maxwell, got that idea of him which, years afterward, he WTote among his reminiscences. It is the only scrap of personal portrait, I think, which is left of Master Cheever. Mr. Maxwell says : '' He wore a long white beard, termi- THE BOSTON LATIN SCHOOL. 403 natinG: in a point, and when lie stroked liis })eard to the point it was a sign for the boys to stand clear." It has often come to pass that great schoolmasters have found among their pupils the voice or pen which has saved them from oblivion — the rates sacer who has rescued them from lying unknown in long night : what Stanley did for Dr. Arnold of Kugby, what Ernest Renan has done for Bishop Dupanloup of St. Nicolas du Chardonnet, that Cotton Mather, the historian and poet-laureate of early Boston, did in a funeral sermon and a memorial poem for Ezekiel Cheever. The nmse was never more modish and self-conscious, poetry never labored under such mountain- weiglit of pedantry, conceits never so turned and returned and doubled ou themselves, the flowers of rhetoric never so ran to seed, as in the marvelous verses in which the minister of the North Church did obituary honor to the master of the Latin School. And yet it shows how great a man the master was that the reality of his pupil's tribute to his greatness pierces through all his absiu'd exaggera- tion, and he walks grandly even in these preposterous clothes. Hear him one instant patiently, just to see what it is like : " A miglity tribe of well-instructed youth Tell what they owe to him, and tell with truth ; All the eight parts of speech he taught to them They now employ to trumpet his esteem ; They fill Fame's Trumpet, and they spread his Fame To last till the last Trumpet drown the same." Then come some lines which give us an idea of the speci- men words of the famous " Accidence " : " Magister pleased them well, because 'twas he ; They saw that Bonus did with it agree ; When they said Amo they the hint improve, Him for to make the object of their love." 404 ESSAYS AXD ADDUESSES. And then these verses, wliicli link his name with that of his brother-teacher in Cambridge : " 'Tis Corlet's pains and Clieever's we must own Tliat thou, New England, art not Seythia grown ;* The Isles of Scilly liad o'errun this day The Continent of our America." It is poor verse, not to be made mneh of in this pres- ence. But there is a certain reality about it, nevertheless. It catches something of the stimibling style, half grand, half commonplace, with which all that old New England greatness used to walk. It has the same patchwork color- ing, yet giving on the whole a total and complete impres- sion, which we behold in the sentence which Judge Sewall wrote in his diary on the twenty-first day of August, 1708, when he heard at last that the old schoolmaster was dead at the good age of ninety-four. " He labored in his call- ing," Sewall says, " skilfully, diligentl}^, constantly, relig- iously, seventy years — a rare instance of piety, health, strength, serviceableness. The welfare of the province was much upon his spirit. He abominated periwigs." Can we not see the good, simple, severe old man ? They buried him from the school-house, with the familiar desks and benches looking on at the service, and as the gram- marian's funeral passed out over the Neck to Roxbnry Burial Ground, the reign of the first great master of the Latin School was over ! No doubt it all was very grim. The master was grim, and the boys were grim. And a grim boy is the grimmest thing on earth. But we must not let the picture of the Puritan school-house grow too somber in our thoughts. They were boys still, those little Puritans, and the whole generation of sober manners and repressed feelings can- not have wholly exorcised the spirit of mischief which has haunted the boy-nature in all the ages. And always, in THE BOSTON LATIN SCHOOL. 405 thinking about the Puritan times, we need to remember that the brightness or dulness of any spot in a picture de- pends altogether on the tone or key in which tlie picture, as a whole, is painted. A spot of dull red in a canvas which is all ashen-gray will glow and burn as the most brilliant scarlet fails to do in the midst of a great carnival of frantic color. It is a question of backgrounds and pro- portions. And so a very little frolic must have gone a great way in the Boston of Ezeldel Cheever, which was the Boston of the " Scarlet Letter." "VMiere Cotton Mather was the Homer and the " Magnalia " was the "Iliad," the power of being amused was no doubt in true relation to the means of amusement which were offered ; and it may weU be doubted whether, save in some exceptional mortal here and there, born out of due time, too early or too late, born with a humorous and freakish spirit which had embodied itself in the wrong place, there was any felt lack of those brighter elements, tha,t ozone in the atmosphere of life, which has come to seem to us so absolutely necessary. But if we leave the question of amusement on one side, and think more serious things, then the school shines with an uncjuestionable light. It may have been very grim, but that it was pervaded with a clear, deep sense of duty, that it was a place where life was seriously thought of, and where hard work was done, no student of those days can doubt. Not yet had come the slightest hesitation concerning the directioii which education ought to take. They gave themselves to the classics without any mocking voice to tell them that their devotion was a fetish- worship. Indeed, any one who thoroughly believes that the classical study is to-day a homage to an effete idol may still be free to own that in the days of Cheever it was a true service of a stiU living master. The Renaissance and the Eefor- mation, both full of the spirit of classicism, were hardly two centuries old. Latin was still the living language 406 ESSAYS JXD ADDRESSES. of diplomacy. John Milton, once the Latin secretary of Cromwell, possibly himself a teacher of Ezekiel Cheever in his youth, did not die till the great Boston master had been teacliing here four years. And the New Testament, being the book which lay at the very soul of all New Eng- land, kept the Greek tongue vital and sacred in every true New England heart and household. To forget that days have changed since then is folly. To shut our eyes to the great procession of new sciences which have come troop- ing in, demanding the recogidtion and study of educated men, is to be blind to a great series of events which the world sees and in which it glories. The classics are not, cannot be, what they were when Ezekiel Cheever taught Cotton Mather and President Leverett their Latin gram- mar. They are not and they cannot be again the tools of present life, the instruments of current thought. All the more for that they may be something greater, something better. All the more they may stand to those whose priv- ilege it is to study them as the monumental structures which display the power of perfected human speech. All the more they may shine in their finished beauty in the midst of our glorious, tumultuous modern life as the Greek temples stand in the same Em-ope which holds the Gothic cathedrals, offering forever the rest of their completeness for the comfort of men's eagerness and discontent. All the more they may show enshrined within them the large and simple types of human life and character, the men and women who shine on our perplexed, distracted, modern life, as the calm moon shines upon the vexed and broken waters of the sea. So long as they can do these offices for man, the classics will not pass out of men's stud}'. It is good to make them elective, but we may be sure that students will elect them abundantly in school and college. It was the classic culture in those earliest days that bound the Latin School and Harvard College close to- THE BOSTON LATIX SCHOOL. 407 getlier. The college is young- beside our venerable seliool. It did not come to bii'tli till we were four years old. But when the college had been founded, it and the school be- came, and ever since have made, one system of continu- ous education. Boys learned their "Accidence " in School Street, and went and were examined in it at Cambridge. The compilers of our catalogue have thought it right to as- sume that every Boston graduate of Harvard in those ear- liest years had studied at the Latin School. Such union between school and college has continued year after year, and has been a great and helpful influence for both. It has kept the school alwaj^s alert and ready for the highest standards. In the days of the first great master Cotton Mather wrote : " It was noted that when scholars came to be admitted into the college they who came from the Cheeverian education were generally the most unexcep- tionable." We Latin School boys have loved to think that that has never ceased to be the case. And so the college has always helped the school. But the school also has helped the college. Its response to all the new. methods which have risen in the university has ever been cordial and sincere. Its thoroughness of work has helped to make those methods possible. The men in whose minds those methods have arisen have been often men of our school. From Leverett to Eliot the school has given to the college not a few of its best presidents and professors. And so we have a right to feel that we have not merely been dragged in the wake of our great neighbor, but have had something to do with the shaping of her course. Ships which met the Alaska and the Winni2)eg upon mid-ocean thought that they saw only a great steamer with a little one in tow ; l^ut really the little steamer was the rudder that was keeping the great steamer in her course. And so we part with INIaster Cheever, the great seven- teenth-century schoolmaster, and pass on. Almost the 408 ESSAYS JXD JDDIiESSES. last glimpse wliicli we catcli of him iu the school-room, when he is more than eighty years old, has something noble in its simplicity. A boy is angrily rebuked by him for a false syntax. He ventures to dispute the master's judgment. He shows a rule which had escaped the mas- ter's memory, and proves that he is right. The master smiles and says : " Thou art a brave boy. I had forgot it." That is the very heroism of school-teaching. So let his serious face pass smiling out of our sight. With Cheever's death the school passed into the reign of Nathaniel Williams. He is already a different kind of man. It is said of him that he was " agreeable," which nobody had said of Cheever. He has accomplishments. And in him there are signs of versatility which belong more to the new century than to the old; for he was min- ister and doctor at the same time that he was schoolmaster. It is wi-itten that "amid the multiplicity of his duties as instructor and physician in extensive practice he never left the ministerial work." No part of man's threefold nature was left out of his care. Well might he have wi'it- ten as the motto of his memorandum book, in Avhich per- haps he kept all together his prescriptions and the notes of his sermons and the roster of his school, " Hiunani a me nil aJiennm putoy No doubt his pupils were both losers and gainers by the diffusion of theu* master's mind. In those pupils also we begin to see a change. It is no longer Cotton Mather, but Benjamin Franklin, who is the t}7)ical Boston boy. At eight years old, his father intending to devote him, according to his own account, as the tithe of his sons to the service of the Church, he was put to the grammar school. He did not sta}^ there long, for he did not accept his father's consecration of his life, but soon passed out to the printer's shop and the Conti- nental Congress and the French Court, and experiments upon the thunderous skies. But he and Samuel Adams, THE BOSTON LATIN SCHOOL. 409 who was one of Master Williams's later scholars, let us feel how the times have changed and another centmy begun. Yet still the sober religious spirit of the past days has not vanished. For years to come the school is dismissed early for the Thursday Lecture. In 1709 the first begin- ning of what now is the school committee makes its ap- pearance. A certain number of gentlemen of liberal edu- cation, together with some of the reverend ministers of the town, are asked to be inspectors of the school, and at their visitation, " one of the ministers by tm-ns to pray with the scholars, and entertain 'em with some instruc- tions of piety specially adapted to their age and educa- tion." According to its light the town still counted that it was its responsibility and right to watch over its chil- dren's characters. And the child honored religion all the more because he had heard his mother-city praying, his Jerusalem crying out to God for him. But I suppose the most striking thing which came in the teachership of Williams must have been the distur- bance in town meeting in the year 1711. Some innova- tors, restless spirits who were not satisfied to leave things as they were, had made inquiries and found that in the schools of Europe boys really learned Latin, and learned it with less of toil and misery than here. And so they sent a memorial to the town-house which recounted, to use its curious words, that '' according to the methods used here very many hundreds of boys in this town, who by their parents were never designed for a more liberal education, have spent two, three, and four years or more of their early days at the Latin School, which hath proved of very little or no benefit to their after accomplishment,'' and asked '' whether it might not be advisable that some more easie and delightful methods be attended and put in practice." It was referred to committees in the good 410 ESSAYS AND ADDRESSES. old way, and came to nothing then ; but it is interesting, because in it there is the first symptom which our town has to show of tliat rebellion against the tyranny and narrowness and unreasonableness of the classical system which will be heard as long as the classical system mani- fests its perpetual tendency to become tyrannical and nar- row and unreasonable. " Some more easie and delightful methods ! " How the souls of the school-boys have hun- gered for them through the ages all along ! How we, the students of a century and a half later, looking back on our own school-boy days, feel still that a more easy and dehghtful method than that which we know somewhere exists and must some day be found ! Were we not started on a course of study which, if one of Pormort's bo3'^s had begun it on the day on which the school was opened and continued it till now, he hardly would have mastered yet? Were not we treated as if the object of our study were not that we should get the delight out of Cicero and Vir- gil, but as if every one of us were meant to be either an- other Andi'cws or another Stoddard ? Remembering these things, we bless the memory of the memorialists of 1711 ; we rejoice to think that the classics, finding themselves hard pressed by upstart modern sciences, must ultimately justify and keep their place by finding out more " easie and delightful methods." The eighteenth century, then, was well upon its way when, almost exactly a hundred years after the foundation of the school, John Lovell, the second of its representative men, became its master. The school at last has reached that stage of growth in which it produces its own seed and renews itself from its own stock. John Lovell was the first true Boston boy, bred in the orthodox routine of Latin School and Harvard College, who attained the mastership. Since him only one master has ascended to that dignity save by those sacred stairs. It has kept us very local, but has made no small part of our strength. THE BOSTON LATIN SCHOOL. 411 John Lovell's name shines in our history as perhaps the best known of all our sovereigns. His portrait, painted by Sniibert, whose son he taught, hangs in the Memorial Hall at Cambridge, and its copy here looks down oq us to-night as it has gazed on many of the fast-coming and fast-going generations of Latin School boys here and in Bedford Street. Look on its calm complacency and say if it be not the very embodiment of the first three quarters of the eighteenth century, before the great distiu'bance and explosion came. The age of troublesome questions and of wrestling souls has passed awa3^ The time of rea- son has succeeded to the time of faith. Authority and obedience are the dominant ideas. System and order are the worshiped standards. Satisfaction with things as they are is the prevailing temper. A long and somewhat sultry calm precedes the outburst, as yet unfeared, with which the century is to close, and which is to clear the ah* for the richer days in which it has been our privilege to live. John Lovell seems to have been thoroughly a man of his time. It is said of him that " though a severe teacher, yet he was remarkably humorous and an agreeable com- panion." That is a true eighteenth-century description. Insistence on authority and comfortable good-humor united in the seK-satisfied conservatism, the marvelous self-con- tentment, of those days. The great achievement of the master was his oration on the death of Peter Faneuil, Esq., delivered in the new hall which the benefactor of the town had built. It is florid and was considered eloquent. *' May this hall be ever sacred to the interests of truth, of justice, of loyalty, of honor, of liberty. May no private views of party broils ever enter these waUs." How little he who so consecrated the cradle knew of the tumultuous child who was to fill it, and to make the country and the world ring with its cries ! The whole oration is tumid and profuse, real no doubt in its da}^, but beaiing now an inevitable suspicion of unreality and superficialness. 412 ESSAYS AXD ADDEESSES. Ezekiel Cheever could not have written it. But we think that Ezekiel Cheever would not have written it if he could ; he would have had stronger things to say. I have not thus far tried to trace the history of the school- house in which the masters of whom I have been speaking taught, because the negligent records have allowed it al- most altogether to slip through their careless fingers ; and there are hardly more than modern guesses left. The soul was sacred, and the body got but little care. We only know that from the first a school-house, which w^as also the head- master's dwelling, stood where now the rear of the King's Chapel stands, its ground reaching about to where the statue of its former pupil, Benjamin Franklin, has been set up in bronze. This school-house lasted until Lov- ell's time. It is of it in his time that it is said that the garden, which belonged to it, was cultivated in the most thrifty manner, free of all expense, by the assistance of the best boys in school, who were permitted to work in it as a reward of merit. The same best boys were allowed to saw the master's wood and bottle his cider, and to laugh as much as they pleased while performing these delightful offices. Remember that these " best boys " were the future signers of the Declaration of Independence, They were John Hancock and Robert Treat Paine and William Hooper, James Bowdoin and Harrison Gray Otis were the names of the boys who made the garden which they tilled ring with their licensed laughter. The hands which sawed the master's wood were the same hands which dragged their sleds to General Haldimand's headquarters in 1775, and whose owners remonstrated, with the vigor of young freemen, against the desecration of their coast by the insolent British soldiers. The spirit of loyalty and the spirit of liberty together, the readiness to obey legiti- mate authority and the determination not to submit to tyranny, these two, which united to secure and which have THE BOSTON LATIX SCHOOL. 413 united to sustain our institutions, burned together in the l)osoms of the boys who went to the old school on the north side of School Street. In 1748 the disturbance of that school-house came. It made a wild excitement then in the little town, but the tumult has sunk into silent oblivion with the old quarrels of the Athenian Agora and the Forum of Rome. The King's Chapel was prosperous, and wanted to enlarge its house of worshii). The school-house stood right in the way. Science and religion were in conflict. The influ- ential chapel asked the tow-n for leave to tear the school- house down and build another on land which the chapel would provide across the street. The town's people, for some reason, perhaps because of the offensive prelacy of the petitioners, were violent^ opposed to the idea. Master Lovell himself fought hard against it. Town-meeting after town-meeting of the most excited kind was held. The strife ran high, but the chapel carried the day, and in a town-meeting of April 18, 1748, by a vote of 205 to 197, the prayer of the petitioners was granted. The onlj epigram to which our school ever gave occa- sion, the only flash of wit which lightens the sky of our serious history, comes in here, and, unique as it is, must not be omitted, however familiar it may be, in any memo- rial address. I charge my successor of two hundred and fifty years hence to find for it a place in his semi-millen- nial oration. On the morning after the great fight was over and the great defeat had come, Mr. Joseph Green, the wearer at that time of the never-fading laurel of the wit of Boston, sent into the school to Master Lovell these verses, which the master probably read out to the boys : " ' A fig for your learning ! I tell yoii the town, To make the clmreh larger, must pnll the school down.' 'Unluckily spoken,' replied Master Birch, 'Then learning, I fear, stops the growth of the church.'" 414 ESSAYS AND ADDEESSES. The school-house which the King's Chapel built in ful- filment of its promise, which stood where the eastern jDortion of the Parker House now stands, seems to have vanished mysteriously and completely from the memory of man. It stood for sixty years, and to-day no record tells us what was its look. There is something pathetic in this total vanishing of an old house, especially of an old school-house. It was so terribly familiar once. It is so hopelessly lost now. We might as well try to recon- struct the ship of Jason or the horse of Troy. A hundred years is as good as a thousand to such pure oblivion. The successor of that first school-house on the south side of School Street was the building in which }-ou, sir, and many whom the city stiU delights to honor, gained their edu- cation between the time of its completion in 18 12 and its destruction in 1844. Nothing remains of it now except its key, which makes part of our modest museum, and which I here hold up for the recognition of my older friends. After that came the Bedford Street house, which many of us who still feel young when we talk with the boy who went to school in School Street remember with various emotions, and which gave Avay only four years ago to this palatial edifice, which, standing in our imaginations alongside of the little, hardly discoverable shed in which Philemon Pormort taught, is the real orator of this occa- sion. We must not linger too long with Master Lovell. It was in the mysterioiis building which the world has now forgotten that he was teaching when the Revolution took him by sui"prise. He was not equal to the time, and saw no further into the future than allowed him to lie a Tory. But his son James, whom he had called to be his assistant, had the spirit of the second and not of the first half of the eighteenth century, and was a patriot. Tra- dition tells how the old man and the young man sat, like the embodied spirits of the past and the future, on sepa- THE BOSTON LATIN SCHOOL. 415 rate platforms at the two ends of the long- vanished school- room, and taught the rights of the crown and the rights of the people to the boys, who listened to both, but turned surely at last away from the setting to the rising sun. At last there came the day of which Harrison Gray Otis, then a school-boy nine years old, has left us his account. I must recite to you his graphic words : " On the 19th of April, 1775, I went to school for the last time. In the morning, about seven, Percy's Brigade was drawn up, ex- tending from Scollay's building through Tremont Street and nearly to the bottom of the Mall, pi'eparing to take up their march for Lexington. A corporal came up to me as I was going to school and turned me off to pass down Court Street, which I did, and came up School Street to the school-house. It may well be imagined that great agitation prevailed, the British line being drawn up a few yards only from the school-house door. As I entered the school I heard the announcement of Deponite libros, and ran home for fear of the regulars." That was the end of one scene of our drama : with the departing form of little Otis running home ''for fear of the regulars" ends the administration of Master Lovell and closes the distinctively eighteenth-century period of our history. The master himself disapj^ears soon with the evacuating British. His son James was carried off a prisoner, perhaps in the same ship, no doubt in revengeful memory of the oration which he had dared to deliver in the old South Meeting-House in honor of the victims of the Boston Massacre. There is nothing heroic about Master Lovell. It was not an heroic nature. It was not an heroic world in which he lived. The lamps were being overtaken by the sunrise, and looked pale and belated as they always do. But he will ever be remembered as one who served his city well according to his light. He keeps and will long keep a 416 ESSAYS AND ADDRESSES. local fame. He is of that class of men whose monuments we read everywhere in quaint and ancient towns, and own that tliongh their fame never overleaped the walls within wliich they were born, jei it is better for the world that they have lived than that many a great man with whom Fame and her silly trumpet have been busy should have strutted on his loftier stage. They have given great faith- fulness to little things, and no one can say how wide- reaching the results have been. ^^ In tenni labor at tenuis no)i gloria." We smile at their exaggerated eulogy, but are glad that their city does them honor. So we may leave the good name of John Lovell to the safe-keeping of his grateful town of Boston. You will remind me, if I do not soon remind myself, that I have not undertaken to write the whole history of the Latin School, but only to recall something of the spirit of what its past has been, letting my thoughts gather es- pecially about the names of its three great masters, who mark the three centuries in which it has lived. Remem- bering this, I must not pause to remind j'ou of how, after LovelPs flight, the school was closed for more than a year, and of how then it was reopened under the mastership of Samuel Hunt. His reign has left severer memories than that of any other of our masters. As we listen at the windows which the recollections of some of his pupils have left open, it is almost like Virgil's awful record : "Hinc exaudiri gemitus et sJBva sonare Verbera ; turn stridor fen-i traetfeqiie eateriEe." After him came William Bigelow, of whom there re- mains no strong mark on our annals. Then to a school fallen a good deal into degeneracy, as if to set it in order for the demands of another century, came the wise, ener- getic administration of Master Benjamin Apthorp Gould, the teacher of Emerson, and Motley, and Adams, and Win- THE BOSTON LATIN SCHOOL. 417 throp, aud Sumner, and Hillard, and Beecher, and James Freeman Clarke. We have come now to familiar names aud days. We are binding the pride of modern Boston very closely to the promise of the past when we see the boys of 1824 come forward to receive their prizes at the hands of Master Gould. Charles Sumner has written a translation from Sallust for which he receives two doUars as a second prize ; and a translation from Ovid for which one dollar is thought enough, George S. Hillard has two doUars for the thu*d declamation prize, and is loaded down with other rewards of merit. Robei't C. Winthrop has written a Latin poem for which he wins a second prize and gets six doUars. Epes S. Dixwell was even then sing- ing in Latin odes his hymn for that year, bringing him just as much as Mr. Winthrop's poem. Not this year, but the next, James F. Clarke gets the first prize for an Eng- lish poem, and little Wendell Phillips gains one of six third prizes for declamation. To read those old catalogues makes the last sixty years seem very short. The masters and scholars of those days are only the masters and scholars of to-day standing just • far enough off for us to study them. The dusty dradgery of the school-room has settled, and we can see its mean- ings clearly. Let us pause a moment and think what this school-keeping and school-going means. There stands the master, like a priest between the present and the past, between the living and the dead, between the ideas and the life of the world. His is a noble, nay, a holy, priest- hood. He is the lens through which truth pours itself on young human souls ; he is the window through which fresh young ej-es look out at human life ; and there around him sit his scholars. Like Homer's heroes, Mr. Hillard says they are, in the frankness and directness of tlieir life. They make their friendships and their feuds. The.y meet the old temptations with their sublime young con- 418 ESSAYS AND ADDBESSES. fidence. That school life is to them their hill of Ida or their palace of Jerusalem. They are Paris or Solomon in their critical encounters with the nobler and the baser allurements of their life. Yet tor the time they live imvj:- niiiceutly apart. The old woi-ld roars around them and they do not care, but live their separate life and are in no impatience for State Street or Court Street. In these days School Sti-eet and the Common and the Charles River made their sufficient world. This ever-recurring hfe of the new generations, this narrow life of boyhood, opening by and by into the larger experience of manhood, to be narrowed again into the boyhood of their children, and so on perpetually — this makes the rhythmic life of the community. It is the systole and diastole of the city's heart. Master Gould passes away, and Master Leverett suc- ceeds. He was scholarly and gracious, and goes down the road of sure and well-earned fame with his dictionary under his arm. Then Master Dillaway, our honored presi- dent, takes up the scepter, and wins the gi-ateful honor which he has never lost. Then Mr. Dixwell begins his long respected reign, which will henceforward be com- memorated by this speakmg portrait. The old walls in Bedford Street have disappeared, but they would almost rise up fi'om the dust to protest against my effrontery if I dared to say more than to pay passing tribute to his mastership with this one woi'd of thanks. Who is the scholar, that he should forget himself and exercise his irreverent analysis on his old master to his living face ? Long may it be before any of his scholars has the right to do it. But with the close of Mr. Dixwell's rule came Francis Gardner. That is to say, that remarkable man then became head-master of the school of which he had long been underteacher. How shall I speak of him in the presence of so many of his old boys, to whom he is a THE BOSTON LATIN SCHOOL. 419 never-fading memory f At least I know that he will be a very vivid recollection with you as I speak. The character and work of Francis Gardner will furnish subjects of discussion as long as any men live who were his pupils, and perhaps long- after the latest of his schol- ars shall have tottered to the grave. But certain things will always be clear regarding him, and will insure his perpetual remembrance, especially these two : his whole life was bound up in the school and its interests ; and his originality and intensity of mind and nature exercised the strongest influence over the boys who passed luider his charge. This last is the best thing, after all, that a teacher can bring to his scholars. Best of all things which can hap- pen to a school-boy is the contact with a vigorous and strongly marked nature which breaks its cords and snaps its shells, and sets it free for whatever it has in it the capacity to do and be. M}^ honored and beloved classmate and friend. Dr. Wil- liam Reynolds Dimmock, himself a notable instructor, has left a very complete account of Dr. Gardner in the memo- rial address which he delivered at the time of our master's death. In his wa}' he did for Francis Gardner what Cot- ton Mather did two centuries before for Ezekiel Cheever. As I read his graphic pages I feel very strongly what I have already suggested, that in Gardner the century to which he belonged is very strikingly embodied. Think of him, O my fellow-students, as he sat upon his platform or moved about the hall among our desks thirty years ago ! Tall, gaunt, muscular, uncouth in bodj' ; quaint, sineAvy, severe in thought and speech ; impressing every boy with the strong sense of vigor, now lovel}^ and now hateful, but never for a moment tame, or dull, or false ; indignant, passionate, an athlete both in mind and body — think what an interesting mixture of opposites he was ! 420 ESSAYS AXD ADDRESSES. He was proud of himself, his school, his city, and his time ; yet no man saw more clearly the faults of each, or was more discontented with them aU. He was one of the frankest of men, and yet one of the most reserved. He was the most patient mortal, and the most impatient. He was one of the most earnest of men, and yet nobody, probably not even himself, knew his positive belief upon any of the deepest themes. He was almost a sentimental- ist with one swing of the pendulum, and almost a cynic with the next. There was sympathy not unmixed with mockery in his grim smile. He clung with almost obsti- nate conservatism to the old standards of education, while he defied the conventionalities of ordinary life with every movement of his restless frame. Can you not see him as we spoke our pieces on the stage, bored ourselves and boring oiir youtlif ul audiences, and no doubt boring him, with the unreality of the whole preposterous performance f Can you not see him in his restlessness taking advantage of the occasion to climb and dust off the pallid bust of Pallas, which stood over the school-room door, and thun- dering down from his ladder some furious correction which for an instant broke the cloud of sham and sent a light- ning flash of reality into the dreary speech? Can you not liear him as he swept the grammar with its tinkling lists aside for an liour, and very possibly with a blackboard illustration enforced some point of fundamental morals in a way his students never could forget ? Can you not feel his proverbs and his phrases, each hard as iron with perpetual use, come pelting across the hall, finding the weak spot in your self-complacency, and making it sensi- tive and humble ever since ? He was a narrow man in the intensity with which he thought of his profession. I heard him say once that he never knew a nuin who had failed as a schoolmaster to succeed in any other occupation. And yet he was a broad THE BOSTON LATIN SCHOOL. 421 man in his idea of the range whicli he conceived that his teaching ought to cover. He made the shabby old school- house to blossom Avith the first suggestions of the artistic side of classical study, with busts and pictures, with pho- togi-aphs and casts ; and hosts of men who have forgotten every grammar rule, and cannot tell an ablative from an accusative, nor scan a verse of Virgil, nor conjugate the least irregular of regular verbs to-day, still feel, while all these flimsy superstructures of their study have vanished like the architecture of a dream, the solid moral basis of respect for work and honor, for pure truthfulness, which he put under it all, still lying sound and deep and unde- cayed. Mr. Gai'dner's great years were the years of the war. It would have been a sad thing if the mighty struggle of the nation for its life had found in the chief teacher of the boys of Boston a soul either hostile or indifferent. The soul which it did find was all alive for freedom and for union. The last news from the battle-field came hot into the school-room, and made the close air tingle with inspi- ration. He told the boj'^s about Gettysburg as Cheever must have told his boys about Marston Moor, and Lovell must have told his about Ticonderoga. He formed his pupils into companies and regiments, and drilled with them himself. It was a war which a great master might well praise, and into which a school full of generous pupils might well throw their whole souls, for it was no war of mere military prowess. It was a war of j^i'inciples. It was a war whose soldiers were citizens. It was a war which hated war-making, and whose methods were kept transparent always with their sacred purposes shining clearly through. Such a war mothers might pray for as their sons went forth, masters might bid their scholars pause from their books and listen to the throbbing of the distant cannon. The statue of the school honoring her 422 ESSAYS AXD ADDRESSES. heroic dead, uuder whose shadow the boys will go and come about their studies every day for generations, will fire no young heart with the passion for niilitar}^ glory, but it will speak patriotism and self-devotion from its silent lips so long as the school-boys come and go. Two hundred and eighty-seven graduates of the school served in the war with the rebellion, and fifty-one laid down their lives. Who of us is there that does not believe that the school where they were trained had something to do with the simple courage with wdiich each of these heroic men went forth to do the duty of the hour ? " Patriseque impendcre vitam Nee sibi sed toti geiiitum se credere mundo." The life of Francis Gardner was not without a certain look of pathos, even in the eyes of his light-hearted pupils. As we looked back upon it after we had left him, we always thought of it as sad. That color of pain and dis- appointment grew deeper in it as it approached its end. It was no smug, smooth, rounded, satisfactory^ career. It was full of vehemence and contradiction and disturbance. He was not always easy for the boys to get along with. Probably it was not always easy for him to get along Avith himself. But it has left a strength of truth and honor and devoted manliness which will always be a treasure in the school he loved. The very confusion and struggle always after something greater than itself make it a true typical life of the century in which he Hved. We look into his stormy face upon our walls, and bid him at last rest in peace. I must not tell of those who have succeeded him ; not of him whom death removed almost as soon as he was seated in the master's chair ; not of him who to-day so wisely and happily and strongly rules the venerable school. I hope that you can see as I do how our whole history THE BOSTON LATIN SCHOOL. 423 falls into shape about these three great masters to whom I have given most of my discourse. Let that be the pic- tui*e which is left upon our memories. Cheever and Lovell and Gardner ! The Puritan, the Tory, and, shall we not say in some fuller sense, the man — are they not character- istic figures? One belongs to the century of Milton, one to the century of Johnson, one to the century of Carlyle. One's eye is on the New Jerusalem, one's soul is all wrapped up in Boston, one has caught sight of humanity. One is of the century of faith, one of the century of common sense, one of the centmy of conscience. One teaches his boys the Christian doctrine, one bids them keep the order of the school, one inspires them to do their duty. The times they represent are great expanses on the sea of time ; one shallower, one deeper, than the others. Through them all sails on the constant school, with its monotonous rou- tines like the clattering machinery of a great ship, which, over many w^aters of different depths, feeling now the deepness and now the shallowness under its keel, presses along to some sea of the future which shall be better than them all. To that distant sea and the waters which are still to cross before it shall be reached, to the future of the Latin School for which all this past has been preparing, let me dii'ect your thoughts for a few moments before I close. Our century is growing better toward its end. With the wealth and richness of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries gathered and distilled into its life, the nineteenth century has been larger and nobler than them both. Its master is the greatest of the three. What sort of figure shall we picture to ourselves the master of the Latin School who shall illustrate the twentieth century, the gates of which are almost ready to swing back ? Wliat shall be the life which he will govern and will help to create "? It will bear, no doubt, the same great general features which 424 ESSAYS jxn add n esses. have marked the past, but with more generous and broad development. Let me only make three easy prophecies : 1. In the twentieth century, as in those which have gone before, our school will be a city school. Its students will find that enlargement of thought and life which comes from close personal connection in the most sensive years with the public life. Here, let me say again, is a blessing which no private school can give. The German states- man, if 50U talk with him, will tell you that, with every evil of his great mihtary system, which makes every citi- zen a soldier for some portion of his life, it j-et has one redeeming good : it brings each young man of the land once in his life directly into the country's service, lets him directly feel its touch of dignity and power, makes him proud of it as his personal commander, and so insures a more definite and vivid loj-alty through all his life. More graciousl}^, more healthily, more Cliristianl}^, the American public school does what the barracks and the drill-room try to do. Would that its blessing might be made absolutely imiversal ! Would that it might be so arranged that once in the life of every Boston boy, if only for three months, he might be a pupil of a public; school, might see his city sitting in the teacher's chair, might find himself, along with boys of all degrees and classes, simply recognized by his community as one of her chil- dren ! It would put an element into his character and life which he would never lose. It would insure the unity and public spirit of our citizens. It would add tenderness and pride and gratitude to the more base and sordid feel- ings with which her sons rejoice in their mother's wealth and strength and fame. 2. And again, our school always must be, in the twen- tieth century as well as in the nineteenth, a school of broad and undivided scholarship. No doubt her teaching will grow more comprehensive as the years go on. The THE BOSTON LATIN SCHOOL. -125 Latin and Greek classics are destined not to be dropped out of our culture, but to share with other studies the gen- erous task of developing- the youthful powers and laying the foundation for the more special work of life. They must accept their place and learn to teach in easier and quicker ways those lessons for which men wiU have less leisure than they used to have, but which they never will consent to leave entii*ely unlearned. The sciences of phys- ical nature will open more and more capacity for the de- velopment of character and thought. Art and the modern speech and life of man will j)i"ove themselves able to do much for which it has seemed as if only the study of anti- quity had the power. Changes like these must come, and will be welcome. But the first principle of liberal learn- ing, the principle that all special education must open out of a broad general culture which is practical only in the deepest and the truest sense, must ever be the principle which rules and shapes our school. '' The strictly practi- cal is not practical enough," says a wise ^vi'iter upon edu- cation. To the education which is most practical because it aims at that breadth of nature in which all special prac- tices shall by and by come to their best, let us dedicate our school anew. 3. And, yet once more, the school, with its continuous history running on into the new centuries, as it has run through these three, taking the boys who are to-day un- born and educating them for the duties which the exigen- cies of the new centuries are to bring, will bear perpet- ual witness that civic manhood is the same always. The school of the period may start out of the exigencies of the period, and perish with the period that gave it birth. It bears its testimony of how every age is exceptional and different from every other. Our school, the school of Cheever and Lovell and Gardner, bears witness to a no- bler, deeper truth — the truth that, however circumstances 426 ESSAYS AND ADDRESSES. may change, the necessary bases of public and private character are still the same ; that truth and bravery and patriotism and manliness are the foundations of private and public happiness and strength, not merely in the sev- enteenth and eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, but in the twentieth century and all the centuries to come until the end. A great school is a great person, only it has, what we men vainly desire, the privilege of growing mature with- out any of the weakness of growing old, the ripeness of age with none of its premonitions of decay. We greet our school to-night, then, venerable in its antiquity, but with the dew of perpetual youth upon its forehead. We congratulate the boys, its present pupils, who feel the thrill along its deck as the old ship sails bravely through the straits of this commemoration and catches sight of vast new seas beyond. We commend her to the great wise future, to the needs and the capacities of the coining generations, to the care of the God of the fathers, who will be tlie God of the children too. With the same kind heart and with \Qt wiser hands may she who educated us educate the boys of Boston for centuries to come, so long as the harbor flashes in the sunlight and the State House shines upon the hill ! BIOGRAPHY. (March 4, 1886.) I HAVE been anxious to choose a suliject for my lecture which should have to do both mth literature and with life. I have pictured to myself what now I see before me, an assemblage of young men to whom the two w^orlds — the world of books and the Avorld of men — were freshly and delightfully opening. Let me take some subject for my evening's talk, I said to myself, which shall bring those two great worlds together ; and so I have come to speak to you about biography. Biography is, in its very name, the literature of life. It is especially the literature of the individual human life. All true literature is the expression of life of some sort. Books are the pictures into which life passes as the land- scape passes through the artist's brain into the glowing canvas, gaining thereby that which it had not in itself, but also turning forth to sight its own more subtle and spii'itual meanings. And since the noblest life on earth is always human life, the literature whii^h deals with hu- man life must always be the noblest literature. And since the individual human life must always have a distinctness and interest which cannot belong to any of the groups of human lives, biography must always have a charm which no other kind of history can rival. I think that I would rather have written a great l)iog- < y: i-aphy than a great book of any other sort, as I would rather have paiuted a great portrait than any other kind of picture. At any rate, the writing of a biography, or, 427 428 ESSAYS AND ADDRESSES. indeed, the pro|)er reading of it, requires one faculty which is not very common, and which does not come into action without some experience. It requires the power of hirge vital imagination, the power of conceiving of a life as a whole. Do you remember, when you were a child, how vague the city which you lived in was to you ? Certain houses in the city, certain streets, you knew ; but the city as a whole — Boston, or Springfield, or New York — one total thing — you had to grow older and make more asso- ciations, and get more ideality, before you could lay hold of that. You had to comprehend it, to grasp around it, as it were. So it is with a life. To know the list of Napoleon's achievements, to be able to quote a page of Carlyle's writings — that is one thing ; but to have Napo- leon Bonaparte or Thomas Carlyle stand out distinct, a complete being by himself, a unit among unities, like a mountain rising out of tlie plain, like a star shining in the sky — that is another thing and very different. That needs a special power. He who has not that power is not fit to read, much less fit to write, a biography. It must always be a noteworthy fact that the great book of the world is the story of a life. The New Testa- ment is a biography. Make it a mere book of dogmas, and its vitality is gone. Make it a book of laws, and it grows hard and untimeh^ Make it a biography, and it is a true book of life. Make it the history of Jesus of Nazareth, and tlie world holds it in its heart forever. Not simply His coming or His going, not simply His birth or His death, but the living, the total life, of Jesus is the world's salvation. And the Book in which His life shines orbed and distinct is the world's treasure. There, as in all best biographies, two values of a marked and well- depicted life appear. It is of value, first, because it is ex- ceptional, and also because it is representative. Every life is at once like and unhke every other. Every good BIOGIIAPHY. 429 stoiy of a life, therefore, sets before those who read it something which is imitable and something which is in- capable of imitation ; and thereby come two different sorts of stimidus and inspiration. It gives us help like that of the stars which guide the ship from without, and also hke that of the fii'e which burns beneath the engines of the ship itself. But let me come to my lecture. I want to divide what I have to say to you about biograpliies into three parts. I want to speak to you about the subjects of biographies, and the writers of biographies, and the readers of biogra- phies. A life must first be lived, and then it must be written, and then it must be read, before the power of a biography is quite complete. You sit some day in your study reading Boswell's "Johnson." Are there not three people holding com- munion with one another in that silent room — Johnson and Boswell and you? Johnson lived the life, Boswell wrote it, you are reading it. It is like the sun, the atmo- sphere, and the earth, making one system. The sun shines through the atmosphere to give the earth its warmth and richness. This is what makes every picture of a man reading and being influenced by a biography an interest- ing thing. It is the completeness of this group of three. John Stuart Mill tells us about the inspiration which came to him, when he was a young man, from Plato's " Pictures of Socrates.'' And, among modern biographies, he re- members the value which he found in Condorcet's " Life of Turgot" — ^'abook," he says, ''well calculated to rouse the best sort of enthusiasm, since it contains one of the wisest and noblest of lives, delineated by one of the wisest and noblest of men." In that sentence you can see the three together — Turgot, Condorcet, and Mill. In another part of his autobiographj^, the same great Englishman records how he was rescued from extreme depression by 430 ESSAYS AND ADDRESSES. the reading of something in the " Memoirs of Marmontel," the most picturesque of literary histories. Or one hkes to think of Dr. Franklin lying on what proved to be his death-bed and listening to the reading of Johnson's " Lives of the Poets." There is something very impressive in letting our imagination picture the stately and sonorous doctor bringing in and introducing the singers one by one before the calm eyes of the homely but sympathetic philosopher. You ought never to read a biography with- out letting such a group construct itself for your imagi- nation. Johnson, and Boswell, and you — all three are there : the subject, the author, and the reader. Your read- ing will be a live thing if j^ou can feel the presence of your two companions, and make them, as it were, feel youi's. 1. Let me speak, then, first, about the subjects of biog- raphies. I believe fully that the intrinsic life of any hu- man being is so interesting that if it can be simply and sympathetically put in words it wiU be legitimately inter- esting to other men. Have you never noticed how any- body, boy or man, who talks to you about himself compels your attention"? I say "who talks about liimseK." I mean, of course, his true self. If he talks about an un- real, an affected, an imaginary self, a self which he would like to seem to be, instead of the self he really is, he tires and disgusts you; but be sui*e of this, that there is not one of us living to-day so simple and monotonous a life that, if he be true and natural, his hfe faithfully written would not be worthy of men's eyes and hold men's hearts. Not one of us, therefore, who, if he be true and pure and natural, may not, though his life never should be written, be interesting and stimulating to his fellow-men in some small circle as they touch his life. It is this truth which accounts for the power of the simplest kind of biograpliies — those which record the Hves BIOGRAPHY. 431 of obscure people who have done no noteworthy work in the world. I think of two such books. One of them is the " Story of Ida," the life of an Italian girl of exquisite character, and whose life was the very pattern of a humble tragedy. Mr. Ruskin, in his introduction to the book, says, with his usual exaggeration, that '' the lives in which the pnblic are interested are hardly ever worth writing." That, of course, is qnite untrue. But he goes on to praise and introduce a sweet and simple story, which is a delight- ful illustration of the truth he overstates. It is like a flower pllicked out of the thousands of the field, which, besides the charm of its own fragrance, has the other value, that it reminds us how fragrant are all the flowers which still grow unplucked in the field from which this came. The other book is very different. It is Thomas Hughes' " Memoir of a Brother," the story of a brave, hopeful, consecrated life, which came to no display, but did its duty out of sight and under endless disappoint- ment, as the stream wrestles with the hindrances which stop its channel deep in the untrodden woods. These are the lives which give us faith in human nature, the lives which now and then it is good for somebody to write, if only to remind us how possible it is for such lives to be lived. But we must not let ourselves be misled by such a state- ment as that which I quoted from Mr. Euskin, so far as to think that notable and exceptional lives are not pecu- Harly entitled to biography. Distinction is a legitimate object of our interest, if we do not overestimate its value. Distinction is the emphasis put upon qualities \yj circum- stances. He who listens to the long music of human liis- tory hears the special stress with which some great human note was uttered long ago, ringing down the ages and mingling with and enriching the later music of modern days. It is a perfectly legitimate curiosity with which .432 i:ssAYS anb addresses. men ask about that resonant, far-reaching life. They are probably asking with a deeper impulse than they know. They are dimly aware that in that famous, interesting man their own humanity — which it is endlessly pathetic to see how men are always tryiug and always failing to understand — is felt pulsating at one of its most sensitive and vital points. Let us think, then, of some of the kinds of famous men whom our biographies embalm. The first class of men whose lives ought specially to be written and read are those rare men who present broad pictures of the healthiest and simplest qualities of human nature most largely and attracti^^ely displayed. Not men of eccentricities, not men of sjiecialties, but men of uni- versal inspiration and appeal — men, shall we not say, like Shakespeare's Horatio, to whom poor distracted Hamlet cries : " Thou art e'en as just a man As e'er my conversation coped withal." How heavily and confidently always the disturbed soul rests on simple justice ! I shall quote as illustrations in all my lecture only the biographies of English-speaking men by English-speaking men. And in this first category of biographies, preemi- nent for their broad humanness, their general healthiness of thought and being, I do not hesitate a moment which to name. There are two lives which stand out clearly as the two best biographies ever written in the English lan- guage. Carlyle says, "In England we have simply one good biography, this Boswell's ^Johnson.'" Certainly there is one other worthy to be set beside it, which is Lockhart's " Scott." Happy the boy who very early gets at those two books, and feels and feeds upon the broad and rich humanity of the two men whom they keep ever .picturesque and living. Johnson and Scott — so human BIOGRAPHY. 433 in their strength and in their weakness, in their virtues and in their faults : one Uke a day of clouds and storms, the other hke a day of sunshine and bright breezes, yet both like nature, both real in times of unreality, both going bravely and Christianly into that darkness and tragieal- ness which gathered at the last on both their lives — two men worthy of having their lives written, fortunate both in the biographers who wrote their lives ; worthy to be read and re-read, and read again by all men who want to keep their manhood healthy, broad, and brave, and true ! Set these two great books first, then, easily first, among English biographies. The streets of London and the streets of Edinburgh live to-day with the images of these two men more than any others of the millions who have walked in them. But in a broader way the streets of hu- man nature still live with their presence. The unfading interest in Dr. Johnson is one of the good signs of English character. Men do not read his books, but they never cease to care about him. It shows what hold the best and broadest human qualities always keep on the heart of man. This man, who had to be coaxed into favor before a request could be asked, and whose friends and equals were afraid to remonstrate with him except by a round- robin, was yet capable of the truest delicacy, the purest modest}'', the most religious love for all that was greater and better than himself. But the great ^^alue of liim was his reality. He was a perpetual protest against the arti- ficialness and unreahty of that strange eighteenth century in which he lived. And Walter Scott, who was thirteen years old when Dr. Johnson- died, bore witness for true humanity in the next century, when men were begmning to delight in that Byronic scorn of life which has deepened into the pessimism of these later days, by the healthy and cheery faith with which he accepted the fact that, as he once wrote, '' we have all our various combats to fight in 434 ESSAYS AND ADDRESSES. the best of all possible worlds, and like brave fellow-sol- diers ought to assist one another as much as possible." Yes, it is good for each new generation of English- speaking boys as tliey come on to the stage of life to find two such brave figures there already. Generations come and go, but these two brave men still keep possession of the stage, and do no man can say how much to make and keep life ever brave and true. We come to a distinctly different type of biography when we pass on to speak of those men whose written lives have value not from their broad humanity, but from the way in which they gather up and throw out into clear light some certain period of the world's history, some special stage of human life. Wonderful is this power which an age has to select one of its men, and crowd itself into him and hold him up before the world and say, '' Know me by him ! " " The age of Pericles," we say, or '' the age of Lorenzo de Medici," and all our study of the history of the fifth century before Christ, or of the fifteenth century after Christ, could not put us into such clear possession of those remarkable times as we should have if we really could know Pericles or the great Lorenzo. Of all such books for us Americans the greatest must be Irving's "Life of Washington." " Washington," says Irving, " had very little private life." All the more for that reason it is true that if yoii master the public life of Washington you have learned how this nation came to be. His early share in the French and Indian wars, which was like a trial-trip of the ship which was afterward to fight with broader seas, his sympathy with the first discontents, his slow approach to the idea of independence, his steadfastness during the war, his pas- sage out of military back to civil life, all of these make his career characteristic. It is the history of the time, all crowded by a sort of composite photograph into him. Washington was by no means the cold, unromantic, pas- BIOGRAPHY. 435 sionless monster that men have sometimes pictured him to be. It was not lack of qualities but poise of qualities that made him calm. It was not absence of color but harmony of color that made his life white and transparent. And so it is with no disparagement of the personal nature of our gi"eat man that we may claim as the special value of his hfe the way in which it sums up in itself the pictu- resque beginnings of our history. Read it for that. Read also Wirt's '' Life of Patrick Henry," which is the story of another nature like a lens, more brilliant but not less true than Washington's. And thus of many ages you will find, if you look for it, the gi-aphic man, who stands forever after his age has passed away, as its picture and its commentary. Wordd you know what sort of a thing English life was in the fifteenth century, the age of the Inquisition, of the Span- ish Armada, of the discovery of America, of the Field of the Cloth of Gold ? Read the direct and simple English of the "■ Life of Cardinal Wolsey," by his gentleman usher, George Cavendish. Woidd you catch the spirit of adven- ture which filled the breezy days of Queen Elizabeth? Would you feel the throb of newly found rivers beating through a great new-discovered continent? Would j^ou see the flashes of colors and hear the bursts of song which came back in those daj^s from mysterious countries which scientific discovery had not yet disenchanted of their poetry and reduced to prose ? Would you know what it was to live in one of the mornings of the world when all the birds were singing and all the eastern heavens were aglow? Read the '^Life of Walter Raleigh," as it has come down to us without a writer's name from some enthusiastic biog- rapher of his o^vn time. Demand everywhere that the inarticulate life of a time shall utter itself in the life of its typical man, as a brood- ing, smoldering fii-e bursts forth at one point into flame. 436 ESSAYS AND ABDBESSES. Do not feel that you know any age or country till you can clearly see its characteristic man. The same is true about a critical event. You think about the Great English Revolution, that convulsion of the seventeenth centuiy which broke the power of privi- lege in State and Church, and made possible all that is happening in England and America to-day, all that is going to happen in the next hundred years, which a man would so like to live and see. How shall you get the spirit and soul and meaning of that great event, and seem to have actually seen it as it came ? You must know its great man. You must study the life of Oliver Cromwell, upon whom the true historical instinct of Carljde has fastened as the man who really did the thing — as much, that is, as any one man did it, as much as any one man ever does anything in history. You must get deep into him. You must see how he led and was led ; how he made his times and was made by them ; how impossible it is to take him in imagination out of those times and set him down in any other. It does not mean that you are to make him slavishly your hero and think everything he did was right, but get the man, his hates, his loves, his dreams, his blundering hopes, his noble, hot, half-forged purposes, his faith, his doubt, get all of these in one vehe- ment person clear before your soul, and then j^ou will know how privilege had to go and liberty had to come in England and America. And as an age or an event, so an occupation or a pro- fession reveals itself in a biography. Many of our great libraries now are divided and arranged both horizontally and perpendicularly. All the books on one level belong to the same subject ; all the books in one upright stack belong to the same nation. So it is with men in history. You may think of all the people in the reign of Queen Elizabeth, engaged in all their different works. That is BIOGRAPHY. 437 the horizontal conception. Or you may think of all the poets, or all the carpenters, or all the sailors in the whole series of ages. That is the perpendicularity of history. If you take the latter view, then, you want some man in each profession who shall make that profession a reality to you. Do you not know what a soldier is, as no abstract book could teach you, when you have read the pages which our great American soldier wrote in the days which he so piteously begged of death a little time to tell the story of his life ? He who would understand the true hf e of a pm*e scholar, let him read the delightful story of Isaac Casaubon, which was written a few years ago by Mark Pattison, or, shall we say, the life of the pugnacious Rich- ard Bentley, which was written by Bishop Monk, the very model of a scholar's life of a scholar? If you want to see what it may be to be a minister, do not look at the parson of your parish, but i-ead Brooke's " Life of Robert- son." When you want to know how bravely and brightly the true lover and questioner of nature may pass his days, let the life of that healthiest of naturalists, Frank Buck- land, be your teacher. Let adventure shine before you in the life of Livingstone. In every occupation you will find some representative, some man who did that thing most healthily and truly. It would be good, I think, if in those critical years, sometimes so anxiously, sometimes so very lightly passed, in which men are deciding what they are to do with this mysterious gift of God which we call life, some wise and sympathetic teacher, in the coUege or elsewhere, should hold a class in professional biography, and make the most representative man of each profession tell, not by his lips but by his life, what sort of man and what sort of career his occupation makes. It might save, here and there, a foolish choice and an unhappy life. And yet, again, there is another class of biographies which gives us types, neither of times, nor of events, nor 438 ASSAYS AXD ADDRESSES. of professions, but of characters. Have you ever read Lord Herbert of Cherbury's '' Memoirs," the most open- hearted of autobiographies, and felt his cheery, self-con- ceited voice bragging in your ear? — the very perfection of that strange, fantastic thing which his strange century took for a gentleman, the selfish bully still dazzling his own eyes and other men's with the glare of personal cou- rage and an easy generosity. Put alongside of his the noble story which has lately been given to the world by Leslie Stephen, of his friend Henry Fawcett, the blind statesman who, with infinite patience and assiduity and resolution and intelligence, conquered the prizes of use- fulness and honor in the darkness; or, turning to the higher power of religion, read the story of the manly piety of Ha^^elock, the missionary faith of Patterson, or the calm progress out of unbelief into a trust in God as the one refuge of the soul of the fine intellect of Ellen Watson — read these, which are the three best and most healthy re- ligious biographies I know, and feel how character is not a thing of which you can tell the nature in a list of quali- ties. It is something human ; you must see it in a man ; you must watch it kindling in an eye ; you must hear it ringing in a voice ; and so biographies are the best ser- mons. Om* first feeling, I suppose, is that all great men ought to have their biographies, that all fine Hves are capable of being finely written. And yet we find out by and by that some great men, some very great men, are unsuited for biography. Shakespeare has no biography; and, much as we would like to know Avhat happened to him in his life, I think we all feel doubtful whether we should get much of increased and deepened richness in our thought of him if what he did and said had been recorded. The poet's life is in his poems. The more profoundly and spiritually he is a poet, the more thoroughly this is true. BIOGRAPHY. 439 the more impossible a biogi'aphy of liim becomes. Where is the life of Shelley that gives you any notion of the beanty of his soul ? The " Skylark " and the " Cenci " and the ''Adonais" are the real events in his history. You fill yourself with them and you know him. The same is true of "Wordsworth. There is not, there cannot be, any very valuable biography of him. For this reason, I think that the young reader ought to become well accustomed to reading the whole works of an author whom he really wants to know. I believe in those long, comely series of books labeled ''complete works." If you read a poet's masterpieces, jou know them. If you have read every- thing which he has ^vl•itteu, you know him. When you have become convinced that some great author, particu- larly some great poet, is really worthy of your study, that you must have him not simply as a recreation of an idle hour Init as the companion of your life, then go and get all his works ; put them, as near as may be, in the order in which he wrote them, and read them once at least, straight through from end to end. Let your liljrary, as it slowly grows, abound in " complete works " ; so you have men, entire men, upon your shelves, if you are man enough to bid them live for you. This is, after aU, the subtlest form in which the biography of writing men can take its shape, and for many writing men it is the only form of biography which is possible. I must not say more about the subjects of biographj'. These kinds of men which I have hurriedly named are the kinds of men about whom other men will ask, and so about whom books will be wi'itten. These are the stars which, being in the heaven of human life, and having some special color or some special light, must shine. There are others no less true and worthy of men's sight than they, which no inan sees. 2. I want to speak now of the men who wi'ite biogra- 440 ESSAYS AND ADDRESSES. phies, the authors. And, first of all, there are the men who are their own biographers — the men who, as the end of life approaches, gather up theii' experiences and tell the world about themselves before they go. In the great Ufflzi Gal- lery at Florence there is a large assemblage of the por- traits of the great artists, painted b}' themselves. Nobody can enter that vast, splendid room, thronged with its silent company, and not be conscious of a special sacredness and awe. Here is the way in which the great artists looked to themselves. Thus it was that Raphael saw the painter of the Sistine Madonna, and thus Leonardo conceived the painter of the Last Supper. It is the man himself telling the story of himself to himself. No wonder that each stands out there with a peculiarly clear and personal dis- tinctness. What that room is in art, a library of autobiographies is in human life. People like to teU us that we do not know ourselves so well as our neighbors know us. I rather think that few maxims are less true than that. -s\ Our neighbors know our little tricks, of which we are unconscious ; but any one of us who is at all thoughtful knows his real heart and nature as no other man has be- gun to know them. Therefore, he who will reaUy teU us about himself makes his life stand forth very distinctly in its unity, its separateness, its reality. Enghsh literature is rich in autobiography. It has, in- deed, no tale so deep and subtle as that which is told in the " Confessions of St. Augustine." It has no such com- plete and unreserved unbosoming of a life as is given by the strange Italian, Benvenuto Cellini, who is the prince of unconcealment. But there is hardly any self -told life in any language which is more attractive than the auto- biography of Edward Gibbon, in which he recounts the story of his own career in the same stately, pure prose in BIOGRAPHY. ^^1 which he narrates the ''Decline and Fall of Rome." It must have needed a great faith in a man's self to write those sonorous pages. Two passages in them have passed into the history of man. One is that in which he describes how, in Rome, on the 15th of October, 1764, as he sat mus- ing amid the ruins of the Capitol, while the barefooted friars were singing vespers in the Temple of Jupiter, the idea of writing the decline and fall of the city iirst started in his mind. The other is the passage in which the great historian records how, on the night of the 27th of June, 1787, between the hours of eleven and twelve, he wrote the last lines of the last page in a summer-house at Lau- sanne, and how then, laying down his pen, he '' took several turns in a berceau, or covered walk of acacias, which com- manded a prospect of the country, the lake, and the moun- tains." The story is aU very solemn and exalted. It is full of the feeling that the beginning and ending of a gi'eat literary work is as great an achievement as the foundation and completion of an empii'c — as worthy of record and of honor ; and as we read we feel so too. A greater autobiography than Edward Gibbon's is our own Benjamin Franklin's. Franklin had exactly the ge- nius and temperament of an autobiographer. He loved and admired himself ; but he was so bent upon analysis and measurement that he could not let even himself pass without discrimination. The style is like Defoe. Indeed, we are pleased to find that he placed great value both on Defoe and Bunyan, whose stories are told so like his own. He watches his own life as he watched one of his own philosophical experiments. He flies his existence as he flew his kite, and he tells the world about it all just as a thoughtful boy might tell his mother what he had been doing — sure of her kindly interest in him. The world is like a mother to Ben Franklin always : so domestic and 442 ESSAYS AND ADDEESSES. familiar is his tboiiglit of her. He who has read this book has always afterward the boy-man who wi'ote it clear and distinct among the men he knows. Of autobiographies of oiu* own time there are three which are full of characteristic life. There is John Stuart Mill's life of himself, so wonderfully cold and calm and clear, yet with the warmth of subdued possibilities of pas- sion always burning in it — a very sea of glass, mingled with fire. There is the story of James Nasmyth, the Scotch engineer and astronomer, written b}^ himself — the happi- est life, in the most natural and simple elements of hap- piness, I tliink, that one can find. And I miist add, al- though we have only a fragment of it yet, the autobiog- raphy of General Grant, the soldier who hated war ; the American who had the spirit of the institiitions of his country filling him ; the author who, without literary train- ing or pretension, or almost, one may say, the literary sense at all, has written in a style which has this great quality, that it is like a simple, brave, true man's talk. Let men like these talk to you and tell you of them- selves. Being dead, they yet can speak. How good it is sometimes to leave the crowded world, which is so hot about its trifles, and go into the company of these great souls which are so calm about the most momentous things ! Next to the autobiography comes the life which is writ- ten by some, one who is of near kindred or of close asso- ciation with the man of whom he writes. In such lives the feeling of gratitude and personal friendship comes in and makes an atmosphere which takes in him who reads as well as the subject and the author of the book. Of such biographies there is no happier or more fascinating- instance than the " Memoir of Professor Agassiz," which Mrs. Agassiz gave to the world a few months ago. It is the picture of a sweet, strong nature turning in its first young simplicity to noble things, and keeping its simplic- BIOGBAPRY. 443 ity through a long life by its perpetual association with them. It is a human creature loving the earth almost as we can imagine that a beast loves it, and yet at the same time studying it like a wise man. The sea and the gla- cier teU him their secrets. In his very dreams the extinct fishes build again for him their lost construction. There is a cool, bright freshness in every page. The boy of twenty-two roUs himseK in the snow for joy. The man has himself let down a hundred and twenty-five feet into the cold, blue, wonderful crevasse to see how the ice is made. Finally, the New World tempts him, and he be- comes the apostle of science to America. All this is told us out of the lips which have the best right to tell it. Take another biography. I do not know whether you boys are inchned to think that if you were school-teachers you would want to have one of yoiu- scholars write your history. There is a common notion about school life — one of the stupid traditions which have an ounce of truth to eleven ounces of falsehood in them — that school-teach- ers and school-boys are natural foes and cannot understand each other. And yet Arthur Stanley wrote the life of Dr. Thomas Arnold, his teacher in the old school at Rug- by, in such a way that the great master's fame has been set like a jewel firm and bright in the record of the nine- teenth century ; and school-teaching owes no little of its new dignity and attractiveness to that delightful book. It has added a name to history, and almost a new sister to the family of the high arts. Suppose that you could have the privilege of sitting down with Mrs.Agassiz and hearing her tell of the great naturalist and the enthusiastic, child-hearted, lion-hearted man ! Suppose that you could walk with Dean Stanley and hear him tell about his great master, to whom he owed so much of his learning and his character ! You can do both these things if you will read these books. 444 ESS ATS AND ADDRESSES. The natui-e of the men they write of will come through the kindred natures and the warm love of those who write about them. It is sunshine poured through sunlight. So the story of William Lloyd Garrison, told by his children, has a certain richness about it which comes from the sym- pathy with liis work which was fed in the home and at the very table of the great emancipator when these biog- raphers were boys. So the " Life of Nathaniel Hawthorne," by Julian Hawthorne, while it has the faults has also much of the charm which belongs to a son's life of a father — the charm of ancestral genius reflected through an heredi- tary genius like itself. Besides these two, the autobiography and the friend's biogi"apliy, there remains the great mass of biographies which must of necessity be the work of authors far re- moved from the subjects about whom they write, perhaps of quite different habits and associations. The biographer of M. Pasteur calls the book which tells his story, " La Vie (Viin tSavant par uu ignorant, " and as we read we easily see that there is some advantage for us in the fact that the author who writes writes from the outside, and is not himself a proficient in the knowledge and the art in which the great French naturalist excels. There is a quiet school- master at Harrow who spends his placid life in hearing school-boy lessons all day long, who, nevertheless, has written a biography of a soldier, a statesman, a ruler of men — the picturesque and heroic Lord LawTcnce, ruler of the Punjaub and subduer of the Indian mutiny — which makes that terrible time live again and all its awful lessons burn like fire. This noble and most interesting book of Bosworth Smith is a fine instance of the kind of biography whose writer is neither bound hy kindred nor identified by similarity of occupation with his hero. This author had never even seen the far-off, gorgeous India in which his drama was enacted, nor had he had arivthing to do BIOGBAPRY. 445 with military life. Such books as his mean something different from the personal interest in one's own life from which comes the autobiograpliy, something different from the desire to raise a monument to a dear friend, or to per- petuate a special bit of history. They inean that large and healthy sense which feels that every strong human career must have in it, whatever its particular field of action may have been, something which belongs to all humanity, and which it will do all human creatures good to know. Such a book, therefore, is a token of the liuman- ness both of him who writes it and of him about whom it is written. Take another. Take Professor Masson's " Life of John Milton." He who wants to know what was done in England dming the great years which filled the middle of the seventeenth century may read that book, and one might almost say that he need read no other, so vitaUy does the great Puritan poet stand in the center of the great tumult of human life, and so vitally does the humanity of his biogi*apher feel him standing there. Great as is the charm which other writers have, this writer, who writes solely because the man of whom he writes seems to him to belong to all mankind and to have something to say to every age, must always have a charm deeper than any other. Great is he who in some special vocation, as a soldier, a governor, a scientist, does good and helpful work for fellow-man. Greater still is he who, doing good work in his special occupation, carries within his devotion to it a human nature so rich and true that it breaks through his profession and claims the love and honor of his fellow-men, simply and purely as a man. His is the life which some true human eye discerns, and some loving and grateful hand makes the subject of a pictui'e to which all men enthusiastically turn. I cannot help fearing that in my evening's talk thus far I have hastily named too many of the great works of 446 ESSAYS AND ADDRESSES. biography with which our literature is filled, and so have not made so clear as I should wish the subject of biogra- phy in general. It is a bad fault always so to paint the picture that men cannot see the forest for the trees. If, however, I have tempted any of my young hearers to read any of the books which I have named, my fault has not been wholly faulty. But as I pass on to say a few words of my third topic, the reader of biography, let me speak more generally. 3. First of all, what must the reader bring in order to get the real life out of the biography he reads ? I answer in one word, a true life of his own. Reading the story of a man whom you admire, whose character is bright and splendid before you, may be the worst thing you can do, unless you meet it with a character and manhood which turns what you read into your own shape and appropriates this other man's vitality into its own. The object of read- ing biography, it cannot be too earnestly or too often said, is not imitation, but inspiration. Imitation does not require life ; inspiration does. For imitation you need nothing but a lump of clay or putty ; for inspiration you must have a pair of lungs. When will aU teachers and all scholars learn that behind all acquirements there must lie character and powers, behind all learning you must have life ? Before you can get mental training you must get a mind ; before you can learn to live well you must learn to live ; before one can become something one must be something. "To him that hath," so Jesus tells us, "to him shall be given." Therefore, to the lives of other men you must carry a true life of your own — convictions, in- tentions, resolutions, a true character. Then your career will not be swamped by theirs, though theirs may give to yours color and direction ; then they will make you wiser, stronger, braver, but they will leave you still yourself. Here is the only danger which I know in the reading of BIOGRAPHY. 447 biographies, lest he who reads shall lose himself, shall come to be not himself, but the feeble repetition of some other mau. It is the danger which attends all friendship, all personal intercourse of man with man. Your own re- sponsibilities, 3^our own chances, your own thoughts, your own hopes, your own reHgion, which are different from those of any other man who ever lived, those you must keep sacred, and then summon the inspiration of the gi*eat- est and most vital men whom j'ou can find to touch your life with their fire, and make you not what they are, but more thoroughly and energetically yourself. And, then, bringing and keeping this life of his own, what sort of biographies shall any special young man select to read ? Two sorts, I answer : those of men most like himself in character and vocation, and those of men who are most unlike. Let him read the first sort for light and intensity ; let him read the second for sympathy and breadth. Here is a young naturalist. Let him read the life of Agassiz of which I spoke. Wliat preparation can be better for the life that is to deal immediate!}^ with nature than to see how nature filled and satisfied a very large, rich human life ; what a great, fresh, happy, and hopeful man it made ; how sacred nature was to him ! Such a life well read must rescue the pursuit of natural science from its abstractness, and clothe it mth human interest. Before I undertake any work, I think that it will do me good to meet and walk through the pages of his biography with the best and greatest man who ever did that thing before. My work, when I go forth to do it, will seem at once more real and more ideal, more famil- iar and more exalted, for such reading. But at the same time my young naturalist should also read such a book as Dr. Holmes's '■'■ Life of Emerson." He should see how full of strength and goodness a man might be who knew nothing of scientific studies ; he should learn the poetic 448 ESSAYS AND ADDRESSES. and pliilosopliic values of the stars, and the mountains, and the iield ; he shoukl provide himself with humihty by learning the dignity and worth of thought and knowledge, which it is beyond his power or outside of his range to attain. These two lives together, one showing him the greatness of what he can do, the other showing Inm the greatness of what he cannot do ; one making his purpose more intense, the other making his sympathy more ex- tensive— both of them he should read with reverence and love. And how should a biography be read ? I answer, with as little of the literary sense as possible. A biograph}^ is, indeed, a book ; but far more than it is a book it is a man. Insist on seeing and knowing the man whom it enshrines. Never lay the biography down until the man is a living, breathiug, acting person to you. Then you may close, and lose, and forget the book ; the man is 3'ours forever. It is a poor telescope that keeps you thinking of its lens and does not make you possess the star. I said about an hour ago that the great Christian book was a biograph}'. The Gospels are the greatest biography that was ever written. And how little literary feeling there is about the Gospels ! How we hardly think about them as a book ! How it is the blessed Man whom we see through their colorless transparency that occupies our attention and our thoughts ! To read a biography must be to see a man — Johnson or Scott or Macaulay. Boswell or Lock- hart or Trevelyan must only be the friend who brings the two, you and Johnson or Macaulay or Scott, together. I think that the reading of many biographies ought to be begun in the middle. It seems a disorderly suggestion, but it has reason in it. It is the way in which you come to know a man. You touch his life at some point in its course ; you find it full of attractive activity ; you grow interested in what he is doing. So you grow interested BIOGRAPHY. 449 in liirn, and then, not till then, you care to know how he came to be what yon find him — what his training was : what his youth was ; who his parents were, perhaps who his ancestors were, and who was the first man of his name who came over to America, and where that progenitor's other descendants have settled. The same is true, I think, of a biography. Indeed, I have often wondered whether a biography might not be written in that way. Let the ''Life of General Grant" begin with the story of Shiloh or of Vicksburg, and when that glowing narrative has thoroughly interested the reader in the great soldier, then let us hear about the childhood in Ohio, and the early life at West Point, and St. Louis, and Galena. Probably biog- raphers will not write so for us ; but we may sometimes read thus the biographies which they have written in the dull order of chronology, and find them full of liveher and deeper interest. And now what is it all for ? I must not talk so long as I have talked to-night, about a certain kind of literature, and urge you to give it a high place in your reading, with- out trying, before I close, to gather up in simple statement the good results which have come to many, and which will come to you, from an intelligent reading of biography. I mention four particulars. It gives reality to foreign lands and distant tunes. There is no land so foreign and no time so distant that a familiar personality, set by imagination in the midst of it, wiU not make it familiar. Some friend of yours goes to live in Venice or Bombay, and how immediately your vision of that remote scene brightens into vividness. The place belongs to you. The Grand Canal and the Caves of Elephanta are real things. You see your friend floating on the " tremulous street," or losing himself in the gloom of the solemn cavern. Or you are able to pictiu'e to your- self how this other friend would have behaved in the days 450 ESSAYS AND ADDEESSES. of Luther. You can imagine him back into the tumult of the Reformation. And straightway the Reformation days are here. Luther is denouncing Tetzel in your study. Biography does the same thing for us, only better. It takes the man who really lived in Venice or Bombay or Wittenberg and makes him real. It makes him live, and straightway all his time and place live with him, as all the heavens spring into glory when the sun clothes itself with light. With each man who becomes a living being to you, a whole new world comes into being. Each new man is a new sun. In all our minds thei'e are regions of recognized but unrealized space and time, only waiting for us to set a real living human life into the midst of them to make them open into reality and glow with life. Still more important and interesting are the regions of thought which are unreal to me until some man stands in the midst of them and lights them up. I read the history of metaphysics. I open and study the great heavy tomes. If my tastes are in quite other directions I say, " How dull this whole thing is ! How vague and dreary these abstractions are ! " And then I tm-n and read the life of some gi-eat metaphysician, and how everything is changed ! I do not understand this great science any more than I did before, but I see him understand it. The enthusiasm trembles in his voice, the light kindles in his eye, as he talks and looks upon these abstract propositions which appeared to me so dreary. It cannot be but that they catch his light. The whole world which they make is real to me through his reality. My universe is larger by this gi-eat expanse. So one world after another kindles into vi\ddness when I see its human inhabitant. The world of music, the world of mathematics, the world of politics, the world of charity, the world of religion, each is a real world to me when in the midst of it stands its real man. BIOGRAPHY. 451 Again, think what must be the effect upon personal character of the reading- of a great biography. If it is really a great life greatly told, like Johnson's, or like Scott's, two convictions grow up in us as we read : first, this man was vastly greater than I can ever be ; and, sec- ond, this man, great as he is, is of the same human sort that I am of, and so I may attain to the same kind of greatness which he reached. The first conviction brings humility, the second brings encouragement. And humil- ity and encouragement together, each by its very pres- ence saving the other from the vices to which it is most inclined, these are the elements which make the noblest character and the happiest life. To be humble because we are ourselves ; to be courageous because we are part of the great humanity, and because all that any man in any time has done in some true sense belongs to us, in some true sense we did it ; to catch the two certainties, one of the identity of mankind and the other of the essential and eternal distinctness of every man, even the most cheap and insignificant ; to hold these two convictions in their true poise and proportion ; to let them make for us one unity of character — this is a large part of the secret of good living, and no kind of book helps us to this so much as a good biography. But finally, may we not say that the supreme blessing of biography is that it is always bathing the special in the universal, and so renewing its vitality and freshness ? Our little habits grow so hard. We get so set in our small ways of doing things. We become creatures of this mo- ment of time on which we happen to have fallen. The power of dull fashion and routine takes possession not merely of the way we dress and talk, but of the way we think. Our schools have their cheap little standard, and our colleges have theirs, and our professions theirs, and everv duty makes more of the wav in which it is done than ^ 452 ESSAYS AND ADDRESSES. of the divine meaning and motive of doing it at all ; all gets to seem parched and hardened like a midsummer plain, and then yon take up your great biography, and as you read is it not as if the fountains were flung open and the great river came pouring down over the arid desert ? The local standard, the mere arbitrary fashion of the mo- ment, disappears in the great richness of human life; the part bathes itself in the whole ; the morbid becomes healthy ; the peculiar is freed from any haunting affecta- tion, and becomes simply that individual expression of the universal which every true man must be. Do we say that all this may come through large asso- ciation with our Hving fellow-men without reading about the dead? Much of it may, no doubt, come so. But in some respects the great dead, whose faces look out on us through their biographies, have always the advantage; they are the best of their kind, the most picturesque illus- trations of the characters they bear ; their lives upon the earth are finished and complete. They will not change some day and throw into confusion the lessons which we have learned from them ; and since they belong to many lands and many times they bring us a sense of universal human life which cannot come to us from the most active contact with living men, who, after all, must represent very much the same conditions to which we ourselves be- long. Therefore, while it is good to walk among the living, it is good also to live with the wise, great, good dead. It keeps out of life the dreadful feeling of extemporaneous- ness, with its conceit and its despair. It makes iis always know that God made other men before He made us. It furnishes a constant background for our living. It pro- vides us with perpetual humility and inspiration. There are some of the great old paintings in which some common work of common men is going on, some BIOGRAPHY. 453 serious but most familiar action — the meeting of two friends, the fighting of a battle, a marriage or a funeral — and all the background of the picture is a mass of living faces, dim, misty, evidently with a veil between them and the life we live, yet evidently there, evidently watching the sad or happy scene, and evidently creating an atmo- sphere within which the action of the picture goes its way. Like such a picture is the life of one who lives in a library of biographies, and feels the lives which have been, always pouring in their spirit and example on the lives which have succeeded them upon the earth. I thank you for your kind and patient attention, and if anything which I have said has been of interest or value to you, I am very glad. LITERATURE AND LIFE. (Chautauqua Assembly, Framingliam, Mass., July 21, 1886.) Ladies and Gentlejien .- It certainly would not be easy to point out, among all assemblages of scholars, a more interesting sight than tliat which I see before me now. This great host of students has come up to the annual festival full of the delightful recollections and associations of a year of study. As he who looked into the faces of the Jews who thronged the temple at Jerusa- lem must have been able to read in them the whole story of the faith and inspiration of the quiet homes on the hillside or the sea-shore out of which they came, so, look- ing in the faces of my audience this afternoon, I seem to discern the pictures, various and different, yet one in their common ambition and struggle, of the lives which have been going on all over the land for the past year. I see busy households where the daily care has been lightened and inspired by the few moments caught every day for earnest study. I see chambers which a single open book fills with light like a burning candle. I see workshops where the toil is all the more faithful because of the higher ambition which fills the toiler's heart. I see parents and children di-awn close to one another in theu' common pursuit of the same truth, their common delight in the same ideas. I see hearts young and old kindling with deepened insights into life, and broadening with enlarged outlooks over the richness of history and the beauty of the world. Happy fellowships in study, self -conquests, 454 LITEliATUEE AND LIFE. 455 self-discoveries, brave resolutions, faithful devotions to ideals and hopes — all these I see as I look abroad upon this multitude of faces of the students of the great College of Chautauqua. I have tried in these opening words to give expression to the spirit of Chautauqua, to indicate that for which Chautauqua stands in the minds of men who look with cordial interest upon this great new spectacle in educa- tion. Its spirit is more important than its methods. Its methods are accidental: its purposes and its spirit are essential. It must not stand in your minds too techni- cally, too purely as a thing of methods. It must not seem to be merely an ingenious artifice, a skilfully contrived arrangement for carrying on instruction with certain great economies, and under certain unfavorable condi- tions in which education has been generally thought to be difficult, perhaps impossible. Chautauqua must mean more than that. It must live in a deeper idea and a larger purpose. Not b}^ ingenious devices and arrange- ments, but by true purposes and live ideas, do all institu- tions flourish and grow strong. To find the true natures of things, that alone is to understand them, and to be able to measure their power of living. The earth nature in the earth, the sun nature in the sun— it is by them alone that the earth pours forth its harvests, and the sun sheds its light. And so, when I was honored by being asked to speak to the students of Chautauqua on this day of their annual assemblage, my mind turned, not to the special methods of this most interesting institution, but to its spirit. I asked myself what it represents, what it means ; and the answer to that question fixed the subject on which it seemed right for me to speak. Chautauqua represents the true and healthy relationship of literatiu"e and life to each other. Its students are scholars who are at the same 456 ESSAYS AXD ADDRESSES. time men and women deeply involved in the business of living. The homes in which they dwell, the occupations in which their daj^s are passed, are not academical and cloistered, but human through and through, and open to the breezy influences of the world. Learning and living are in closest intercourse and friendship with each other here. What subject could be more suited to an anniver- sary Chautauqua Day tlian an attemj)t to estimate the relationships of literature and life? That literature and life have often been out of their true and healthy relation, nobody can doubt. Literature has often become technical and hard. Its purposes have seemed to lie outside of the ordinary purposes for which men lived. The men who wrote books and the men who read books have seemed to make a little world all by them- selves. The subjects with which literature was to deal have been arbitrarily chosen and strictly limited. A great part of the live activity of men has seemed to be unsuited for the purposes of letters. On the other hand, life has often been contemptuous of literature. The practical man has boasted that he never read a book. The reading of books, when it was under- taken, has been counted an amusement, the recreation of an idle hour ; something, perhaps, to be ashamed of ; cer- tainly something which belonged to a region of existence distinct from the shoeing of horses or the selling of goods. Pedantry on the one side and drudgery upon the other — these have been the result of the unnatural divorce of lit- eratm-e and life wherever it has taken place. The stream of activity has flowed on its way under the great cliff of learning, and only felt its hardness and its frown. Not always ! for in e\Qvy time the truest literature has recognized that it must feed itself from life, and the most active life has known that it must broaden and refine itself by literature ; and it is one of the happy tokens of the real LITERATFEE AND LIFE. 457 progress, the real approach to natural and fundamental standards, which our modern days are making, that the unnatural divorce is tolerated less and less. More and more — this Chautauqua is one sign of it, and there are many others — more and more, literature and hfe are lay- ing claim to one another. Literature is claiming all life for its material : all life is claiming Hterature for its in- spii'ation and its food. A book, then — to put our general truth at once into its simplest statement — stands between life on one side of it, and life on the other side of it — the living fact or truth which it records on one side, and the living reader on the other side — and is itself the lens of the living personality of the author, which brings the two into communication. You see how life is everywhere through the whole process — in the star which shines, in the telescope which trans- mits the light, and in the eye which sees the l^eauty. It matters not of what kind the book may be — a novel of George Eliot, an essay of Macaulay, a history of Park- man, a poem of Browning, a play of Shakespeare, a treat- ise of John Stuart Mill — it is perfectly possible so to con- ceive of it, so to speak of it, that everything technically literary disappears from our thought and language, and nothing is present to us except life, beating and pulsing through life, to find its effect on life which lies upon the other side ; the life of what has happened or of what is intrinsically true, transmitted through the live intelligence of some man or woman who has perceived it, to tell upon the character or action of the man or woman who stands waiting for its effect beyond. It is A^ery interesting to see how in the simplest read- ers all the technical and formal part of the conception of literature does really disappear, and oul}^ the living pro- cesses and elements remain. When Dickens and Thack- eray came to this country years ago, when Matthew Arnold 458 ESSAYS AND ADDRESSES. and Archdeacon Farrar came the other day, they all found themselves greeted, not only as the authors of books, pro- fessional artists, excelling in a certain art — that welcome they received from fellow-artists, from brother-authors, practised in the same technique, and from readers used to criticism and analysis — but out of city w^orkshops and country cottages came hosts of readers who thought of these authors as living friends who had told them living things, and to whom they looked with personal intimacy and gratitude which took the author by surprise. So men and women are gathering about Dr. Holmes in England now. It is hard for those to whom the detail of book- making is familiar, who know all about the selection of subjects, and the laying out of scales of treatment, and the choice of styles, and the consulting of authorities, and the negotiating with publishers, and the selection of types and pages, and the reading of proof, and the putting of a book upon the market — it is hard, I say, for those who are familiar with all that, to realize how absolutely unlit- erary is the whole conception which hosts of readers have of the books they read. We talk of *' reading Gibbon's ' Rome.' " To the literary man that means the study of a certain style, and the critical observation of how a great writer has dealt with a great subject. To the unliterary reader it means the pouring of all the wUd, turbid, f ui'ious life of a great period of history through the clear channel of a great intellect upon the passions and delighted or astounded perceptions of a, man living here in these differ- ent days, but bearing in him the same old human nature which was in those Romans centuries ago. It is the dif- ference between Ruskin looking at a picture of Raphael, and the American schoolboy who never saw" a studio or a brush gazing at the same immortal canvas. The Hterary conception does not banish or destroy the human concep- tion, but it is distinct from it. And when the literary LITERATURE AND LIFE. 459- conception is wholly absent, then we can see what in its simplest meaning a book is : namely, a life standing- be- tween two other lives, and putting them into association ; an intellect translating a truth which lies behind it into character, or pleasure, or action, in the man who stands before it. These two relations each book, and the whole world of books which we call literature, possess. First they receive life into themselves, and then they give out life from themselves to other life. May not this last definition furnish me with the natural division and arrangement of what I want to say? Let me speak first of literature as the effect or utterance of life, and then, secondly, of literature as the food of life, which will come very near to speaking first of the author and then of the reader, or first of the writing and then of the reading of books. Consider first the priority of life. Life comes before literature, as the material always comes before the work. The hills are full of marble before the world blooms with statues. The forests are full of trees before the sea is thick with ships. So the world abounds in life before men begin to reason and describe and analyze and sing, and literature is born. The fact and the action must come first. This is true in every kind of hteratm-e. The mind and its workings are before the metaphysician. Beauty and romance antedate the poet. The nations rise and fall before the historian tells their stor}^ Nature's profusion exists before the first scientific book is written. Even the facts of mathematics must be true before the first diagram is drawn for their demonstration. To own and recognize this priority of life is the first need of literature. Literature which does not utter a life already existent, more fundamental than itself, is shallow and unreal. I had a schoolmate who at the age of twenty published a volume of poems called '' Life Memories." The 460 ESSAYS AND ADDRESSES. book died before it was born. There were no real memo- ries, because there had been no life. So every science which does not utter investigated fact, every history which does not tell of experience, every poetry which is not based upon tlie truth of things, has no real life. It does not perish : it is never born. Therefore men and nations must live before they can make literature. Boys and girls do not write books, Oregon and Van Dieman's Land produce no literature : they are too busy living. The first attempts at literature of any country, as of our own, are apt to be unreal and imitative and transitory, because life has not yet accu- mulated and presented itself in forms which recommend themselves to literature. The wars must come, the clam- orous problems must arise, the new types of character must be evolved, the picturesque social complications must develop, a life must come, and then will be the true time for a literature. Very impressive and mysteiious and beautiful are these noble years in the life of a people or a man, which are so full of living that they had no time or thought for writ- ing. Sometimes when we think of the vast ages which have passed thus, and left no record, all hterature, all that man has written of himself, seems to be only like the wave-beats on the sea-shore sand compared to the great tumultuous ocean beyond, whose million surges foam and roll and break, and leave no record. Literature grows feeble and conceited unless it ever recognizes the priority and superiority of life, and stands in genuine awe before the greatness of the men and of the ages which have simply lived. And yet equally true with this necessity of living first is the instinct which by and by, in its true time, demands expression, and gives birth to literature. How many of us can remember it in our own lives, the time when life LITEnATUBE AND LIFE. 461 claimed utterance, and clumsily, shamefacedly, secretly, but with a dim sense of crossing a line and entering- a new condition, we wrote sometliing — a poem, an essay, a story — something which gave literary utterance to life ! It is a common enough experience with active-minded children. It is not purely imitative and unreal : there is a native hmnan impulse in it. The result is not valuable, but the act is significant and interesting. Up to this point of private literature, as we may call it, it would be good if everybody came at least once in his Ufe. The prose or verse would be hke the papers in lost pocketbooks, " of no value except to the owner " ; and yet it would be of real value and significance to him. It would mark a stage in his existence, a distinct entrance on a special and new period of being. What happens thus to the bright boy or girl happens also to the growing race, has happened to the growing world. Nay, even out beyond our world, in the mysteri- ous regions of essential and eternal Being, what intima- tions and suggestions there are of how truly the necessity of utterance belongs to life ! Think of those deep words of the Book of Genesis : " God said. Let there be light : and there was light." Think of the great beginning of the Gospel of St. John : ''The Word was with God, and the Word was God ; and tlie Word was made flesh, and dwelt among us." It is the depth of life becoming speech, making itself audible in word. God is, and God speaks — existence and revelation. " I am," and " Hear, O Israel " — those two are inseparable. "I make light and create darkness," that comes first ; and then '' Day unto day utter- eth speech, niglit unto night showeth knowledge." Surely there are the two facts, being and utterance, which in our human world appear as life and literature ; both sacred, and in deepest and most necessary union with each other. Who can tell what a barbarism would settle on the 462 ESSAYS JXD JDDBESSES. world if this imj)ulse of utterance were not always pres- ent? For utterance is registration and declared attain- ment. Any achievement of man embodied in literary expression becomes in large degree fixed and settled, and is a point of departure for new achievements. Without such registration and fixity by utterance, each new gen- eration must begin at the bottom of the hill, and climb the whole long height anew. A great literary work is a Grands Mulcts, where the traveler stays over-night, and assures himself of what he has already done, and is ready for a new start toward the summit in the morning. It is not possible, indeed, that any utterance should do this absolutely, or that each new generation should in any way be reheved of the necessity of going back to the begin- ning, and solving over again for itself the most funda- mental of the everlasting problems. Some things, the deepest things, each race, each man, must do from the very outset, almost as if no race or man had lived and struggled at the task before. But there are other achieve- ments— the great discoveries in nature or in art, the great practical experiments in living — which, once attained and thoroughly expressed in literature, make, as it were, a new and higher plane of living, on which the next generation takes its stand, and from which it sets out toward the higher heights which remain for it to climb. Was it not a different thing for a Greek that he lived after Plato, in- stead of before ? Is it not a new England for a child to be born in since Shakespeare gathered up the centuries and told the stor;^' of humanity up to his time ? WiU not Carlyle and Tennyson make the man who begins to live from them the " heir of aU the ages " which have distilled their riclmess into the books of the sage and the singer of the nineteenth century ? I do not mean, of course, merely that the literature of any time records specifically the facts which have been LITERATURE AND LIFE. 463 discovered, or the truths which have been learned, up to his time, so that thej' do not have to be discovered or learned again. It is something more general, more spirit- ual than that. The literature of any time, taken as a whole, declares what man in that time has come to be — the quality of his existence, the sort of ci-eature he is, the degree of his development. Then, as that creature, in that development, he starts forth on the next stage of his long joui'ney. The literature is the node or focus into which life gathers itself, that it may open itself thence into new life. It is a judgment-day between two worlds. It is like the hour of meditation in which thoughtful souls indulge at twilight, or on a New Year's eve, when an old year lies a-dying, in which they gather themselves into self-consciousness, and feel themselves full of mysterious prophecy of what they are to be. This is the way in which literature stands between liv- ing and living. Life utters itself in literature, and then, in its turn, literature produces itself in life. Once more, life, and not literature, is the essential thing. It is Alpha and Omega, the beginning and the end, the first and the last. All else, from Beta to Psi, comes in the interval between. A man, and not a book, is the piu-pose of the world. No wonder that many literary men, who have been also truly living men, have felt this to a degree which has abnost made them despise their high vocation. " Life," Carlyle used to say, " is action, not talk. The speech, the book, the review or newspaper article, is so much force expended — force lost to practical usefulness." He said once that England produced her greatest men before she had any literature at aU. "If I had been taught to do the simplest useful thing," he said, " I should have been a better and happier man." Somewhat in the same strain writes Emerson. " Much of our reading," he declares, ''is a pusillanimous desertion of our work to 464 ESSAYS JXD ADDRESSES. gaze after our neighbors." BjTon says of Jack Bunting, " He knew not wliat to say, and so he swore." I may say it of our preposterous use of books : " He knew not what to do, and so lie read." Who cannot understand this im- patience of the hterary man with hterature ? Wlio does not feel that it is healthy and human? Who does not believe that the literary man who feels it healthily, and not morbidly, does his literary work the better for it? For it is a witness that he has rightly apprehended the relation of literature to life, the essential superiority of life to literature. And }'et we know that we have not given the full ac- count of literature when we have declared it to be the record and utterance of life. It is far more than that. What happens to life when it passes into literature is something very rich and subtle. It keeps its quality as life, but it gains other qualities, which result from its passage through the intelligence of man, and from its expression in that form of utterance which we caU style. Truth uttered in prose or verse becomes a new thing, with new powers ; a distinct addition to the beings and the forces which are in the world ; and so something more than an extension and perpetuation of the truth as it ex- isted before it entered into literature. Do you see what I mean ? Is Hamlet the play nothing more than a mere record of Hamlet the man and his history ? Is there not in the wonderful tragedy a quality and preciousness of its own, distinct from that which belonged to the life, be- cause of a different sort from that which lives possess, of a sort which only comes from the combination of lives first with the subtle intelligence of observing man, and then with the expressive medium of style? The great drama of the French Eevolution fights itself out in tumul- tuous Paris, and stands thenceforth forever an imperish- able fact in the history of man. Years afterward Thomas LITERATUBE AXD LIFE. 465 Carlyle, iu England, writes the story of the French Revo- lution, and liis finished work is another fact, distinct, vrith quality of its owm ; another achievement, which also can- not perish, hut stands forever in its own region of interest and greatness. '• Carlyle's ' French Eevolution,' " we say, almost as if we woidd indicate in the very phrase that there is a French Revoliition which belongs to him, which exists in the world in ^■irtue of his genius. It is not sim- ply that his genius has shone upon an historic fact, as the sun shines upon a stone, and makes manifest what was always in the stone before, adding absolutely noth- ing new. The historic fact and the author's genius have mingled, as the seed and sunshine mingle, and this flower of literatui'e is the result. This is easiest to see, perhaps, in works of the kind of these of which I have been speaking, in which the histor- ical element is very large — works of history or biography. But it is true of all books which really have authors, and so really belong to literatui-e. A fact of nature is one thing ; a book of science is another. A faculty in human nature has its wonder, its mystei-j', its beauty ; the por- trayal of that faculty, its analysis, its coordination with other faculties, in a book of Pascal or John Stuart 31111, possesses a different value of a different sort. " Speaking the truth in love," St. Paul says. See what three elements go to make up the total achievement which that phrase describes — truth, and love, and speech ; a fact lying back of all, a personal disposition in which that fact is con- ceived, and a form of utterance — all these together. Truth bathed in love, and uttered in speech, makes the new unit of power, which is literature. It is quite necessary that we should acknowledge this peculiar value of literature. If we do not, it loses its dig- nity, and becomes mere reporting, whose sole virtue is its accuracy. I have great respect for the reporter ■ it be- •166 ESSAYS AXD ADDRESSES. comes US all to respect liim, for we are all helpless in his niighty hands. Bnt rightfully as he claims our respect, I do not suppose that he thinks of himself as an author, or calls the result of his labors literature. The qualities which separate the author from the stenographer, and make the superiority of literature to reportership, are two — one metaphysical and the other artistic. They are ideal- ity and order, the development of ideas and the arrange- ment of parts — the same qualities which in art separate a true portrait from a photograph. A poi'trait has a value of its own, entirely independent of its likeness to the man who sat for it ; a photograph has none. So literature is known to be true literature by its possession of a value in itself, a value of thought and style, distinct from that first and highest value which belongs to it as an expression of life. This last it must have, or it is worthless. Those others it must also have, or, whatever worth it may pos- sess, it is not literature. It is evident, I think, from what I have been saying, that the relations between life and the literature in which it finds its expression are very delicate, and their propor- tions to each other ma}^ be disturbed in various ways. Life may become too strong for literature. There is ques- tion whether it be not so to-day. The world is intensely and vehemently alive. New forms of human activity are at work on every side. Energy is bursting out in unex- pected places ; calm questions are becoming violent ; prob- lems which men used to think easy are showing themselves to be all feverish with difficulty. It may well prove at such a time that the literary methods and standards which have been heretofore developed are not sufficient for their task ; and until expression expands itself, and becomes more fit for its new duty, that which is waiting to be expressed may very possibly suffer from the inarticulate condition in which it is compelled to remain. Is it not so LITEBATVUE AND LIFE. 4G7 to-day? Who doubts, that, if the social perplexities of the time could be set forth iu a more competent and suffi- cient literature ; if the poem, the novel, the treatise, were more able than they have yet shown themselves to analyze and interpret the tumult of argument and passion which is filling' the actual life of man, to catch its true meaning, and expound it with clearness — the pent-up torrent would find easier vent, and prejudice would sweep away, and open into broader, juster, and more charitable thought ? At such a time literature must enlarge its methods ; it must break the slavery of old standards ; it must learn to let new forms shape themselves freely from the pressure of spiritual life ; it must beheve in the future even more than it reverences the past. "We can see signs enough of such pressure of hfe on lit- erature. We see it in the very fact that the other danger is hardly a thing to fear to-day. That other danger is, that literature should be too strong for life. That comes in times when the spirit of life is feeble, when the energy of man seems for the time exhausted, and merely to tell of what has been and what is appears the easy task of men of letters. Then comes a dilettante age. Then men play ^vith books, and make arbitraiy, fantastic, artificial canons of literary style. Such times come in the luUs which follow great convulsions; in the reactions after mighty energies, when men seem weary of action, as the water just below Niagara pauses after its tremendous plunge, and idly eddies to and fro before it starts with a new impetuosity toward the rapids. The end of the seventeenth century and the beginning of the eighteenth made such a period. Such a pei-iod may very possibly follow the vehement vitalit}^ of our time. But oiu* time is not such a period. Now life is pressing upon litera- ture. Men's hearts are feeling and dreaming and discern- ing more than the poets know how to sing. Society is 468 ESSAYS AND ADD BESSES. trembling with incipient convulsions, of which no analysis can give a competent account. Science is finding more truth than onr systems, philosophical or religious, can easily digest. Life is too strong for literature. We discern the signs of such a state of things in many places. We see it in the readiness with which bright and earnest men devise new forms of utterance, essen- tially literary, yet free from much of the formality of old literary methods, for the outpouring of their tumultuous ideas, as in all the multifarious systems of magazines and periodicals and journals. We see it in the vagueness of the whole impressionist school of fiction and of poetry, which tries to do with a few broad sweeps of the brush what it despairs of working out in clear, minute, intelli- gent detail. We see it in the frequent palsy of high en- deavor. Can anything more show the sense of incompe- tency for its time than that the most skilful novel should give up the great life of men, and go to depicting police- courts and boarding-houses ? We see it in the very mul- titude and variety of books, as when the torrent which found no one outlet sufficient for its flow, bursts through every possible chink, and spends a little of its pent-up fury in a thousand wayward spirts and jets. " Goethe," says Frederick Maurice, "was entirely a pro- testant against the bookishness of Germany in behalf of life." The whole pressure of literature on life of which I have been speaknig began contemporaneously with Goethe. Its great voice has been, like his, a protest against book- ishness. To write a book was once a serious and awful action. A book was a sacred thing. A true book is sa- cred still, but it is a healthier sacredness which it pos- sesses : it is the sacredness of religion, not of superstition ; it is the sacredness of the sunny cornfield, and not of the sunless Druid grove ; it is the sacredness of purpose, and not of initiated execution. LITERATURE AND LIFE. 469, The multitude of books dismays us. I look around on this assemblage, and I dare say I am speaking to a hun- di'ed authors. In such an assemblage I should once have spoken to not two. It is easj'^ to be disheartened and cynical at this ; it is easy to turn it into ridicule. To me it seems to give ground for neither of those dispositions, I rejoice in the multitude of books. What though three quarters of them die as soon as they are born, and only one in a million has a voice that the world hears ? Is it not so with trees ? Is it not so with men ? It is " a pro- test against bookishness in behalf of life," this multitude of books. It is a declaration that, while life will always seek for itself the special value which belongs to literary expression, it wiR not so stand in awe of the dignity of literature as to wait till it can conform itself to classical standards and conventional rules, but will break out with v/hat voice it can command, whether it be the deep bass of a theological treatise, or the piping treble of a social pamphlet, to tell the world what is on its soul. Of course, literature will be demoralized in the process of its enlargement and multiplication ; but it will be the demoralization of the arni}^ when it breaks its camp and goes out to the battle. Of course, a vast amount of futil- ity and idiocy and blasphemy wiU pour itself out in print. In the long run the world will take care of that. The public taste, the pubhc conscience, the public busyness, and the printer's bill — we must trust to them for win- nowers. In spite of them we must expect to see empt}^ charlatans, blown full of wind, standing like bronze statues on their pedestals. But in spite of them, too, the time will never come in which the world will not, once a month, know what voice, speaking to it earnest^ and seriously, has something to say which it will do well to hear, and once or twice a century will not recognize that another great singer or great teacher has been sent of God to join the slowly growing chorus of immortals. 470 ESSAYS AXD ADDRESSES. Therefore, fellow-students of Cliantauqua, write your book fearlessly, if you have a book to "vvrite. Let no liter- ary conceit scare you with its sneer, sajdiig, ''What! will you, too, be author?" Answer him boldly, ''Yes, I will." Only be sure that your calling to be an author is a true calling; and then answer it, whoever sneers. Only be sure that it is real life seeking for genuine utterance ; and then say your word simply, strongly, serenel}', without affectation and without fear. The world may not listen : you must none the less be glad to have spoken. Who can tell beforehand to whom the world will listen ? Who can tell, even afterward, what good it may have done the speaker to have spoken, even to an unlistening world ? This much I say of literature as the effect of life. I hope that I have made it clear how natural and essential is the first relationship between the two. Literature is not an artificial habit ; certainly it is not a corrupt crust upon the surface of life : it is the true utterance of life ; it is indeed a part of life, necessary for life's full complete- ness ; it is the expression of life's heart and soul. And now let us pass on, in what time we may still ven- ture to consume, to speak of the other side of our subject — literature as the food of life. Life first produces litera- ture, then literature in its turn produces life. The first part of our subject has led us to speak of book-wi'iters and book- writing : this second part leads us to speak of book-readers and book-reading. Perhaps this second part will come nearer to the interests of my hearers than the first ; for we are all readers of books, while not all, not quite all, of us write them. Literature, then, let us begin by saying, finds its way into life through three great doors, which we may call the door of curiosity, the door of obedience, and the door of admiration ; or, to put it less figuratively, every book pre- sents itself to its student either as a body of knowledge which he may believe, or as a law which he may obey, or LITERATURE AXD LIFE. 471 as an inspiration and an influence which may tell upon his spiritual nature. You cannot picture to yourself any other kind of approach and offer which a book can make to him who takes it up to read it. From the most ponder- ous treatise of theology down to the lightest novel which comes skipping from the press, every book comes bring- ing one or other of these three appeals. One book comes, saying, " Believe this, for it is true ; " another, " Do this, for it is right ; " another, " Become this, for it is good." The book which seems the lightest, the book of mere amusement, still takes its place, whether it will or no, in one or other of these classes ; and, when its easy pages close, leaves, though too light for the reader's self-con- sciousness to recognize it, some idea for the mind, or some rule for the conduct, or some impress on the character, which is its legitimate and permanent result upon its reader. It must be so, because these, and these only, are the open capacities of man. These are the doors through which all things come into his life. Take away man's power of believing that which he is taught, and of obey- ing that which he is commanded, and of loving and ap- propriating that which he admires, and he remains noth- ing but a great, high fortress of unbroken wall, without a gateway through which any visitor from the rich world outside himself can come in to bring him of its richness. The gateways through which all his gains come to him are these three — curiosity, and obedience, and admiration ; the power of the disposition to learn truth, and to accept authority, and to feel influence. I hesitate, as you see, just what name to write over the third of man's great gateways. It is not so easy to give a name to as the others. They are very simple: this third is very subtle and elaborate. I mean by it that whole mysterious power which belongs to man to be 472- ESSAYS jxn addbesses. changed in liis character by direct contact with some nature wliich he loves — or which he hateSj for hate is only love turned backward — even without the communication of truth to his understanding, or of commandment to his will. You see how elaborate the definition grows; but the gate stands more or less open in the hfe of every human being, from the baby to the sage. Every book and every literary man, then, comes before the world in one or other of these three aspects — either as dogmatist, or as moralist, or as what, for want of a better name, we may call mystic. The same writer, in- deed, may combine more than one of these characters. A gi'eat book may unite all three. This is the glory of the Bible. It is at once the book of truth, the book of law, and the book of influence. Think of it as the book of truth, and yoii remember immediately the great historical pictures of the Old Testament, and the gi-eat appeals to reason in the Epistles of the New. Think of it as the book of law, and you hear the thunder of the Ten Com- mandments, and the vehement admonitions of the Hebrew prophets. Think of it as the book of influence, and you feel the pathetic power of the Psalms of David and the Gospel of St. John. Try to conceive its full might as a combination of the three, and there stands out before you the personality of Him of whom the whole Bible is but the picture and expression — that Christ who is at once the teacher of man's ignorance, the ruler of man's way- wardness, and the inspirer of man's spiritual vitality ; at once the Truth and the Way and the Life. It is in its combination and mastery of all three of these great funda- mental powers that the Bible is the universal and eternal book, the Word of God to man. Christian literature lias divided into departments and shared among her many wi-iters that whole which the great Christian book comprehends in its totality. She has had LITERATURE AXD LIFE. 473 her dogmatists, her moralists, and her spiritual leaders, her inspirers of character. Truth, like the sunshine ; law, like the thunder and the lightning; mystical influences, like the unseen touches of the atmosphere — these, in their combination, make the completeness of that literature with which, from Paul and John down to Maurice and Channing and Bushnell, Christianity has blessed the world. Thus she has brought her blessed power into human nature through all its open doors. And now note how these three powers in man, to which all hteratm-e must appeal, are the intrinsic powers of his vitality. See how, if he lives at all, he must live in them ; see how, if they are dead within him, there is no true vitality left — and then you see, I think, what is the real truth concerning the approach of literatm-e to man. Cui*i- osity, obedience, admiration — these are the powers of all man's life. The desii-e to know the true, to do the right, to be the good — these are what make him man. In the increase of the acti\'ity of these his manhood grows. If there were no such thing as literature, these powers would still be active, and be the precious, the indispensable, pre- rogatives and proof -marks of his humanity. If there were no book for him to open, stdl man would use and grow by and live in these same powers of curiosity and obedience and admiration to which the books appeal. He would put puzzled questions to the earth and to the sky. He would ask commandments of the stars and his own soul. He would crave communion with nature and with his dim thought of God. Wliat then? What follows? Does not this follow, and is it wot most important — that the powers to which the books appeal, the powers to which literature speaks, are not peculiar, special powers, which have no activity in man except as he is the reader of books, but are the common and familiar powers of his universal life ? That 474 ESSAYS AND ADDEESSES. the vitality which literature finds and feeds is the same vitality with which man does all his living work, and gets all his knowledge ? That, therefore, the first great quah- fication of a man, in order that he may be healthily fed b}'- the best literature, is not the possession of some arti- ficial tastes, the develojjment of some unusual and highly trained capacity, but the activity of the simple, funda- mental human powers — in other words, that the livest man will be the best reader of the best books? That what you have to do with your own or any nature, in order to make it receptive of the truest knowledge, or the wisest guidance, or the noblest inspirations, is to make it thoroughly alive in all its best and broadest human powers ? Do we see anything in the history of human learning to justify that idea '? Do we not all know how often scholar- ship has wasted itself by being poured into a nature which had no vitality to receive it ? Are not our colleges only too rich in pedants the failure of whose career lies here, in that their manhood was dead or only half alive, and so their learning found no real welcome or digestion, and lay in them, and lies in them still, crude, hard, unsoftened, and unsweetened into wisdom? What our colleges need to-day is, not more learning for their men, but more men for their learning. The little conceited specialist, with small curiosity and less obedience and no admiration, is incapable of the fullest approach and entrance of truth. Let him read what books he will, he goes unfed. The anxiety of every man who cares for the higher education to-day must be as to how that healthy process of perpetual reaction can be kept alive by which more knowledge shall always make the men to whom it comes more broadly and profoundly human, and so more fit for the healthiest re- ception of yet more knowledge, which shall fii'st come to them because they are, and then shall make them yet more to be, true and living men. LITERATURE AND LIFE. 475 In that anxieby, we look about us here, and are very thankful for Chautauqua. Unless I much misjudge, the system which is represented under these spreading trees has something to say to the problem at which we have just been giving a hasty glance. You are students who are not separated or (iivorced from life. Life, and not literature, is to you the primary and most potent fact. You are refreshing your vitality all the time out of those great eternal fountains which God forever keeps open for His children, lest they die out of theii' humanness into stones, or brutes, or machines. Fatherhood, motherhood, brotherhood, sisterhood, the home life, practical labor, the need of sacrificing self for others, the necessity of fore- thought, the wrestling with difficulties — these are the things which make men live. It is to lives fed out of these fountains that your books open themselves, and your teachers speak. It is to natures which have been taught curiosity, docility, and admiration in the great school of hving, that this Chautauqua College opens her hospitable gates, and says, " Come, learn ! " with a peculiar hopefulness. Wliat is there to expect ? May we not say, a very vivid grasp and hold on learning? Maj^ we not believe, if the students of Chautauqua be indeed what we have every right to expect that they will be, men and women thor- oughly and healthily alive, through their perpetual con- tact with the facts of life, that when they take the books which have the knowledge in them, like pure water in silver urns, though they will not drink as deeply, they wiU drink more healthily than many of those who in the deader and more artificial life of college halls bring no such eager vitality to give value to their draft ? If I understand Chautauqua, this is what it means : it finds its value in the vitality of its students. It, of neces- sity, sacrifices thoroughness. It knows and feels that sac- 476 ESSAYS AND ADDIiESSES. rince. It recognizes that if it were possible to fill each one of its students with all that every science has to give, each student would be the better for it. It has not, and it must not come to have, any contempt for the completer training which is the privilege of those who can give their whole time to study. It acknowledges that if he can Iveep, as he certainly may keep, a healthy, live, s;^Tiipa- thetic humanity through all his work, the finished scholar in any department is happier and more successful than the most interested amateur. It honors the father of Louis Agassiz, wanting to touch, even with the tip of his lips, the science of which his son was drinking to the full ; but it owns that the son's lot was richer and more blessed. It does not dishonor thoroughness, it does not magnify superficiahiess ; but it does say that life is the truest and best condition for the reception of learning. It does de- clare that a seed has more chance of growth in a flower- pot of mold than in a hundred acres of sand. While it does not disown the importance of habits of study, and of the apparatus and environment of learned life, it believes and declares that far more important is the spirit of the student ; and so it summons those who are alive with true liunum hunger to come and learn what they can learn of that great world of knowledge of which he who knows the most knows such a very little, and feels more and more, with every increase of his knowledge, how very little it is that he knows. It would l)e a great misfortune if Chautauqua, with all the interest which it excites, and all the success of which it has to boast, should seem to give any praise to super- ficialness, or to make any less precious than men think it now, that thoroughness of scholarship which is so rare, even among our professed and consecrated scholars. We are assured tliat that ^vill not be its working. Those who, in the gracious and helpful training of Chautauqua, come LITER ATUBE AXD LIFE. '^71 on to the sacred soil of any science, tread its firm ground, and see the richness of its landscape, will siu*ely not count it less but far more sacred than they counted it when they were wholly strangers to its fascination. Poor is the student's soul in which familiarity with his science breeds contempt of it. Rather, he who knows something, and is well aware how little it is that he knows, will re- joice with all his heart that there are others whose privi- lege it is to know more, and will sit eagerly listening for what tidings they who have pushed on deep into the heart of the Promised Land shall bring back to those who sit wondering and thankful in the richness of its borders. And yet, sure as I am that our culture here will never be so perverted as to clothe superficialness with any un- real glory, I still think it may be well for all of us to be upon our guard over our own standards, and to take some precaution that thoroughness may never lose that high esteem which it ought ever to keep in all our eyes ; not merely for learning's sake, but for our own. How shall that be done f I have only one suggestion to make. Is it not well that each of us whom the culture of this insti- tution, and the spirit of the time, incline to a discursive largeness in our reading and study, should have some one well-chosen subject in which he shall endeavor to go as deep as possible, and know all that he can? Is it not good that in our great farm, fed on the surface by the ever-bounteous skies, there should be somewhere one deep, cool well which should pierce as deep as possible, and for- ever remind us of how the true sources of supply lie far below f Surely such a habit would keep alive our love of thoroughness, which is the thing which a man most needs in the world, even in relation to those things in which liis circumstances compel him to do superficial work. In the literary world to-day there are two figures whose faces are exceedingly familiar; we all know them well 478 ESSAYS AXD ADDRESSES. One of them is called the special student; the other is known as the general reader. The fii'st has his home chiefly at Cambridge, but is to be seen at all our colleges. The second lives at Boston, but lives also everywhere else where there are brightness and books. Both of them have much that is good, and some things which are not good, about them. The iirst is full of knowledge, but is a little hard and narrow, as if he had been fed on needles. The second is full of sympath}', but liis face has a little haziness about it, as if he had feasted upon fog. The first is intensive ; the second is extensive. By the labors of the special student learning is deepened ; by the labors — shall we call them ? — of the general reader learning is broadened. The work of the first is to dig wells ; the work of the second is to dig ditches. I am not sure that it is not fated that these two, so often separated from each other, so often suspicious of each other, should meet, and look into each other's eyes, and know each other for friends and fellow-workers at Chautauqua. At any rate, I believe that they are destined to meet somewhere — or, indeed, that they are meeting e^s^erywhere — in the spirit of this reconciling age of ours, this age which knows the need of thoroughness, and also knows the need of life ; and which, while it would like to have both dispositions meet in the person of each one of its scholars, yet, if that cannot be, gives welcome to every reading man or woman who brings either disposition as a contribution to its character and growth. The fact is, that in these days of ours, Uterature, like theology, has broken loose, and there is temporary trou- ble. Happily in both cases the confusion comes from increase and not from deficiency of life, and so it will be all right ; it wiU be vastly better than ever in the end, but for a time there is disorder. The fences are swept away. Land which seemed consecrated to dryness is deep under LITERATVBE AND LIFE. 479 the waters of life. The old channels cannot be found ; men seek for them in vain. The two cases are very like each other. There are no longer certain men to whom theology is exclusively com- mitted, experts in the things of God. Nor is there any more a sacred caste of people who write books. The peo- ple are all priests. The people, almost all, are authors. And yet, in theology and in literature alike, never had the real priest, the priest who bears the true priestly witness in his face and voice, the priest whose priestliness is in the convictions and sympathies of his soul, and not in the robe upon his shoulders — never had the real priest such a chance of power as he has to-day. Literature and theology are both claiming all the world for their field, all the interests of mankind for their care. Literature and theology are both full of discontent and full of hope. Both of them are appealing for recognition, not to a few trained faculties, or to a '' religious public " or a '' literary world," but to human life everywhere, in its primary emotions and its universal needs. Both theology and literature are overwhelmed with the tremendous mass and infinite variet}^ of the material which is being poured in upon them, and which they can- not cast aside ; yet both alike are feeling dim but certain intimations of a latent unity in the great multitude of things, and are searching for the key whose touch shall bid that unity spring forth to sight, and be the great solution of our wonder and our fear. Such are theology and literature to-day. Is it not good, indeed, to be counted to-day in any humblest degree among the Christian scholars ? But I have kept you much too long. Now, in a few last words, which shall be hardly more than apothegms, let me try to sum up the practical consequences which I think result from our doctrine, that, the fuller the healthy vitality of anv man becomes, the more truly does he be- 480 ESSAYS JXD ADDHESSES. come receptive of the best effect of books, the more capa- ble is he of being fed by literatm-e. 1. First, deej^est, truest of all, let us say this : that all life completes itself in the divine life. He lives most truly and intensely who lives nearest to the great source of life, which is God. Therefore it is to him who really counts himself, and tries in actual experience to be, the son of God, that literature brings its best messages. To hiui, full of the highest curiosity, which is faith, and the high- est obedience, which is consecration, and the highest ad- miration, which is divine love — to him truth enters full- statured through every door. Alas that men have said, alas that l^igotry has given men the right to say, that much which called itself the fear of the Lord was not the beginning, but the end, of wisdom ! None the less is that true what John wrote to his disciples in such sublime realization of their possibilities that those possibilities seemed to him already present and achieved possessions : "Ye have an unction from the Holy One, and ye know all things." 2. And secondl}^, since life is a thing of cpiality rather than of quantity; since, that is, all living things, from least to greatest, in virtue of their life, are one with one another, and every life in the wondrousness of its quality is infinite — therefore it will be more and more the quality rather than the quantity of knowledge which will be of importance in studying and learning men. At least the quality of knowledge will be primarily important, and only after that the quantity. Not what we know, so much as the way in which we know everything ; not how much do we know, but how do we know — that is the question that is significant. Get the quality right, and an eternity of living in the light of God will take care of the quantity. 3. And thirdly, since life is perfect in the individual only as it feels and owns its share in the great multitude of life which fills the mass, so no man's personal relation LITEEATUEE AXD LIFE. 481 to literature is complete unless it feels and owtis about it this great mixed mass of ignorance and knowledge and half -knowledge which makes up the woi'Ul. All exclu- sive, selfish, aristocratic learning is vulgar, and loses the best fineness of scholarship ; is turbid, and loses the best brightness of light. Whatever else is aristocratic in the world, learning must be democratic. Every man who reads must read for all men. The trutli of stewardship is the first truth of the study. He who learns selfishly only half learns. 4. And yet once more : this close union of literature and Hfe brings us encouragement. It gives us the right to believe that the dangers of literature, the dangers of learning, are the same as the dangers of life, and are to be met in the same way — by deeper entrance into that whose sm-face only is dangerous, whose heart always is serene and safe. Life has its dangers, but their cure is not in suicide. Learning has its dangers, but their cure is not in ignorance. Forward, not backward, into greater life ; forward, not backward, into greater knowledge, not into less — there, there only, lies the safety of the man or of the world. No man was ever yet hurt by knowing too much. All harm lias come by knowing too httle. A little learning is a dangerous thing ; but the danger is not in the learning, but in the littleness. Get more ! Get more ! So only, so only can you be safe. My friends, I do not know whether I have rightly in- terpreted the spirit of Chautauqua. It is my first admis- sion to her councils. But I think that I cannot be wi'ong in beheving that she stands, above aU things, for the close, essential, inseparable union of literatm^e and life. Long may she live ! Much may she live in the hves of all her children ! For much hfe, if what I have said to-day be true, must mean wide welcome to truth ; the power richlv to receive and richlv to transmit the light of God. HENRY HOBSON RICHARDSON. {Harvard Montlih/, October, 1886.) From the day when he entered college, in 1855, to the day when he died, full of honors, in 1886, Mr. Richardson was alwaj^s a true son of Harvard. His student life was critical in his career. His college friendships lived with him until he died. He never lost the inspiration of Cam- bridge things and men. His growing fame made the place of his education illustrious ; and when his work was done, two of his most characteristic buildings — Sever Hall and the new Law School — remained among the treasures of the college for all time to come. It is right that the Harvard MontJihj should devote to him a few pages of remembrance, and try to give to those who did not know him some idea of what manner of man he was. He came to college from New Orleans in the years which immediately preceded the great war. He was a Southerner, and nobody can understand him or his career who does not keep that fact always in mind. Deeply as Richardson fastened his life into the life of the region where he ultimately lived, he always carried something in his nature which was foreign to it. Much as he loved to boast, somewhat fantastically, that he was descended from the sober English theologian and philosopher, Dr. Priest- ley, that quiet blood had mingled with lighter and more impetuous currents before it came to him. He kept to the end much of the spirit of the Southerner before and 482 HENRY HOBSOX UICHABDSOX. 483 during the Rebelliou, a spirit of recklessness and earnest- ness, which were often strangely and strikingly combined. His college days are too recent for some of us and too remote for others of us to remember. The jiicture of them which his classmates give is very distinct. They were days of carelessness and plenty. The seriousness of life had laid hold upon him less even than it does upon most college men. His college photograph is not recog- nizable by those who knew him only when he had become mature. Nothing about him was precocious. He did not lisp in plans and elevations. Some interest in mathemat- ics as a special study seems to be all that is remembered as the slightest prophecy of what was to come later. But at the time he was known only for the peculiar charm of his bright, open nature and for the sunshine which he brought into every company he entered. It was a morn- ing period of simple joy in life which was capable, although nobody guessed it then, of richening into the buoyant hopefulness, the manly grasp of difficulties, the healthy love of living and working which those who saw his great years know so well. It is only another instance in which a prophecy is recognized after its fulfilment which no man could have known when it was si^oken. The choice of architecture as his profession seems to have been made in the last half of his senior year ; but I cannot find that anybody knows what led him to it, or what the feelings were with which he made the choice. During all his life he did true things of which he con- sciously gave very little account to himself. He was apt to be wiser than he knew — and so he probably was here. It is not at all likely that he knew, as we know now, how thoroughly the work of the architect was the work for him ; how the fii'm grasp of solid, palpable material, com- bined with the exercise of vivid intelligence, just suited his concrete and most vivacious intellect. At axvy rate, 484 ESSAYS Axn addresses. there is no record of enthusiasm, and none of his class- mates imagined what an important thing had happened when his choice was made. After his graduation lie went to Europe, and in a lei- surely sort of way began to study. His biography will tell us in detail how life changed with him at the beginning of the war, and how his character and force came out under two impulses. He was both driven and drawn to greatness. Behind him came the pressure of poverty when his remittances fi-om home were cut off by the war. Before him was always opening more and more the at- traction of his profession, of which he wrote, in 1862 : " The more I see and know of architecture, the more majesty the art gains. Oh, if I had begun at nineteen to study it ! " The letters which Richardson wrote during these years in Paris, from 1860 to 1865, presented a delightful picture of the making of a man. He is so transparent that the process is perfectly clear to one who watches it. Little by little poverty and the need of work are separating him from his old luxurious boy's life. Little by little a great art is claiming the liberated worker for its own. It is impossible to pity him for his privations. What are they to one who is full of hope and is just feeling his genius? It is impossible to think of his hard work and cheap li\'- ing as heroic. It was too buoyant with annual spirits and the certainty of success. But it is the negative and the positive conditions ; it is Hfe saying to him, " There is no more money for you ; you must support yourself," and also, '' Here is your work ; here is your great art ;" it is the sight of these two influences together, turning the light-hearted boy into the brave-hearted man, that makes these years picturesque and beautiful. It was onl}^ when the work for his living interfered with and postponed his study that he felt any disposition to complain. The whole HENRY ROBSON RICHAEDSOX. 485 experience was tlie test of character and strength coming just at the right time and in the right way. He knew that he should stand it, and he did. All the while behind his personal struggle hung the cloud and was heard the solemn tumult of the war, giv- ing his struggle breadth and seriousness. It was good always, in later life, to hear his slightest reference to those years, out of which he came another man, and yet evidently the man that he had been meant to be. It is the five years after college which are most decisive in a man's career. Any event which happens then has its full influence. The years which come before are too fluid. The years which come afterward are too solid. It was in these yeai's that Eichardson lost his property and caught sight, as he says, of the greatness of architecture. In October, 1865, he came back to America and began his work. The war was over, and there was work to do. Soon he began to find it, or it began to find him. All his first work seems to be feeling after something which he has not found. It has vigor and beauty, but not the posi- tiveness and purpose to which he afterward came. His genius was in the condition of proof before letter. You saw that it M^as beautifid, but did not know exactly what it meant. One or two Gothic churches belong to these earliest years. By and by you see the difference. When he built Brattle Street Church and Trinity Church in Boston he knew what he was about. By the year 1872, when he was only thirty-three years old, he had attained that degree of success in which a man works best ; the earliest strain was over; he was freely afloat with the broad sea before him ; and he had developed the style in which, with wonderful richness and variety, all his future work was done. From 1872 to 1886 — fourteen years — was the great full period of Richardson's life and work. And M^liat years 486 ESSAYS AND ADDRESSES. they were ! He had realized his powers. The fire of dis- tinct genius, indefinable and unmistakable, was burning lu-ightly. His buildings opened like flowers out of his life. It is not in niy purpose now to name even his great- est works, or to describe the order in which they came, but rather to characterize some of the qualities, both of the man and of his Av^ork, as they showed themselves in those glorious years when — all over the country, in Albany and Washington and Boston and Cincinnati and Chicago, and in quiet villages, where he made the town hall and librar}^ a perpetual inspiration, and along the railroads, where he made the station-houses bear witness to the power of art to beautify the most i)rosaic uses, and in dwellings, which lie filled Avith dignity and grace — every- where the man genuinely and spontaneously blended his own nature with the purposes and material of the struc- tures which he built. The first quality of true genius certainly was in all that he did. It was instinctive and spontaneous. Based upon thorough study, genuinely expressing great ideas, it yet was true that there was much in Richardson's work of which he gave and could give to himself little or no ac- count as to how it came to pass. He was not a man of theories. His life passed into his buildings b}^ ways too subtle even for himself to understand. And so he has done a larger work than he ever delib- erately resolved to do. When Mr. Freeman was here in America, he wrote, in the midst of much hearty condem- nation of our architecture : '* In these round-arch build- ings I see a hope for a really good American stjde. The thing seems to have come by itself, and the prospect is all the more hopeful if it has." He apparently has never heard of Richardson, but it is Richardson's work that he is feehng. And yet no man ever said to himself less than Richardson, '-'I will make a style of architecture for HENRY HOBSON BICHABDSON. 487 America." He simply did his work in his own way, and the style was there. It is a style of breadth and simplicity that corresponds with his whole nature. Never somber, because the irre- pressible buoyancy and cheerfulness of his life are in it ; never attaining the highest reach of spirituality and ex- altation, for his own being had its strong association with the earth, and knew no mystic raptures or transcendental aspirations ; healthy and satisfying within its own range, and suggesting larger things as he himself always sug- gested the possession of powers which he had never real- ized and used — something like this is the character of the buildings which he has left behind him. He grew simpler as he grew older and greater. He often seemed to disregard and almost despise detail of ornament. He loved a broad, unln-oken stretch of wall. He seemed to count, with Ruskin, "a noble surface of stone a fairer thing than most architectural features which it is caused to assume." And yet out of this simplicity could burst a sumptuousness of design or decoration all the more captivating and overwhelming for the simplicity out of which it sprang. I have heard one of his own pro- fession call him "barbaric." It was that wliich made his work delightful. Whoever came in contact with it felt that the wind l)lew out of an elemental simplicity, out of the primitive life and fundamental qualities of man. And this great simplicity, the truthfidness with which he was liimself, made him the real master of all that his art had ever been, made it possil^le for him, without concealment, to take some work of other days and appropriate it into work of his own, as Shakespeare took an Italian tale and turned it iuto Slwlock or Othello. These are the moral qualities of his architecture. Of those quahties which belong more technically to his art, more competent and special pens must ^^^•ite. But these 488 ESSAYS AXD ADDRESSES. qualities every one must feel who stands in front of one of Richardson's great buildings ; and the same qualities every man felt who came to know him. That is another note of genius. The man and his work are absolutely one. The man is in the work, and the work is in the man. So Richardson possessed in himself that solidity without stolidity, that joyousness without frivolity, which his best art expresses. He was as entirely free from affectation as is Sever Hall. He was too large to be jealous of other men. " I never saw it," he insisted on saj'ing about a big, bad house of a brother-architect, which he passed every week in his life. He took people into the confidence of his ideas with his hearty and capacious "Don't you know?" He talked of himself and his work so largely that he was not egotistical. He had quick sympathies with subjects of which he knew nothing. He gave one as much reason to believe as almost any man I ever knew that tliei-e is truth in the happy theory that all men have all faculties, that what faculties find their way out to activity in this bit of a life is largely an affair of chance, and that some time, somewhere, all faculties in all men will come forth into activity. Richardson built for Harvard College, Sever Hall and the Law School. The Law School is good, and has many of his best qualities in it. But in Sever Hall the college most happily possesses one of the veiy greatest works of this great son of hers. His interest in building it was very deep, and he put into his first work for his college all his best thought and power. From the day when it was finished it seemed to possess the yard, as all his build- ings took possession of the earth they stood on, as he him- self, without pretentious self-assertion, took possession of every scene in the midst of which he stood. Sever Hall makes the other modern l)uildings of the college yard seem like visitors, who came, and who will go again — for HENRY HOBSOX RICHARDSON. 489 which oue wouki not grieve. This serious and cheerful structure one hardly thinks of as having ever come, and one rejoices to believe that it will stay forever. Nowhere does this identity of Richardson and his work seem more impressive than in that unique house at Brook- line which was at once his workshop and his home. No one who saw it when it was filled with his vitality -will ever lose the feeling of how it was all vital like a thing that had gro\\ai, of how the household rooms gave birth to the long corridor with the alcoves in which the work was done, and then the long stalk blossomed into the rich flower of the master's room, in which the fulness of his life was represented. It would be good if his students would tell us what they got from him. He himself was to have delivered one of the lectures on the jDrofessions in his own Sever Hall last winter. It is interesting to wonder what he would have said, but unless he could have made himself felt by his audience, his lecture could never have explained his power. The loss which his death brought to his friends it is not possible to describe. It is a change in all their life. When some men die it is as if you had lost your jienknif e, and were subject to perpetual inconvenience until you could get another. Other men's going is like the vanish- ing of a great mountain from the landscape, and the out- look of hfe is changed forever. His life was like a great pictm-e full of glowing color. The canvas on which it was painted was immense. It lighted all the room in which it hung. It warmed the chilliest air. It made, and it will long make, life broader, work easier, and simple strength and courage dearer to many men. ADDRESS AT THE DEDICATION OF THE PEO- PLE'S INSTITUTE, ROXBURY, MASS., OCT. 1, 1890. Ladies and Gentlemen : This is one of tlie occasions on which one would not wiUingly be absent. There are always things happening from time to time with which one likes to have association ; because as they go on, with the possibiHties that are in them, he likes to remember that he was at the starting of a stream which afterward widens and grows into a great and mighty river, and to feel even the smallest identification with what comes forth for the blessing of mankind. So if it had not been my privilege to have been in^•ited to speak at this gathering to-night, I should have liked to creep into some obscure corner of this room, and remember that I was present when this institution was opened. There are days in our lives which we always like to re- member— days in which we saw some great, good deed take shape, and show itself in the world ; we had faith in it, though a very blind sort of faith. We have afterward seen it go forward as we are going to see this People's Institute grow and spread itself until it not only fills the capacity of tliis room, but spreads itself abroad to multi- ply into many other institutes. I will try to tell you the thing which impresses me most — the tiling probably in most of our minds : it is the absolute simplicit}^ of the greatest things. Here is something that has never been seen in Boston, except as seen in its mother and sister institute, the Wells 490 DEDICATIOX OF THE PEOPLE'S IXSTITUTE. 491 Memorial Institute ; and our tii-st impulse is to think that it must be something- strange — that the powers which have given it bii'th must be something- very rare, and therefore we must look suddenly and quickly because it cannot be repeated in this world. On the contrary, we see that these things spring so out of the warmest im- pulses of onr human natiu'e that they belong to all men in different forms and shapes : until we wonder not that any really good thing is done in the world, but our wonder is that it is not done every day. Think what this institution means, as it stands here on Tremont Street, to those who enter into its doors, and even to those who pass by its doors on the sidewalk ! Given a mutual respect between men whose interests are bound together ; given public spirit on the part of those men who need for their souls the large range of a whole community in which they may work ; gi^'en the power of a man to recognize the noblest uses and the best right of the wealth placed in his hands : and then you have this institution or some other institution, and that for which this institution stands — the expression of large-hearted liberality, noble public sentiment, and deep personal in- terest in the welfare of the community in which one has gi'own and which he loves with all his heai't. Whom shall we congratulate to-night? You who ai'e to enter into the privileges of this institution, we congrat- ulate you ; and we congratulate you who may not find it in your way to enter into its privileges in months to come, but who are going to be richer because you know it is here, and who know of these truths of which we have spoken, and feel these influences which are inseparable from this spot. We congratulate the city of Boston, which is richer, not merely by one institution, but by the lighting of a new flame which shall kindle with its light other institu- 492 ESSAYS AXD JDDHESSES. tions of a different character from this, but with tlie same deep convictions out of whicli this has sprung. Tliese are the things which have alwa^^s been in tlie workl tak- ing different forms — tlie various successive forms which a new age and condition of mankind bring forth. Above all, we congratulate him whose name is associ- ated with this work, for whom you have just cheered; him who has had it in his power, in the first place, to be able, and in the second place to desire and to do that which has taken form in this gracious institution, and ■which shall go forward not merely perpetuating his name — no noble man cares for that — but perpetuating those thiugs for which he cares, and making them a poAver in new ways in the w^orld as it gi'ows older even after he shall have jjassed away. These are all old principles ; and, as I sa}^, the marvel and wonder is, as we look at an institution like this, that they do not spriug up eternally. The marvel of our human nature is, that there should not come out of the depths of its capacity the thing that the world needs. There Avere no People's Institutes fifty years ago ; there was perhaps no need then for People's Institutes. No doubt there are tilings lacking that ought to l)e here to- day— things necessary to our community that ought to bless our community; but when we see this institution gi'owing up to meet the need of the world, then w^e have great faith in regard to the future. I never go to London but I see a dear friend of mine, who has done a work in a few years which is simply a revelation — not of the capacity of the man : he is not a man of remarkable capacity ; he is not a man of genius in any sort of way ; he is not a man of whom you would say. We must hurry and get all w^e can out of him, be- cause when he dies we never shall get another such man : but he is a simple, true, brave man — a man of keen and DEDICATION OF THE PEOPLE'S INSTITUTE. 493 quick perceptions of what others need, with a heart full of desh'e to manifest his care for men Ijy putting in their power those things which they require. ^Vlien I see that man at the center of a great club of several hundred mem- bers at the East End of London, which it is impossible to confine mthin any four walls, and see each time I go there how it has spread forth into new branches, rooted in some new part of that arid field where he has gone to live — when I see the character of the man and the char- acter of the work, I simply lift up my hands and say, " It would not be marvelous if the millennium should come to-morrow morning." The wonder would not be that the millennium should come, but that the millennium lags, that it does not come at once. I see no reason why there should not be five hundred such men here as my friend in London. Given five hundred men with a power pre- cisely^ the same as this of his — the simple power that be- longs to hundreds and thousands of men, only it is not used as my friend uses his powers, and I do not see why they should not be — the man is not different from others in power, but the light dawned upon him, and he saw what the true use of human power was — and I say to myself that the wonder would not be that the day of re- generation of mankind should break to-morrow morning ; the wonder woidd be that it does not, that five hundred men do not spring to their feet and say, " Let me do some- thing that would make life worth living." Many are ask- ing to-da}', " Is life worth living ? " There are things to do at every man's hand that would make the question impertinent from his lips, an absm-d question for him to ask. There is not a man or woman so shut out, so bare of influence, so robbed of capacity for loving their breth- ren, of enlarging their life, that they might not go forth upon fields of labor so actively and earnestly that to ask them if life was worth living would seem to them to be 494 ESSAYS AND ADDRESSES. the most preposterous of questions, and tliey would turn their backs upon you while they went forth to do their work. My friends, there is no good work in this world which is not in the nature of an experiment. Even the great Christian work which is being carried forward has in it the elements of experiment. The cause of Christ making men blessed in its gospel, with the certainty of an ulti- mate triumph, is in the nature of an experiment. Every great question is an experiment. It seems to me the only joy of life is in experiment. To try something that I could see absolutely to the end, that I could see how it was to work out, until I saw the top stone put on — it would lose its interest at once. One of the greatest architects of this citj^, whose fine work all about rejoices us, drove the people almost crazy who worked with him, because no building was complete until it was done. He never knew what he was going to accomplish until the top stone was put on ; and then the work stood forth. Wlio dares to say what is to come in these rooms and out of this institution ? Wlio shall dare to say that even the good work the Wells Memorial has accomplished is not to be done here '] It is in the nature of an experiment. ShaU we hesitate because it is an experiment ? Shall we still go on wondering how we can possibly try a, thing without knowing of the result? Do you remember the man with the pair of tight boots, who said he didn't know what he was going to do — he would have to wear them a day or two before he could get them on ? That is the way with the man who tries experiments. Let us go on our way, and do the work which may open into strange and unguessed regions. I rejoice with any man who stands at the opening of a little stream like this, though he cannot tell into what it is DEDICATION OF THE PEOPLE'S INSTITUTE. 495 going to develop. The man who founded this Peoj)le's Institute — it is impossible for him to tell to what uses this may grow. Only one thing more. Let me say that and then sit down. One thing is absolutely essential, my friends : that is, that the spirit out of which this institution has sprung should run through every part and portion of its life. It is good to hear reports like those from the Wells Memorial to-night. It is good that men should learn where they may save, that they may put to the best possible use the dollars and the quarters that God gives into their hands. There shall be a deeper spirit in this institute along with that, working through that, making continual use of that which shall perpetuate the name of its founder, and bring it forward again and again upon the lips of these people. The idea of trusteeship — the idea that that which a man has he has not for himself — is the true idea. The man who misuses the trust with which he is intrusted — who uses it for his own use — goes to Charlestown prison. The man who holds funds that belong to the great vrorld and humanity who uses them for his own luxur}', or for the pleasure of bathing his hands in thein as they accumulate in his chest — shall we count him a worthy man ? At least we will say this, that he is shutting himself out of the noblest pleasure that belongs to hunum life. One of the greatest benefactors that this world has seen — one who has left his name so marked in the great beneficences of the world that he has made it proverbial — came to the true knowledge of the use and capacity of human life when he was an old man ; and he was heard to sa}^ again and again that if men only knew what the true pleasure of life was when they began to count what was given to them as not for their own use but as belonging to others, they would not have to be urged ; they could not keep their hands out of their pockets, as they drew forth for 496 ESSAYS AXD ADDRESSES. the use of the worhl, for whom it was intrusted to their care. That applies not only to money, hut to everything which a man owns of life and truth. You have no business to believe even your creed in any such way, that it is only to be used for your own soul. You nuist believe your creed as a trust ; it Avas not given to you that you might save only your own soul, but given that the world might be purer and happier. The comfort, joy, happiness, bless- ing, and companionship that you give to yourself in this building — they are just as truly trusts put into jowr hands as was the money put into the hands of him who founded this institute. This spirit nuist run into every part of it, must fill every class-room, making it glow, not witii the selfish avidity of knowledge for some selfish use, but mak- ing it glow with that divine hunger after knowledge that all nobler souls have that they may make better the world. It must pervade the whole, making saving even, which is so apt to be a sordid and disgraceful thing, become a sacred and glorious thing ; because that wLich is saved makes up an endowment for the use of one's fellow-men. I beUeve that any such thing must l^e a consecration to Him who is the Father of all men, and for whom this work must be done ; that the fire lighted at the beginning of this work cannot fade out as its histoiy goes on ; that it must go on pervading every part of the life of this institution, as it opens into new and perhaps most un- expected forms of developed activity. But there remains one ching which I desire to litter — the eternal truth of life : that no man truly owns anything except that which he consecrates to the service of God and his fellow-men. Thei'efore with that great faith in its future, with that belief in that which is to be — the faith which is to pervade it, we saj', cordially, sincerely, and very cheerfully, " God- speed to the People's Institute." ADDRESS AT A MEETING IN BEHALF OF THE CHILDREN'S AID SOCIETY, PHILADEL- PHIA, PA., JANUARY 30, 1892. Mr. President, Ladies, and Gentlemen : To any one who has had the pvivileg-e for many happy years, altliough it were many years ago, of watching the spontaneous and delightful generosity of the citizens of Philadelphia, it is indeed a great delight to come back and recognize that Vvhieh he knew well enough to be the fact, that in the years that have come between that great, rich stream of be- nevolence and ever-thoughtful generosity has been widen- ing and deepening. It is just exactly as when one comes back, having made a journey across lots, and finds again a great stream by whose side he has journe3'ed before, in whose company he has rejoiced, and sees how it has grown richer and deeper in the courses in Avliich he has been separated from it. You told us, sir, at the beginning of this meeting, of the t\v<) purposes of such a meeting as this. One of them is the gathering up of the report of what has ])een accomplished by such a society as this, and the distinct recognition, by those who have not had the opj^ortunity of knoAving much about it before, of what the methods of its working are. The first purpose of such a meet- ing is information. I cannot help thinking we have been richly supplied with information here this evening. We have seen what this society does ; that its work is a simple work. It is an effort ever^^where to reinstate into 497 498 ESSAYS AND ADDRESSES. the systeni of our liuniaii life tliat little atom whicli lias been in any way separated from it. Nothing lives except in the system to whicli it belongs. Nothing lives except it is natural. Nothing is natural absolutely by itself. Nothing is natural exee2)t it be taken into the system of nature in which it natni'all}^ inheres and follows the movement of the whole about it. And so the whole meaning of our society is that aiw little atom of our hu- manity which has been" cast out of the rich and ever-swell- ing sj'stem of our human life shall be just as far and just as quickly as possible reinstated where it lielongs. Eveiy- thing we have heard from the good doctor, who let us look into the deep and awful secrets which belong to the life of this society, from its managers, from its treasurer, everything we have heard shows us that perpetual effort of good women and trne men to reinstate into its true place the atom of our human life which has been sepa- rated from the condition and position in Avhicli it belongs. The second object of such a meeting as this was. to stir enthusiasm, so you told us. In other words, it is to see the richness and the beauty and the glory of that which we are doing. We lose ourselves in the midst of multi- tudinous details. We lose ourselves in those things which are absolutely essential, and those things without which life in a society such as this cannot possibly exist, but which, when we have buried ourselves in the midst of them, too often obscure the very rich meaning which be- longs to the whole. We want to feel the glory of such a work as this which this society is doing. It seems to mo also that we want to do that which I always feel impelled to do when I have the privilege of saying a word or two at the close of a meeting such as this. I want to give the thanks of this community, and the thanks of all that this community represents, for it is impossible in the rich com- n\unication of life in which we live with one another to IME CHILDREN'S AID SOCIETY. 499 separate ourselves iuto communities and think anytliing can be done in Philadelphia for which Massachusetts and Illinois and Georgia are not the richer. We want to rec- ognize the thankfuhiess which every part of our country owes to those willing to step forward in this work. Truly it is very little you and I can do, to come here on a plea- sant evening for an hour or two and praise and rejoice in the work that has been done, and make our contributions to the continuance of that work, when we think what it is they are doing who have summoned us here. They have gone forward. They have taken the l^runt of the labor. They have given anxious care, they have given perpetual devotion to this work to which we now say Godspeed, and to which in the proper time I am sure you will not refuse your abundant assistance. It almost seems to me like the old days in Philadelpliia which come back to me from the time I walked her streets, when we sat here at home and felt beating the pulse of war at the front, when Ave rejoiced for every little thing we could do to make the soldiers at the front know our hearts were with them, to let them understand it was not in any supine indifference, not in any sense that the great work which they were doing belonged to them and not to us, that we dared to take that place which many of us look back upon now almost with shame. At least we rejoiced then for everything we could do to cheer their souls and strengthen their arms. So let it be with those Avho stand forward here and voluntarily with noble con- secration undertake this labor which belongs to the con- duct of a great work like this. Let them not lack the pei-petual Godspeed and the continual assistance and sup- port of those who simply watch and bless what they are doing. It is impossible for us to see the limits of a work like this. As one studies the lessons of such things as have 500 ESSAYS AND ADDRESSES. been said to us to-uight, how his thought opens into the future ! The richness of these days in which we live is that it is impossible for us not to anticipate the future. I think there have been certain ages in the world's history in which there has been almost no anticipation of things to come, when it seemed almost as if men lived in the days in which they were especially situated and did not look forward, did not feel that the present is inseparably bound to the future, and that it was impossible to live in the present worthily unless they anticipated the future. There have been times in the world's history in which it seemed almost that was the case, but it has absolutely ceased now. In the end of the nineteenth century surely we do look forward into the twentieth century. Peering into the vast distance, let us try to anticipate the days that are going to be. It seems to me one of the great things in the minds of people to-day in the anticipation of the future is the great, rich, solemn fear which anticipates the great future with anxiety because it sees the larger forces which are going to work there. It is impossible for us to look into a child's face to- day and not think of the fifty years in which that child is to live, if its life shall be spared to fulfil the normal length of human life upon earth, of the great forces that are coming into. existence, the great powers that are tak- ing possession of this earth both in its physical and moral and spiritual life, the great powers that are shaking the old systems, so that we see that whatever is to come upon the world, the old systems have had their day and are ceasing to be, and something new is to come. There is electricity in the air that those of the future are to breathe, dynamite in the soil over which they are to tread, deeper forces stirring all that soil, changing the most ab- solute conclnsions of human life, everything that seems most settled being disorganized, questions that seemed THE CHILDREN'S AID SOCIETY. 501 forever closed being opened. It is impossible tliat men shall look forward without fear. The man simpl}^ de- clares himself an animal, the man simply declares himself incapable of thoughtful anticijiation, who does not look forward into the days that immediately are to be and the days that lie further off, and feel a great, deep anxiety. It is not a cruel thing, it is not a base thing, it is not a thing for which a man dare to be ashamed for a mo- ment, that something that realty proves him a man makes him anticipate with great joy that which he at the same time anticipates with great anxiety. This world so Avon- derful in which we live, it is impossible for any man to think of it with nobleness — it is impossible for any man to think of it with loftiness and not at the same time to think of it both with fear and hope. We rejoice in the great forces that are ever taking possession of it. We rejoice that the years to come are going to be greater than the years that have been, and yet we know that in them there is much that threatens danger. The man who lives in this world without a sense of danger lives but an ani- mal and a brutal life. The man who lives in this world "without a sense of danger lives also without a sense of opportunity, for in every world of God that we have ever known the two are absolutely bound together, and it is impossible to separate tliem from each other. Now, one of the things which impresses itself, it seems to me, is that this perpetual sense which we see in every thoughtful face and recognize in every thoughtful mind, that sense of dan- ger in the days to be, has also a strange beauty. The recuiTence of evils permanent and eternal promotes the strongest human life. Men do not know what the effect of these new elements will be, and therefore they are being thrown back again, as they never perhaps have been, cer- tainly not for many generations before, upon the simplest and most primal forces of human life, certain that in them, 502 ESSAYS AXB ADDRESSES. however impossible it may be for any man, however wise he is, to anticipate their apphcation, in them must lie the real safety of Iniman life in the dangers in which it is going to be launched forth on that new century whose brink we have almost reached. We come back to those great, everlasting, primitive, primal things which must be the salvation of the world in the future as in the past. This world of ours may have this great characteristic, that it is at once most complicated in its conception of life and at the same time it grows more and more to put great stress and value upon the everlasting, primal, simplest things of human life. It seems to me all this comes di- rectly into ayjplication with that which we are thinking al)out to-night. The world is to be full of complications which we cannot read. Wliat is to keep the world safe in the midst of all these dangers? The great, everlast- ing, primal things underlying history. In new regions of danger, amid forces of greater comprehensiveness than ever before, it is human character. It is the simple nature of man, known in his divineness as the child of God. It is the relation in which man stands in intimate affection and in perpetual and mutual dependence upon his fellow- man. It is the state largely organized and simplified with the great idea of democracy or government of the people. It is the constitution of human society as man stands most intimately and at the same time most simply related to his fellow-man. It is the family made more noble and divine in order that it may be the saving element of the great complications of the future even more than it has been in anj^ of the ages of the past. And in connection with all this it is childhood with its power estimated, its dignity maintained, its critical importance made manifest. With the care for every human creature recognized as the duty of every other human creature, he can touch any hu- man creature that needs care with his help. THE CHILDREN'S AID SOCIETY. 503 This seems to me to be the secret of the whole matter that is behind the fear for the future, tliat great proven faith which I do beheve is at the bottom of the heart of man to-day more than in any age that has ever passed, Jie g-reat proven faith in the simple, primal forces of hu- manity and society, the government of the family and of G-od, They are going to be the preservation of the future as the}' have been the preservation of the past. Because the bad child in the next ten years is going to be capable of doing more evil than the bad child has been able to do in any past years, therefore it is that men go back again and fasten themselves upon those great things to which they have sometimes been indifferent ; therefore it is that they are appealed to by the absolute simplicity of a society like this. What is it that it is trying to do ? Simply to take the child and make him a child again. Simply to bring him back to those days of bright, sunny innocence, of the freshness of human life, to bring him back again so that he may fulfil the first period of human life and carry forth into it the indestructible power with which the subsequent periods of his human life are to be laid. Let us obey the great inspiration of our time. Let us be afraid for the future. I;et us recognize that man is going in upon a more critical period of his existence than he has ever lived in before. Let us rejoice in such assurances, but let us only dare to rejoice in so far as we give what strength it is possible for us to inspire in these gi"eat preservative forces which ever have been and ever must be the salvation of the world. The power of a generation, just think what it is ! We sometimes personify generations and centuries. The eighteenth, the seventeenth, the sixteenth centuries, to the student of history, stand forth distinct and clear. We can see exactly what they are. We can look into their faces. We can hear the tread with which thev move 504 ESSAYS AND ADDRESSES. along" tlie stages of liistoiy. So it is with every genera- tion. It has its personal life. It has its personality, Wliat this society is trjdng to do, in other words — for that is the real value of such a meeting and of such an organization as this — that power or disposition of human nature which this society moves in a small way, in a little degree, is the solemn i-esponsihility of generation for generation. Looking at it in a large wa}^, I think that is what this society is doing, and the world that this society represents. It is doing for the next generation precisely what the father and the mother do for the child whose life they have brought into this world, and whom they are to leave here in this M^orld after they have passed away. The father and mother build the home, gather the true enjoyments of human life, and provide for the educa- tion of the child, smooth just as many of the first footsteps as it is possible to make plain, and only dismiss hiin from their care when the time comes that they must pass away to higiier worlds, and must leave him here to fight the battles and meet the experiences of life. Generation does that for generation just as the father or mother does it for the child. This which ^^'e are doing is simply the manifest exj)ressiou of that sense of responsibihty and privilege which belong to a generation as it sends forth the next generation into life. The work is going on through all our homes. Everywhere where children are being educated by the sweet, natural influences of father- hood and motherhood the next generation is being fitted for its work. He who trains a little child in the house- hold is doing something more than simply making an heir for his property and a jjerpetuator of his fame. He is building also part of that great human life that is to come after this special little bit of human life in which we have been living. Here are fragments, waifs and strays cast aside. We will bring them also and incorporate them TEE CHILDREN'S AID SOCIETY. 505 into the power of tliat generation which is to come after ourselves. Poor is the life of any man, poor is the gen- eration of mankind that says, '■'■ We care not what comes after we are gone." It is a beautiful provision of Him who made not merely individual but corporate and con- tinuous human life, that man may care for that which is to come after hun, that the father and mother may care for their child, that the generation may care for the gen- eration that is to be ; and so when you pick the child out of the gutter, and when you lead down the httle child from the court-room where he has been condemned for a crime whose name and nature he can hardh^ understand, you are helping to build that future whose reflex power is adding the richest and loftiest power to the present life which we are living now. It seems to me he that acts for childhood is in a large sense acting for humanity, he is acting with such bright hope. I believe in every good institution. I believe in the institutions wliere old men are gathered at the end of their lives that the last lapping of the wave upon the beach may be calm in the twilight, however the tmnult of the storm may have been raging out at sea. It is all beautiful, the softening of the ends of life, and it is not destitute of hope to him Avho believes that every life that fails most here opens into some new opportunity beyond the stars. But surely there is a supreme presence of hopefulness when we are alile to take him in whom the years of the future lie yet unopened, him who has not 3'et inanifested the thing that is in him, when we are able to take him and stock his life with strength from our life, to free it from hiudi'ances, and say, " Go forth, and be the thing God made yow. to be." It is a rich sense of the niysterj' of human being, simple and distinct in itself, that seems to me to be a wonder that groAvs on us the longer we live, and makes this world so beautiful that 506 ESSAYS AND ADDRESSES. we dread with every anticipation the time when we shall be called to go away from it. We talk abont the mys- tery of the great men who have manifested the splendid powers of om* human life in their snpremest exhibi- tion. We talk about Martin Luther and William Shake- speare. We say how mj'sterious they are. Well, the mys- tery is not in their greatness. The mystery is in their commonness. The mystery is in their humanity. The poorest little waif upon your streets, the poorest little ruffian that steals at the cart-tail, there is a mystery about him which, when you look at him, baffles philosophers and laughs philosophy to scorn. Ask this little creature on the street what it was he was doing j^esterday. He says he remembers yesterday he went to West Philadel- phia or he went to Camden. Do you take in the infinite mystery there is about that? What is it for that little creature to remember? Where has been stowed away that experience of yesterday which now he brings up and hands as if it were a billet out of his pocket to show to me f Mystery that with all thinking and dreaming, Avith all singing and prophesying, men are no nearer to to-day than they were when the first men were puzzled by the everlasting inystery of human life. Now, to touch that mysteiy in its childhood, to touch that mystery before it is poured into the specific and different ways of life which it is going to manifest by and by, to take, not the doctor nor the merchant, not the young student nor the young criminal, but him in whom there is simply the absolute humanity, him in whom there is human life undivided and unnamed, simple human life. He who helps a child helps humanity with a distinctness, with an immediateness, which no other help given to human creatures in any other stage of their human life can possibly give again. He who puts his blessed influence into a river blesses the land to which that river is to flow: but he THE CHILDREN'S AID SOCIETY. 507 who puts liis iuflueuce into the fountain where the river comes out puts his influence €ver;y"Avhere. No land it may not reach. No ocean it may not make sweeter. No bark it may not bear. No wheel it may not turn. Sometimes we get at things best by their contraries. Learn, my friends, the rich beauty of helping a child by the awful- ness of hurting a child. The thing men have always shuddered at most, the thing men have seemed to recog- nize as marking the deepest and most essential meanness of human nature, is hurting a child ; hurting a child even in liis physical frame, so that he weeps, shrieks, and cries ; hurting him still more in soul and in mind. The thing that made the Divine Master indignant as He stood there in Jerusalem was that He dreamed of seeing before Him a man who had harmed some of these little ones, and He said of any such ruffian, " It were better for him that he never had been born." If it is such an awful thing to hurt a child's life, to aid a child's life is beautiful. I sometimes think how it would be if midtitude were tak- en away aud we saw in its simplicity that which often loses itself in the large variety in which it is manifested to us. vSuppose there were but one needy child in all the world. Suppose every child from China to Pei'u were wrapped in the soft care and tender luxury which belong to children in their parents' arms. Suj^pose every babe were cooing itself to rest in its mother's embrace, and everj- little boy were looking up into the face of a father's syinpathy for the first manifestation of a truth that was to make him strong. Then suppose that somewhere, anywhere upon our earth, there came one cry of a poor, MTonged, needy child. Can you not be sure that all humanity would lift itself up aud never be satisfied until that child was aided ? Is it less pathetic, is it less appealing, because they are here by the million instead of one or two ? If one of those little creatures that the doctor read to us about had stood 508 jfiSSAYS AND ADDRESSES. alone in all the generations of humanity, how infinitely pathetic it would have been ! How you all would have stood up and said, "Where is that child f Where is that child? Life shall not be life to us until we have reheved it, until those poor limbs have been straightened and those arms made strong, until those bleared eyes have been taught to see, and that voice has sung some of the fii'st beginnings of the song of life." Well, there are hundreds and thousands and millions of them. They look up to you from the gutter as you walk the street. They look into the face of the good, kind judge as he sits upon his bench. They come stretching out their poor sick arms to the doctors in the hospitals, and you can help them. You can help them. Help them just as you would if there were only one of them, by giving your sympathy, your blessing, your loud praise, and your large contribu- tions to the Cliildren's Aid Society. TWO HUNDRED AND SEVENTY-SECOND ANNI- VERSARY OF THE LANDING OF THE PILGRIMS. (New England Society, Brooklyn, N. Y., December 21, 1892.) Brother New-Englanders : I bring yon most cordial gi-eeting from New England. It is indeed a privilege to be allowed to bring a greeting from sucli a mother to such sons who have gathered around her for love during these festal days. We left her this morning, some of us who love her, for the sake of being here with you this evening, resting there in the same familiar beauty "with which you have known her aU your life ; looking back upon her past, as she opened her eyes upon her birthday, with the same old spirit, the same perpetual sense of duty, and the same expectation that every one of her children shall do his duty, which she gathered from the old land from which she came and which she has given down to all her chil- dren. Truly it is good thus to come from every part of New England with the quick speed which belongs to these modern days, and to stop here among these happy exiles and to see them by the waters of their Babylon, with their harps taken down from the trees, trying to sing the Lord's song in a strange land; bearing in mind that if they re- member not Jerusalem in their mirth their tongues wiU cleave to the roofs of their mouths. Our thoughts turn Bibleward, because we are speaking of Bible men. There is one word in the New Testament which seems as if it 509 510 ESSAYS AND ADDRESSES. were a g^reetina: wliich one wants to bring to-niglit. It is the beginning of one of the great epistles, that of James, " to the Twelve Tribes which are scattered abroad," which is a proper greeting : be snre that if you never forget New England, New England will never forget yon. And she rejoices perpetually not simph^ in that which lies behind, but in that which lies before ; in the anticipa- tion of what her children are to do, in the knowledge of what her children are doing, all through the land, all through the world. I am quite sure that if I looked over the series of speeches which fortunate men have been privileged to make on these occasions, I should find two strains pervading them all : one of rejoicing that they themselves inherit and keep alive perpetuall}^ the spirit and blood of Puritanism; and the other of congratula- tion that Puritanism had gone aln'oad bej'^ond themselves and was impregnating with the largest life and the best thoughts the action of the world. The first of these we can never forget. I can imagine how a great man's sons must feel. I can imagine how the childi*en of Shakespeare, the children of Milton, the childi'en of Webster, and the children of Lowell must feel when they find that what has been familiar to them all their days has been taken up and made the heritage and possession of all the world ; not merely as creatures belonging to the great human race, not merely as those who have to do with all the life of humanity, but as those who have been bound to that personality in their own association, do they rejoice in the fame and character and in the undying memor}^ of him whom the world honors and who is especially and pecu- liarly theirs. So we feel about Puritanism. It is the world's, but it is peculiarly ours. We have our own per- sonal associations with it ; we have the legends of our ancestr}^, and the stories of our homes are full of that spirit which is more and more pervading the life of all THE LANDING OF THE PILGRIMS. 511 the world. The great step that shakes the substance of the earth as it moves on its way has shaken the rafters of the honse in which we Hve. The voices to whicli we listen to-day sang- the lullaby which soothed us to sleep. In the power of its spirit Puritanism has gone and is to go more and more ; but there is coming to us a deeper sense of how good it is that we ourselves belong in the very heart of it and have it peculiarly for our own. For it is to be found not simply in the legends of our history and in the traditional stories of onr homes, but we feel it in our blood. There is some compensation in a man's growing older when he knows that he is holding out to other men those conditions of his life which show the more clearly in him the older he grows. There is not one of us who does not find the Puritan in some of the worst and most malign aspects of his life; but the Puritan also ennobles, manifesting himself the better the older he grows. We see his spirit even in the faces of the chil- dren, and in their clothes, and in their character, which they have inherited from their ancestors, and we rejoice in it all. We see it strongly in men who have sprung from the stock which first belonged to the Puritans ; in the conceptions and in the ideas which they had when they li\'ed upon the eai'th, in the days which are pecu- liarl}' stamj)ed with their histor}'. It shows itself in mul- titudes of wa.}'s ; it shows itself iii. the way in which tlie Puritan is always a disappointing man. He seems to be a selfish creatm-e, he seems to be a harmless, self -centered creature; but there is always showing itself out of the depths of Puritanism perpetually the great public spirit which meddles with the things of all the earth, and which will show its force when that force is called for. It stands like a rusty gun in a corner of the room ; but let no man ever fool with Puritanism, thinking the thing is not loaded, for by and by it will go off. It is the essential positive- 512 ESSAYS AND ADDEESSES. uess of the thing that has force and life that is going- to show itself whenever needed. We should all rejoice in Puritanism, and in our own personal association with Puritanism, and bear its marks upon us as we bear its signs and traditions in our Ijlood. I suppose the real prooi that we are Puritans is that Ave are proud of being Puritans ; which nobody but a Puritan would be. Pui'itanism is expressing itself through all the life of all the world. Just see : when we look back into the sev- enteenth century it seems as if we were looking to those days of Pui-itanism when the world gathered its forces for a new departure. Out of the great fountain of the seventeenth century the great springs of modern life have flowed, and they open themselves more and more as the centuries go on. What forces seem to be working in the world to-day ! You can trace them far back. As you do so they all seem to find theii" origin and combination in the seventeenth century, from which they spread them- selves abroad to work in the world, and which has been in the development of those forces which then started, when Puritanism was the very heart and core of their life. We may recount in the simple names of the first Puritans the watchwords of the times in which they lived. What have they done °? These things are now perfectly familiar to us ; they are the watchwords of the people. They are : first, religious liberty. Religions liberty sprung up in the seventeenth century, and it has lived ever since. Next, popular government; the right of the people to govern themselves led up to and into Abraham Lincoln's " gov- ernment of the people, by the people, and for the people." Tliird, popular education, so that no man is counted too poor to know the best things in the universe of God ; and every man is poorer just in proportion as he fails to know the truth of which the world is full. And last, trustee- ship of the world, and especially of the land and country THE LANDING OF THE PILGRIMS. 513 in which a nation lives. Those are the foui- things that have made the modern history of the whole world, and especially the modern history of America, because here has been the livest life of all the world during these two hundred years. I look back to the old Book with which the Puritan was so familiar, from which he drew the types, the pat- terns, and the foi'ms from which his ideas were always shaping themselves. The Book was always before his mind. In the picture of the second chapter of the majes- tic Book in which his whole life lived, there is the repre- sentation of that which his life was to be, the life of the world that was to come after him. There was always before him that old picture of the Book of Genesis, and those simple words in which it was recorded for him, as for us, that " out of the Garden of Eden there came forth a river" — a watered garden — and from thence it was parted and divided into four heads, like a Puritan sermon. It embodied the Puritan life ; and the great river Avas divided into four heads : Pison, Gihon, Hiddekel, and Eu- phrates, and went into possession of the world in all its various forms. The first great river which went forth was that of religious liberty, which laid hold of the deep- est life of man and realized that liberty for the feeblest child of God. Then the river of popular government went forth. Then there was another river which went forth reaching for the knowledge of all that is knowable. Then another issue came, the trusteeship of the land, the occu- pation of it for a moment by any race, until they should fill it with a fuller and completer life ; because the land is the responsibilit}' for the whole human race, of any gen- eration and any nation for the period in which it lives. Now, my friends, I know how easy it is to look back in our history and claim those great principles which spring forth from Puritanism. I know how the religious liberty 514 ESSAYS AND ADDRESSES. of tlie men in Pljonoiitli was nnder perpetual litigation, and that they never freed themselves from the lives against which they themselves rebelled. I know how popular government was always haunted by the spirit of aristoc- racy which had preceded it. I know how the search for truth was forever hampered by the preconception which it seemed must forever rest upon the human mind, and which could never let it become absolutely free. I know how the possession of the land for the moment seems again and again to give the right of absolute possession to every one who takes up his residence within it. And never yet have our Puritans themselves appreciated the fulness of the life they embody. But it is out of that Gar- den that the river of Eden has flowed off in its four branches, Pison and Gilion and Hiddekel and Euphrates, which is more and more taking possession of the world. It seems to me, my friends, most seriously on such an occasion as this, that the great question of our time is this : How do these four great principles stand in the conceptions of mankind "? What is the power which they have gained for themselves ? What force do they assume over the nation's heart to-day? That is the question which men are forever going to ask when they gather, as on this occasion, as Puritans. Where do religious liberty, popular government, universal education, and the trustee- ship of the world for the future stand in the conception of the coming generation ? I do not think I can misin- terpret the time, or the view you take of it, when I say, with regard to every one of these great principles, that there is to-day upon the minds of men a certain strange sense of disappointment. There is a misgiving with re- gard to every one of them. There is a misgiving with re- gard to religious liberty, lest it should go too far. There is also a doubt with regard to popular government in the minds of men ; there is a certain disposition to feel dis- THE LANDING OF THE PILGRIMS. 515 trust in universal suffrage, tlie great charter of our exis- tence, the life-blood of our life. There is a certain dispo- sition in the heart of man to have deep misgivings with regard to universal education, as to whether it may not be so broad that men may be unfitted for the work which they have to do in the world, and whether we may not have to close our school-doors and close our school-books that have been once opened. There is a doubt with re- gard to the trusteeship with which every nation and every age holds the earth on which it lives for all humanity and for the posterity that is to come, and by which it is to make it fit for the purposes of its trust and fit to bestow the great life which is in it for the blessing of mankind. Is there not a sense of disappointment, to-day, haunting the thoughts of very many thoughtful menf Is it not good for us, the sons of the Puritan builders, Puritans ourselves, to tliink of this great misgiving in many people's minds, and to insist that these are the great principles which were in the Puritans' blood which has flowed forth in the centuries, and that these are the truths through which we must live in all the ages that are to come ? There are several kinds of disappointment. There is the disappointment which looks back, and there is the disap- pointment which looks forward and presses continually onward. There is the disappointment which sees the evil of that which it has trusted, and would fling it away be- cause the light is too rich and blinding for human eyes to bear. That is the disappointment of despair. There is a disappointment which is full of inspiration, which sends the disappointed man deeper into the heart and soul of the thing which he has begun to distrust and in regard to which he has had misgivings, and which makes him study it more deeply; which makes him believe it with deeper faith, and more and more, so far as in him lies, bring it to its fullest application. Our people are never 516 ESSAYS AND ADDRESSES. going to cease to believe in those four great powers which have come forth out of the Puritan life. Religious liberty, in order that it should have its full power, should be made not the destroyer but the nurse, and the producer, of an intense personal conviction, without which it can never be complete. And a great government of the people by the peoj^le must be impregnated with a strict sense of duty ; a people governing themselves must know the duty which belongs to the principle of its government. And we do not doubt that our system of public education will have to be revised and reconstructed so that what a man ought to know shall be accessible. And then, through popular education for all men, there can be brought to our knowledge the great purpose and ideal which must be set before us — the trusteeship of our land for all human- ity. We are never going to lose that conception ; it may be, it must be, in order that we may make our land the blessing that it should be to all the world, that we shall stand guard over it from time to time. It may be that some day we shall receive into it the lives of the oppressed, the lives of the degraded. We shall exclude them for the moment, and, it may be, stand guard over the quantity in order that we may make more sure of the quality of that to which we shall welcome all the world. The one thing, it seems to me, that we ought to do to-day in regard to this whole matter of the limitation of access to our land, is to keep the true principle in view which lies behind it all. If the desire be to hold exclusively for our own inter- est, even our own best interest, the land to Avhich our lives have come first, then it is unworthy of the way in which we have stood before the world for these past generations. But if, more than that, it is because we feel so profoundly the trust that God has given to us in this America of ours, that we desire to keej) her pure and to receive into her that which she has abundant power to assimilate, so that THE LANDING OF THE PILGRIMS. 517 she shall be able forever to receive into a higher life, a life higher than theirs, those who come to ns out of the darkness of other lands, then this limitation is not a re- versal of the position which our nation has assumed in the past, that we are the home of the oppressed ; but it is simply keeping the home of the oppressed so that the oj)- pressed may come to her and shake their chains off upon the beach and live the full lives of intelligent and well- grown citizens within her borders. It seems to me that the one great thing to do is to keep uj) the standards of our national life, and to do in new ways precisely the same thing which it has been necessary to do in the old ways in other days. I believe that those strange gentlemen who play at baseball have a way in which they can fling a ball with a certain knowledge, that in a certain direction, at a certain distance, and at a cer- tain moment, that ball is going to change the direction in which it has been moving to another direction by the same force which they imparted to it at first. Whether I am right al^out that or not, that is what liistory is always doing : sending forth her impulse with the certainty that she will change the direction, with the certainty that the impulse will be the same in the new direction as in the old. So it is that religious liberty and popular govern- ment should never be restrained out of temporary fear. And universal education, finding the deepest and truest substances on which it shall feed the young, and the best methods by which the food shall be administered, shall build itself deeper and higher, and the school-doors shall be opened wider and wider as the years go on ; and the great and solemn sense of a trust for mankind shall grow, so that each man shall know that the ground on which he stands is given to him in trust, and that the great ocean, with its dancing waves and rolling tides, was given to him for a nol)le and universal purpose also. When we feel 518 i:SSA¥S AXD JDDEESSES. tliis, then we are able to gather together around these festive tables under circumstances which are so different from those which greeted our ancestors at Plymouth, and to declare, on such occasions as these, that Puritanism is not an isolated thing in the world; that it is not their simple standing in history that we are going to admii'e at a distance. What the world needs to-day is more Puri- tanism, and not less Puritanism. It is our growing con- sciousness that there is in Puritanism the force waiting at the door, touching the springs of action of the world at all times. That is the essential and eternal Puritanism ; not merely the memory of the past, but the presence of the sense of duty, and the presence of God, and the ever- lasting presence of the ideal in the lives of men, in the lives of nations, and in the lives of humanity, of Avhich we make a part. We have gone so far away from l^uri- tanism to-day that we may look upon it as a mount, stand- ing in history. We can see how great it was, but it is a very poor thing if we simply make it an object in the his- torical landscape. The rivers coming from that mount must take our lives into their torrent ; must make us re- joice in the past be(.*ause it has exhibited itself more richly in the future in which we live to-day. And all the while we must hear what these Puritans heard, the great boom- ing and rushing of the sea of God, the sea of the completed life of man, moving in obedience to the law of God, in which they rejoiced and which was the inspiration of theu' life and belief. So, embodied in the past, uttered in the present, and anticipating the future, too great for any man to know, is the true Puritanism. Such Puritans may we be ; such Puritans I think we are to-night. THE PUBLIC-SCHOOL SYSTEM. Somewhat to the surprise of many people, and yet as the inevitable result of causes which have been at work ever since our public-school system was set in operation, that system is now the subject of the most serious ques- tionings, and its whole future is such as no man can con- fidently predict. We have boasted of it as if it were almost a perfect thing. It has seemed to be at once the most fertile root and the most beautiful flower of our peculiar civilization. It has been held up as the rebuke and pattern of the Old World. And now, almost suddenly, we hear men debating whether it is really good and wise, and whether, if it is not seriously reformed, the prosperity of the country will not suffer. These questionings arise, no doubt, in part from the anxiety with which men are looking everywhere and ques- tioning everything to find the causes for the patent evils of our political and social life. But they are partly also the ripened utterance of misgivings wdiose seeds have loug lain in thoughtful minds. Whoever deals, however slightly, with the subject must look back and see some- thing of the origin of the state of things in which we were educated and under which we live. The common statement and the general boast of Amer- icans has been that in our American polity there is an entire separation of Church and State. But nothing can be clearer than that such a separation was very far from 519 520 ESSAYS AND ADDRESSES. the thought of the founders of many of the colonies from whose union our nation sprang. Alike in Puritan New Enghxnd, in orthodox Pennsylvania and Delaware, and in the churchly South, the provinces of religion and govern- ment, though not counted identical, continually overran each other. This condition of things lasted until the Revo- lution, and even in the Declaration of Independence a religious basis is freely claimed for the newly asserted rights. When the Constitution is formed all appeal to religion disappears. It is a purely secular instrument, and only mentions religion to declare that it shall be for- ever excluded from an influence in the selection of the officers of government. This fact was owing, doubtless, to the times in which the Constitution was drawn, and to the fact that so many of its fi'amers shared in the spirit of those times. But from then until now the theory of our general government has been wholly secular. But for many years the state of things which belonged to our earlier history, and which was perpetuated in some of our State governments, preserved a presence and influ- ence of religion in some departments of our life, and per- haps most notably of all in the department of our educa- tion. Our schools had been in their foundation closely united to the churches. The same men who built the one had built the other, and as, especiaU}^ in New England, they had valued and provided for intelligence and learning in the churches, they had with equal care preserved and pro- vided for religion in the schools. We have, then, for a century been living under a gov- ernment theoretically secular, and 3'et that government has supported a public education in which religion was a recognized and enforced element. It is the culmination of this incongruity which we are meeting now. So long as, with all the formal exclusion of religion, the mass of our people were of essentially similar belief, and the tone of THE PUBLIC-SCHOOL SYSTEM. S21 religious feeling which pervaded our life modified the administration of our system without challenge, all went well ; but during the last centmy certain slow but sure changes have taken place. First, the whole conception of life, public and private, has grown more and more secular ; second, our population has become mixed by im- migration with immense umnbers of people of quite differ- ent religious beliefs from those of our first citizens ; thii'd, the idea of toleration and the rights of men have been immensely developed, and latterly the new methods of political action have made it less possible for anything to be done by general consent or by local law which is not in harmony with the fundamental theory and genius of our institutions. Under the pressure of these influences, the religious element has been steadily pushed out of our system, and it has disappeared from our educational work, leaving nothing behind except the practice of reading a portion of the Scriptures at some of the exercises of our public schools. I claim that this is a fair statement of what has been going on. Our public schools have been steadily conform- ing themselves to the secular character of all our public institutions. And the question which is agitating people's minds now, and which was really the issue of the last election in Ohio, is not whether the pulilic schools shall be secular or religious. That is settled, and they are secu- lar. It is whether a certain syml^ol of a character which they once j^ossessed shall be retained now that their char- acter is gone. I know that a certain positive value may be given to it, and if the reading of the Bible be per- formed by a religious man in a religious spirit it may certainly give something of saeredness and consecration to the school work which succeeds, but this is very little, and to require its reading by teachers who have been ap- pointed to their places with no reference to their fitness 522 ESSAYS AXD ADDRESSES. for this duty is surely to expose the sacred Book to care- less treatment, if not to wantou insult. But this, I think, is not the ground on which its use is urged. It is as the assertion of a religious character in our school system. It is as the symbol of something which is felt to be so feeble a reahty that without this symbol it would not be recognized — of something which has really passed away. It is analogous to that which some good people are very anxious to secure, the insertion of the name of God in the preamble to the Constitution of the United States — and is subject to the same criticism which that attempt suggests, that if it is real it is not needed, and if it is needed it is not real. As to the question of the right of the State to order the use of the Bible the case seems plain. The proper authority may command the subjects to be taught and the books from which instruction shall be given in the public schools. If they choose to command that morals shall be included in the course of teaching, and that the Gospels or any part of the Bible shall be the text-book, they have the perfect right to do so. And a mere protest of the Roman Catholic Church that the use of that Book is not allowed b}^ its religion is of no more weight than if it blankly asserted that the Copernican astronom^^ or the science of geolog}^ or the accepted theories of history were Protestant or infidel and must be cast aside. Any religious sect with any arl3itrar3^ dogma might block the education of a whole community. It is not, then, because it is unjust or illegitimate, but because its use is not a living practice but a dead symbol, that it seems right to yield to that demand for the disuse of the Bible which the Roman Catholics and others urge so strongly. And then what will our schools become '? The answer is, first, that they will be what they are now. A symbol THE PUBLIC-SCHOOL SYSTEM. 523 which represents no reality will have been di'opped. The schools are secular ah-eady, and they will be so still. No perceptible difference will show the feeling. The schools of Chicago, where the Bible is not read, are now essen- tially like the schools of Boston, where its use is still en- forced. But incidentally a plausible pretense of grievance will have been removed, and the Catholic, who ever since the Papal EueycUcal of 1864, however it may previously have been, is the inevitable and irreconcilable enemy of our whole system, will be compelled to put his opposition on its real ground and blankly state the only remedy which he really descries. But still the secular school is not of necessity an irre- Ugious school. President Grant is not very clear in his mind when he wants to forbid " the teaching in said schools of religious, atheistical, or pagan tenets." He would have a school where it shall not be taught that there is a God, nor yet that there is not a God, where his- tory, for instance, shall neither have a Christian nor a pagan exposition. It nuist have one or the other. And what exposition it has, what color it receives, -will depend upon the current thought or tone of the community in which the school is as expressed by a representative man or woman as the teacher. Again, the school here is anal- ogous to the civil government. A secular government administered in Christian lands by Christian men will act on Clu-istian principles, and so a school without a verse out of the Bible, in a Christian city, and taught by Chi-is- tian teachers, will be in a true sense a Christian school, full of a Christian spirit. I have kno"s^^l teachers in our public schools who, without violating in the least the let- ter or the spirit of the laws under which they held their post, have had that truly Christian influence upon their scholars which a true Christian must exercise on those 524 ESSAYS AND ADDRESSES. with whom he deals in the most secular relations. I would rather see a religious teacher in a secular school than an irreligious man bound to the most punctilious performance of religious rites. The school is the most sensitive point of the community after the family. Per- haps it even precedes the Chiu'ch in this regard, and there will always be a positive strong tendency in every school to catch and copy the tone and color of the community where it is set. If the town is religious so its public school will be. If the town is pagan its public school will be pagan too, in spite of any imposed hereditary cere- monies. If this be all true, and the secular character be thus stamped upon our public education, then the question comes right to the root of things. What shaU a Chris- tian man think of the whole matter? How shall he act? Is the public-school system, then, a blessing or a curse ? What kind of education shall we give our influence to help and foster ? And there are really three alternatives, three plans of education which alone any practical man can contemplate as possible. Let us see what they are. First, it is conceivable tliat the public money raised by general taxation for education should be appropriated in part at least to various religious bodies, to be applied by them to the support of schools under their own manage- ment, with more or less of government supervision. This is what the Roman Catholic Church is really seeking. This is what to some extent has been found possible in the revised educational system of England, but there, although the experiment has not been tried long enough to be decisive, it has already develoj^ed serious difficulties, and the advocates of purely secular schools are becoming stronger and stronger. With us the obstacles in the way of such a project seem to be these. The body who would THE PUBLIC-SCHOOL SYSTEM. 525 most of all avail themselves of it are the Roman Catholics, the body which fui-uishes to the country the largest amount of ignorance and the smallest amount of money. It would be mainly a plan for educating Roman Catholic children in a religion whose fundamental tendencies are hostile to the first ideas of our republic, and would abolish at once the strongest and healthiest of influences by which at present the juvenile Irishman and Irishwoman are appro- priated and assimilated into the life of the land to which a mysterious Providence has brought them. But looking wider, and taking in all the denominations, the objections to such a proposition seem to be three : first, it would lower the standard of education, for the religious bodies, being organized and governed for quite other purposes, are not, and it is not at all likely that they could be, adapted to the work of thorough, systematic education ; secondly, it would intensify and perpetuate every evil which belongs now to our mass of sects, creating a whole new class of jealousies, and initiating even children into the spirit which we dread in men and women ; and thirdly, it would drop some children, probably many, out alto- gether, through the gaps and joints of such a patchwork, and, destroying the possibility of any uniform and homo- geneous culture, would condemn other children who had the misfortune to be born in an illiterate sect to such poor teaching as their sect thought satisfactory. The next suggestion would be that all public provision for education should be abandoned, that there should be no taxation for any schools, but that every religious body should be left to provide as it thought best for the educa- tion of its own children. It seems as if no practical man, really looking at the facts of the case, could give his vote to such a plan as that. Only some theorist, who took the broad ground that education was the sacred responsibility of the Church alone, with which the State had no right to 52G ESSAYS AND ADDRESSES. meddle, conld be its advocate. It has been advocated by two such different theorists as the Bisliop of Tennessee and the late Mr. Gerritt Smith. But any man who looks at the ability which the Church shows, or gives us any reason to expect that it would show, to support such schools as we require sees instantly the blank impossibiUty. There would be an utter absence of any power to enforce contri- butions. And almost all the evils which I specified under the last suggestion are just as certain here. The Church and society, education and religion, would find it equally disastrous. It is hard to say which it would harm most. It is a pretty di-eam for some town rector who holds up his model parish school, but it seems as if even his mind must be appalled when he compares his puny machinery with the mass of ignorance that lies grimly defying us to turn it into knowledge. If any country could have lived on such a system it would have been England, with her established faith and her traditions and her wealth and her old parish schools. And in the establishment of the national-school system there is a clear confession that she could not rely upon spontaneous religious and charitable provision for the education of her people. Of both these plans before I leave them let me say that they have, besides all else which I have suggested, the in- herent vice of narrowness. Much as we love our Chm-ch, we must know that with all her capacity for universality she is practically and at present partial. She represents only certain elements out of the whole range either of the general human or the special American life. And to be trained wholly within her care would be for the young American to lose both the knowledge of and the share in other elements which would add to the richness and use- fulness of his life. Nothing is left, then, but the thii'd possibility. And what is that ? The secular school pure and simple, the THE PUBLIC-SCHOOL SYSTEM. 527 scliool where the Bible is not read nor any religious in- struction given. I have already said that our schools are essentially just that now. That they are destined to be- come that more and more is perfectly ine\itable. Nobody but King Canute or Mrs. Partington would attempt to stop the tide. And taking, as I have tried to take, everything into the account, I think we could not hesitate, even if the choice were wholly open, to prefer this prospect to either of the others. But with regard to this manifest destinj', or rather this present condition of our public schools, there are one or two things to sa}'. First, it is surely not a condition to rejoice in. It is not a great trium]3h. Rather it is mortifying and distress- ing. It is full of anxious forebodings. It is a witness of the failure of man to bring his Christianity to use where it is most needed. It is the weak spot in our secular the- ory of government. It is a sad witness of the sectarian condition of Christendom. It is a waiving, not an answer- ing, of the hard question. And President Grant is ui-ging the best that we can do, but not by any means the best conceivable, Avhen he l)ids us "leave the matter of religion to the family altar, the Church, and the private school, supported entirely by private contril^utions." We accept his policy heartily, but we cannot cheer over it when w^e remember the multitudes of children whom no religious influence fi'om family or Church ever reaches, but wlio are gathering in our secular schools a knowledge and bright- ness which without moral principle must be the ruin of a state Hke ours. And again, one result of the distinct recognition of the purely secular character of our public schools must be in the withdrawal of many children whose parents insist upon religion being mingled with their instruction. It 528 ESSAYS AND ADDRESSES. can only be seen in time how large such a withdrawal may be, and how it may affect the stabihty of the whole system by weakening- the interest in it of those people in the community without whose moral support and sympa- thy it cannot stand. And yet, again, the question comes at once to Christian people and the Christian churches : What can we do, ac- cepting the secular school, and so losing all help in our religious work from the public educator, to meet the re- sponsibility that must be thrown upon usf The answer is found in the exhortations to increased faithfulness of parish labor and the widening and deepening of the edu- cation of our Sunday-schools. And no doubt they can do, they have done, very nmch. It is well to note that all along beside the growing secularness of the public school has gone on the growth and steadily increasing- activity of the parish and the Sunday-school. No doubt they will come up to their work more and more. But I look, and it is one of the bright prospects of the whole matter, to another influence, an influence upon religion itself, from this throwing back of responsibil- ity upon its centers and springs. Too often our churches have taught some speculative or sentimental theology and been satisfied with teaching it, vaguely believing that morals, the conduct of life, and practical religion were taught somewhere else. They never went to see what was taught, but they did not feel pressing upon themselves the burden of the people's moral traiiung and its inspira- tion with religious life. If the churches are made to know that burden for their own, if they thus seek and find a theology more near and real to human life, if dogmatic narrowness is forced to expand to human breadth, and the Christian religion is really set to its true task, which is not building churches and bewildering brains, but mak- THE PUBLIC-SCHOOL SYSTEM. 529 ing men, then the change in our conception of the school which forced upon the Church this larger sense of herself and her duties will certainly not be an unmixed evil. When the nation is truly Christian the nation's schools will be Christian without an effort or an act of any school committee. Then a pervading religion will ilow through education as through every other interest. Until that time shall come it is our task to make the secular school as lofty as its nature will allow, and to do what we can to increase in the community that broad and unsectarian religious life which the schools cannot but feel, and to which, when it becomes universal, they must submit them- selves. LETTERS OF TRAVEL. By PHILLIPS BROOKS. 14th Thousand. Large 12 mo. 392 pages, cloth, gilt top, $2.00. White cloth, full gilt, with cloth cover, $2.50. CONTENTS : First Journey Abroad. 1S65-1866. In the Tyrol and Switzerland. 1870. Summer in Northern Europe. 1872. From London to Venice. 1 8 7 4- . England and the Continent. 18 7 7. In Paris, England, Scotland, and Ireland. 1880. A Year in Europe and India. 1882-1883. England and Europe. 18 85. Across the Continent to San Francisco. 18 8 6. A Summer in Japan. 1889. Summer of 189 0. Last Journey Abroad. " Few, if any, of the books of 1893 will attract or deserve more attention. The volume embraces letters to his father, mother, brothers and other relatives. ... To many of these letters a peculiar interest attaches, in that the writer regarded them somewhat in the light of a private journal, and, reclaiming them on his return, pre- served them for the pleasurable reminiscences which they awakened. . . . His biography is in course of preparation, but we are confident that there will be nothing in it which will more accurately reveal the grandly simple character of this great man than do these letters. Here he opens his heart without reserve, and without any thought of being misunderstood." — Boston Daily Advertiser. " We owe a debt of gratitude to the family who have consented thus to open the door and let us sit by Phillips Brooks's side and hear him talk in familiar conver- sation."— The Outlook. " There could be no better memorial of the beloved and eloquent preacher than this volume. It is thoroughly characteristic of the man, and therefore thoroughly delightful. It is full of bright sayings, kindly reminiscences and gleeful, even boyish, talk. Phillips Brooks would never have grown old had he lived a hundred years. His mind and heart were always fresh, and he had such a hopeful way of looking at things that you could not help breaking into happy laughter as he talked. We have enjoyed the volume intensely." — A^. 1". Herald. " They abound in everything which can make such a compilation attractive — ■ pleasing scenes and incident, good company, a light, dignified and vivacious style, and the strong personal charm of a very unusual man driving the quill." — The Independent. " Thousands will read the letters with as much eagerness as if they were written to themselves." — jV. V. Observer. " These letters present a new and winning side of Phillips Brooks's character. They prove that he was at once an acute and sympathetic observer of men and things, that he had a keen sense of the ludicrous, as well as a large fund of bubbling and spontaneous humor ; and that in spite of all the honors that came to him, his heart remained as simple as that of a child. We know of no letters to children published during the present generation more delightful in every way than those included in this volume. In flashes of unexpected humor, and in their genuine and unstudied humanness, they are charming." — N. Y. Tribune. " But to cite all that is pleasant in the book, all that reveals, without any effort at revelation, what was pure and kind and faithful in Bishop Brooks's nature, would be to cite the book entire. . . . From the first letter to the last we feel in the reading that we are learning, perhaps, the most valuable side of a valuable life, and that we are being shown the anchorage of that warm and large heart, to which thousands did honor after it had ceased tn beat, in the narrowing home circle where Bishop Brooks was brother, son, uncle and friend." — N. Y. Times. " His letters are a treat. . . . They bring their readers into a contact with one of the greatest souls of the ages — a contact which cannot fail to benefit any one who feels it." — The Interior (Chicago). Sent by mail., post-paid, on receipt of price. E. P. DDTTON & CO., Publisliers, 31 West 23d Street, New York. THIRTY-FIRST THOUSAND. Phillips Brooks Year Book. SELECTIONS FROM THE WRITINGS OF THE Rt. Rev. PHILLIPS BROOKS, D.D. By H. L. S. and L. H. S. i6mo, 372 pages, gilt top, $1.25. " I am so much impressed with its wonderful insight and the spiritual fitness of the quotations that I desire to express my personal gratitude to the editors for the spiritual help which they have given to me and to thousands of others, by the rare discrimination and excellent taste which they have shown in their happy work. No complaint can be made to the effect that this book does not fairly represent Bishop Brooks. It gives us a great many of his best thoughts, his communion with the Master, his spiritual insights, and his highest aspirations." " One of the richest and most beautiful books of the year in point of contents. ... It would probably be impossible to find in any vol- ume of this size, drawn from distinctively religious writings, a richer fer- tility of spiritual resource and intellectual insight than is to be found in these pages." — The Outlook. " The thoughts are so deep and grand and uplifting, the beauty of the language so great, the selections so varied and so wonderfully chosen, and the poetry as if written for its place in the book! Your country owes you a debt of gratitude for stringing the pearls and arranging the gems so as to bring out their greatest beauty and make apparent their intrinsic value." — From an English Letter. "In looking these over, one is impressed that the compilers must not only have known what was appropriate to select, but must also have been intimately acquainted with the great preacher. We see, even more clearly than we would in reading through the complete volumes of his sermons and lectures, the man and preacher himself." — Zion's Herald, ' ' The stuff out of which the book is mainly made is royal purple, and it is like the sound of a trumpet or the rush of many waters, as one opens his ear to the impassioned voice that speaks in these pages." — Atlantic Monthly. " The fitness of these passages is evident at once, and it must be con- fessed that this work, in the beauty of its selections, in the fitness of its type, and in the simplicity of its binding, is the beau ideal of what a year book ought to be. It is as choice and as delightful as one could wish. Such a work as this will go into thousands of hands and find immediate response, and it is calculated to do a great deal of good. In it Bishop Brooks will still preach to the multitude, and he will lead to heaven and guide people in the right way." — Boston Herald. " Those who have known and loved Phillips Brooks, those who have listened to his glowing words and seen his illumined face, and those who have merely been able to trace his thought in print, will take a tender pleasure in turning the leaves of this " Year Book" compiled by loving hands. It will be a help from day to day ; for the ringing sentences, the wise counsellings and the inciting to a higher life, strong in themselves, seem almost sacred now one feels impelled to heed them." ■ — Boston Transcript. Sent liy maily post-paid^ on receipt of price. E. P. BUTTON & CO., Publishers, 31 W. 23(1 Street, New York. By Bishop Phillips Brooks. Sermons. First Series. 25th Thousand. i2mo. 20 Sermons. 380 pages. Cloth, $1.75. Paper, 50 cents. " Humanity, and not sectarianism, is built up by such sermons as these. Mr. Broolis is a man preaching to men about the struggles and triumphs of men." — N. )'. Tribune. " We emphatically apprise our readers that if they overlook this volume they will miss some of the freshest, most fervent, most truthful, most quickening, most comfort- ing and helping religious discourses which life is likely to bring them. If all preaching were to be like this how we should all wish that great were the company of preachers." — Literary IV or id. Sermons. Second Series. The Candle of the Lord, etc. 20th Thousand. 21 Sermons. 378 pages. Cloth, $1.75 Paper, 50 cents. "Dr. Brooks is wonderfully suggestive in opening men's thoughts in directions which give to life fresh meanings." — .V. V. Times, Sermons Preached in English Churches. Third Series. I2th Thousand. 14 Sermons. 320 pages. Cloth, $1.75. Paper, 50 cents. "He has a message to deliver, it is from God ; he believes in its reality, and he delivers it earnestly and devoutly, and his hearers catch the enthusiasm of his own faith." — Churchman. Twenty Sermons. Fourth Series. I2th Thousand. 378 pages. Cloth, $1.75. Paper, 50 cents. " Mr. Brooks brings to the pulpit the mind of a poet and the devout heart of a Christian, with a very large and generous human personality." — Independent. The Light of the World, and Other Sermons. Fifth Series. I2th Thousand. 21 Sermons. 382 pages. Cloth, $1.75. Paper, 50 cents. " Because he reveals to men with force and beauty their true and deeper selves, meant for all good and right things. Dr. Brooks preaches a word which they ever rejoice to hear, and having heard, can never go away unprofited. His larger parish will cordially welcome these twenty-one sermons." — Literary World. Sermons. Sixth Series. 7th Thousand. i2mo. 20 Sermons. 368 pages. Cloth, $1.75. " How shall we describe these twenty sermons ? They take the old stories told in the Hebrew narratives and fill them with a life that throbs and glows with the breath and blood of to-day. Simplicity and power seem to be the attributes of this preacher. . . . Gladly we welcome this new vial containing the life-blood of a master spirit." — The Critic. " These sermons, in their spirituality of temper, their breadth of sympathy, their insight, and their beautiful literary quality, are quite on a level vi^ith any earlier ser- mons from the same hand. . . . Like its predecessors it is full not only of consola- tion, but also of spiritual stimulus." — The Outlook. Sent by tnail, post-paid, on receipt of price. E. P. DUTTON & CO., Publishers, 31 W. 23(1 Street, New York. LECTURES ON PREACHING. Delivered before the Divinity School of Yale College in January and February, 1877. By the Rev. PHILLIPS BROOKS. Twelfth Thousand. i2mo, 281 pages . . , ^i.jo. " Unlike Robertson, Phillips Brooks continually reminds us of him. He has the same analytical power ; the same broad human sympathy ; the same keen knowledge of human nature, toned and tempered and made the more true by his sympathies; the same mys- terious and indefinable element of divine life, so that his messagje comes with a guast authority, wholly unecclesiastical, purely personal ; and the same undertone of sadness, the same touch of pathos, speaking low as a man who is saddened by his own seeming success, — a success which is to his thought, and in comparison with his ideals, a failure. No minister can read carefully these lectures without getting a profounder sense of the true gra ideur of his work, and a clearer conception of at least some of the secrets of success in its prosecution." — Harper's I\Iazazine. No one in our country has had more continuous or more conspicuous success 11. preaching than Mr. Brooks; and the book he has given us points directly to the princi- ples which underlie his power. No one can read it and go on repeating the proverb, 'as dry as a sermon,' if only sermons shall be conceived and delivered in the moral and in- tellectual atmosphere with which these lectures surround the subject. "The teaching in these lectures is of necessity full of vitality. It is to be compared net so much to a treatise on tactics or an exhortaiion to enlist, as to a strain of martial music inspiring the enthusiasm of a soldier. It is withal very noble and very genuine No theological student could ever read it and doubt that character lav at the bottom of his success. Full of inspiring suggestions as it is, no one could glean from it any comfort in trusting to inspirations and neglecting work and study." — Scribtiers Monthly. "The enthusiasm for the profession which this book displays has contagion in it, be- cause it is not expended on that which separates the profession from other occupations, but on that which it shares with them. Throughout the book runs a single thought nevei lost sight of, — the greater the man the greater the preacher; and again and again, when discoursing of practical methods, the lecturer returns in some form to his golden text, that it is the man behind the sermon which makes the sermon a power. It is because the lecturer, holding this truth firmly, addresses himself to the living facts of a preacher's profession rather than to the mechanism or elaborate organization in which he works, that his words will be life to the living and glittering generalities to the moribund." — Atlantic Monthly. " We do not hesitate to say that they are of more practical value than any work of the sort we have ever seen It is a book to be read for the feeling it awakens, but feel- ing so lofty that it is one with wisdom and truth." — Literary World, " Nothing of the kind can be superior to his first four lectures They might be truly described as an analysis of the elements of Christian manliness, and as a statement of the conditions on which men who preach can hope to win other men. Nearly every page con- tains something over which the reader lingers with delight." — New York Times. " No man, lay or clerical, who likes bright thoughts and clear, artistic expression, can afford to neglect this volume." — A'eiv i'ork Sun. " There is a noble breadth and height and depth to each of these lectures. They are both roomy and full. Of all the courses which have been given on this foundation, we remember none that are more vital, fresh, and inspiring. One does not need to be a mini Ister to read them with great satisfaction and great improvement." — Boston Advertiser " It would be ver7 easy to fill columns with fresh, sagacious, subtile, true observation:: from these pages." — Boston Evenitt^ Tra>iscript. For sale at all bookstores, or sent by fiiail, post-paid, on receipt of price. E. P. DUTTON & CO., Publishers, 31 West 230 Street, New York. By the Rev. Phillips Brooks, D.D. THE INFLUENCE OF JESUS. The Bohlen Lectures for 1879. Fourteenth Thousand. i6mo. 274 pages. Cloth, $1.25. Lecture I. The Influence of Jesus on the Moral Life of Man. " n. The Influence of Jesus on the Social Life of Man. " III, The Influence of Jesus on the Emotional Life of Man. " IV. The Influence of Jesus on the Intellectual Life of Man. " It is written with an open heart toward the thousands who are seeking to find the secret of the fascination which men have in Christ as Man, and will be welcomed in much the same quarters as those in which ' Ecce Homo ' found a hearing ten years ago. It is a strong and healthy book, which has grown out of the life of a strong and healthy man." — A', i'. Times. " The ringing keynote is the Fatherhood of God to all mankind, the favorite idea of this distinguished preacher, and one which he here develops with all his characteristic energy, eloquence and hopefulness." — The Literary World. TOLERANCE. Two Lectures addressed to the Students of Several of the Divinity Schools of the Protestant Episcopal Church. Fourth Thousand. i6mo. III pages. Paper, 50 cents ; cloth, 75 cents. " Mr. Brooks's two lectures in eloquence, sweetness, and literary charm are what he always is when at all equal to himself. For their substance they lay down a doctrine of tolerance which would at a touch bring all sections of Christendom together on the basis of a tolerance which carries in it the promise of spiritual unity." — Independent. " They are marked by the broad and catholic spirit of Dr. Brooks, and are to be commended to all students, and with especial earnestness to seekers after the unity and union of Christians." — -V. 1'. Observer, " It is a book for large-minded men and women of whatever creed or no creed. . . . To appreciate these lectures fully they should be read from the first line to the last. One clear-cut and finely polished sentence follows another in such natural sequence, illustrating each the other, that they form a harmonious and inseparable whole." — Home Joti rnal. " In this his latest contribution to religious thought the eloquent Rector of Trinity Church appears at his best. The subject he has chosen, equally with his mode of treating it, are characteristic of the man." — -V. Y. Times. BAPTISM AND CONFIRMATION. Fifteenth Thousand. Paper, lo cents. THE GOOD WINE AT THE FEAST'S END. A Sermon on Cirowing Old. Paper, 25 cents. A CHRISTMAS SERMON. Paper, 25 cents. AN EASTER SERMON, Paper, 25 cents. THE SYMMETRY OF LIFE. An Address to Young Men. Paper, 25 cents. THE LIFE HERE AND THE LIFE HEREAFTER. In attractive paper covers. 25 cents. For sale by all booksellers, or sent by mail, post-paid, on receipt 0/ prices. E. P. DUTTON & CO., Publishers, 31 West 23d Street, New York. Princeton Theological Seminary-Speer Library 1 1012 01130 3320 Date Due k) ■■- |H! , ^>#ini TV fiMMMfW!' n All. J A.flBW[|^^^y rlRS^M^'**, f)