BX 9833 
 .A43 
 
LIBRARY OF CONGRESS, 
 
 :eX^33 — 
 
 Chap. Copyright No. 
 
 UNITED STATES OF AMERICA. 
 
SEQUEL 
 
 TO 
 
 "OUR LIBERAL MOVEMENT" 
 
SEQUEL 
 
 TO 
 
 a 
 
 Our Liberal Movement" 
 
 BY 
 
 JOSEPH HENRY ALLEN 
 
 LATE LECTURER ON ECCLESIASTICAL HISTORY IN 
 HARVARD UNIVERSITY 
 
 
 t\ 
 
 BOSTON 
 
 ROBERTS BROTHERS 
 
 1897 
 
^ )\V> 
 
 Copyright, 1897, 
 By Joseph Henry Allen. 
 
 ITHB LIB**** 1 
 
 Hnttattg Press: 
 
 John Wilson and Son, Cambridge, U.S.A. 
 
CONTENTS. 
 
 Page 
 
 I. The Old School and its Work .... 1 
 
 II. German Influence . . . ; 22 
 
 III. Forty Years Later 44 
 
 IV. Frederic Henry Hedge 63 
 
 V. Some Younger Memories 97 
 
 James Freeman Clarke 98 
 
 William Greenleaf Eliot 100 
 
 Thomas Starr King 103 
 
 John Weiss 108 
 
 Frederick Newman Knapp ...... 115 
 
 Thomas Hill 120 
 
 William Francis Allen . 132 
 
 Samuel Longfellow . 137 
 
 Edmund Burke Willson 140 
 
 Octavius Brooks Frothingham 146 
 
 David Atkins Wasson 152 
 
SEQUEL TO 
 OUR LIBERAL MOVEMENT." 
 
 I. 
 
 THE OLD SCHOOL AND ITS WOEK. 1 
 
 ONE year ago William Henry Furness, then in 
 his ninety-fourth year, — the widest known, 
 the most venerated, and the best beloved name 
 among us, — was appointed the speaker of this occa- 
 sion. It was an act of confiding trust in his per- 
 petual youth ; for of him that may be said more 
 literally than of any other whom we have known, 
 which Homer says of Nestor, that " from his tongue 
 flowed speech more sweet than honey, yet already 
 two generations of mortal men were passed away, 
 while he stood as a prince among the third." And, 
 when some of us heard him at the conference in 
 Washington, four months later, we listened to a 
 voice as resonant and firm, if not quite so mellow, as 
 when he spoke to us in his earlier prime. 
 
 It is, as you will easily understand, with much 
 diffidence 1 and reluctantly that I have consented to 
 occupy the hour which that voice should have filled ; 
 
 1 An address before the Alumni of the Harvard Divinity School, 
 June 23, 1896. 
 
 1 1 
 
A THE OLD SCHOOL AND ITS WORK. 
 
 and I did not promise to undertake the task until it 
 proved impossible to be undertaken by some one at 
 once more nearly contemporary with Dr. Furness 
 and more closely associated with his earlier life- 
 work. Besides, it was thought fitting that this 
 should be an occasion not only or chiefly of personal 
 commemoration, but for bringing into a single view 
 the work of an entire period, which the passing 
 away of that one life seems suddenly to have thrown 
 back in the perspective, and to have made a scene in 
 history by itself. 
 
 Two circumstances, which I will not dwell on, set 
 this view of our topic in special relief to-day, — the 
 recent passing away of so many of the " Old Guard " 
 among our ministers, making a death-list in the last 
 eighteen months of ten, whose average age was con- 
 siderably over eighty, and the average length of 
 their ordained service nearly sixty years ; 1 and, sec- 
 ond, the completion of seventy years since the build- 
 ing and consecration of this Divinity Hall in which 
 we are now met. And I may add that the reason of 
 my speaking is that what I shall offer is in the way 
 of personal testimony rather than an historical sur- 
 vey simply or a general essay, since every name I 
 shall have to recall in these memories is that of one 
 toward whom I have stood in some direct personal 
 
 1 Their names in the order of seniority are : Thomas T. Stone 
 (1801-95); W. H. Furness (1802-96); J. H. Morison (1S08-96) ; 
 H. A. Miles (1809-95) ; G. W. Briggs (1810-95) ; F. W. Holland 
 (1811-95) ; E. B. Willson (1820-95) ; J. F. Moors (1821-95) ; O. B. 
 Frothingham (1822-95); Augustus Woodbury (1825-95). Dr. 
 Stone had been associated with our body since 1846. The otbers 
 were all members of the Harvard Divinity School. 
 
ANDREWS NORTON". 3 
 
 relation of respect, gratitude, affection, kindred, or 
 mutual help. 
 
 The history of this School properly begins with 
 the time when a regular post-graduate course of the- 
 ology was established here under the presidency of 
 Dr. Kirkland. The class of 1811, I believe, was the 
 first to which this course was open. But the Divin- 
 ity School apart from the College was not formally 
 organized till 1819, with the appointment of An- 
 drews Norton as Professor of Sacred Literature. It 
 will be proper, therefore, to begin our survey by 
 considering briefly what that first appointment sig- 
 nified in the teachings and character of the School. 
 
 The date here given was, as you may remember, just 
 twenty years before Professor Norton led the way in 
 vehement protest against the newer liberalism her- 
 alded in Emerson's Divinity School address, which 
 he denounced as " the latest form of infidelity." 
 Here it is difficult for us of a younger generation 
 to do justice to his position, or perhaps even to 
 understand it. It is one of the tragedies of the in- 
 tellectual life when a sincere and able leader of 
 opinion finds his maturest work already outgrown 
 before it has reached its final shape by the advance 
 of general thought, and outlives, as Mr. Norton did 
 for fifteen years, his own cordial sympathy with 
 that advance. Till he gave up his professorship in 
 1830, his was unquestionably the dominating mind 
 in this school, which was largely guided by his in- 
 fluence till the new tide of opinion had well set in. 
 Even then his sharpest opponents spoke — Theodore 
 Parker, for example, spoke to me — with a singular 
 
4 THE OLD SCHOOL AND ITS WOKK. 
 
 deference of his unchallenged scholarship and rare 
 mental ability. We are apt to think of him as 
 merely a defender of Unitarian opinion on its nega- 
 tive side, in " a statement of reasons for not believ- 
 ing " certain articles of the popular creed, or else as 
 holding an advocate's brief for " the genuineness of 
 the Gospels," which he maintained, with laborious 
 erudition, in an argument whose sense has grown 
 obsolete and even unintelligible in the light of later 
 criticism, — nay, was already clearly seen by many 
 to be so before the argument appeared in a printed 
 book. I remember a conversation with him in 
 1850, in which this topic (it is true) was not 
 touched upon, but which left on my mind the im- 
 pression of a certain intellectual loneliness, if not 
 despondency, which one grieves to find in a spirit 
 so brave, clear, and widely accomplished as his. He 
 was then sixty-four years old. But we should 
 think rather of the work he did at twenty-six : the 
 strenuous and tonic quality he gave then to the 
 earlier liberalism in the " General Eepository ; " his 
 great service as the pioneer of a wider literature 
 and a higher criticism among us in the " Select 
 Journal" conducted by him and that accomplished 
 scholar, his friend, Charles Folsom ; the welcome he 
 gave to some of the purest and tenderest voices of 
 the modern muse ; and the share he has contributed, 
 as a true religious poet, to our own treasuries of 
 devotion, in a few hymns that are among the very 
 finest of their class. And we should remember, 
 too, the filial respect and gratitude with which his 
 pupils in theology owned their debt to his grave and 
 
ANDREWS NORTON. 5 
 
 scrupulous criticism, while they might seem — as 
 Dr. Furness did — to be giving it a turn that would 
 cost him many a pang. Surely, it was no ill augury 
 for the work of this School that for eleven of its 
 first years this veteran scholar and critic guided its 
 teachings by his master mind. 
 
 Though devoted from his youth to the study of 
 theology and the service of the higher intellectual 
 life, and though himself a man of strong religious 
 conviction, Mr. Norton was the only professor in 
 this school, down to the appointment of Ezra Abbot, 
 who had not actually occupied a pulpit. Possibly, 
 this may have been from distaste of natural tem- 
 perament, or reluctance to sacrifice that "quiet and 
 still air of delightful studies " in which his lot was 
 cast. It was, at any rate, a mark of his sensitive 
 independence, perhaps of a certain proud humility, 
 that he always refused the academic title which is 
 conventionally held proper for a theological pro- 
 fessor : he was never "Doctor" or "Keverend," to 
 the end of his days. These titles he held the due 
 only of ordained workers in the ministry. A keen 
 critic he always was, as we have heard, of the pulpit 
 exercises of other men, younger men, his pupils 
 here; and if they were sometimes more daunted 
 than helped, as I fear they were, by the severe 
 standard he judged them by, no doubt they would 
 feel the value of it afterward. It was a man of his 
 own training, we must remember, George Eipley, 
 who stood out against him boldest and longest on a 
 question touching the foundations of religious belief ; 
 and, whatever else his students learned or failed to 
 
6 THE OLD SCHOOL AND ITS WORK. 
 
 learn, I am sure he taught them respect for perfect 
 integrity and honest candor of the spoken word. 
 
 The next influence comparable with Professor Nor- 
 ton's in amount and depth for its effect on the life 
 nurtured here was, I suppose, that of Henry Ware, 
 Junior, a man of radically different mental temper, 
 but absolutely harmonious in conviction and aim. 
 More than any other, I should say, he was during 
 his twelve years' service the pastor and apostle in 
 his calling, — in a very special sense, what Matthew 
 Arnold so finely says of Emerson, " the friend and 
 aider of those who would live in the spirit." He was 
 put and sustained in the place of service for which 
 he was felt to be singularly fit, by the special con- 
 tributions of friends who created that place ex- 
 pressly for him. He was a modest but excellent 
 scholar, a man of very precious and tender pastoral 
 experience, of poetic gift, also, who would (his 
 brother said of him) have desired more than any- 
 thing the vocation of a poet, shy of native tempera- 
 ment, and often slow of utterance, yet capable of 
 fervent, ready, direct, and incisive speech, of sym- 
 pathies warm, wide, quick, generous, and helpful, 
 and, as much as any man we have ever had among 
 us, having what we may call the very genius of 
 piety, — a choice gift which he shared with a few 
 such men as Channing, Furness, Gannett, Dr. Hos- 
 mer, and Ephraim Peabody. It is impossible not 
 to associate with his influence one very noble phase 
 of the life that has gone forth from this School : I 
 mean a certain devoted and heroic consecration to 
 a ministry of holiness, which I might illustrate by 
 
HENEY WARE, JUNIOR. 7 
 
 many examples, but will here mention only two, — 
 our own " Apostle Eliot " of St. Louis, and that 
 beloved and valiant " saint of all the humanities," 
 Samuel Joseph May, — men alike in their clear 
 insight and great moral courage, though ever so 
 wide apart in the lines of service they were sever- 
 ally true to. This quality in its teaching we asso- 
 ciate as distinctly with the name of Ware as we 
 connect its order of intellectual service with those 
 of Norton, Palfrey, and Noyes. I wish there were 
 time to speak fitly of them all. But here I must 
 deal with currents of influence, not with names 
 of men ; and there will be some now present who, 
 with a certain filial gratitude, will always associate 
 the particular influence I speak of with him who 
 is recalled oftener than any other I can remember 
 by an epithet unusual among us, and very precise 
 in its application, as "the sainted Ware." 
 
 His name reminds us, again, that this has never, 
 as its proper title, been called a school of Theology, 
 but a school of Divinity. It may be well, just here, 
 to say a word of what this designation seems to 
 imply. I will do it by dwelling a moment on an 
 aspect of this School, or of the life sheltered and 
 trained in it, which we see perhaps most distinctly 
 when we look back to those years among the 
 " thirties," or a little earlier, and recall the men 
 whose life-work was inspired and shaped here then, 
 who make our best illustration of the characteristic 
 thing here done. Kepresentative names are those 
 of Ephraim and Andrew Peabody, George Ripley, 
 Samuel Atkins Eliot, James Freeman Clarke, Wil- 
 
8 THE OLD SCHOOL AND ITS WORK. 
 
 liam Henry Charming, Henry Whitney Bellows, and 
 Theodore Parker. I choose these from a long list, 
 not merely for their eminence, but for the variety 
 of gifts they showed. Certainly it would not be 
 easy to devise any one type or descriptive name 
 that would fairly include them all. But they seem 
 to me to illustrate very well a feature in this School, 
 which may possibly distinguish it favorably among 
 some other schools more famous and more richly 
 endowed. The complaint always made of it in its 
 earlier years, was its poverty of endowment. Two 
 men, it was said by way of reproach, were made to 
 do the work of five or six : the first thing wanted, 
 we were incessantly told, was a wealthier endow- 
 ment. But to such complaint I should always 
 reply that we must not " think that the gift of God 
 can be purchased with money." The essentials of 
 the higher education are a consecrated will, intel- 
 lectual opportunity, a wide, buoyant, and elastic 
 atmosphere of thought, sufficient guidance — but 
 not too much — in the wide wilderness of learning, 
 and, above all, great mental leisure and freedom, 
 with great joy and wealth of spiritual companionship. 
 And it may be fairly questioned whether all these 
 may not be had at their best in the inverse ratio 
 of that elaborated equipment which is often more a 
 burden than a help to the nobler intellectual life. 
 Even if we suppose poverty in such things to have 
 its difficulties, yet it is through difficulties, not fa- 
 cilities, that men win the temper fittest for their 
 work in life. 
 
 But I am not speaking here of difficulties, — here, 
 
A SCHOOL OF DIVINITY. 9 
 
 where university life is overburdened with its wealth 
 of opportunity. I speak only of the two essential 
 things, — large freedom of choice and large leisure 
 of companionship, — these, with the motive and the 
 guidance that are just enough for the best uses of 
 that freedom and that leisure. It has never seemed 
 to me that we suffered any serious loss in that our 
 teachers were only two, when those two were Henry 
 Ware and Dr. Noyes. I am not speaking here of 
 the theological department in a university, — which 
 needs (no doubt) a wide variety of special learning, 
 — but of a Divinity School such as this was sixty 
 years ago, where the first need is personal influence 
 and inspiration, restrained but not dominated by 
 critical erudition. And I am not saying that this is 
 a better thing than the other, but only that it was 
 a good thing in its way to have, while we were 
 waiting for the other. 
 
 Nay, for the time we have in view it may even be 
 contended that it was better than the other would 
 have been if we could have had the other then. 
 The liberal movement, which in a way it has been 
 the business of this School to guide and help, is a 
 movement even less of thought than it is of life, a 
 movement even less of theology than of practical 
 conduct. And at that time its aim and method 
 were far less precise than now. The questions that 
 were coming up had more to do with the vague 
 idealism which we term " Transcendental" than they 
 had with the very precise and tangible scientific 
 problems of the present day. Nobody knew, for one 
 thing, or could possibly suspect, how far the advance 
 
10 THE OLD SCHOOL AND ITS WORK. 
 
 of criticism would affect our interpretation of the 
 Bible, or how far the advance of natural science 
 would invade and alter our very conception of 
 human duty and destiny. At such a time, with an 
 astounding amount of shallow and restless radicalism, 
 with appalling questions of society and politics loom- 
 ing, too, in the horizon, it was of far more account 
 to the student that his mental atmosphere should be 
 elastic and wide than that his mental training should 
 be carried on within rigid lines. At such a time 
 there is an inconvenience in being committed to too 
 sharply defined opinions. Opinion, to be worth 
 anything, must be long held in solution in a medium 
 (so far as may be) transparent and colorless, and 
 must crystallize very slowly about some nucleus of 
 positive conviction, which is the gift not of logic, but 
 of life. No opinion that was ever held, I should 
 think, was more sincerely held, more wholesome, 
 more manly, conducive whether to a purer piety or 
 a more devoted humanity than the form of super- 
 naturalism in which Norton and Ware and their 
 whole generation were trained ; yet in the next gen- 
 eration it was destined to be completely outgrown, 
 while they, as honest men as ever lived, could never 
 learn or endure to see it so. That was in one way 
 a great pity, causing as it did painful misunderstand- 
 ings and great loss of moral force. But it would 
 have been a far greater pity if, in the temper of that 
 day, there had been here an equipment of learning 
 that should compact that half-way view into a full- 
 grown system and an intellectual creed. 
 
 From that worse evil, it may be, the very poverty 
 
ITS METHODS OF STUDY. 11 
 
 of this School protected us. At least, there was not 
 a corps of teachers numerous enough, or well enough 
 armed with modern appliances of learning, to tie us 
 down by exactions of routine-work to the mastery of 
 an elaborated method in theology, which we should 
 see now to be painfully inadequate. I think that, 
 on the whole, a healthier growth has come of it than 
 if there had been. I do not easily associate such 
 wealth, vigor, variety, and independence in the re- 
 ligious life as we recall in the names I recited a 
 little while ago, — take only what is signified to us 
 in the last two, Bellows and Parker, names that 
 belong to the period next before my own, — with 
 the stricter training appropriate to a purely scientific 
 theology that is up to the present standard. That 
 would mean a longer time of pupilage than is good 
 for the average man, — at any rate, longer than 
 would have been possible to us then. I give my 
 testimony for what it is worth ; but I know that, 
 for one, the best piece of work I did while here was 
 entirely outside all school courses, actual or conceiv- 
 able : it was an attempt to master the principles of 
 the modern scientific method, with such guidance as 
 could be had then, in the seven thick volumes of 
 Whewell and John Stuart Mill, aided by some light 
 in pure mathematics from my near friend of those 
 days, Thomas Hill, and brightened by a good deal 
 of talk with President Walker, who was so generous 
 of his shrewd, wise, kindly, and helpful companion- 
 ship to us younger men. This may serve as, if not 
 a brilliant yet a useful example of what I suppose 
 was very common, — the accidental and incidental 
 
12 THE OLD SCHOOL AND ITS WOKK. 
 
 benefit that befell from the less formal methods of a 
 Divinity School in that earlier day. 
 
 I will now attempt to recall one or two aspects 
 of the field where onr life-work lay, for which we 
 had been preparing under such influences as I have 
 described. The date I have here in mind is 1840, 
 which marks the end of the period spoken of hith- 
 erto and the beginning of that in which I became 
 a sharer in its tasks. Our life-work was to be 
 found in that part of the Lord's vineyard for which 
 we were in training, to dress it and to keep it, every 
 man according to his several ability. 
 
 The soil of that vineyard was just then remarka- 
 bly fertile in " isms," which grew in it like weeds. 
 These I would define as so many off-hand creeds, 
 of one article aniece, which the believer in it ac- 
 cepted with a certain romantic faith, and spent 
 his life in thrusting upon the consciences of his 
 fellow-men. All these more or less abortive creeds 
 had, I think, an aim more mundane than the curi- 
 ous other-worldliness which has come into being 
 since the famous " Chardon Street Conference," 
 where they swarmed preparatory to taking flight, 
 — where I witnessed a great twinkling and sputter- 
 ing of new lights, some of them set rather awk- 
 wardly in their candlesticks, and not nearly so 
 neatly trimmed as hotly burning. This took place, 
 we must remember, while Brook Farm was an 
 enterprise just set on foot, and five years before 
 the first advent of modern spiritism. Some of 
 those embryo schemes were of a certain vague but 
 high idealism, and were the precursors of the 
 
FORMS OF RADICALISM. 13 
 
 Theosophy and Christian Science of our day. Some 
 met the social problems of the time in a generous, 
 devoted, and heroic temper, testified in brave cam- 
 paigns of conscience, such as Christian socialism, 
 the temperance reform, and (most chivalrous of 
 all) the " old-school " antislavery crusade. Some 
 were not much more than the whim of a few 
 eccentrics, — the no-Sabbath, no-property, no-gov- 
 ernment, no-resistance leaguers. But, in general, 
 they were " sports," or offshoots, of that growth of 
 modern liberalism, suddenly become conscious of 
 itself, and without the experience of that twofold 
 discipline which has so sternly held them in check 
 during the half -century which has elapsed since, — 
 the discipline of fact, painfully learned through 
 the struggle that came to a crisis in our Civil War, 
 with that rather chaotic chapter which describes 
 our political performance since ; the discipline of 
 science, — for the time I speak of was twenty 
 years before Darwin had brought home to the 
 common mind the fact of evolution in natural 
 things, or Spencer had expounded the general law 
 which has greatly chastened and chilled the revo- 
 lutionary temper so vagrant and rampant then. 
 
 And, it must be remembered, all these escapades 
 of moral knight-errantry took a shape in this com- 
 munity, with its Puritan antecedents, at once serious, 
 sternly practical, and even, in a sense, intensely 
 religious. Each, in its fashion,, set itself about 
 taking the kingdom of heaven by violence ; each, 
 no doubt sincerely, deemed itself the one indis- 
 pensable gateway to the New Jerusalem, the earthly 
 
14 THE OLD SCHOOL AND ITS WORK. 
 
 paradise. It may be easily seen, then, what a 
 warp must have been given to the minds in train- 
 ing for their life-work here. Those minds had 
 chosen their vocation because it represented to 
 them the ideal side of life. They were for that 
 very reason susceptible to this chaotic clamor of 
 many tongues, and fascinated by some one or 
 another phase of that ethical ideal, which glances 
 in facets as multitudinous as a cut and polished 
 gem. How would the sober tradition of their re- 
 ligious culture be invaded, how would the grave 
 lessons of their theological or philosophic training 
 be beguiled, by these so many voices from the 
 world about, when not one of those voices, as their 
 own Scripture itself assured them, was without 
 its proper signification ? Who knew whether it 
 might not be the one voice to show you or me the 
 particular path it was ordained for us to follow, 
 forsaking every other ? 
 
 In looking through the catalogue of these years, 
 we see how large a proportion of those educated 
 here have found their real vocation in some other 
 thing than what they seemed to have chosen. Life 
 is so different from our theories and plans of life ! 
 The liberal ministry, as we have sought it or ac- 
 cepted it, has been often said to be like certain 
 localities, which are good to grow up in, but par- 
 ticularly good to emigrate away from. This may 
 be a drawback in a profession, or in the education 
 that prepares one for a profession ; but it need not 
 be a disaster or a reproach. It is a special glory of 
 the life educated here that it has turned so easily 
 
JOHN GORHAM PALFEEY. 15 
 
 to so large a variety of outside work. Among its 
 ministers of the Word there have been a fair pro- 
 portion better known to the public as teachers, 
 historians, artists, or poets ; some as agents of 
 public charities, literary editors and critics, or 
 correctors of the press ; some few as soldiers val- 
 iant in the field, or men of high authority in public 
 station. All this was in answer to the demand of 
 a restless time, a great national crisis, an immature 
 civilization, a fast-growing, ever-hopeful community. 
 It was a part of the work this School had to do, — 
 a gift to the world not inferior, perhaps, to ever so 
 imposing a record of ecclesiastics, scholiasts, and 
 devotees. 
 
 How could I better illustrate this feature of its 
 history than by the name of that noble friend of 
 my earlier studies and my after ministry, — John 
 Gorham Palfrey, eight years professor in this 
 School? As the successor of Buckminster and 
 Everett, he had dignified a pulpit not second in 
 lustre to any of that time with laborious and ac- 
 complished service. As instructor here, he, among 
 other tasks, prepared a text-book of several Oriental 
 dialects, and was a pioneer in our first attempts at a 
 scientific criticism of the Old Testament. As a mem- 
 ber of Congress, later on, he sacrificed popularity 
 to honest independence, becoming one of the original 
 founders of the Free Soil party. As postmaster 
 of Boston, he was a reformer of official methods, 
 and set an example, which some would deem 
 fantastic, of scrupulous integrity in his accounts. 
 Always a laborious student, the well-known classic 
 
16 THE OLD SCHOOL AND ITS WORK. 
 
 historian of New England, and able among the 
 ablest editors of the " North American Keview," he 
 was, as a gentleman, cultivated and courteous, with 
 abounding vivacity and wit. As a man of con- 
 science, he set the high example of liberating nine- 
 teen slaves whom he had selected as his share in a 
 family inheritance, and generously aiding them 
 afterwards, as if dependent members of his own 
 household. Such was the versatile and brilliant 
 intellectual life he brought to this high service. By 
 so much was the theologian ennobled in the man ! 
 
 I have spoken of Dr. Palfrey as a pioneer among 
 us in the scientific criticism of the Old Testament. 
 This is better seen in his attempt, published in 
 1840, at a constructive theory of the book of 
 Genesis, — which he regarded as a compilation 
 from earlier sources by the hand of Moses, — than 
 in his defence of the Mosaic authority of the Pen- 
 tateuch throughout, which is quite on the lines of 
 the conventional apologists. These lines were 
 broken into, four years later, with a much bolder 
 hand, by Mr. Norton in his " Note on the Old 
 Testament," which is as radical in 'tone as anything 
 we have had since, but for its very characteristic 
 reserve touching Moses and Elijah. Dr. Noyes's 
 argument on Messianic prophecy, in the " Christian 
 Examiner" of 1834, — which brought out the 
 famous hint of prosecution under the old Massachu- 
 setts law of blasphemy, — we may take to have 
 been (however heretical it looked) a piece of legiti- 
 mate textual criticism ; and it is not, perhaps, to be 
 counted as a conscious departure from the tradi- 
 
THE LATER CRITICISM. 17 
 
 tional point of view. His eminent service to this 
 School by his intellectual candor, honesty, and 
 courage, in guiding it through a critical period of 
 transition, by which he earned a debt of gratitude 
 from his immediate students such as was never 
 quite due to any other, belongs to a time consider- 
 ably later than that I have here in view. But 
 these three, taken together, show how completely 
 the later method of thinking that prevails among 
 us, both literary and historical, which in the last 
 half-century has almost wholly blotted out the 
 older view, was an outgrowth of the training 
 of this School. Dr. Furness's tender and sympa- 
 thetic treatment of the gospel story, which ingenu- 
 ously attempts to identify natural and supernatural, 
 while keeping close to the letter of the record, 
 claims to follow out legitimately the lessons he 
 had learned under Norton's teaching, since what 
 it holds to have been natural in Jesus would be 
 supernatural in anybody else. And it was only 
 one easy step in advance when Theodore Parker, 
 with temper and motive widely different from 
 theirs, threw wide open to public gaze the gateway 
 of the course that has been followed since. Emer- 
 son's address in this very chapel in 1838, — the 
 controversy between Norton and Eipley that fol- 
 lowed the next year, — the group of later eloquent 
 expounders, including John Weiss, Samuel John- 
 son, Octavius Frothingham, Samuel Longfellow, and 
 William Potter, not to speak of work done by their 
 associates still living, — are so many dates that 
 connect every phase of the advancing liberalism in 
 
 2 
 
18 THE OLD SCHOOL AND ITS WOKK. 
 
 theology with names, influences, and traditions 
 belonging to this School. Not one of them be- 
 trays a motive merely academic, speculative, criti- 
 cal, or scientific. Every one made a step forward 
 into a new and wider intellectual life. No mat- 
 ter how frank the negation, it always sought, not 
 a narrower or feebler, but a larger and a robuster 
 faith. 
 
 In this sketch I have had in view a definite 
 period in the history of this School, — a period 
 which ended fifty-six years ago, and had most to 
 do with shaping out that life whose general fea- 
 tures we have been trying to retrace. For this 
 reason I have said nothing as yet, and can say 
 but a few words now in closing, of two men to 
 whom I am personally indebted very much, whose 
 best work in life was too closely related with our 
 present topic to be quite left out in our survey, — 
 Convers Francis and Frederic Henry Hedge. 
 
 Professor Francis was somewhat on in years, not 
 far from fifty, at his coming here ; and it may be 
 that his most fruitful work in life, his most kind- 
 ling influence, and the singular esteem yielded him 
 by the men of his own time, belong rather to the 
 date of his more than twenty years' ministry in 
 Watertown than to the somewhat hampered and 
 (I fear) disappointed toils of his later service. His 
 earlier manhood fell in with the sudden widening 
 of the intellectual field by what was, to all intents 
 and purposes, the discovery of a new literature, a 
 new philosophy, a new way of thinking among us. 
 I do not dare to say whether the enthusiasm that 
 
CONVEES FRANCIS. 19 
 
 greeted this fresh discovery did or did not exag- 
 gerate the great qualities of German letters or 
 German thought. For the space of half a gen- 
 eration, while the many looked on ignorantly or 
 jealously askance, there were a chosen few to whom 
 it was almost as if there were no other letters and 
 no other thought worth their study. In the heart 
 of this select circle, the mind of Dr. Francis re- 
 ceived with eager enjoyment and quenchless thirst 
 the treasures thus thrown open, though it might 
 be in their most arid form. For it was a mind 
 more sympathetic than critical, widely and gener- 
 ously eclectic, almost too impartial in its likes, and 
 apparently having no dislikes at all. As Theodore 
 Parker, his grateful younger friend, said to me, he 
 " did not gravitate to the stronger thoughts or the 
 greater minds." Such width of mental sympathy 
 lacks some stringent mental tonic. To one of less 
 receptive faculty, his must seem a superfluity of 
 mere possession, which dulled the edge of indepen- 
 dent thinking, and, like a lens inconveniently near, 
 blurred the sharp outline of the object you were 
 trying to define. But to one seeking material for 
 unbiassed judgment nothing could be finer than 
 that quiet impartiality, that untiring kindliness and 
 patience, that lavish generosity in putting at your 
 service, in any shape you would, the stores he had 
 so diligently gathered. No one, I am sure, ever 
 served the interest of true learning here with more 
 scrupulous devotion ; and the placid widening-out 
 of the circle of our knowledge under his kindly 
 influence was of more value, in that day of eager 
 
20 THE OLD SCHOOL AND ITS WORK. 
 
 anticipation and hastily formed conclusion, than 
 some of us were quite willing to understand. 
 
 Dr. Hedge's large and richly stored intelligence 
 had had the advantage of a far more thorough 
 early discipline than most of us have received, or 
 than could have been given in this country at the 
 time he needed it most. In his school-days Ger- 
 man became to him a second mother tongue. Thus 
 not only did he benefit from the tonic method of the 
 German "gymnasium," but he was guarded from 
 the illusion which many suffered under, of taking 
 all to be sublime, august, and true that came to 
 them in the long and many syllables of that magic 
 tongue, — since he knew, among other things, Ger- 
 man school-boy slang. The great boon he gained 
 from that source was, however, qualified in him by 
 two specially English gifts — a certain wealth of 
 poetic imagination, with a feeling of the rhythmic 
 melody of language that might easily have made 
 one of less critical or reflective temper eminent as 
 orator or poet ; and a deep ground of ethical con- 
 viction, which wholly dominated his speculative 
 faculty, and made him restive under the restraint 
 of any merely intellectual creed. More than any 
 other of like philosophic turn whom I have ever 
 known, philosophy was to him a department of 
 literature, not a system of regulated opinion. More 
 than with any other of so wide literary accomplish- 
 ment, the chief interest with him lay in the ranges 
 of higher contemplation. The more he studied the 
 results of speculative science, the less he was satis- 
 fied with any claim it put forth to solve that most 
 
FREDEEIC H. HEDGE. 21 
 
 tantalizing of problems, how to give a true intel- 
 lectual theory of the universe. It is likely that 
 this sense of inadequacy troubled at intervals his 
 philosophic conscience ; for he never quite let that 
 problem go, or fully accepted the positivist dogma 
 (which he inclined to) that in the nature of things 
 it is unsolvable. His refuge was that which many 
 of the best minds of every age have found, — re- 
 ligious discipline and religious meditation. The 
 visible work he did was by no means a full measure 
 of his ability ; yet he was one of the most pains- 
 taking as well as conscientious of workers, one of 
 the widest in intellectual range, and a diligent 
 learner to the end of his days. His most charac- 
 teristic treatise, "Reason in Religion," was closely 
 associated with his earlier labors here ; and it re- 
 mains among the most highly valued of the agencies 
 that have enriched the thinking faculty in a gen- 
 eration later than his own. 
 
 I have thus outlined, so far as my allotted hour 
 permits, the work of the Old School as we have 
 known it, illustrated by the names and incidents 
 most familiar in its history. How that work has 
 been developed and carried on in the half -century 
 since the period chiefly had in view, and how its 
 influence has gone forth upon the mind and life of 
 our community, is a topic requiring a larger treat- 
 ment and a different hand. I trust that what has 
 now been said may serve, in some slight measure, 
 as an introduction to such a theme. 
 
II. 
 
 GEKMAN INFLUENCE. 1 
 
 IN order to bring the vast topic of German The- 
 ology in any intelligible way within my limits, 
 I must confine myself to the very narrowest inter- 
 pretation of the words in which my subject is an- 
 nounced. And these must be understood to mean, 
 not how Unitarianism is to be found in German 
 theology, for it is not there at all — at least in 
 name. The German theologians, for reasons which 
 I need not explain, are generally bound by Lutheran 
 or other State traditions and conditions ; and while 
 it may often be said of the best of them that their 
 way of thinking is quite in harmony with ours, their 
 form of doctrine is wholly different. I shall not, 
 therefore, trouble myself or you about that, but 
 take what is the only serviceable rendering of the 
 words of my title, namely : How, when, and where 
 has the course of Unitarianism in America been 
 affected by contact with German theology since the 
 beginning of that movement of thought among us 
 which we term Transcendental ? 
 
 This brings me, again, to a very precise date, 
 which I must take for my starting-point. That 
 date I shall take, for reasons of convenience, at just 
 
 1 An address delivered in Channing Hall, in November, 1888. 
 
EMERSON'S ADDRESS. 23 
 
 fifty years ago. And, as there is a personal equa- 
 tion in all these things which more or less warps 
 our judgment of them, perhaps you will pardon me 
 the impropriety of a word to explain what those 
 reasons of convenience are. I was at that time a 
 student in college, among circumstances that led 
 me to take an eager interest in the discussions then 
 going on, and to look forward with timid hope to 
 the part I might possibly be afterwards called to 
 take in them. I was in the dear and serious house- 
 hold of my mother's brother Henry Ware, Junior, 
 who affectionately encouraged such early hopes in 
 his kindly but taciturn way. I had listened with 
 a vague but exhilarating delight to Mr. Emerson's 
 Divinity School Address, given that summer, — 
 which had, as you know, shocked some, while it 
 had charmed others, as the first clear word of " an- 
 other gospel, which yet w~as not another." So that 
 I was already prepared, when a year later the battle 
 of the books began, to follow its changing fortunes 
 with a degree of personal feeling as to the issues 
 involved which has not been in the least diminished 
 to this day. In short, to speak with still greater 
 precision, the exact crisis that brought to the front 
 the bearing of German theology upon American 
 opinion was the publication, in 1839, of Professor 
 Andrews Norton's Divinity School Address on " The 
 Latest Form of Infidelity." 
 
 Here, perhaps, I ought to add a further word of 
 explanation. First, as to myself, — for by nurture 
 and habit I clung strongly to the more conservative 
 side in the debate that followed. I have always 
 
24 GERMAN INFLUENCE. 
 
 considered that Professor Norton had the better of 
 his opponents in scholarship and logic ; till the age 
 of twenty-five I intended or expected that my place 
 would be on that side ; and if I have altered from 
 this position since, it has been not so much due (as 
 I think) to the course of that discussion as to a 
 passage of argument with that rude logician, Orestes 
 A. Brownson, during the crisis of the notable change 
 by which he became a Catholic. Next, as to others ; 
 for the real point at issue in that debate has been 
 often misunderstood, as if it had been the question 
 of admitting the supernatural or miraculous in 
 Christianity. On the contrary, in one of his letters 
 addressed to Professor Norton, Mr. George Eipley 
 says : " For my own part, I cannot avoid the con- 
 clusion that the miracles related in the Gospels 
 were actually wrought by Jesus : " and in a pamph- 
 let of the same date, understood to have been writ- 
 ten by Theodore Parker, he says, " I believe that 
 Jesus, like other religious teachers, wrought mira- 
 cles." And as neither of these men has been ac- 
 cused of Jesuistry or moral cowardice, it appears 
 that the question at issue was not as to their 
 opinions, which at that time were in the main con- 
 ventional and customary, but as to a new and un- 
 familiar order of thought, which was seen to be 
 powerfully affecting the principles and foundations 
 of men's religious belief. What this new order of 
 thought was, and what has been its effect among us 
 during this past half-century, it will be my duty to 
 make as clear as I can within the limits allowed 
 me. 
 
GERMAN THEOLOGY. 25 
 
 That influence, whatever it was, we ascribe in a 
 vague and general way to German theology, espe- 
 cially from the time of Schleiermacher. But Ger- 
 man theology of that period : — that is, of the last 
 ninety years — is (as I said) a very vast and un- 
 manageable topic ; and I must therefore narrow my 
 field still further, by pointing out three great de- 
 partments into which it may be roughly divided. 
 
 First is that which especially dates from Schleier- 
 macher himself, though it also has to do with those 
 famous philosophical schools which appear to have 
 had absolute control in the higher thought of Ger- 
 many down to about forty years ago, — chiefly, the 
 school of Hegel. It was these that gave the great 
 intellectual impulse, and that appeared to open up 
 an entirely new interpretation of religious thought 
 and the religious life ; and hence created that fresh 
 enthusiasm among some of our younger men half a 
 century or more ago, which we call Transcendental- 
 ism, and Professor Norton called " the latest form of 
 Infidelity." This (as I just said) did not so much 
 affect men's particular opinions as their whole w T ay 
 of looking at the subject of Eeligion. We may call 
 it, if you please, the German Speculative Theology. 
 
 Second, and producing its effect more gradually, 
 is a movement which started still farther back, 
 largely from the impulse given by the German poet 
 and critic, Lessing. I may describe it in a general 
 way by saying that its effect has been to take the 
 Bible out of that sanctuary where it was regarded as 
 a holy thing by itself, never to be judged, but only 
 to be explained and then accepted reveringly by the 
 
26 GERMAN INFLUENCE. 
 
 human mind ; to take it, I say, from that sanctuary, 
 to class it among our other literary treasures, and to 
 interpret it just as we do other books of history, of 
 legend or tradition, of moral exhortation, or of re- 
 ligious poetry. I say nothing for or against this 
 result, which I suppose that we are all at this day 
 fully agreed to accept. I only say that to bring it 
 about took something like a century of controversy, 
 often very angry and bitter; and that during this 
 time there was evolved a mass of erudition, argu- 
 ment, exposition, speculation, literally unspeakable 
 in its dimensions, which makes the field of German 
 Critical Theology. And it is the diligent cultiva- 
 tion of this field among our own best scholars — 
 including Professor Noyes, Dr. Hedge, Theodore 
 Parker, and James Freeman Clarke, against ,the 
 strong protest of the elder school represented by 
 Professor Norton — that has brought about the 
 most marked changes in the body of opinion known 
 as American Unitarianism. 
 
 Third, we must reckon a field with which I have 
 nothing whatever to do here, although in some ways 
 it is perhaps the most important of all. For Ger- 
 man theology, in its large sense, has been one of the 
 greatest and most remarkable educating influences 
 of the last half-century to a very large class of 
 minds. Every topic suggested in both the lines 
 of discussion I have described has been taken up, 
 and with infinite painstaking, erudition, and patience 
 followed out to the last slender filament of inference 
 or investigation on which it was possible to string 
 an opinion or a guess. It would be mere pedantry 
 
SCHLEIERMACHER. 27 
 
 to cite the names of the innumerable laborers in 
 that wide field ; 1 and any attempt to explore it 
 would only lead us away from the strict and narrow 
 line we have to follow. That portion of the field 
 we may call the German Theology of Erudition. 
 With it, as I have said, I have for the present 
 nothing to do. 
 
 I must now go back, and explain the prominence 
 which has been given in my topic to the name of 
 Schleiermacher. 
 
 Frederick Daniel Ernst Schleiermacher was born 
 in 1768, and died in 1834, at the age of sixty-six. 
 He was a man of the very finest religious genius, 
 a preacher of extraordinary fervor and wealth of 
 thought, of a moral nature singularly clinging, sym- 
 pathetic, and emotional, a scholar of vast erudition 
 even for a German, a student of great and indefati- 
 gable industry, and a teacher, or intimate adviser, of 
 personal weight and influence almost unparalleled. 
 Professor Philip Schaff calls him, without qualifica- 
 tion, " the greatest divine of the nineteenth century." 
 To understand the ground of his unexampled and 
 unique influence upon the religious thought of his 
 day, we should take into account that very early in 
 life he saw clearly these two things : first, that the 
 doctrinal system built up during the Eeformation 
 had completely gone to seed, and existed only as a 
 lifeless and sterile form — at least in Germany and 
 among the educated classes, where his work was, as 
 we see in the life of Lessing — and must perish 
 
 1 Tholuck and Neander are perhaps those which will be most 
 widely and gratefully recognized. 
 
28 GERMAN INFLUENCE. 
 
 unless a new soul could be breathed into it ; and, 
 second, that the idea, the method, the discipline, 
 embodied in the Christian Church and known to the 
 Christian conscience, must form the type, the model, 
 the condition, under which such new religious life 
 could be had, — and this, if it must be, independent 
 of all doctrinal forms whatever. To show the inten- 
 sity of his conviction on this point, I copy here his 
 own words : " Eeligion was the mother's bosom, in 
 whose sacred warmth and darkness my young life 
 was nourished and prepared for the world which lay 
 before me all unknown ; and she still remained with 
 me, ivhen God and immortality vanished before my 
 doubting eyes!' This, I say, is his characteristic 
 testimony to the reality of the religious life, wholly 
 independent of all doctrinal forms whatever. And 
 we must take it as our starting-point, in estimating 
 both the peculiar nature of his influence upon the 
 mind of his time, and the peculiar dread of that 
 influence which we find amongst those who, like 
 Professor Norton, honestly held that very clearly 
 defined opinions were essential to any hold at all 
 upon the Christian faith. To such minds that lan- 
 guage sounded merely vague, delusive, and 
 sophistical. 
 
 The date of the first strong impression made by 
 Schleiermacher upon the mind of his time was the 
 year 1799, when he published a series of eloquent 
 pamphlet " Discourses " on Eeligion, addressed to 
 " the cultivated among its despisers." As to this 
 date we have to bear in mind that it was just at the 
 coming in of the tide of reaction that followed the 
 
SCHLEIERMACHEE. 29 
 
 extravagant anti-religious fury of the French Kevo- 
 lution, and set so strongly towards conservatism in 
 politics and religion : so that he was doing in Ger- 
 many a like task to that attempted just then by 
 Chateaubriand in France. But we must look back 
 of that date, to see how this religious reaction took 
 just the shape it did in his mind. The father of 
 Schleiermacher was a good old-fashioned Calvinistic 
 preacher, chaplain to a regiment ; and, for conven- 
 ience in some of his wanderings, he put the boy at 
 school among the " Moravian Brethren." These 
 made the most pious of religious communities. In 
 spiritual descent their tradition came down from 
 Bohemian exiles, who carried into their retreat the 
 same religious ardor that had flamed with such 
 obstinate fury in the Hussite wars ; but in them, or 
 in their followers, it was tempered to a sweet, some- 
 what austere, and most nobly self-sacrificing piety. 
 It was the placid faith of a company of Moravian 
 missionaries in a storm at sea that had touched John 
 Wesley more profoundly than ever before with the 
 reality and power of a religious life. And this 
 obscure community was " the mother's bosom, warm 
 and dark," which nourished the germs of that vounej 
 life given to its charge. 
 
 The later experience of university life, and the 
 deliberate study of the Deistical writers (then mak- 
 ing a good deal of noise), which he undertook against 
 his father's earnest protest, did not, as we have seen, 
 extinguish the deep sense that religion in the soul 
 is the most profound and blessed of realities ; while 
 they did convince him that it must be interpreted 
 
30 GERMAN INFLUENCE. 
 
 to the educated mind in a way very different from 
 the old doctrinal scheme, — a way in which the 
 form of expression should be, avowedly, not the 
 adequate statement of a fact of human knowledge, 
 but the symbol, or image (Vorstelhcng) of that which 
 far transcends all human knowledge. Hence he 
 chose such phrases as seemed to minds like Pro- 
 fessor Norton's a mere playing fast and loose with 
 sacred things, sophistry or conscious self-deception, 
 "veil-weaving" : about one's real opinions, so as to 
 hide their true meaning from others' eyes. Thus, 
 departing from the common language of theology, 
 Schleiermacher speaks not of " God the Creator and 
 Moral Governor " (which are the terms insisted on 
 by Martineau and English thinkers generally), but 
 rather of "the Divine Life " and our "communion 
 with the Living God : a sharp distinction," he says, 
 " is to be drawn between the Living God and a 
 personal God ; " not of " a Future Life of Judgment," 
 in the terms familiar to most Christians, but rather 
 of the " Eternal Life," or deathlessness of the spirit- 
 ual principle in man, and of its blending in the 
 Hereafter with the Universal Life, in language that 
 implied, or seemed to imply, that its conscious 
 identity would be lost. 2 In short, his whole system 
 of doctrine ( Glaubenslehre) — which is developed at 
 great length and very elaborately — appears to be 
 built on the interpreting not of any written word, 
 but of the actual experience of the religious life. Its 
 
 1 Schleiermacher (as Professor Norton reminds us) is a German 
 word signifying " veil-maker." 
 
 2 Compare Martineau's " Study of Religion," ii. 355-360. 
 
SCHLEIERMACHER. 31 
 
 data are purely the facts of Christian consciousness ; 
 and, as a countryman of his has said of him, it was 
 " quite uncertain whether Schleiermacher believed 
 or not in revelation, miracle, the divinity of Christ, 
 the trinity, the personality of God, or the immor- 
 tality of the soul. In his theological phrases he 
 would avoid all that could distinctly mean this or 
 that." In his exposition of faith he starts with this 
 one point of fact : / am a Christian ; this I am by 
 nature and inheritance. By introspection and analy- 
 sis, not by study of the letter of the gospel, he will 
 then determine what that fact implies ; what is the 
 meaning of incarnation, atonement, resurrection, in 
 the terms of religious experience ; and this shall be 
 his Christian creed. Of course, all sharp bounds of 
 doctrine disappear; and this simplicity of method, 
 carried out with the wonderful wealth and fervor 
 of his exposition, makes him the great master of 
 liberal theology, by whatever name his disciples may 
 be called. 
 
 But it is not my business here to expound Schleier- 
 macher's method or doctrinal system, however 
 briefly : only to show how the order of thought I 
 have been trying to describe came into effect on New 
 England Unitarianism at that particular time; why 
 it fascinated some while it alarmed or offended 
 others, and in what ways it has modified the char- 
 acter of our religious thinking ever since. 
 
 This order of thought was (as I have already 
 hinted) further strengthened by those schools of 
 German philosophy so powerful in the first half of 
 this century, which came to be eagerly studied 
 
32 GERMAN INFLUENCE. 
 
 among us about fifty years ago. I have nothing 
 whatever to do with them here as systems of opinion. 
 I only speak of them because they shared the same 
 obloquy with the new theology from those who im- 
 perfectly understood them ; and because they have 
 strongly affected the current of opinion since — more 
 strongly than most of us are apt to think. Not 
 directly ; for few cared to study them, or could 
 possibly understand them if they did. But those 
 few have in a very special sense been the teachers 
 of our generation, and have influenced even the pop- 
 ular way of thinking among us more than we are 
 often aware. James Freeman Clarke, for example, 
 was strongly attracted by these philosophies and by 
 the theology founded upon them. Then there are 
 two well-known works of two very accomplished 
 students in this direction : " Keason in Eeligion " by 
 Dr. Hedge, to whom German came to be almost a 
 second mother tongue during his school-days passed 
 in Germany, and who had as much to do as anybody 
 in naturalizing the new order of thought among us ; 
 and " The Science of Thought," by Professor Everett, 
 which is understood to be a product of the philoso- 
 phy of Hegel, — that philosophy held in especial 
 dread and abhorrence by sober thinkers among us 
 half a century ago. Just in proportion to the seri- 
 ousness and the religiousness of their way of think- 
 ing have the men of a younger generation been 
 influenced by such books as these. 
 
 But the philosophy I speak of has had another 
 effect among us, more direct and more intelligible. 
 Fifty years ago, as I have shown, Unitarians were 
 
OPINION AS TO MIRACLES. 33 
 
 substantially all agreed in accepting Christianity as 
 a special and supernatural revelation, in the common 
 sense of those terms. I have quoted both George 
 Eipley and Theodore Parker, in their controversy 
 with Professor Norton, as professing, with the ut- 
 most apparent simplicity, their own belief in the 
 Christian miracles. At this day, on the contrary, 
 not only (with very rare exceptions) those who are 
 regarded as leaders of thought among us — such as 
 Martineau in England and Hedge in America — 
 have quietly dropped or openly discarded the argu- 
 ment from miracles ; but Broad Churchmen in 
 England, like Bishop Colenso, who never forfeited 
 his bishopric, like Bev. Charles Voysey and Stopford 
 Brooke (before the secession of these latter), have 
 done the same ; Matthew Arnold, openly a member 
 of the Church of England, says without rebuke that 
 "miracles do not happen." The way for this re- 
 markable change of opinion among men in general 
 has no doubt been opened by scientific habits of 
 thinking ; but, as a change in religious opinion, the 
 way for it had to be prepared by philosophy. 
 Schleiermacher, as usual, speaks both ways : " In- 
 sulate any natural fact," he says, " and it becomes 
 a miracle ; repeat any miracle, and it becomes 
 a natural fact." And, for a time, the religious 
 scruple is pacified by such a compromise. 
 
 Clear and honest thinking, however, demands 
 something more than this tampering with words. 
 It demands, first, a fixed habit of mind in harmony 
 with the best opinion or knowledge of the day : 
 this we call a philosophical method in our thought ; 
 
 3 
 
34 GERMAN INFLUENCE. 
 
 and, second, a careful study, with the best helps of 
 modern learning, of the documents and evidences of 
 our faith : this we call a scientific criticism in our 
 theology. I have just spoken of the great change 
 that has come to pass in the opinions of the think- 
 ing world, in the common understanding of the 
 Bible history. I have now a few words to say of 
 the way in which this change has been helped 
 amongst ourselves by the study of German critical 
 theology. 
 
 To go into the subject properly, I ought to show 
 how there have grown up , in Germany, more or 
 less directly as the fruit of different philosophical 
 schools, a great variety of interpretations, or ways 
 of interpreting the Bible records, most of them more 
 or less rationalistic ; and how these may be divided 
 into three main groups : the non-miraculous, pure 
 and simple, represented by the name of Paulus ; 
 the mythical or poetic, represented by Strauss ; and 
 the historical or scientific, of which the best ex- 
 ponent is the school of Baur. Now the story of 
 these groups is extremely interesting and instruc- 
 tive, but I have not time to give it here ; 1 and, 
 besides, my subject seems to make it more proper 
 for me to illustrate it by examples taken among our 
 own students and theologians, instead of those that 
 come to us across the water in a foreign tongue. 
 
 Strictly speaking, there has been no scholarly 
 investigation of this field amongst ourselves. The 
 best that any of our students have done has been 
 
 1 It is given in " Christian History in its Three Great Periods," 
 vol. iii. pp. 227-238. 
 
EAELIER INDICATIONS. 35 
 
 to study according to their ability, and appropriate 
 as far as they thought good, the learning which has 
 been poured forth in unstinted measure from the 
 German press. German has for this half-century 
 been the favorite, I may say the indispensable, 
 language in which to follow up any of these lines 
 of investigation. And, whether our own writers 
 have borrowed their opinions out and out, or 
 whether they have thought them out for them- 
 selves under the atmospheric pressure of that great 
 world of learning and speculation, the result is 
 one : the general, even the popular, way of looking 
 at the subject, with or without knowing it, has 
 taken its tone from Germany. 
 
 The earliest signs of this influence among us were 
 an essay on " The Messianic Prophecies," by Mr. 
 (afterwards Professor) George R. Noyes, in 1834; 
 critical " Lectures on the Old Testament," by Pro- 
 fessor Palfrey, published in 1840; and a "Note on 
 the Old Testament," by Professor Norton, in 1844. 
 These, however, though expressing the extreme of 
 radical opinion in their day, were addressed only to 
 scholars, and hardly reached the general mind ; then, 
 too, they did not directly touch the Christian records, 
 and so excited little or no particular alarm. The first 
 book I remember, showing clear traces of German 
 influence upon critical opinion, — less by its argu- 
 ment than by the fact of its publication, — was a 
 tale called " Theodore, or the Skeptic's Conversion," 
 translated by James Freeman Clarke from the 
 learned and famous theologian De Wette. Theodore 
 is an ingenuous young theologian, beginning to be 
 
36 GERMAN INFLUENCE. 
 
 troubled with doubts of the supernatural, — a sort 
 of Eobert Elsmere of that period, whose spiritual 
 struggles are mild, indeed, compared with those of 
 a later day, and who easily finds comfort in such 
 pious compromises as those we have seen in 
 Schleiermacher. There could not have been a 
 gentler or kindlier introduction among us of the 
 line of thought which controversy was to make so 
 familiar afterwards. De Wette was one of the 
 earliest, one of the most devout and pure-minded, 
 as well as most copious and learned, of the new 
 school of commentators ; and his writings, though 
 long left behind by the rushing current of specu- 
 lative exegesis, did perhaps more than any others 
 to instruct the students of that generation. 
 
 It is natural to speak next of the work of 
 Theodore Parker, whose chief task of erudition was 
 to translate and expound, from his immense range 
 of reading, De Wette's commentary on the Old 
 Testament. He had already, in his South Boston 
 sermon on " The Transient and Permanent in 
 Christianity " (1841), cast these topics of learned 
 discussion into the waters of popular controversy ; 
 and his name, more than any other, came to be the 
 watchword of the change of opinion that was slowly 
 coming to pass upon the popular mind : a change 
 which was strikingly shown three years ago this 
 month, when the American Unitarian Association 
 published a large volume of Theodore Parker's 
 writings, including that very discourse, under the 
 editorship of James Freeman Clarke. 
 
 Two other Unitarian scholars, especially revered 
 
W. H. FUENESS. — E. H. SEAES. 37 
 
 and beloved among us, have shown in different 
 ways and more obscurely something of the German 
 influence in their commentaries upon the Gospel, — 
 Dr. William Henry Furness and Mr. Edmund 
 Hamilton Sears. "Jesus and his Biographers," 
 which is the completest and best statement of Dr. 
 Furness's exposition, recognizes with extreme grati- 
 tude and respect his obligation to his instructor 
 Professor Norton ; but its characteristic view — 
 that the miracles, taken in their most literal sense, 
 were the natural acts of such a soul as Jesus — 
 not only was a great shock to the received opinion, 
 but no one can read the rationalistic commentary 
 of Paulus, without seeing how the two differ in 
 their method only by a hair's-breadth, and how 
 (consciously or not) the one has caught the manner 
 and spirit of the other whom apparently he means 
 to contradict. They have the same matter-of-fact 
 way of taking the detail of narrative and of giving it 
 a " natural " explanation, each in his own fashion. 
 Allow for the thick, clumsy, dingy, ill-printed 
 German volumes, and set beside them the fair, 
 clean, trim, compact pages of the American press, — 
 compare the scholastic method of the German 
 erudite, who chiefly rejoices and expands in the dry 
 light of criticism, with the religious beauty and 
 tenderness that mark the later exposition, — and 
 you have in the one, in many a familiar passage, 
 only a transfigured likeness of the other. Mr. 
 Sears's " Heart of Christ," T should say on the other 
 hand, with perhaps a little less confidence, reflects, 
 in the great sweetness and spiritual beauty of its 
 
38 GERMAN INFLUENCE. 
 
 exposition, the tone of Olshausen, that most devout 
 and mystical of learned commentators, whose ortho- 
 doxy of belief seems purely a phase of his senti- 
 mental piety, and whose spirit is wonderfully 
 winning as you begin to read him, whether or not 
 you are long content with his intellectual view. 
 Mr. Sears's refined and beautiful intelligence was 
 the gracious channel through which that vein of 
 influence flowed in, to the delight and comfort of 
 many a kindred mind. 
 
 I do not know of any theologian among us who 
 has accepted seriously Strauss's mythical theory of 
 interpreting the gospel narrative. It was taken up 
 by Theodore Parker, while it was yet new, in the 
 " Christian Examiner," in an admirable exposition 
 and confutation ; and I do not remember any dis- 
 cussion of it as a living issue among us since. In 
 brief, it would make the supernatural parts of the 
 Gospels a sort of allegory, or philosophical poem, 
 founded on ideas current in Jewish tradition, and 
 embodying in symbols certain facts and phases of 
 the higher life of man. Especially such transcen- 
 dental facts of the Gospel narrative as the Incar- 
 nation, the Temptation, the Transfiguration, the 
 Resurrection and Ascension, are expounded frankly 
 as " myths," — that is, philosophical ideas, or facts 
 of the religious life, put in the form of narrative of 
 real events, which are regarded as purely symbolic 
 or allegorical. It is understood to be the product 
 of what is called the school of Hegel " of the Left " 
 in philosophy ; and, if one wishes to see how that 
 general line of symbolic interpretation is carried 
 
D. F. STRAUSS. — F. C. BAUR. 39 
 
 out through the field of fact and dogma, he might 
 be advised, instead of studying the words of Strauss 
 himself (which are foreign in tone, and more or less 
 repellent to us), to find it in the writings of Drs. 
 Hedge and Everett before cited, especially the 
 former. 
 
 Of far greater importance at this day. than the 
 schools of criticism yet spoken of is what is known 
 as the "Tubingen School," established and still 
 largely controlled by the massive learning and 
 masterly mind of Ferdinand Christian Baur. I 
 have myself several times given public exposition 
 of the method of this school and the results it 
 seems to lead to, and shall say nothing of it now, 
 except that it has been most fully, most intelli- 
 gently, and best set forth before our public by that 
 graceful scholar, that widely read theologian, that 
 accomplished man of letters, Octavius Brooks Froth - 
 ingham, — a man who inherits the elegant and 
 fastidious refinement of our elder New England 
 scholarship, and has added to it an intellectual 
 breadth, a moral courage, and a mental vigor which 
 put him conspicuously in the front rank of a 
 younger school of theologians. 1 
 
 I have now, as time allowed me, passed in review 
 the influences, both religious and dogmatic or intel- 
 lectual, which have come upon American Unitarian- 
 ism during the last fifty years, while I have been 
 
 1 When these words were spoken, Mr. Frothingham was by my 
 side ; and the response they called forth must have convinced him, 
 gratefully, how little the noble independence of his career had 
 estranged him from the affection and honor of his earlier associates. 
 
40 GEEMAN INFLUENCE. 
 
 a close and interested spectator in the field. There 
 is one other thing which seems to me necessary, in 
 order to make this survey complete. I have said 
 already what were the dismay and repugnance with 
 which that influence was first seen to be coming on. 
 
 o 
 
 To quote from Professor Norton's address on " The 
 Latest Form of Infidelity " : " In Germany the 
 theology of which I speak has allied itself with 
 atheism, with pantheism, and with other irreligious 
 speculations, that have appeared in those meta- 
 physical systems from which the God of Christianity 
 is excluded." Some of you may no doubt remember 
 when the very name German was a sort of reproach, 
 and any suspicion of that line of speculation was a 
 stigma from which it was not easy for the young 
 theologian to get absolved. Yet you have also 
 lived to see one who as a young theologian most 
 eagerly and with warmest sympathy followed that 
 line of speculation, come nearer perhaps than any 
 other man of education among us to the common 
 thought and heart ; for, when I recall those early 
 influences, I seem to find the popular embodiment 
 of them all in James Freeman Clarke. 
 
 Again, it seems to me clear that the life of re- 
 ligious thought which has come down to us survives 
 not in spite of, but in virtue of, those influences I 
 have attempted to describe. I do not mean that 
 the opinions of the present day are in better har- 
 mony with the true religious life than those which 
 prevailed fifty years ago. I do not think they are. 
 At any rate, it is not for us to disparage that body 
 of opinion which stayed the religious life of Chan- 
 
THE OPEN CHANNEL. 41 
 
 ning, Tuckerman, and Henry Ware. What I do 
 mean is, that to have shut down the gates against 
 an intellectual tide so genuine and strong as was 
 then setting in, would have been to turn what till 
 then had been an open channel into a little land- 
 locked creek, and to shut us out effectually from 
 the large intellectual currents of our age. The 
 alternative in that case would have been to strand 
 in dry-rot, or to effect a breach by violence into the 
 wider waters. There were those then who were 
 willing to do either : Norton the one thing, Parker 
 the other thing. But all of us, I think, are now 
 agreed that the more excellent way was that taken 
 by the younger scholars of that day, — Furness, 
 Hedge, and Clarke being conspicuous in the group, 
 — who set themselves to deepen the channel and 
 keep it open, and won for us who follow them the 
 free navigation of the sea. 
 
 And this service of theirs turned, as you will 
 have seen, upon the same point which Schleier- 
 macher made the pivot of his first appeal to the 
 German people : I mean his assertion that the 
 religious life — with all there is in it of beauty and 
 joy, of comfort, aspiration, strength, and hope — is 
 its owti evidence and its own exceeding great reward ; 
 and, while it is not without intellectual foundation 
 of its own, is yet independent of all form, of specu- 
 lative opinion. It was (humanly speaking) of in- 
 finite importance for us at that time that this 
 conviction should be well established. Doubtless 
 it has had the ill effect of making some men loose, 
 reckless perhaps, about holding firmly any clear 
 
42 GERMAN INFLUENCE. 
 
 conviction at all about anything. But it has had 
 the good effect, with very many more in whom 
 opinion was wavering, to hold them still within 
 the blessed circle of Christian fellowship, till 
 character should be ripened, principle braced, and 
 the mental tone invigorated. Thus it has quickened 
 and refreshed the springs of spiritual life in the 
 veins of our religious organization itself. 
 
 Besides, as we must remember, the opinions then 
 most dreaded — opinions touching the supernatural 
 and miraculous in the ministry of Jesus — were 
 not opinions invented by theologians, however 
 radical. On the contrary, the most radical of 
 theologians used every art of forced interpretation, 
 of evasion, and of intellectual compromise, to escape 
 the pressure of those opinions. If the old doctrinal 
 view of the incarnation, the atonement, the resur- 
 rection, and the miraculous works of Jesus has in 
 any mind been weakened, dissolved, or washed 
 away, it has been not by the theology which 
 first exhausted every shift to save it, but by the 
 science which in a pitiless flood beat and encroached 
 upon it, in spite of those poor makeshifts. Within 
 these fifty years many of us have had thrust upon 
 us, again and again, first-hand testimony from be- 
 lievers of facts as distinctly miraculous as anything 
 in the New Testament, — facts which one or two 
 hundred years ago would just as distinctly have 
 received that interpretation ; yet we know perfectly 
 well that such testimony, however vouched, would 
 not stand an hour in any civilized court of justice, 
 and so we quietly lay it by, whatever be our private 
 
THE BELIEF IN MIRACLES. 43 
 
 opinion of its validity. It is just so with treatment 
 of the miracles of the New Testament. Thousands 
 among us receive them with the same faith, comfort, 
 and reverence as of old. But not one of us thinks 
 of defining the line of Christian fellowship by the 
 acceptance of them ; not one of us would stake a 
 single point of his own religious faith upon them; 
 not one of us appeals to them as argument for the 
 spiritual truth, but at most as what that " truth as 
 it is in Jesus " may help us to accept. 
 
 This change in the general intelligence has come 
 about, reluctantly and with infinite protest, during 
 the entire scientific revolution of the last two centu- 
 ries. It has not been frankly accepted, among those 
 calling themselves Christians, till comparatively late 
 in the fifty years' period we have been looking back 
 upon. But it had to reach not our scientific opin- 
 ions merely, but our religious opinions. If the 
 religious life survives among us in spite of it, this 
 result is due, in no small part, to the influence upon 
 our elder Unitarianism of German theology from 
 the time of Schleiermacher. 
 
III. 
 
 FORTY YEARS LATER. 
 
 IN the course which comes to an end to-night, 1 
 you have been studying one of those large 
 movements of the human mind, whose advance is 
 measured not by years, but by- centuries. The line 
 of thought you have followed reaches back some- 
 thing more than five hundred years. Certainly, it 
 is a new heaven and a new earth that have come 
 into view, since the slow and painful dissolution 
 began, of that great structure which we call the 
 Catholic civilization of the Middle Age, — a new 
 heaven, revealed in the system of Copernicus, or 
 through the telescope of Galileo ; a new earth, 
 whose law of development, long foreshadowed, comes 
 to be more clearly seen, by Darwin's and Spencer's 
 help, in these last thirty years. 
 
 And this change in the world's outward aspect 
 is but a type of the more radical revolution in men's 
 religious thought, — a revolution far costlier in 
 conflict, tears, and blood. Its march is not a holi- 
 day journey, but a campaign. Its victories are won 
 by hard and painful strokes. The campaign is not 
 always bloodless. It has not only its solitary vic- 
 
 1 An Address delivered before the Brooklyn Association for 
 Moral and Spiritual Education, May 30, 1886, 
 
THE MARCH OF THOUGHT. 45 
 
 tims, like Giordano Bruno, burnt alive in Eome for 
 his gospel of free-thinking ;_ but its martyr hosts, as 
 the Huguenots and the English Puritans, who died 
 in the hope of founding a free religious common- 
 wealth. And, no doubt, the way will even yet be 
 rough and painful, to us or to our children, before 
 the present movement will have its fruit in a fully 
 recovered harmony between men's knowledge and 
 their faith. It is well to think of our subject thus 
 at starting, in its severer and more heroic aspect ; 
 and to feel that we ourselves have volunteered (not, 
 let us hope, quite unworthily) in the service which 
 it indicates of our common humanity. 
 
 That march of thought you have sought to inter- 
 pret, stage by stage, as it has borne upon those two 
 chief interests of men's life, their morals and their 
 religion. A march — in this present view of it — 
 of five centuries, that began out of great obscurity, 
 and has been followed with slow and hard-won 
 steps. As it emerges in these latter days into a 
 clearer field, we have a better understanding of what 
 it is, and whither it is tending. It is to this later 
 phase of it, for about a century back, that we give, 
 in particular, the name " liberal movement ; " and 
 you have asked me to attempt some exposition of 
 the point it has come to, and the aspect it presents 
 to-day. 
 
 I am glad, and a little proud, to have this task 
 assigned me. But, as I come to take it up, I find 
 myself in a mood which I should like to explain in 
 advance. For, I must confess, it does not prove 
 so plain and easy a business as I might have hoped. 
 
46 FORTY YEARS LATER. 
 
 The earlier phases of this movement, indeed, it is 
 comparatively easy to interpret, as they settle into 
 shape and take their place in history. We are well 
 away from the passion and turmoil that beset them 
 once. We think of them now as steps in an evo- 
 lution determined in advance by the very nature of 
 human thought and life. We feel nothing of the 
 dread and horror the Eeformers felt at the mighty 
 genius of papal Eome, that had created and for a 
 thousand years controlled the Catholic Empire of 
 the West. We calmly balance the right and wrong 
 of the conflict waged against it by the valiant, 
 heroic^ austere, and domineering creed which gives 
 a lurid glory to the name of Calvin. We look back, 
 it may be, with easy indifference to the sectarian 
 controversies of sixty years ago, in which the dear- 
 est interests of mankind seemed then to be at stake. 
 We embark, with an easy confidence, on that widen- 
 ing and gracious stream, which bears in its bosom 
 the literature, the science, and the philosophic 
 thought of our nineteenth century ; and these, by 
 their blending with our religious thought, make the 
 very definition of what we know as Liberalism. So 
 far, our view is quite clear and undisturbed. But 
 when we come square up to the hour in which we 
 live and speak, and try to interpret that, we feel a 
 sudden arrest. The abrupt challenge of that ques- 
 tion — What is, after all, the aspect and the promise 
 of this very moment of time ? — must give us pause. 
 The scientific phase we talk of, indeed, quite con- 
 fidently ; but of the social phase, which envelops 
 and controls the scientific, who knows what symp- 
 
TWENTY-FIVE AND SIXTY-FIVE. 47 
 
 toms may open on us unawares, this very coming 
 month ? 
 
 One may be pardoned at twenty-five for feeling 
 very sure of the way he is going, and very sure that 
 the great world is going the same way too. Look- 
 ing as he does with one eye — the eye of hope — 
 through a narrow tube, his vision is more keen than 
 wide. Well for him that it is so ! I do not know 
 how he should ever have courage to face the future, 
 which makes the field where he must walk and 
 work, if he had to see in advance all that he will 
 look back on with the eye of experience before his 
 work is done. Well for him that that future shows 
 to him in the color of his own hope ! His aim in 
 life (we will suppose) is ideal and intellectual, not 
 mercenary and base. In that temper, he easily 
 finds things as he wants to find them. Faith fur- 
 nishes forth the substance of things hoped for, and 
 the evidence of things not seen. Thus, " Your 
 young men shall see visions ; " and this, as Lord 
 Bacon tells us, is life's contrast against that dim, 
 remote, uncertain glance upon the future, hinted in 
 the phrase that follows : " Your old men shall 
 dream dreams," — knowing, alas ! that they are 
 dreams, whose real being is of the past. 
 
 But the pardon found so easily at twenty- five 
 will not be given him if forty years later he has 
 only the same sanguine confidence, if he still finds 
 the situation as clear and easy to be interpreted as 
 he thought it then. Life has brought him in sharp 
 collision with facts and forces, whose existence he 
 had hardly begun to suspect. The " stream of 
 
48 FORTY YEARS LATER. 
 
 tendency," whose course he thought so smooth and 
 certain, turns out to be a turbulent flood, whose 
 twisting eddies perplex his bearings as he tosses and 
 spins upon its surface. Those forty years will have 
 brought to the front many a revolution of opinion, 
 many a political upheaval, the eclipse of many a 
 shining reputation, many a social change wrought 
 through blind passion, and involving unforeseen 
 events. They will, further, have brought such 
 advance and widening-out of general knowledge as 
 to make the visible sphere he moves in quite 
 another, a wider, a more bewildering thing. His 
 thought moves painfully and slow amid the new 
 surroundings. He envies and admires, it may be, 
 the alacrity with which younger minds find free 
 play in a scene that to him grows dim and unfa- 
 miliar. He begins to feel that a younger hand 
 must take and carry forward that torch of truth on 
 which his grasp is slackening. He is less hardy 
 and single-minded in his view, not because he has 
 less faith, but because he knows more things. He 
 sees more widely than he did, and so sees not so far 
 or sharply in one direction as he thought he did. 
 And his opinion is likely to be the calm assent that 
 this is so wpon the whole, rather than the ardent 
 assertion that this is surely so, and cannot be 
 otherwise. 
 
 Now I stand, in comparison with some of you, 
 at the end of that term of forty years ; and I stand 
 in something of that attitude of disadvantage. 
 And, to simplify the task you have given me, I 
 must begin by narrowing down my view : not try 
 
TO LIMIT THE FIELD. 49 
 
 to span the wide horizon, but to look understand- 
 ingly at one or two things that lie very near. Thus 
 the present aspect of the liberal movement ought 
 by right to include a great deal that I cannot so 
 much as touch upon. Hardly a hint, for example, 
 of those most interesting and kindred phases of 
 it among the leaders of liberal thought in England ; 
 still less the later aspects of German learning and 
 speculation, or the instructive criticism that comes 
 from the universities of Holland, or those rare, 
 precious, and heroic strivings after a liberal the- 
 ology that appear here and there — in France 
 especially, but also in Italy and even Spain — in 
 the field so long given over to bitter conflict be- 
 tween the spiritual despotism of Eome and blank 
 materialistic unbelief flaming out now and then 
 in hot revolutionary hate. All these would be 
 needed, to fill out an adequate picture of our time, 
 taken from the point of view you have assigned 
 me. But I am afraid that a sketch so wide and 
 ambitious would be ineffective and thin. It is an 
 ungrateful task to summarize a volume in the 
 limits of a half-hour's essay. And because you 
 have applied to me, who have spent these forty 
 years, and more, in living contact with certain 
 special phases of the liberal movement, and not in 
 a far-away study of it as a whole, I shall deal with 
 only that part of the wide field in which I have 
 been an interested eyewitness, and in a small way 
 a. worker. It is only with that small segment of 
 our subject that I propose to deal ; only there, if 
 anywhere, my word can be of any use. 
 
 4 
 
50 FORTY YEAES LATER. 
 
 Taking this point of view, then, I shall briefly 
 trace some lines of comparison between the present 
 and earlier stages of the liberal movement in these 
 three respects, — its temper, its thought, and its 
 aim ; and with this I shall mingle as I may some 
 consideration of those practical aspects of it most 
 plainly bearing upon the future. 
 
 I. And first, as I look back upon that lapse 
 of time, I do not seem to find liberalism so light 
 of heart as forty years ago. Nay, I easily fancy 
 that then the world itself was younger, and the 
 spirit of the time was younger, as well as we who 
 were living our youth then. Grave events, cruel 
 disappointments, some of the darkest tragedies of 
 history, have stamped their mark upon this period 
 of time. How easily and how eagerly the human 
 heart looks for the present coming of an age of 
 gold ! How heavy and quick the shadow falls 
 upon that fair vision ! Some of you may recall 
 the glow of hope that greeted the revolutions of 
 1848, that year of wonders, whose promise of 
 liberty and peace was followed so soon by such 
 thunderstorms and shocks of war. That type 
 shows us in the world of politics what we so often 
 find in the world of morals and thought. It seems 
 impossible that with anybody the view of things 
 should be so roseate and cheerful now as it was 
 with almost everybody then. Our time, in com- 
 parison with that, looks anxious, critical, and full 
 of doubt. It is a long way from the serene gospel 
 according to Emerson, in which all the higher 
 faiths are taken for granted, to the labored theistic 
 
LESS OPTIMISTIC. 51 
 
 arguments which are the last product of the Con- 
 cord School. It is a long way from the easy op- 
 timism that explored with so confident touch our 
 chief social horrors, drunkenness, slavery, vice, and 
 crime, to that sterner mood in which we live, tem- 
 pered by the fire and blood of civil war, or taught 
 by the slow revolution in society and the State 
 that has been proceeding since. It is a long way 
 from that fair Arcadia of Brook Farm, with its 
 harmless socialistic theories and its amiable but 
 rather futile idealizing of daily toil, to the obstinate 
 labor-battles of this last month, and the red-handed, 
 death-dealing anarchism of Chicago. 
 
 The first aspect, then, in which the liberal move- 
 ment presents itself to my mind at this time, is the 
 contrast that it shows to the easy and optimistic 
 idealism of forty years ago. Looked at externally, 
 the change is a little saddening. But if we look 
 to the temper of mind that meets it, we find that 
 it is a healthy and a promising change. The manly 
 and brave temper is that which chooses to look 
 facts in the face and see the worst of them, rather 
 than brood upon them in the illusive glow of 
 Utopian dreams. Anything like advance to a bet- 
 ter knowledge of the situation is had by dealing 
 first-hand with the facts of human nature, includ- 
 ing its malign and dangerous passions as well as 
 its radiant possibilities. That, I think, is more 
 the temper of liberalism in our day than it was 
 forty years ago. Those darker facts of men's life, 
 those evil passions of the mind, are what religion- 
 ists of earlier time hated and fought against as 
 
52 FOETY YEAES LATEE. 
 
 enemies of God, desiring to see their face openly. 
 And in this regard, we have better understanding 
 than earlier liberals had of the heroic side of that 
 elder faith. 
 
 For, in its first form, religions liberalism is simply 
 a movement away from the creeds and institutions 
 of the past, with the heavy bondage they laid upon 
 the human spirit, toward the breadth, the freedom, 
 the wealth of the world's larger life. The fresh 
 consciousness of this is a keen sense of emancipa- 
 tion, it is the joy of a new-found liberty. Deliver- 
 ance from the ancient terror, — terror before the 
 inexorable Judge whom theologians have depicted ; 
 terror of devils that assailed the soul in all un- 
 guarded hours ; terror of the eternal hell, whose 
 fiery torment has so been held out before the naked 
 conscience ; terror at the thought of blasphemy in 
 casting off beliefs that have grown to be flat unrea- 
 son, while the mind yet shrinks from looking its 
 honest thought in the face, — deliverance from that 
 manifold " terror of the Lord " is enough, at first, to 
 fill the soul with a great joy. It seems, for the 
 time, as if it were alone ample to supply the fulness 
 of the religious life. Only leave that vague dark 
 dread behind, and the whole soul is flooded with 
 kindly light. 
 
 That is the first flush of feeling in the new eman- 
 cipation ; and that was, very largely, the spirit of 
 the younger liberalism with which we compare our 
 own. It was as if we had abolished those dark 
 facts of life, of which the old dogma was but the 
 symbol ; as if there were no longer any such thing 
 
THE CHANGE FOR GOOD. 53 
 
 as depravity in human nature, when we had once 
 denied the dogma of its innate corruption; as if 
 there were no divine wrath that blazed against 
 wrongdoing, when once we had got over our dread 
 of a future hell. A radiant humanity found nothing 
 anywhere but good. Misery and pain, it thought, 
 were to be banished at a word out of the conditions 
 of men's lives. Ah ! but it forgot that chaos and 
 horror of men's passions which have furnished from 
 the beginning the imagery, the apprehension, and 
 the foretaste of eternal doom. 
 
 We have learned, too, that religion itself, as a 
 power in the soul, is its own joy and exceeding 
 great reward. Here, too, we have come into better 
 understanding of the ancient creed. With all its 
 narrowness and error, we still see that while it was 
 honestly and bravely held, it brought to its adhe- 
 rents an heroic temper to fight stoutly as the Lord's 
 champions in the battle against wrong. It brought, 
 too, great gladness of heart and a peace which passed 
 understanding, from the mere fact that it was a 
 religion, — that it meant the surrender of the soul 
 to that which was worshipped as highest, holiest, 
 best. That heroism remained, that joy and peace 
 remained, of the faith that had been as the soul of 
 goodness in an evil creed. 
 
 At least, if it did not remain, we have learned 
 better to understand its loss ; for the old foes have 
 been about us with new faces. And, in these forty 
 years since the early flush of our newly emancipated 
 liberalism, there is not so much to boast of our own 
 better success in dealing with those old foes as to 
 
54 FORTY YEARS LATER. 
 
 give us any very complacent sense of the superiority 
 of our ways over the former ways. And so the pres- 
 ent temper of liberalism is soberer, more modest of 
 itself, less apt and confident in its claim, less proud 
 of its achievement ; and it is well for us that it is so. 
 II. The second aspect of the liberal movement 
 now, in comparison with forty years ago, is that it 
 seeks a scientific rather than a sentimental, mystic, 
 or idealistic expression of itself. Any movement of 
 religious thought implies these two things. It aims, 
 first, to state with authority what is the deepest 
 ground of trust and the most imperative law of 
 conduct : that is the sphere of personal religion, 
 dealing with the individual heart and conscience. 
 It aims, secondly, to train and stimulate the intelli- 
 gence, by setting forth, both to the mind and im- 
 agination, the largest and most general view we are 
 able to get of the universe and of human life in its 
 broadest relations : that is the sphere of religion 
 intellectually, dealing with the speculative under- 
 standing. Now, regarding the former, I do not see 
 that religion as a spiritual force in men's lives has 
 changed in the least from what it was when the 
 Vedic Hymns or the Hebrew Psalms or the trage- 
 dies of iEschylus were composed. Life brings men 
 face to face, now as then, with the same great won- 
 der and glory of the heavens, with the same stormy 
 passions or gentler affections of the heart, with the 
 same bitter experiences of pain and grief and guilt, 
 with the same dark problem and mystery of the 
 human lot. As to either of these, I do not see that 
 our attitude, morally regarded, has changed at all 
 
EMERSON'S THREE WORDS. 55 
 
 since the earliest time of recorded thought. The 
 only solution to the enigma of life, as it touches us 
 personally, is that which consists in the reconcilia- 
 tion of heart and conscience to the conditions of 
 each man's particular lot in life. The key of this 
 reconciliation is found, now as ever, in the words 
 " obedience and trust and help." These words have 
 to do with life itself, not with our thoughts about 
 life ; their meaning is to the heart, not to the under- 
 standing ; the method they indicate is the method 
 not of science, but of faith. By that method, and 
 by that alone, we are able to solve the problem of 
 life practically, which we can never solve theoreti- 
 cally. That practical solving of it is what we call 
 salvation. Toward any speculative solution of it, I 
 am unable to see that science or philosophy has 
 advanced us a single step. 
 
 Now, it is just within these forty years that 
 science has made its most brilliant effort, and seems 
 to have all but fulfilled its promise, to do that very 
 thing. Consider, for a moment, the change that has 
 come about in our mental habit. Forty years ago 
 the most advanced religious thinking was purely of 
 the type known as transcendental ; that is, it was 
 speculation upon data and postulates furnished by 
 the religious sentiment. The three great words 
 which more than any other marked the advent and 
 set the key of that phase of the liberal movement 
 were spoken in Emerson's "Nature" in 1836, his 
 appeal to the "American Scholar" in 1837, and his 
 Divinity School Address in 1838. The last two of 
 these I heard as they were spoken ; and — though 
 
56 FOETY YEARS LATER. 
 
 dimly and confusedly, out of my deep ignorance — 
 I felt with a sense I can yet recall the breath and 
 pulse of the new era then opening upon us. And I 
 do not yet see that that fresh inspiration has lost 
 its charm or its power or its use. 
 
 But, as soon as we think of what now appeals to 
 our chief intellectual interest, we find ourselves in 
 another atmosphere, — chill, gray, and bracing, when 
 we compare it with that warmth and glow. We 
 have lost the secret of that willing and radiant faith. 
 We yield belief only where fact has had the verifica- 
 tion of scientific tests ; we feel assured only where 
 experience has bodied forth the meaning of the 
 word. Thus the great and certain verities of the 
 religious life, as they were then thought of, — God, 
 Freedom, and Immortality, — we submit to tests 
 which no one demanded then, and bestow upon 
 them interpretations which no one would have 
 admitted then. Theories of the universe, which 
 formerly were purely speculative or religious, — the 
 origin of the visible heavens, the development of 
 life upon our planet, the law of the Providence that 
 rules in human history ; theories of life, dealing with 
 the laws of health, the laws of character, the laws 
 of sanity, the laws of population, wealth and pov- 
 erty, the laws of crime, — are constructed on scien- 
 tific data and dealt with by scientific methods. For 
 providential rule, we have the law of evolution ; for 
 the " sacred history " of our younger days, we have 
 the study of " comparative religions," which becomes 
 as mere a branch of human science as that of com- 
 parative philology; and so with all the rest. 
 
SCIENTIFIC THEISM. 57 
 
 This, I say, is the change which has come about 
 within the recollection of some of us, marking 
 strongly one present aspect of the liberal movement. 
 On the whole, it is better to welcome this phase of 
 our religious thought, and make the best of it, than 
 to criticise or vituperate it as Carlyle and Euskin 
 have done so bitterly. 1 But we may say of it that 
 it attempts too much. Take the two phrases most 
 commonly in use to express the conscious attitude 
 of men's thought toward the highest of intellectual 
 problems, — "a Scientific Theism " and " the Idea of 
 God," — and I think we may say of both of them 
 that, so far as it is a religious theism we mean, and 
 not merely a cosmic speculation, it goes before our 
 premises, it underlies our processes, and makes 
 a supplement to our deductions : like Newton's 
 " Scholium " at the end of his Principia, which 
 gives an eloquent statement of his own belief, but 
 was certainly not proved by his differential calculus. 
 So the form of theistic argument most familiar to us 
 at this day may be regarded as the cropping out of a 
 conviction implanted by a devout Christian train- 
 ing rather than a logical deduction from the prem- 
 ises that have been assumed. And the result, upon 
 the whole, we may find to be this : that religion, 
 with its implicit faiths, abides as a primary element 
 
 1 Thus from Mr. Ruskin : " I know of nothing that has been 
 taught the youth of our time, except that their fathers were apes 
 and their mothers winkles ; that the world began in accident and 
 will end in darkness ; that honor is a folly, ambition a virtue, charity 
 a vice, poverty a crime, and rascality the means of all wealth and 
 the sum of all wisdom. Both Mr. Carlyle and I knew perfectly 
 well all along what would be the outcome of that education." 
 
58 FORTY YEAKS LATER. 
 
 in human nature ; that it must be accepted, where 
 it is accepted at all, on its own merits, and not on 
 those of any logic ; that natural science must. waive 
 the attempt to solve that problem of the universe 
 which has proved beyond the grasp of speculative 
 philosophy. Thus we learn that the true province of 
 Eeligion must be experience and duty of the life 
 that now is, not vain strivings to fathom the Eternal 
 and Unknown ; and the true province of Science 
 will be to explain not the ultimate ground of things, 
 or the primary motive of right and duty, but the 
 real conditions under which men's work on earth 
 may be more effectually done. 
 
 III. And so we come to a third aspect of the 
 liberal movement, more characteristic and more full 
 of powerful appeal to our hope and fear than either 
 of the others. I mean, that the questions it raises 
 are not those of theory, but of life, — questions of 
 ethics and questions of social order. There is a 
 singular consent, all along the line, in turning away 
 from interests merely speculative, and facing the 
 problems of human life. Not merely that societies 
 for " ethical culture " take the place of societies pro- 
 fessedly religious ; not merely that greater attention 
 is given, in pulpits and religious journals, to the 
 social questions of the day ; but that, with multi- 
 tudes, their real religion, the only religion they pre- 
 tend to know, is that which deals with secular 
 concerns and is inspired with secular passion. A 
 man's religion is that which makes to him the ideal 
 thing in life ; that which he believes in so heartily 
 that he holds any other gain, or life itself, cheap in 
 
QUESTIONS OF LIFE, NOT THEORY. 59 
 
 comparison with it. Thus, that which makes a 
 nihilist or an anarchist ready to suffer and die for 
 his horrible creed is the same religious frenzy that 
 inspires a cannibal war-dance, and that made the 
 priests of Baal howl aloud and gash themselves with 
 knives. The fervent passion of a " Nationalist," 
 whose true religion is Ireland, is the same thing 
 with the Messianic passion of the Jews, which after 
 ages have exalted into a symbol, and made the 
 central fact of religious history. The creed of 
 Calvin, for which men freely fought and bled three 
 hundred years ago, has faded to a mere chimera ; it 
 is no longer a genuine religion — that is, a flaming 
 and dominant passion of the human heart — with 
 anybody in our day. What has come to take its 
 place is not the serene platitudes of a speculative 
 theology ; not the " cosmic theism " or the " scientific 
 theism " which builds itself up, as an intellectual 
 deduction, upon the foundations of modern knowl- 
 edge. It is rather the keen interest, the patient 
 service, the sacrifice of personal indulgence, the 
 spirit kindling to moral enthusiasm and a passion of 
 self-devotion, that drafts and enlists men as loyal 
 champions in the battle for right, for truth, for 
 human welfare. Just in proportion as the fires of 
 old controversy fade, as the mind falls back, baffled 
 and weary, from its search after the infinite and 
 unknowable, just in that proportion the faith and 
 zeal, of which the human heart has shown itself 
 capable, come to be devoted to that attainable ideal 
 which in pious phrase we call the Kingdom of God 
 upon earth. 
 
60 FORTY YEARS LATER. 
 
 At least, that great hope which lays hold upon 
 the future, even (we may say) the possibility of any 
 religion at all for mankind in the coming time, 
 seems to depend on the vital reality of that phase in 
 our movement which is ethical and social. It has 
 nothing to do with denial of or indifference toward 
 those sublimer conceptions, — a Living God as the 
 soul of things, and Immortal Life as the inspiration 
 of men's hope : on the contrary, the more vividly 
 these are conceived, the deeper and surer the motive 
 of that service of humanity. But " pure religion 
 and undefiled," as James says, consists in that very 
 service, not in any dreams or speculations or opin- 
 ions of men. And, of that liberal movement we are 
 studying, the most hopeful aspect is that it has en- 
 tered upon that phase. 
 
 It were a waste of time to cite here the innumer- 
 able illustrations that appear in every channel where 
 there is the least activity of religious thought. But 
 our business is with that which is properly included 
 in " the liberal movement." Wherever, indeed, 
 those human feelings and motives have colored the 
 exposition of religion, there we find a liberalism of 
 heart wider than any creed and embracing many. 
 But it has often happened that religious thinkers, 
 professedly liberal, have been the pioneers and the 
 shapers-out of work taken up then and pushed by 
 other hands. Such work may be semi-secular, like 
 education and prison-reform, which got their first 
 great impulse so ; or it may be purely humanitary 
 and moral. I have just received from that veteran 
 leader in religious liberalism, Francis William New- 
 
KELIGION OF HUMANITY. 61 
 
 man, now just closing his eighty -first year, — a man 
 whose singular intellectual candor and restless ac- 
 tivity of thought go along with an equal fervor of 
 spirit touching all human needs, — a pamphlet in 
 which he sets forth, with more than youthful ardor 
 of conviction, the five " new crusades " of our own 
 day against five gross evils of modern society, — 
 slavery, now happily extinct ; drunkenness, screened 
 by statute right and fostered by executive favor ; the 
 shelter of vice under laws especially offensive and 
 insulting to women ; that special horror of great 
 capitals assailed by the White Cross League ; and 
 the enormous guilt of war as a recognized court of 
 appeal for nations. In all these — and just as much 
 in the peril that comes with the new conditions of 
 modern industry, the distress and alarm of the great 
 labor-battle, the " red terror " of social anarchy, the 
 chronic task of disinfecting our party politics — we 
 see the need both of the severe, calm guidance of the 
 scientific spirit, and of a deep religious devotion of 
 the heart to human welfare. 
 
 These things, and such as these, are in our day 
 the special tasks of " the Eeligion of Humanity." 
 It is in keeping with the spirit of our liberal move- 
 ment from the beginning, that practical and not 
 theoretical interests should be its main concern ; 
 that it should more and more become an ethical and 
 social, not a speculative movement ; that its learning 
 shall not degenerate to pedantry, or its higher cul- 
 ture to dilettantism ; that its science shall be turned 
 from being a mere minister of material gain, or a 
 mere method and illustration of barren meditation 
 
62 FORTY YEARS LATER. 
 
 upon the universe, into a help and a guide for the 
 effectual working-out of those most necessary tasks. 
 
 These, then, appear to me the most instructive 
 aspects of the liberal movement, as it has come down 
 to us, to be guided by our hands : 1. An increasing 
 seriousness of temper, as compared with the buoyant 
 optimism of forty years ago ; 2. The clearer recogni- 
 tion and acceptance of the method of science, as 
 compared with that of pure sentiment and specula- 
 tion ; 3. The attempting of positive tasks, or the 
 study of positive problems of ethics, especially of 
 social ethics, instead of resting content in the intel- 
 lectual joy and pride of discovery of truth, or eman- 
 cipation from mental error. Into this large and 
 generous and real and consecrated liberalism, it is 
 (as we may trust) our great privilege to have at 
 length arrived. 
 
IV. 
 FREDERIC HENRY HEDGE. 
 
 DR. HEDGE'S grandfather, Lemuel Hedge, was 
 a country minister in Warwick, Massachu- 
 setts, a stout Loyalist in the time of the Revolution, 
 whose patriot neighbors made life a burden to him 
 in consequence. To the eldest of his six boys there 
 fell, as by birthright, the privilege of going to col- 
 lege, while a sturdy younger son, Levi, of stronger 
 brain and hand, was apprenticed to a master mason ; 
 but at the age of twenty, or thereabout, laying down 
 brick and trowel, resolutely won his way to the 
 only higher education then known, and became a 
 professor of logic and metaphysics in Harvard Col- 
 lege, and the father of our eminent theologian and 
 teacher, the subject of this sketch. The son kept in 
 his mind a pretty image of his maternal grand- 
 mother, daughter of President Holyoke of Harvard, 
 whom tradition pictured as a bright young girl, 
 standing on an insulated stool and holding an elec- 
 tric chain, while she offered her laughing lip in 
 challenge to whatever daring youth should advance 
 to touch. Experimental science was young and gay 
 in those good days ! A great-uncle on the same 
 side was Edward Augustus Holyoke, a physician of 
 Salem, who died in 1829 at something over the age 
 
64 FREDERIC HENRY HEDGE. 
 
 of one hundred, — a man of methodical ways, ad- 
 dicted to scientific observation, and of a repute in 
 his profession which, I suppose, gave to his young 
 relative, who knew him, the feeling, which he never 
 quite outgrew, that in choosing another path he had 
 forsaken his own true vocation. 
 
 Of such parentage and antecedents Frederic Henry 
 Hedge was born, on the 12th of December, 1805, two 
 years younger than Emerson, three years younger 
 than Eurness, his two nearest life-long friends. Of 
 his school days little can be known, since his schol- 
 arly calling was declared so early that, as he has 
 told me, he never had a purer delight in letters than 
 in committing to memory, at seven, the Eclogues of 
 Virgil in the original, and at ten he knew by heart 
 long passages of Homer in Greek. This means that 
 he could have had no companions in study, and no 
 class rivalry to cramp or cheer. But a young man 
 of uncommon genius and scholarship, George Ban- 
 croft, then in college, became an inmate of the 
 father's family, and tutor to the boy ; and it shows 
 in the father a singular confidence in both, that, 
 when the boy was thirteen and the tutor a graduate 
 of eighteen, they were sent together across the 
 ocean to become, the one a student of philosophy, 
 and the other a pupil in a classical school, in Ger- 
 many, where, absolutely among strangers, he passed 
 the next four years. I once persuaded him, when 
 he had pleased himself for some weeks in recalling 
 incidents of this period, to put them in the form of 
 an autobiographical sketch. It was in the interval 
 just before his grievous malady of the spring of 
 
AT SCHOOL IN GERMANY. 65 
 
 1887 ; and it was in a respite of that lingering 
 torment that he gave me the few pages that fol- 
 low — the only consecutive memorials that he has 
 left behind, of a career in which there was so much 
 of interest to tell : — 
 
 At the age of thirteen, having first been duly in- 
 stituted in the mysteries of the German language at a 
 private pension, I was put to school at a gymnasium in 
 north Germany, situated in a romantic valley among 
 the southward-stretching spurs of the Harz, permeated 
 by a small stream fordable in summer, swelled to a 
 roaring torrent by the melting snows of winter, and 
 washing the base of the Herzberg, a mountain some- 
 what less than a thousand feet in height. 
 
 The school buildings, a congeries of quadrangles 
 with other structures, including a church, had once 
 beeri a monastery : the boys' rooms, stretching along 
 two or three corridors, were the identical cells 
 formerly occupied by the monks, rooms about ten 
 feet square, with little bedrooms {Kammerri) attached. 
 They had stone floors and were heated by stoves, — 
 one stove to every two rooms, the mouth opening on 
 the corridor and closed by a lock of which the cale- 
 factor kept the key. Underneath the portion of the 
 building inhabited by the officers and scholars was 
 the crypt, lined with perpendicular tombstones, each 
 faced with an effigy in relief of the sainted brother 
 who slumbered beneath. Through this crypt the 
 truant boy, admitted by the calefactor, who served as 
 janitor, had to pass, with such courage as he might, 
 when after dark the upper doors were closed. The 
 school church was also the church of the Flecken, 
 the small town that leaned to the cloister, though 
 
 5 
 
66 FEEDEEIC HENEY HEDGE. 
 
 governed by a magistrate of its own. The students 
 with the teachers occupied the transept, the towns- 
 people the nave. 
 
 My coming was awaited with much curiosity by 
 the youths who were to be my fellow-students. 
 They expected to see a copper-colored savage : they 
 were met by a boy as white .as the whitest of their 
 own race, with no more of the savage than belongs to 
 the boy in every clime. 
 
 And yet these fellows were acquainted with the 
 history of this country, and could have passed a 
 better examination concerning it than the average 
 of American boys in those days. They knew that 
 the people of the United States were English, not 
 Indians. But such is the difference between book- 
 knowledge and ideas practically appropriated and 
 assimilated by the mind, and such was the glamour 
 attending the word " America ; " in the early years 
 of this century, the geographical confusion of ideas 
 respecting this somewhat extended continent is in- 
 credible. When about to leave Germany on my 
 homeward journey, I was requested by a learned 
 professor to make inquiry concerning his wife's 
 brother who had emigrated to America: when last 
 heard from, he was in Surinam. 
 
 My schoolmates gathered around the little stranger. 
 They made much of me. The hazing usually prac- 
 tised on new-comers was forborne, instead of which, 
 with true German Wissbegier, they assailed me with 
 questions about tropical plants and tropical animals, 
 as if all America lay in the torrid zone. 
 
 The staff of instructors consisted of the director, 
 the rector, the conrector, three collaborators, and a 
 French teacher of his own language, who resided in 
 
THE SCHOOL DISCIPLINE. 67 
 
 the Flecken. The Director Brohm spoke English 
 with ease, and was more inclined to grant my requests 
 if I addressed him in that language. 
 
 The official intercourse between pupils and teachers, 
 outside of the lecture-room or social communion, was 
 conducted in Latin. For example, if a student 
 wished to be excused from attendance on the ex- 
 ercises of the day, he aegrotirte, as we called it; that 
 is, he pleaded illness, — it might be real or it might 
 be shammed, — and on that ground wrote a letter 
 addressed to all the teachers, to be circulated among 
 them by our Mercury, the calefactor, on this wise : 
 
 Viri honoratissimi ! 
 
 Ut mihi aegrotanti (or ob capitis dolores, or purgandi 
 causa) hodie a lectionibus vestris abesse liceat rogo petoque. 
 
 Signed by the student. 
 
 But this privilege had its price. The aegrotirende 
 must not leave the cloister, and must have no dinner 
 but a plate of soup and a piece of dry bread. If he 
 was really ill, what needed he more ? If he shammed, 
 let him take the consequences, which for a healthy 
 boy with good appetite and love of muscular exercise 
 might be supposed to counterbalance the satisfaction 
 of idleness. 
 
 In like manner, sentence of punishment adjudged 
 by a teacher was given in Latin. Of punishment there 
 were three grades, — Carenz, loss of dinner, Klosterar- 
 rest, detention within doors, and Carcerstrafe, incarce- 
 ration. Accordingly, the sentence would read : Schulz 
 or Kurz ob negligentiam, or ob contumaciam, or, if the 
 Latin for any particular offence did not come readily 
 to mind, ob causas sibi cognitas, hodie prandio carebit, 
 or per triduum ne coenobio exeat, or carceris poenam 
 
68 FREDERIC HENRY HEDGE. 
 
 sxibeat. The career, or prison, was a room in the attic 
 in which the student was locked up for one or two 
 days, with tasks sufficient to occupy the solitary hours 
 and prevent the morbid action of the mind. 
 
 The discipline, if superficially strict, was not 
 searching and not quickening. Our rooms were 
 visited several times each day, always twice in the 
 evening, — once at nine, when the teacher whose turn 
 it was came to our desks to see what we were doing, 
 and again at eleven to see that we were in bed. On 
 Sundays we were marshalled into church ; but, once 
 there, devout attention to the service, if expected, 
 was certainly not enforced. A teacher in the op- 
 posite side of the transept was supposed to be 
 watching us ; but the inspection did not prevent our 
 conversing freely or amusing ourselves with a novel, 
 except in winter, when the bitter cold kept us in a 
 state of torpor amounting almost to suspended ani- 
 mation. Such cold within doors I had never before 
 experienced, and have never experienced since. 
 
 The gymnasium supplied us with two meals daily, 
 one at noon and one at six p. m. We sat at long tables, 
 each table presided over by one of the teachers. We 
 were well served, and had no reason to complain of 
 our fare, although complaints were not wanting. At 
 the upper table one of the Primaner read aloud ac- 
 cording to monastic tradition. But the books selected 
 for that use were not works of monkish or any other 
 theology: they were not chosen with a view to edifi- 
 cation, but for entertainment solely, mostly works of 
 fiction. 
 
 Our breakfasts we had to provide for ourselves out 
 of our weekly pocket-money. Each student furnished 
 himself with an apparatus for cooking with charcoal, 
 
SCHOOL DELIGHTS. 69 
 
 and with such table furniture as he could afford. The 
 cooking was a pleasant occupation ; but the washing 
 of the vessels was an onerous business, not very rigo- 
 rously discharged. Only when a cup became so en- 
 crusted as to seriously contract its capacity, it was 
 found necessary to cleanse it for fresh deposits. 
 Some of the boys became adepts in brewing coffee or 
 chocolate, and invited others to test their proficiency 
 in that useful art. A Chocoladeschmaus (chocolate 
 feast) was a favorite entertainment, to which of a 
 Sunday afternoon the knowing would ask their 
 friends. 
 
 If the discipline was in some respects strict, it was 
 variously relieved. Sometimes we were taken on a 
 walk to the nearest city, about five miles distant, to 
 see a play or an elephant. One of our teachers had a 
 fancy for pyrotechnics, and gave us an occasional en- 
 tertainment in that kind. Twice every year the stu- 
 dents were allowed to give a ball, to which ladies 
 within a circuit of ten miles were invited, but none of 
 the other sex, the youths themselves officiating as 
 partners. The dancing lasted all night, relieved at 
 intervals by drinking of bishop 1 and other refection, 
 which caused a good deal of aegrotiren on the follow- 
 ing day. Indeed, if I remember rightly, the day suc- 
 ceeding the ball was decreed a holiday. 
 
 A marked peculiarity of this gymnasium was an 
 organization of the students for self-government, inde- 
 pendent of the teachers, and supposed to be unknown 
 to them. Boys who had reached the age of sixteen, 
 and who had spent a year and a half at the school, 
 constituted a senate called the " Veterans." These 
 exercised an absolute and undisputed sway over the 
 
 1 A weak concoction of spirituous liquors. 
 
70 FREDERIC HENRY HEDGE. 
 
 younger portion. There was a written code of laws, 
 to which each new-comer was required to sign his 
 allegiance. He then received his cloister name, con- 
 ferred by the veterans, — a sobriquet suggested by 
 some personal peculiarity, to which he must respond 
 when called by a senior, though not allowed in return 
 to address a senior of a year's standing by the cloister 
 name which that senior bore among his peers. 
 
 The code contained provisions for the protection of 
 the weak against the oppression of his stronger mates. 
 If a boy was bullied by another for whom he was 
 physically no match, he had only to say to his perse- 
 cutor, Ich chasse Sie, " I bid you leave me," and the 
 intercourse between the two was stopped at once. 
 For if, after that magic formula had been pronounced, 
 the bully should continue his persecution, an appeal to 
 the veterans would subject him to a sound thrashing. 
 The non-intercourse between the two was usually of 
 short duration, but could only be terminated by an 
 offer of reconciliation by the chasser, who would say 
 to the chassed, Soil es wieder gut sein ? " Shall we 
 be friends again ? " If a student had been guilty of 
 meanness, such, for example, as cheating at play or 
 informing against a fellow-student, the veterans in 
 council decreed that he be sent to Coventry, or, as the 
 phrase now is, "boycotted," for a definite term. Who- 
 ever should speak to him during that period would be 
 visited with the same penalty. 
 
 Boys under the age of twelve in Germany address 
 each other with the second person singular, du; but the 
 gymnasium brings a transition to adult speech. The 
 gymnasiast is addressed and addresses his mates with 
 the customary third person plural, Sie ; but if two of 
 these youngsters are smitten with a mutual liking, 
 
SCHOOL INSTRUCTION. 71 
 
 they agree to use the more familiar second person 
 singular : Sollen wir uns du nennen ? I seemed to 
 notice that such treaties of amity were most often 
 formed when wine was circulating. But they sur- 
 vived the festive hour. 
 
 As an evidence of the democratic spirit which, pre- 
 vails in academic life, I may mention that, though 
 many of the boys in this school were sons of noble- 
 men, and some of them of the highest rank, no dis- 
 crimination was made by pupil or teacher in favor of 
 these high-born youths. 
 
 If the discipline, as I have said, was not quicken- 
 ing, neither was* the instruction fructifying. For 
 boys so young, it partook too much of the university 
 method of teaching by lectures. Too little prepara- 
 tion was required of the pupil. Many of these, it is 
 true, took notes of the lectures with all the assiduity 
 so caustically recommended by Mephistopheles when 
 lie personates Faust in the play; but they were not 
 examined on their notes, and the question of promo- 
 tion to a higher class or detention in a lower was 
 determined by no very rigorous test. For myself, I 
 seem on looking back to have made but little progress 
 while there, except in writing Latin, the one exercise 
 that was rigorously enforced. 
 
 After nearly two years spent in this school, I was 
 transferred to Schulpforte. And what a change ! 
 Schulpforte was then, as it is still, a Prussian institu- 
 tion, and manifested in its discipline, its vitality, its 
 thoroughness, the care of the best government of 
 modern time. It was a pet of that government, and 
 was often visited by the minister of instruction in 
 person. It lies on the Saale, about thirty miles from 
 Leipsic and sixteen from Weimar. It constitutes a 
 
72 FREDERIC HENRY HEDGE. 
 
 community by itself, independent of any municipal 
 control. The main building, or collection of attached 
 buildings, including a church, like the other school 
 had once been a monastery. Other detached edifices, 
 among them the house of Amtmann, or purveyor, had 
 sprung up around the central mass. An extensive 
 playground, with bowling-alleys and gymnastic ap- 
 paratus, formed part of the establishment. The 
 whole was enclosed with a wall of a mile or more in 
 circumference. This wall no one of the alumni 
 proper was without special permission allowed to 
 pass. 
 
 The term alumni proper requires explanation. For 
 Prussian citizens, Schulpforte was a free school. A 
 limited number of Prussian youth were educated at 
 the cost of the government. These were the alumni 
 proper. They had no single rooms, but, when not in 
 the class-rooms, were distributed through several 
 spacious apartments, presided over by a senior who 
 superintended their studies and gave them special in- 
 struction in addition to their class-work. At night 
 they were lodged in large dormitories. 
 
 But, in addition to the Prussian alumni, the school 
 was open to boys from other States, either German or 
 foreigners, who were called Kostgdnger (boarders). 
 They were domesticated with the professors, and had 
 rooms of their own or shared by a single chum, and 
 paid for board and tuition. I had the good fortune to 
 be boarded by Dr. Koberstein, who has written the 
 most complete history of German literature. My 
 chum was young Baron von Munchhausen, nephew of 
 the veritable but unveracious story-teller of that 
 name. 
 
 The staff of instructors consisted of a rector, a con- 
 
SCHULPFOETE. 73 
 
 rector, five professors, and four adjuncti, or tutors, — 
 a considerably larger number of teachers than Harvard 
 could boast in my college days. To these must be 
 added the pastor, the physician, the Kapellmeister, or 
 director of music, a drawing-master, a dancing-master, 
 and in summer a swimming-master. 
 
 The course of study, though more effectively pur- 
 sued, was much the same as in other gymnasia; but 
 special attention was given to Greek composition and 
 to Latin verses. As an illustration of the former, I 
 may mention that a Pfortner translated Goethe's 
 Iphigenie into Greek, of which translation 'a copy was 
 presented to the poet by a committee chosen to wait 
 upon him. 
 
 The making of Latin verses was one of the require- 
 ments of the semi-annual examination. The materia 
 poetica was dictated in portions adjusted to the rank 
 of each class. A Primaner had, I think, a hundred 
 hexameters to exhibit. The one who accomplished 
 this Pensum first signalized his triumph by ringing 
 the great bell. This was done twice while I was 
 there by Wilhelm Ranke, brother of the historian, 
 who was also a graduate of Schulpforte. 
 
 Having gone so far, the tired hand stopped, and 
 refused to take up the task again : once more it was 
 holclen " by a sort of fate." He commissioned me 
 to do what I would with it, and even dictated a few 
 sentences as a sort of sequel. The substance of them 
 was that at Schulpforte his mind opened to a knowl- 
 edge of what is meant by a life of thought and 
 letters ; and, above all, that " here I came to know 
 Goethe." But an anecdote or tw T o may serve to 
 piece out the too fragmentary sketch. Thus it is 
 
74 FREDERIC HENRY HEDGE. 
 
 odd in this day to hear of his long walk in the 
 country with his tutor, who would keep up his 
 pupil's spirits by a glass of undiluted gin ; and the 
 tales are wonderful of the aptness of the more 
 advanced students in their exercises of Latin verse ; 
 and he showed me once, in the " album " of those 
 days (a portfolio of very modest engravings), the 
 autograph of his school-friend and chum, Carl von 
 Munchhausen, nephew and heir of that veracious 
 traveller, the far-celebrated baron. Munchhausen 
 was the better mathematician, and Hedge the better 
 linguist, so that they were often helpful to each 
 other in their school tasks ; and it happened 
 once that when the former was to be " confirmed " 
 by the Lutheran rite, and was much put to it how 
 to word his indispensable confession in Latin, the 
 draft was truthfully and skilfully composed for him 
 by his friend. Truly, one might say, a school-boy 
 has not lived in vain, to whose lot it has fallen to 
 write " the confessions of Baron Munchhausen " ! A 
 more serious event in this friendship befell, when the 
 two agreed together to swim a somewhat powerful 
 river. The Saxon boy was the sturdier, and came 
 safely across, when turning he saw his companion the 
 American gasping helpless in the stream, and just 
 about to drown : he succeeded in dragging him 
 out, quite unconscious ; and, ignorant what to do, 
 stretched him on the warm sand, where that and 
 the sun's rays presently brought him back to life. 
 
 Eeturning to America at the end of 1822, he was 
 first beguiled into a tedious boat-passage down the 
 Elbe ; then long kept in port by the sickness of the 
 
AT HAEVARD COLLEGE. 75 
 
 captain of the poor little ship ; then, when the cap- 
 tain had died in Hamburg, was forced to put to sea 
 with an incompetent mate for commander, to face 
 a long and terrible winter voyage to New York. 
 However, he was not conscious of the real danger, 
 and remembered most distinctly the water famine 
 when they were becalmed in the Gulf Stream and 
 were reduced to a pint a day, and his effort to 
 wash in water baled from the sea, which was too 
 noisome and horrible to be touched, — this, with 
 the overland journey home, when he had to trudge 
 beside the stage-coach through the blocking snow- 
 drifts of Worcester County. Little hints like these 
 help fill out the picture of the cheery, sturdy, valiant 
 lad of seventeen, fighting his way through such cold 
 welcome to the home where his academic honors 
 were to be won. 
 
 The date of his graduation at Harvard College, in 
 the class of Charles Francis Adams and Horatio 
 Greenough, in 1825, very nearly touches the high- 
 water mark of that wave of intellectual enthusiasm 
 which for the space of a generation identified the 
 college with the best life of New England more 
 closely than, probably, it has ever been before or 
 since. The rise of that wave was first made plainly 
 visible in the installation of President Kirkland 
 in 1810 ; its flow included the college careers of 
 Everett, Frothingham, Walker, Bancroft, and Em- 
 erson ; its shining crest was when, in 1824, Ed- 
 ward Everett, in his Phi Beta Kappa oration, paid 
 eloquent homage to Lafayette as the guest of the 
 nation and a hero of two worlds, — a moment which 
 
76 FREDERIC HENRY HEDGE. 
 
 is still looked back to, by living witnesses, as the 
 most splendid in that period of their young pride 
 and hope. It will be noticed that the character of 
 this mental epoch was almost purely literary, rhetor- 
 ical, or philosophic : of those just named, President 
 Walker was the only one who gave his mind seri- 
 ously to study the scientific method in its effect on 
 the intellectual life ; and he was by profession a 
 theologian and moralist, not himself a man of scien- 
 tific method as a thinker. All the best intellectual 
 work of the period was shaped and toned by the 
 exigencies of popular speech, rather than the severer 
 logic of the Schools. Even grave chapters of his- 
 tory, theology, or metaphysics, in such hands, be- 
 came a series of eloquent addresses rather than 
 steps in a methodical essay. Even the severely 
 disciplined mind of such a scholar as Dr. Hedge 
 was at its best in the four or five noble orations 
 which mark the culminating moments of his career ; 
 and his first public appearance in the field was as 
 the poet of his class on Commencement Day. 
 
 After passing through the regular course of the- 
 ological study, he was settled as minister of West 
 Cambridge (now Arlington) in 1829. Here, in his 
 six years' ministry, he developed by resolute disci- 
 pline the mental habit that remained with him 
 through life. A sturdy build, and a fibre tenacious 
 rather than supple, marked the character of both 
 mind and body. Alert and no way sluggish (that 
 vice of scholars), he was a vigorous pedestrian till 
 near the end of his days, and the strains of endur- 
 ance he underwent in his various travelling experi- 
 
HIS LITERARY HABIT. 77 
 
 ence were such as can rarely befall a man of letters 
 in these days. But the daily life was that of a 
 laborious student, — which means that he was ca- 
 pable of the physical strain of an amount of confine- 
 ment to books which few men are equal to. And 
 it means too, in his case, a very unusual strain 
 of laborious and painstaking literary composition. 
 The amount of mechanical labor in preparing for 
 the pulpit was greater then than now ; and, while 
 exceptionally faithful in this task-work, he wrote 
 always slowly and with effort. Quite in contrast 
 with the swift and brilliant movement of his emi- 
 nent contemporary and friend, Dr. Martineau, who 
 in early days made himself master of shorthand, that 
 his pen might keep pace with the electric rapidity of 
 his thought, every sentence, every line, was traced 
 with deliberation, — nay, revised and interlined with 
 scrupulous care. There was none of the labor-saving 
 that comes with the modern way of dictating to an 
 amanuensis or type-writer, none of the slovenly pen- 
 manship which is said sometimes to be the cruel affec- 
 tation of men of letters. In the hundreds of pages 
 of his manuscript that I have read, formal essay or 
 familiar epistle, I do not remember ever hesitating 
 at a single illegible word or carelessly written let- 
 ter : the pages of the autobiographic fragment just 
 given are as scrupulously penned as a school-boy's 
 composition ; no trembling of the hand, even, is 
 discernible, though written far past eighty, in the 
 lassitude and dread of threatening infirmity. This 
 firmness of fibre, this resolute temper, is strongly 
 characteristic both of the scholar and the man. 
 
78 FEEDEEIC HENEY HEDGE. 
 
 As a set-off to this laborious habit of mind, he 
 had the rare gift — which we have never known in 
 equal degree except in the case of Edward Everett — 
 of mastering with verbal accuracy, by a single read- 
 ing, the form and phrase of a long elaborate dis- 
 course. The advantage this gave him on the public- 
 platform, on formal occasions, has been often felt ; 
 and all the more, because (as we may recall of the 
 eulogy on Bellows and Emerson a ) it w T as attended 
 with so easy a mastery of matter as well as form 
 that his mind played freely, in variation of the 
 theme, as the point, the phrase, or the illustration 
 might suggest itself at the moment. I have never 
 understood why he did not avail himself of this 
 remarkable power" in the ordinary exercises of the 
 pulpit : possibly it involved a grasp and a strain 
 that he did not care to put forth too often. But 
 among the very last of his public utterances there 
 were two occasions — in Providence and in Phila- 
 delphia — when, distrusting his eyesight for the 
 evening service, after speaking in the usual way in 
 the morning, he secured by that forthputting of 
 memory the freedom of speech he craved. 
 
 These habits of thought and speech, along with 
 the gathering of great treasures of book-lore, w~e may 
 suppose to have been the attainment of those six 
 years of his first pastoral charge. At the age of 
 thirty, with powers ripened to self-reliance, and with 
 rare wealth of intellectual resource, he became min- 
 ister of the Independent Congregational Church in 
 
 1 These are given, with the author's revision, as an Appendix to 
 " Our Liberal Movement." 
 
BANGOR. — VISITS TO EUROPE. 79 
 
 Bangor, Maine, then a place remote and hard to 
 reach, 1 but full of the intelligence, the enterprise, 
 the ea^er confidence in a brilliant future, which we 
 have been more accustomed since to associate with 
 the growth of our Western cities. The fifteen years 
 spent here not only served to develop his powers to 
 a more vigorous independence of thought and will 
 than they might, possibly, have grown to in an older 
 community, but were the period when the position 
 he has so long held before the public was firmly 
 taken and broadly recognized. Among warm friends 
 and eager learners in the circle of his local ministry 
 there was an ease and joy in the assertion of his own 
 ripening thought ; while the special contribution he 
 could bring, from the intimate home knowledge he 
 had of German, made his most characteristic and 
 valuable gift to the larger movement of thought 
 that illuminated those days. The first of three later 
 visits to Europe for the purpose of study and travel, 
 and of by far the deepest influence in shaping his 
 riper thought, was in the year 1847. Spending the 
 ensuing winter in Borne, he not only became an 
 appreciative student of Italian art, thus enriching 
 his culture by a vein which most of us are obliged 
 to neglect, but was a witness to some of the most 
 striking scenes of that strange revolutionary spring- 
 time of 1848, including the moment of the passion- 
 
 1 A parishioner of his, whom I knew afterwards, was once he- 
 calmed for a week off the headland of Penobscot Bay on the return 
 voyage from Boston ; and the overland journey in winter had its 
 full share of arctic hardships and perils : he has told me of toiling 
 through half the night to help right the stage-coach when upset, or 
 keep it from being blockaded in the snow-drifts. 
 
80 FREDERIC HENRY HEDGE. 
 
 ate protest of Pope Pius IX. against the demands of 
 the revolutionists : Non voglio, non debbo, non posso ! 
 — words which he was fond of quoting as he had 
 heard them from those sonorous lips. The delight 
 of that one deep draught of the intellectual life of 
 Italy, and then of moving with the ease of native 
 speech in the scholarly circles of revisited Germany, 
 made one of the treasures of a memory ever fresh, 
 during the years that followed. 
 
 With his rare intellectual gifts and great wealth 
 of literary culture, there was no one farther than he 
 from the dilettante spirit which cherishes literature 
 or art for its own sake, apart from its higher uses. 
 It was his fixed habit of mind to regard those things 
 not merely as good and beautiful in themselves, but 
 as instruments of service. It was highly character- 
 istic of this temper of mind that he disdained the 
 clamor, and wholly dissented from the argument, 
 that demanded international copyright on the ground 
 of property-right, holding in scorn whatever seemed 
 to turn into a trade the high vocation of authorship. 
 The temper was that of the teacher, the preacher, 
 the interpreter of thought or beauty to the higher 
 life of men. This vocation was very early rec- 
 ognized in him, and it was rewarded in his long 
 career with every honor which service like his can 
 win. Yet, in the simplicity of his judgment of him- 
 self, he always doubted whether he ought not to 
 have followed his first inclination to a physician's 
 life ; and always regretted that he was born too 
 early (as he thought) to be baptized into the newer 
 life of Science, instead of that almost purely literary 
 
MENTAL TEMPER AND RESOURCES. 81 
 
 and philosophic training, in which most persons saw 
 the noblest field for the exercise of his powers. 
 
 While he was born to the birthright and full 
 enjoyment of companionship hi the most brilliant 
 intellectual era of New England, he brought to it a 
 gift of his own, which no other man either did or 
 could, — the gift (as we might almost term it) of two 
 mother-tongues, English and German being about 
 equally familiar to him from his school-days. It 
 was not alone the literary knowledge of German, in 
 which many scholars may have rivalled him ; but 
 he learned the tongue as a boy amongst boys, when 
 the great day of German literature was still shining 
 in its mellow afternoon, while Goethe, whose sun 
 was not set, was still the object of that revering 
 homage which is never, perhaps, so loyally felt as 
 by young disciples to a living Master ; so that not 
 only he was quick in later years to resent any dis- 
 paragement of that hero of his boyish imagination, 
 but in him and in other masters could trace the 
 touches of home-feeling, and even here and there 
 the reminiscences of school-boy slang, in the diction 
 that makes up the marvellous composite of the 
 Goethean verse and prose. This atmosphere of 
 German thought rather than its form and under- 
 standing merely, he had brought home with him 
 just at a time when it not only quickened and 
 enlarged his own university studies, but could be 
 turned to later account, to make flexible and rich 
 the somewhat provincial dialect of letters and 
 scholarship then prevailing in New England. This, 
 rather than any formal teaching of philosophy, — 
 
 6 
 
82 FREDERIC HENRY HEDGE. 
 
 which he disbelieved in and kept aloof from, — 
 made his characteristic service to our so-called 
 "Transcendental" movement. 
 
 Perhaps the greatest social as well as intellectual 
 delight he ever enjoyed was in the companionship 
 of that golden age (as we are tempted to call it now) 
 when the glory and the dew of youth still lay upon 
 many fields of thought which we have since had to 
 survey with measuring-rods and to take account of 
 in critical judgment and comparison. And those 
 companionships were perhaps always the closest and 
 most familiar to his thought. None others have 
 ever quite taken the place to him of the names of 
 Emerson, Furness, and Margaret Fuller. It may he 
 that some, even among his own students, have since 
 those days found or imagined him difficult of ap- 
 proach and slow of sympathy ; and he might find it 
 hard to pardon an affront once given to his good 
 taste, his self-respect, or his jealous regard for a 
 friend. So that it has been often a surprise to find 
 how generous, considerate, tender, even humble- 
 minded this strong man could be when the magic 
 circle was once passed, or when his thought came 
 up for judgment and comparison in debate as be- 
 tween equals. The writer of these lines has been 
 personally indebted to that generous consideration 
 in many ways that do not concern the public, and 
 has come to know instances of his bounty in giving, 
 and thoughtful loving-kindness, which for mere 
 justice' sake, and in memory of a friend, and for the 
 better understanding of those who did not see that 
 side, justify this brief mention here. 
 
THE GIFT OF MEMORY. 83 
 
 It may be mentioned here that the singular 
 vigor and tenacity of memory, before spoken of, 
 embraced first and naturally those masses of liter- 
 ary task-work which made his conspicuous public 
 performance ; but took in with equal ease long 
 passages from classic Writers, — particularly from 
 the poets, both German and English, who made 
 his favorite companions, — and served as a great 
 help in the act of composition as well. Eor ex- 
 ample, the lines entitled " The Idealist " (first 
 published as " Questionings "), one of the longest 
 and most striking of his poems and among those 
 he regarded as the best, were suggested to his 
 thought while watching the stars during a sleep- 
 less night in the Bangor mail-coach, and were 
 wholly elaborated in memory, to be written down 
 on his arrival at home. Others of his verses were 
 composed in a similar way. Whatever was metri- 
 cal in form, he said, was taken easily into his mem- 
 ory and stayed there, For example, referring quite 
 incidentally to the early promise and the early loss 
 of Edward Emerson, the most brilliantly gifted of 
 the three brothers, he quoted at once for illustra- 
 tion the pathetic stanzas in which that rare genius 
 bade farewell to his native land from the ship that 
 bore him out of Boston Harbor upon the voyage 
 from which he never returned. Nor were these 
 as one might expect, only the familiar handling 
 of long-kept hoards ; for once, when I spoke of 
 those verses of Matthew Arnold (" Obermann once 
 more ") which tell so powerfully the tragedy and 
 pathos of that desolation of spirit in ancient Eome 
 
84 FREDERIC HENRY HEDGE. 
 
 which bowed her proud head to the yoke of Orien- 
 tal faith, he began, in that deep and mellow tone 
 of recitation which his friends will recall so well, 
 and without hesitation repeated perhaps a dozen 
 of those wonderful stanzas, which (I think) he had 
 read only once, but which had so struck and clung 
 upon his memory. 
 
 One other quality in him appears to have been 
 ripened in these days : it belongs, in part, to that 
 which President Walker had in mind when he 
 spoke to me of him once as " the only man we 
 have who is master of the grand style." This 
 phrase might possibly mean only what is ornate 
 and orotund in rhetorical composition ; but in this 
 case it meant something more. I was first dis- 
 tinctly conscious of it in a passage of the " Christian 
 Examiner," about 1851, speaking of the effect upon 
 the imagination of an experience at sea ; and I 
 have since thought that in this one deep resonant 
 chord there was a tone not reached by any other 
 living master of English prose : we might compare 
 it to the music of a bell, which is no one single 
 note, like that of a bugle, but is made up of the 
 harmonies, peal within peal, which respond to the 
 intricate curves, of varying diameter, that make 
 the shape and vibrate to the cadence of the bell. 
 A few passages in his writings — in no writer are 
 there more than a very few — will justify this 
 comparison. 
 
 The mind of Dr. Hedge was in like manner sensi- 
 tive to what we may call the resonances with which 
 the soul or the imagination responds to the utter- 
 
HIS INTELLECTUAL HABIT. 85 
 
 ance of a thought, — it may be in a poetic image, 
 or it may be in a philosophic truth. He would 
 never be content with the abstract expression of 
 a thing, the one hard formal statement. To his 
 mind it must speak in the language of literature 
 rather than science. And this had a more far- 
 reaching effect upon the substance and range of 
 the thought itself than might at first be supposed. 
 Thus, for example, he was extraordinarily well 
 read in the literature of philosophy, — which we 
 may, indeed, qualify by saying that it was mainly 
 the literature anterior to the last thirty or forty 
 years. But he was extremely distrustful of the 
 dogmatism of formal metaphysics. He steadily 
 and with increasing emphasis disparaged the syste- 
 matizing of Hegel and his disciples. He as con- 
 stantly and with increasing satisfaction gave his 
 preference to Schelling, whom he regarded as 
 having the profounder insight of a seer instead of 
 a theorist. What we might still less have ex- 
 pected, while his knowledge of G-erman was that 
 of a mother tongue, while he read its philosophic 
 dialect without even the conscious effort which 
 most readers need to assimilate the phrase and 
 the thought, it was not his habit to read a treatise 
 consecutively, with regard to the logic of its struc- 
 ture. Thus he had never read through that com- 
 paratively brief and compactly reasoned essay, 
 Kant's "Critique," but was familiar only with its 
 speculations on Time and Space and with its criti- 
 cism of the argument for a speculative Theism ; 
 while he might show, incidentally, the pleasure 
 
86 FREDERIC HENRY HEDGE. 
 
 he took in various of Kant's minor essays, which 
 are never heard of in histories of philosophy. Then, 
 too, it was the poetic and speculative, not the logical 
 or didactic, side of natural science that interested 
 him ; and he liked it best when in some shape that 
 allowed one to treat as open questions its most 
 fundamental theories, — even the theory of gravi- 
 tation, or the structure of the solar system. With 
 much insight and delight in speculative philosophy, 
 it was always the literary study of it that delighted 
 him most. 
 
 Again, with a great range both of knowledge 
 and of sympathy in the field of history, he rather 
 preferred views of it which were generalistic, specu- 
 lative, and somewhat vague. Writers, like Gibbon, 
 of powerful bias, especially such as express their 
 conception in literary " good form " and in " the 
 grand style," attracted him more than those more 
 curiously accurate : history, like philosophy, was 
 rather literature than science. Nor, though a 
 scholar of admirable equipment, was he in the 
 modern sense a trained philologist: his interest in 
 philology was that of a curious amateur. His 
 large knowledge and facile use of the learned 
 tongues, especially Latin, did not lead him, in 
 general, to deal with the sources of our historical 
 knowledge in the original speech, even in his 
 chosen and professional field of ecclesiastical his- 
 tory. The thought, the doctrine, the persons of 
 the great and eminent men who make the actors 
 in that field, he knew well, often with a grasp of 
 imagination and memory of facts that made his 
 
HIS HISTORICAL STUDIES. 87 
 
 knowledge of them singularly vivid, instructive, 
 and real. Particular writers, too, lie knew by the 
 critical and profound apprehension of their own 
 works. Augustine, Anselm, and Eaymond Lully 
 may be mentioned among those who thus attracted 
 him ; and, of later writers, Spinoza and Leibnitz, 
 whom he had studied extensively and patiently 
 in their own text. But the great web of history 
 is wrought of the lives and thoughts of a multitude 
 of lesser men, who should also be judged by touch 
 of the hand and look of the eye, — that is, by their 
 own word for what they thought and did ; and of 
 this knowledge he took less account. I do not 
 think, for example, that he knew the Greek Fathers 
 (unless the very earliest) except at second hand ; 
 and, excepting Scotus Erigena, the Latin ecclesias- 
 tical writers of the "lower" period were mostly 
 unknown to him. On the other hand, his literary 
 apprehension of the great classics, Greek as well 
 as Latin, was eager, discriminating, and fresh. 
 
 One who is greatly his inferior in range and 
 wealth of the knowledge to be had from books — 
 as there is' no one of us but must confess himself 
 to be — will take such indications as the above to 
 show not the extent or accuracy or value of that 
 knowledge in him, but only the particular lines in 
 which it ]ay. We take the impression of a large, 
 luminous, and richly stored intelligence ; we stand 
 towards it in the attitude of learners ; and we are 
 aware of the powerful influence that comes to us 
 from that mental touch. When, further, we look 
 to see the form of the channel through which it 
 
88 FREDERIC HENRY HEDGE. 
 
 comes, we are at once struck by noticing how much 
 is instruction and discipline, how little is mere 
 didactics : to use the familiar distinction, how little 
 in comparison is the " literature of knowledge," how 
 much the " literature of power." Now power tells 
 best in a series of waves, or blows, — not like the 
 tug of a chain, which is no stronger than its weak- 
 est link. It will be found that the delivery of 
 Dr. Hedge's argument — take, for example, his best- 
 known work, " Eeason in Eeligion " — was in a 
 series of discourses, each rounded and complete in 
 itself, which developed a single order of thought 
 with culminating effect, but with little of logical 
 coherence. There was a felicity of phrase, but ab- 
 solute injustice of thought, in the criticism which 
 once spoke of these discourses as a garland of 
 plucked flowers tied together with a string, not a 
 living plant that yields them by vital force : the 
 live thought connecting them runs underground, 
 like the root of " Solomon's seal," sending up its 
 shoots independent of one another, and is invisible 
 to those who do not look below the surface. But, 
 it may be contended, the argument is all the more 
 readily grasped, and so all the more effective, be- 
 cause delivered in this form. And the book just 
 named has doubtless had far more influence in our 
 own later thinking than any other of its time and 
 class. 
 
 Quite in keeping with the mould in which he 
 thus cast his argument, Dr. Hedge felt a certain 
 impatience and disdain of that intellectual method 
 which affects logical completeness, and tries to for- 
 
HIS PHILOSOPHIC METHOD. 89 
 
 mulate all modes of being in a coherent system. 
 From his own mind he seems distinctly to have 
 excluded anything that could be called a theory 
 of the universe. He was equally offended on the 
 one hand by the argument for Final Causes, which 
 he thought to have been effectually discredited in 
 Kant's " Critique," and by modern theories of Evolu- 
 tion, which seemed to him a baseless dogmatism, 
 and which he never attempted really to understand. 
 Probably that conception of the universe would have 
 pleased him best which took into account only the 
 order of Ideas exhibited in it ; and if he had for- 
 mulated it at all, it would have been in a more or 
 less qualified Berkleyanism. What was not in the 
 Divine order of Ideas touched neither his philoso- 
 phy nor his religion. If he tended more and more, 
 in later life, to a way of thinking that refused to 
 regard the Eternal God as the Creator of material 
 things, and set up an illogical Dualism over against 
 our traditional Theism, it was, I think, more from a 
 moral than from an intellectual motive : he would 
 not make the Holy One responsible for the woe and 
 wickedness we see ; he would at least reserve a 
 sanctuary of worship for the soul, undisturbed by 
 the jarring and painful argument that ever seeks 
 and ever fails to reconcile the facts of daily life with 
 the conception the mind loves to frame of a purely 
 benevolent Creator. 
 
 And it may be held, further, that his mental tem- 
 perament — poetic, sensitive, and sympathetic rather 
 than severely logical — made it all the harder to 
 accept the optimism which consoles the average 
 
90 FREDERIC HENRY HEDGE. 
 
 religious mind. He would admire without heartily 
 accepting the clear and brilliant argumentation of 
 that masterpiece of forensic divinity, Martineau's 
 "Study of Eeligion;" and, while he was morally 
 repelled, he was intellectually fascinated — more, 
 perhaps, than he would readily admit to himself — 
 by Schopenhauer's interpretation of the more som- 
 bre facts of life. At any rate, he kept his religion 
 and his cosmology quite apart, excepting so far as 
 he might indulge in speculation or poetic meditation 
 upon the latter. In the constant mood of his in- 
 ward life he was a reverent, submissive, and humble 
 worshipper of the Living God ; while he refused to 
 lift with daring hand the veil that hides the mys- 
 tery of the Eternal, and repudiated the pious logic 
 by which many have thought to bolster up their 
 faith. 
 
 Just what effect this habit of thought had on his 
 doctrinal belief, it would be hard and not quite 
 safe to say. In his own expression of it he was 
 true to the Emersonian maxim, to see and say the 
 one thing, honestly and plainly, as it reveals itself 
 to the mind in its best moods, and let the matter 
 of logical consistency shift for itself. Eeverent and 
 submissive in his own acceptance of the discipline 
 of life, and asserting with whatever fulness of mean- 
 ing it could bear to him the sublime and comforting 
 faith of the soul's eternal life, he yet has given 
 public expression 2 to an exposition of that faith 
 
 1 See "Atheism in Philosophy/' p. 388, and the essay on " Per- 
 sonality " in the volume entitled " Luther and Other Essays/* 
 pp. 286-288. 
 
HIS EELIGIOUS FAITH. 91 
 
 which seems to deny outright the survival of man's 
 personal consciousness beyond, the present sphere. 
 That this was no mere phase of philosophic specu- 
 lation he showed, further, by his repeated assertion 
 that memory and consciousness are " functions of 
 the brain," which cannot be conceived to survive its 
 dissolution ; nay, by the solace he found in insist- 
 ing upon this view at a time of great suffering and 
 depression, when " to drag the lengthening chain 
 of memory " into perpetual duration seemed to him 
 the most dreadful of anticipations, and absolute 
 repose was the only boon he craved. To which it 
 is only to be added that the Eternal Life itself, with 
 whatever it may imply for the serenity and support 
 of the individual soul, was to him the most vivid 
 of realities, and that, religiously as well as men- 
 tally, he walked always in those "ways of the 
 Spirit" which it was ever the burden weighing 
 upon his thought to interpret fitly to other men. 
 
 A friend who was privileged to be much in 
 communication with him in his last years writes as 
 follows : — 
 
 "In the early months of this year [1887] he was for 
 many weeks afflicted with a most depressing (eczema- 
 tous) complaint, as to which I have often thought 
 since that its torment exceeded many times over that 
 of martyrdom by slow fire, as in the case of Servetus : 
 indeed, the memory of it is, I think, to be traced in 
 the tone of some of his writings since, for example in 
 the article on < Nature, a Problem/ in the ' Unita- 
 rian Review ' of March, 1888. During this time of 
 suffering his frequent and almost passionately ex- 
 
92 FREDERIC HENRY HEDGE. 
 
 pressed wish was only for absolute forgetfulness and 
 rest. It happened once that, when I had not seen him 
 for two or three weeks, he sent for me to his bedside, 
 and spoke to me nearly in these words : ' I wished to 
 see you at this time. When I recover from this sick- 
 ness, if I do recover, you will see another man, and 
 you will not know your friend. I shall have lost my 
 memory ; I shall be afflicted with a troublesome 
 aphasia ; and I shall not be able to say what I wish 
 to say now,' — going on, with strong assurance of 
 affection and of gratitude for the service he conceived 
 me to have rendered, to give the few instructions 
 which I was to observe. I assured him (as I very 
 sincerely could) that I thought his fear quite ground- 
 less : I had watched carefully, and had observed that 
 (allowing for the languor due to his malady) his 
 thought was always precise and clear, and the right 
 word was always chosen. I left him, I think, partly 
 reassured ; and indeed, as soon as the crisis was past, 
 he not only rallied surprisingly fast, but his conversa- 
 tion was never more fluent and clear, or his memory of 
 the past held in easier grasp, than in the months that 
 followed." 
 
 This testimony, it is true, needs to be qualified 
 by adding that something — not much — of the 
 difficulty he dreaded did in fact occur. It was 
 most marked by the inability of sustained literary 
 effort ; the old habit and desire remained, but after 
 a few paragraphs or pages the pen absolutely re- 
 fused its task, — "by a sort of fate," as he expressed 
 it. Thus the publication of Emerson's memoir was 
 the occasion of a long series of delightful remi- 
 niscences ; but to the hope that these might be 
 
HIS LAST YEAKS. 93 
 
 wrought into such a picture and judgment of his 
 life-long friend as other friends would love to keep, 
 he could only reply by pleading the utter impossi- 
 bility of the task. And while his talk (which we 
 would test sometimes in that way) ranged as freely 
 as ever through the wide fields of history, litera- 
 ture, and philosophy that had been familiar to him, 
 there would come the check — oftener as time went 
 on — of being unable to recall the name of the 
 person or the place : Bayle, Leibnitz, and Newton 
 — Paris, Genoa, the Eiviera — occur among the 
 names that had to be supplied to fill the blank. 
 But he held with a jealous tenacity to what re- 
 mained of his wonderful verbal memory, and among 
 the last efforts by which he strove to keep his 
 grasp of conscious intelligence was the silent repe- 
 tition to himself of passages, even at some length, 
 from German poets, which had been among the 
 most cherished treasures of his great intellectual 
 wealth. 
 
 A mind so individual, and so far apart from the 
 conventional beliefs of Christendom, was slow in 
 finding wide popular recognition, and long failed of 
 its proper weight among those of its generation. 
 That his power was felt in his circle of immediate 
 influence was a thing of course : his word was 
 always " weighty and powerful," — the more, be- 
 cause much of what he said, and often the best of 
 what he said, had to do not with matters of specu- 
 lation, but with every-day ethics, the personal ex- 
 perience of religion, and the successive crises of our 
 public life. Bat it was when he was already more 
 
94 FREDERIC HENRY HEDGE. 
 
 than fifty, and his name came up in connection with 
 a certain academic appointment he was understood 
 to desire, that Dr. Putnam (then in authority in 
 the university) spoke to me of the contrast there 
 was between the honor in which Dr. Hedge was 
 held among those of his own profession and the 
 ignorance of him in the general public. This lack 
 of general appreciation afterwards changed very 
 fast to vague respect and then to better knowledge; 
 and for full thirty years he has been everywhere 
 fully recognized as without a peer in the com- 
 munion to which he loyally belonged from first to 
 last, certainly without a superior among the intel- 
 lectual leaders of our country. 
 
 This change in his attitude towards the large 
 world of those more remotely interested in philoso- 
 phy and letters had to do, it is likely, with his 
 removal from Bangor to Providence, in 1850 ; and 
 again with his removal from Providence to Brook- 
 line, in 1857. Here he was in what he probably 
 felt to be his proper place, as one of the immediate 
 Boston circle ; and, besides, it was now that, by 
 persuasion of his near connection, Eev. Thomas B. 
 Fox, he took editorial charge, for a few years, of 
 the " Christian Examiner," and so opened new chan- 
 nels of communication with that wider world. At 
 this date, too, he accepted the charge of the depart- 
 ment of Ecclesiastical History in the Harvard Di- 
 vinity School, which he held for twenty-one years, 
 receiving meanwhile, in 1872, the appointment of 
 Professor of German Literature in the University, 
 which he held till 1881. 
 
HIS WRITINGS AND INFLUENCE. 95 
 
 The last forty years of his life were thus spent in 
 full view and in close relations with that larger 
 intellectual public to which he always felt so strong 
 attraction. It was also the period of his greatest 
 activity and influence as a writer. The series of 
 volumes already cited — "Eeason in Eeligion" 
 (1865), "Ways of the Spirit"' (1877), "Atheism in 
 Philosophy" (1884), and "Luther" (1888), together 
 with " The Primeval World of Hebrew Tradition " 
 (1869), and a thin volume of translations and origi- 
 nal poems — have been the waymarks of this later 
 career. They are the proper subject of literary crit- 
 icism, which I do not propose to combine with this 
 personal memorial; and his place in the future 
 development of our .religious thought will turn upon 
 the judgment that shall be formed upon them. To 
 me it simply happens that for just one third of a 
 century I was thrown into near personal relations 
 with the man, sometimes as helper and sometimes 
 as successor in his work, — sometimes, too, in a very 
 close and confidential way, — and this seems to lay 
 upon me the charge not of critic, but of interpreter 
 in part: to help, if I may, by such knowledge of 
 him as I have been able to gain through personal 
 communication, in the right understanding of the 
 lesson which he has left to the world. The lesson, 
 truly interpreted, is that which we find in the char- 
 acter, the spiritual endowment, and the mental 
 habit of the man. How these had their roots in the 
 antecedents and their growth in the earlier stages of 
 his career, it has been my attempt to show. And 
 with this key it is my hope that the work of his 
 
96 FREDERIC HENRY HEDGE. 
 
 pen and hand — which with every gifted and original 
 mind is a sort of hieroglyph, needing that clew to its 
 proper reading — may be the better understood. I 
 am sure that the man himself will receive his full 
 meed of loving honor. 
 
V. 
 
 SOME YOUNGEE MEMOEIES. 
 
 BEFOKE closing this record, which is so largely 
 made up of personal recollections and im- 
 pressions, it seems fitting to include in it the names 
 of a few whose history belongs to a later day, most 
 of whom were my own contemporaries and com- 
 panions. In the tender words of Henry Vaughan, 
 " they are all gone into the world of light," and 
 remain our examples of the " holy hope and high 
 humility," which belong to the ideal of life we 
 cherished together. What I would recall of them 
 is not anything that would make the faintest out- 
 line of a biography or hint of criticism, but only 
 some touch or memory, not elsewhere recorded, 
 which in justice to them I would not willingly let 
 die. 
 
 First, however, two or three names occur, mark- 
 ing the transition from the time I have been chiefly 
 dealing with to that which is properly of my own 
 generation. The impression one gets from the com- 
 panionship, in later life, of those old enough to have 
 been once looked up to as his teachers and guides 
 is the one I wish here very briefly to recall. This 
 impression some of us have had in the memory of 
 a well-marked group of men, examples of a special 
 
 7 
 
98 SOME YOUNGER MEMORIES. 
 
 form of idealism more familiar once than now, who 
 made, as it were, a " bridge of light " that brought 
 over the finest faith of an older generation into the 
 new intellectual conditions by which we found our- 
 selves surrounded ; whose generous interpretation 
 of that faith saved many a mind from the sterile 
 doubt which a period of rationalizing criticism 
 might else have carried with it. 
 
 It was something, in that day, to be a herald and 
 interpreter of the new light that (to the deep mis- 
 giving of some of our best teachers) was breaking 
 over upon us out of Germany, — to be a loving 
 expositor of Schleiermacher and Goethe, and at the 
 same time to keep all the pure single-heartedness 
 of " the faith which was once delivered to the 
 saints," through such apostles as Freeman and 
 Channing. This service James Freeman Clarke, 
 more perhaps than any single man, has done for us ; 
 but in doing it he was one of a goodly company. 
 It seems as if no one who had not felt in its prime 
 the glow of that quickening movement of the 
 Spirit could quite know how much that group of 
 men have been to those who came a little after 
 them. It happened that I was in California when 
 the death of William Henry Channing had just 
 left Dr. Clarke the sole survivor of that group ; and 
 I was moved to express to him by letter my sense 
 of this peculiar debt. His reply was as follows : — 
 
 " I received your very kind letter, and it gave me 
 very great pleasure. Your description of the interest 
 in the group of which Theodore Parker, William 
 Henry Channing, James H. Perkins, George Ripley, 
 
JAMES FREEMAN CLARKE. 99 
 
 and others were members, and with which I also had 
 the pleasure of being associated, was peculiarly pleas- 
 ing and touched me nearly. How strange are the 
 influences which act on us ! There was our poor little 
 ' Western Messenger/ which found you out in North- 
 borough, and found our dear brother Conant in 
 Chicago, and in which we pnt the best life we had- 
 How well James H. Perkins wrote ! When it was 
 printed in Louisville, I had to be publisher, editor, 
 contributor, proof-reader, and boy to pack up the 
 copies and carry them to the post-office. But I en- 
 joyed it. And you read ' Theodore ' too, and went 
 to Amory Hall ! I have scarcely ever heard of any 
 one's reading ' Theodore,' but, if you liked it, perhaps 
 others also liked it. Every man who writes a book 
 or preaches a sermon casts his bread on the waters, 
 happy if he finds it again after many days. It was 
 very kind of you to write to me as you have done, 
 and your kindly appreciation of some of my past 
 efforts warms my heart. We do not care for praise- 
 as we grow old, but we always are made happy by 
 sympathy. 
 
 ' Common as light is love, 
 And its familiar voice wearies not ever.'" 
 
 While of Dr. Clarke's many and choice gifts the 
 greatest was charity, — which we may here interpret 
 as that fine and rare quality which drew men to him 
 in confiding sympathy, — he could be valiant for 
 the right with a courage as invincible and obstinate 
 as any champion of the sword. I remember a 
 strange scene in Faneuil Hall in 1847, when, with- 
 out hesitation as without effect, he pressed his 
 word of " sweet reasonableness " upon a stormy 
 
100 SOME YOUNGER MEMORIES. 
 
 crowd, — when the hall fairly glistened with the 
 shining caps of a valiant crew mustered in for the 
 war with Mexico. One can point to at least three 
 distinct issues in these later years of political note, 
 in which that serene conviction of duty, backed by 
 no little hardihood of temper, left a definite mark 
 upon the event, the chief of them being his defence 
 of independent politics in the convention at Worces- 
 ter. But in general he has left the impression of 
 one averse to contention and the strife of tongues. 
 No one that we can anywhere recall has led the 
 intellectual life in an atmosphere quite so radiant 
 with the gladness and affection of a great host of 
 friends ; no apostle of the Word, whom we can 
 readily name, has sent forth that word so penetrat- 
 ing and so broadly into the hearts of those waiting 
 to be delivered from bondage to error and fear, who 
 received it in the spirit of glad confidence which 
 was so eminently the spirit of his gospel. 
 
 It is now a great while ago ■ — in fact, some years 
 more than sixty — that I remember hearing read, in 
 my father's vestry, a little tract which may be 
 called the first sounding of the key-note of Unitarian 
 missions in the West. It was in the form of a 
 letter written from Ephraim Peabody (then in 
 Cincinnati) to George Putnam. I believe it was 
 the same tract which keenly interested William G. 
 Eliot, then completing his course in the Cambridge 
 Divinity School. As I heard the account from his 
 mother (who was, long after, a member of my 
 congregation in Washington), he resolved at once, 
 
WILLIAM GKEENLEAF ELIOT. 101 
 
 with the tenacity of purpose characteristic of him, 
 that the West should be his field ; and it was not 
 a call from without, or an invitation in any sense, 
 but a study of the map of the United States, that 
 first made him, in that early day of tedious and 
 difficult travel, fix on a place so remote and un- 
 promising as St. Louis. His friends were grieved 
 and disappointed at this resolve, for he was very 
 dear to them ; and they had fond hopes of a Boston 
 settlement, which would have kept him nearer, and 
 given what seemed a more brilliant opportunity. 
 Finding him inflexible, his father at length said to 
 him : " Go where you think it is right. I will find 
 you in clothes, and where you go, no doubt, you 
 will have food and lodging ; and God be with you, 
 my son." At the beginning he found an audience 
 of thirty, — at best, perhaps twice as many. At 
 the end of six months he had a congregation of 
 nine, but, of these, seven were resolved to stand by 
 him ; and by the end of the year they were in- 
 creased to two hundred. The result makes perhaps 
 the most eventful chapter in our denominational 
 history. When once, during the war, a brother of 
 mine, visiting St. Louis on business of the Sanitary 
 Commission, said to a friend, " I suppose that Dr. 
 Eliot has done as much as any man to save Missouri 
 to the Union and make it a free State," the reply 
 was instant and prompt : " As much as any man ? 
 Dr. Eliot has done ten times more for that than 
 any other ten men put together ! " 
 
 There was a time — in 1847, I think — when it 
 was proposed and voted to invite Dr. Eliot to serve 
 
102 SOME YOUNGER MEMORIES. 
 
 as Secretary of the American Unitarian Association. 
 Antislavery feeling at this time ran high ; the 
 action of religious bodies was jealously watched, 
 and the Association was at once sharply attacked 
 for putting its confidence in a man supposed to 
 have some complicity with slavery, — nay, charged 
 with being himself a slaveholder. The true story 
 shows how cruel and unjust such charges sometimes 
 were. For it appears, from the account his mother 
 gave to me, that a certain gentleman, to whom he 
 was under obligation for much kindness, had lived 
 for a time in his family, bringing a servant-woman, 
 — a slave, — to whom the family became much 
 attached. Afterwards it happened that the gentle- 
 man failed in business ; and, under the cruel law 
 of slavery, the woman was liable to be seized for 
 his debt, and sold to the Southern market. Full of 
 distress, she appealed to Mr. Eliot, who paid out of 
 his own means the price of her ransom, never took 
 a title-deed or was her legal owner, — unless it 
 might be technically, till her free papers could be 
 made out, — and simply accepted her verbal assur- 
 ance that her wages would go towards the payment 
 of the sum advanced. Only a small part of this 
 was ever in fact repaid ; for when, some time after, 
 Mr. Eliot took a journey to Europe, he cancelled the 
 debt, giving her a small house and a cow, and she 
 lived thenceforth in comfort and independence. 
 Such is the true story of his " slaveholding." 
 
 And who is there that can possibly make a 
 younger generation understand what the name of 
 
THOMAS STARR KING. 103 
 
 Thomas Starr King means to those who knew and 
 loved him ? A noble memorial statue in San 
 Francisco ; the well-known story of General Scott, 
 who said he had heard that California was saved 
 to the Union by " a young man of the name of 
 King ; " two small volumes, without the light of 
 those eyes to read them by, — these are all, or nearly 
 all, that the general public can ever know of him. 
 Yet to us his presence and his loss seem so near ! 
 Many are the recollections cherished of that young 
 life, which ought to have a far more full presenting 
 than was given by his friend Mr. Whipple as an 
 introduction to the volume of his Discourses : the 
 letters, in particular, of which none are preserved 
 there, would give a far more living picture of that 
 bright and versatile intelligence than any more 
 formal composition. But who is there to prevent 
 such memorials from fading into the dimness of an 
 unregistered tradition ? In his brief public career, 
 and in the charm of friendly intercourse, he seemed 
 all transparent and open as daylight to whoever 
 would come and hear, as if there were no shadow 
 behind that beaming and winning personality : the 
 luminous eye, the noble quality of voice, a certain 
 eager gayety of temper, quick wit and humor, an 
 intelligence to which the term " lucid " as well as 
 wide, swift, and vigorous belonged more absolutely 
 than to any other I have ever known, drew men to 
 him as to a friend whom not only they would in- 
 evitably love, but might easily read through and 
 through. But a correspondence with him early 
 in the fifties contained one letter (lent, alas, and 
 
104 SOME YOUNGER MEMORIES. 
 
 lost) which threw a deeper light on his earlier 
 life than anything that yet survives. And there 
 were hints and confessions from his lips in conver- 
 sation, — not, surely, of anything that stained the 
 crystal purity of his life, hut which showed a vein 
 that appealed to one's sympathy in quite another 
 way than the public could ever know. In particu- 
 lar, he lamented a certain " coldness " of temper- 
 ament which no one could ever suspect under the 
 charm of that genial companionship. Dr. Hale 
 has told of his distrust of his own ability to speak 
 out, spontaneously, such words as flow from heart 
 to heart. I happened myself to know (being just 
 then his guest) that what seemed, on a public occa- 
 sion, to be an easy flow of unpremeditated wit was 
 anxiously studied and put together in the spare 
 minutes of a very busy week. The natural gener- 
 osity of his temper towards certain matters of 
 public right was cramped by a fastidious critical 
 sense that shut off his sympathy with some popular 
 moral movements of his day, and made the ruder 
 methods of many "reformers" strongly repugnant 
 to him; and the full wealth and strength of his 
 nature, we may well believe, would never have 
 shown itself, but for the magnificent opportunity 
 of those last four years, — when the cause was 
 that of national unity as well as personal liberty ; 
 when for once he threw himself upon the tide 
 of a noble passion without any misgiving or with- 
 holding. I copy here from a letter of this later 
 period, written in San Francisco in February, 
 1862: — 
 
THOMAS STAKE KING. 105 
 
 "I am tolerably well, and intolerably at work. 
 Never wrote so much, in a year as during the last 
 year, and am speaking as much as my feeble voice 
 will permit. Among my recent activities have been 
 nine lecture-sermons on the Book of Job. They were 
 received so well that I am repeating them. So you 
 see that we are not utterly barbarous here. Some 
 chapters of [a recent book] stirred me so much that 
 I wrote a lecture on ' Secession in Palestine and its 
 Consequences/ which I delivered twice to crammed 
 houses in our church and two or three times else- 
 where. I am to stay a year or two longer from the 
 dear East and precious Boston. Then I want to see 
 Europe, — perhaps shall have earned the right to see 
 it. . . . We are rejoicing just now over victories [Port 
 Eoyal, etc.]. I arranged a great exultation in church, 
 last Sunday, in which the music was glorious. And 
 such a jam! But I fear the diplomatists. Traitors 
 we can beat, but the traders ! Yet let us hope that 
 God has a purpose of winding his anaconda around 
 the South, which won't be prevailed on to let go." 
 
 And again, from a letter written to Dr. Hedge a 
 little more than six weeks before the writer's death 
 (Jan. 12, 1864) : — 
 
 " San Francisco is trying to do her duty again on 
 the Sanitary subscription. We shall send $200,000 
 this year, and I am now arranging circulars and plans 
 to secure $ 100,000 from the interior of the State. 
 Perhaps I shall have to take the stump to secure it. 
 But my church duties are now very heavy, and my 
 strength begins to totter. I should like to give the 
 new church, with its grand congregation and ample 
 treasury, into the keeping of a new voice and spirit. 
 
106 SOME YOUNGER MEMORIES. 
 
 I have no carnal pride in it whatever, but a sincere 
 longing to go into quiet and seclusion. The moment 
 the war is over, I shall run like a mole for a burrow 
 — perhaps Burroughs Place again." 
 
 From a letter of earlier date (1851), I copy this 
 illustration of the conservative temper of those 
 days : — 
 
 " Perhaps you have seen in the papers that I de- 
 livered a Fourth of July address before [a certain 
 New England town]. I have heard of ' Hunkers ' 
 and ' Union men,' but never saw the genuine article 
 till I made acquaintance with the leading citizens of 
 
 . They were determined, they told me, to have 
 
 no one as an orator at all tinctured with Free-soilism ; 
 and after trying in vain to get either Choate, Gushing, 
 Frank Pierce, or B. F. Hallet, telegraphed to me, 
 relying on the newspaper reports of the Artillery 
 sermon that I was ' national ' and true blue. I was 
 in what Charles Francis Adams calls 'the tight 
 pinch,' but succeeded in satisfying all but two or 
 three of them in the address, and those took excep- 
 tion to some remarks which implied that the institu- 
 tions of the South were not so consistent with the 
 American idea as those of the North. I was de- 
 fended by others of the committee on the ground that 
 my language ivas misunderstood and that I could not 
 have meant so ! " 
 
 He said once, pleasantly, that in the new Cali- 
 f ornian creed " we are no second-adventists ; we 
 believe in no ' thousand years,' but in thousands a 
 year." But no one, surely, was more generous of 
 his own means, or more faithful in urging the re- 
 sponsibility of those who had greater. I insert 
 
THOMAS STARR KING. 107 
 
 here, by request of a friend, a characteristic bit of 
 a practical discourse of his on " The Christian 
 Dollar": — 
 
 " We say it is the duty of every man, with any 
 means, to observe proportion in his surplus ex- 
 penses; to have a conscientious order with regard to 
 the service which his superfluous dollars discharge. 
 Over against every prominent allowance for a per- 
 sonal luxury, the celestial record book ought to show 
 some entry in favor of the cause of goodness and 
 suffering humanity; for every guinea that goes into 
 a theatre, a museum, an athenaeum, or the treasury 
 of a music hall, there ought to be some twin-guinea 
 pledged for a truth, or flying on some errand of 
 mercy in a city so crowded with misery as this. 
 Then we have a right to our amusements and our 
 grateful pleasures. Otherwise we have no right to 
 them, but are liable every moment to impeachment 
 in the court of righteousness and charity for our 
 treachery to heaven and our race." 
 
 Some j^ears ago I had a conversation with our 
 old friend, Mr. Oliver Steele, of Buffalo, who told, 
 me some facts that seem to me very interesting 
 about Starr King's parentage, — he having been a 
 member of his father's congregation when preaching 
 as a Universalist minister in Connecticut. Mr. 
 King, the father, was born in New York City, and 
 it was through his mother that the son inherited 
 the strain of Irish blood which I had been told of 
 in accounting for his remarkable vivacity of mind 
 and wit : the father, I have heard, was even a more 
 brilliant talker and story-teller than the son. He 
 
108 SOME YOUNGER MEMORIES. 
 
 had been educated as a mechanic, — I forget in 
 what trade, — and had gained a certain fame among 
 his fellows as a ready and eloquent speaker in their 
 trade meetings. It was customary for the New 
 York trades, in turn, to elect an orator — generally 
 a lawyer, preacher, or politician of local fame — to 
 give an annual address before their united societies ; 
 and when the turn of his own came, proud of their 
 fellow-craftsman, they broke the precedent by ap- 
 pointing him speaker of the year. His address 
 made such an impression that he was soon per- 
 suaded to lay down the tools of his craft and take 
 the post of preacher, which he filled with , eminent 
 success in New York, Portsmouth, and Charles- 
 town, till his death about the age of forty. Starr 
 King had said more than once that he never ex- 
 pected to outlive his father's age : the horizon, up 
 to seventy or eighty, looked very far and dim to 
 him. In fact, he died early in his fortieth year. 
 
 John Weiss, too, was a man whom one should 
 have known in person to know at all as he was, — 
 his gayety and invincible wit, and the singular dash 
 of humor with a pathetic something that was partly 
 ill-health and partly a certain reckless disregard of 
 self, along with his busy, immense, yet largely 
 fruitless industry (for masses of fact laboriously 
 gathered in his commonplace-book seemed never to 
 find a use), and the eccentricity of style and temper 
 that handicapped his real genius. All these are 
 matters of keen personal impression, and need to 
 be dealt with — as they have been — by one (0. B. 
 
JOHN WEISS. 109 
 
 Frothingham) with whom they made part of a near 
 and affectionate memory of the man. 
 
 He was three years before me in college, His 
 father, I have understood, was a barber in the town 
 of Worcester, a German by blood and by race a 
 Jew, — to which last I have sometimes ascribed the 
 singular fervor of his religious genius. The first I 
 ever saw of him was in the college yard, where he 
 had a sort of ovation from his classmates on his 
 return from a few months' rustication, and frolicked 
 like a child among them. To everybody's surprise 
 who knew his quaint levity and drollery, he joined 
 our class in the Divinity School, spending a year of 
 the course in Germany. Meeting him from time 
 to time in the " Hook-and-Ladder," and having after- 
 wards some special links of communication with 
 him while he was in New Bedford, I have felt per- 
 sonally nearer to him than any degree of mental 
 sympathy I could claim might seem to warrant. 
 Having at one time something to do with the 
 " Christian Examiner," I succeeded in getting from 
 him one or two papers which I greatly valued. 
 But he was always eccentric, kicking out of the 
 traces, and enveloping his brilliant parts more and 
 more in a thicket of sparkling rhetoric ; hampered by 
 ill health and personal anxieties ; but having, with 
 a certain carelessness of appreciation and success, 
 a winning sweetness and humility at bottom, that 
 made everybody fond of him. I tried once to get 
 him to work out a sketch of Jesus " the Galilean," 
 such as he had given the hint of in conversation, 
 and might have developed with great vigor if he 
 
110 SOME YOUNGER MEMORIES. 
 
 had chosen ; but he appears never to have put his 
 hand to it. He said, with much emphasis, that the 
 popular theory of Jesus, his mildness and serenity 
 and so on, was thoroughly mistaken : he was a man, 
 on the other hand, of deep and powerful nature, 
 capable of strong passion and high political enthu- 
 siasm ; his most characteristic sayings were not the 
 Beatitudes and moral precepts, but rather his hot 
 denunciation of Scribes and Pharisees. But of this, 
 and of many another judgment daringly unconven- 
 tional, his full word was never spoken. 
 
 The mind of one so spontaneous and versatile is 
 best read in his unstudied correspondence ; and I 
 will fill out the hints already given, by transcribing 
 at some length from letters which revive, by some 
 characteristic touches, the interests and discussions 
 of those days : — 
 
 New Bedford, January 29, 1849. 
 
 All thoughts of correspondence were interrupted 
 by a fire, of which perhaps you have heard ; and now 
 I am plunged in the lassitude consequent upon the 
 material and mental dilapidations of the past three 
 weeks, including the rehabilitation of another dwelling. 
 But, upon opening my ill-used secretary again, I find 
 your epistle, which was good enough to have deserved 
 an earlier answer. So, in spite of a sort of general 
 apathy, which has seized me in consequence of late 
 excitements, I '11 acknowledge said letter at the least. 
 Were you ever burnt out (I doubt not the Spirit has 
 flamed over your prairie, and that you have been 
 tried " as by fire," but) burnt out physically, and 
 left with two or three hundred wrecks of books, to 
 
JOHN WEISS. Ill 
 
 say nothing of a general reduction of your valuables ? 
 It is astonishing how much can be perpetrated in 
 a kindly way in twenty minutes. Even a regular 
 rebellion in 1834, conducted Avith damage as its final 
 cause, was not more destructive. Engines suddenly 
 decant the contents of three or four neighboring 
 cloacas in your rooms, and the fire retires in disgust 
 at seeing the dirty work. The warm-hearted fellow 
 would have made clean work. 
 
 Such, then, is our latest noticeable circumstance; 
 and I can fairly set down a new sensation as having 
 been experienced. Note, too, that one of the chil- 
 dren of light was wise enough to have his library 
 insured, also furniture and wearing apparel. Who 
 shall say, after that policy, that I am of the impracti- 
 cables ? But you would like to know what is going 
 on ; and here one is embarrassed, for there is very 
 little to communicate. The gold fever rages fiercely 
 in this city, and it is supposed that from four to five 
 hundred stalwart men will emigrate. They all belong 
 to the better class in this community, respectable 
 mechanics and clerks. Its effect upon the whale- 
 fishery is at present bad. Vessels can fit out here 
 and carry passengers ; but the place produces noth- 
 ing to export. All freight for California is collected 
 from other quarters. At the least, the whaling 
 will languish for a couple of years, with little but 
 passenger money to supply its place ; and if they 
 should commence whaling from San Francisco, 
 it would materially damage this city. If there is 
 a bubble and it bursts, why, then all speculation col- 
 lapses also. But is it not a great way of founding 
 a new State and of excluding slave-labor ? and was 
 not the year 1848 mirabilis ? 
 
112 SOME YOUNGER MEMORIES. 
 
 Emerson came down here, and gave the pleasantest, 
 most genial, most natural and generous lecture that 
 I have heard from him, on the English. The appre- 
 hensive New England Platonist magnified discrimi- 
 natingly his beef-eating and sensible, worldly mother. 
 What an eye he has, after all, for national character- 
 istics ! You know they say that all his geese are 
 swans ; but, allowing for a faint tint of rose caught 
 from the hot-house hospitality which received him, 
 he gave them no more than their due, and it was 
 refreshing to hear the fulgid mystic, " who is one 
 slope from head to foot," talking about these men 
 who " clinch every nail they drive," and who pursue 
 Professor Bronson's method of abdominal speaking. 
 Excuse the slender material of this letter, but ac- 
 cept the intention of acknowledging your favor and 
 asking for more. 
 
 May 28, 1849. 
 
 Do you think that we up here read much, and 
 settle all questions ? Eond delusion ! We proceed 
 in the old way, and do not startle each other with 
 great discoveries. We might as well read iEschylus 
 and Peirce as for anything that we do to set forward 
 Christianity another peg. I doubt whether even the 
 Hook-and-Ladder divulges anything. They may look 
 very busy and mysterious, but they have nothing to 
 divulge. Something has kept me from their meetings 
 for the last three or four times, so that my judgment 
 is to be taken as merely that of an outsider, who has 
 observed nothing uncommon in the atmosphere, and 
 heard no explosion. Nor will the tracts of William 
 B. Greene help the matter. They are smart, but do 
 not increase the planet's velocity. One upon Trans- 
 
JOHN WEISS. 113 
 
 cendentalism contains errors. But he must write 
 and publish. Be assured, however, that he will not 
 reinforce the total impression made upon your mind 
 by iEschylus and Benny Peirce. He is great at at- 
 tacking superannuated orthodox ministers up in Wor- 
 cester County. By a smart and sudden dig in the pit 
 of the stomach, he deprives the inoffensive men of 
 wind, so that one hears no answers. Greene is emi- 
 nently useful in this line. If any light is really 
 thrown on the history of Christian speculation by 
 the "Antiquities of Egypt," it has not yet fallen upon 
 your correspondent, who is thus compelled to leave 
 you in the dark, merely saying that Bunsen's book, 
 from which something may be expected on that point, 
 
 is not yet completed. Neither does 's theory 
 
 appear to have modified the current speculation ; and 
 it can hardly be considered as a transmittendum (ex- 
 cept as supine in (h)urri), since it is still confined to 
 himself. The a-priori autobiography is by our friend 
 who knocks the wind out of dying ministers after 
 the manner of Mexican nurses, and doubtless with 
 the same humane intention of putting them out of 
 pain. Part of it was read to the Hook-and-Ladder, 
 and created inextinguishable peals of laughter, which 
 he bore so genially that I thought there was some- 
 thing in his essay. Each one can judge for himself. 
 The introduction seems to be a brisk flirtation with 
 Pythagoras and the science (?) of numbers. The 
 autobiography purported to be a genuine experience 
 of Greene's in Florida, and as such is valuable. . . . 
 Parker does not yet forget his wrongs. That is the 
 worst thing I know about him. He flourishes and 
 has influence ; but he begins to complain of his head 
 again. He works too hard. There is no controversy 
 
 8 
 
114 SOME YOUNGER MEMORIES. 
 
 with him now ; but the Boston Association does not 
 yet fraternize with him, and the whole matter is in 
 abeyance. The Massachusetts Quarterly ought to 
 do what you say, and I am confident that it will come 
 out right. Eipley is reviewing Bushnell. The Ex- 
 aminer will remain about so-so. Parker skims those 
 blue foreign pamphlets, but what he does with the 
 cream is not known to me. I have not seen one for 
 a year or two. 
 
 By far the most labored work of Weiss 's hand was 
 the Life of Theodore Parker, with copious editing of 
 his correspondence. This was a task which he 
 sought and eagerly undertook as a labor of love, 
 with abundance of generous appreciation of the 
 subject, but with the drawback of too little near 
 personal acquaintance. As a record of Parker's 
 religious life, especially by the free use made of his 
 diary and correspondence, it is incomparably rich, 
 and, in spite of Mr. Erothingham's admirable biog- 
 raphy, it remains as the best source of our acquaint- 
 ance with the man. Those who knew Weiss inti- 
 mately, and had a key to the dialect in which he 
 wrote, were hardly sensible (as it proved) of some 
 things in that book which gave needless prejudice 
 and pain to many excellent persons. It happened, 
 too, that certain material was held back, for personal 
 reasons or in hope of some completer future record, 
 so that on one side the book was left defective, — 
 Parker's relations with Emerson, for example. But, 
 on the other hand, where no sensitive nerve was 
 touched, it was a great delight to see that eager and 
 strong intelligence, colored and heated by so much 
 
JOHN WEISS. — F. N". KNAPP. 115 
 
 of fervid passion, as interpreted by the fine, keen, 
 and ardent genius of the biographer. And some 
 single chapters in that book restore to us better than 
 anything else we know the very form and pressure 
 of the time it dealt with. 
 
 One thinks of Weiss's as a pathetically truncated 
 career, when compared with the wealth of his gifts 
 and the brightness of his promise. This impression 
 comes partly, no doubt, from the circumstance that 
 his sensitive and restless individualism took him 
 away, in the latter years of his life, more and more 
 from the associations and companionships he started 
 with ; and so the impression may be a fallacious 
 one. Certainly, he was very impatient of the move- 
 ment towards a more effective organizing of the 
 Unitarian forces in the years just following the war ; 
 and, as soon as the " Radical " was started, he replied 
 to the kindly words of Dr. Bellows and others, that 
 his loyalty was due to that other, not to our older 
 organs of thought. He felt himself in his last years 
 to be more of a stranger among us than he need to 
 have done, and said to one of our younger free- 
 thinkers once, half sadly, that he himself, and a few 
 others, had paid the price of that liberty in think- 
 ing which the later generation have enjoyed. 
 
 Frederick Newman Knapp, a cousin of Dr. Bel- 
 lows, and to many others a very dear friend and 
 beloved brother, was taken out of our sight on Sat- 
 urday, the 12th of January, 1889, the nervous 
 malady which had caused him severe suffering 
 through much of his last few years terminating in 
 
116 SOME YOUNGER MEMORIES. 
 
 " a clot in the heart, producing instantaneous death." x 
 Surely, in the multiplied services which he rendered 
 during his lifetime of sixty-seven years, few can have 
 left a record so full of cheery usefulness. His two 
 brief pastorates, in Brookline and in Plymouth (with 
 the briefer ones at Yonkers, N, Y., and at East 
 Cambridge), were filled with conscientious fidelity, 
 like everything he did, but were hardly the most 
 characteristic or most successful part of his work. 
 The great opportunity of his life was when, early in 
 the war, by that felicity of insight in Dr. Bellows 
 which sometimes came like a great inspiration, " he 
 was appointed Assistant Secretary [of the Sanitary 
 Commission], and created and ruled the Special 
 Eelief department, of which the Soldiers' Home 
 [with which his name was identified through the 
 years that followed] was a very small part." I was 
 with him in Washington for a few days, in the 
 summer of 1864, when he told me, with a detail I 
 wish I could remember now, the forlorn and lamen- 
 table condition of the discharged or disabled men, 
 homesick, diseased, wounded, helpless, friendless, 
 who were to be found by the ten thousand, thronged 
 in those wide streets and desolate squares, on their 
 weary pilgrimage — it might be to their home, it 
 might be to their grave. 
 
 When Mr. Knapp sought to give his life to what 
 seemed the one great duty of the time, in whatever 
 
 1 By the account of a friend, " he was standing in his parlor 
 just after breakfast, talking to a boy, when suddenly he said, Oh ! 
 rather as in surprise than in pain, laying his hand at the same time 
 upon his heart, and dropping dead, apparently instantaneously. He 
 was not, for God took him." 
 
FREDERICK NEWMAN KNAPP. 117 
 
 field it should be most wanted, this form of it was 
 just then and there most urgent; and his singular 
 sagacity, sympathy, and genius of administration were 
 put at once to their best use. It has been lately 
 said that a hundred and fifty thousand of those men 
 came into personal relation with him, and received 
 from his shrewd, kindly, and practical intelligence 
 the comfort and help which only such a friend could 
 give. He knew very well the risks to health, the 
 danger especially of breaking down with the insid- 
 ious malaria that " walketh in darkness," and his 
 precaution against it was an example of his cool 
 practical sagacity. I occupied his room one night, 
 while he was absent on some remoter charge : it was 
 after a sultry September day ; and early in the even- 
 ing his attendant had a glowing fire of coals in the 
 grate almost within arm's reach of the bed. That, 
 he told me, had been done every night, summer or 
 winter, since he first took charge, and to it he as- 
 cribed his complete freedom from any disabling 
 illness. 
 
 But his duties often carried him away, to serve in 
 the crowded horrors of transport vessels or at the 
 front in the edge of battle. It was a delight to hear 
 him tell of what he had seen and shared on such 
 occasions with his associates in the work, Helen 
 Gilson and others, whose names live with us as a 
 benediction ; of his kindly relations, too, with the 
 colored refugees, and of the slave-woman with her 
 twin daughters, " Dick and Jerry " (named, to fulfil a 
 vow, after her two sons who had been sold away), 
 who became his fast friends for life. Of one such 
 
118 SOME YOUNGER MEMORIES. 
 
 time it is recorded that when he had been warned, 
 almost ordered, not to push forward into the Wilder- 
 ness with his Sanitary supply-train, — a feat which 
 skirmishing parties in the woods seemed to make 
 impossible, — he persisted nevertheless, and was 
 three days in advance of the regular army supplies, 
 just when they were most needed, after one of those 
 horrible engagements, and furnished all the relief 
 that was required. This is not the only example of 
 that more than military courage which was found 
 among the ministers of humanity in that most try- 
 ing service; but it should be told as one example 
 of what that service often was. In recognition of 
 it, he was (I have been told) the only man who had 
 never worn the uniform, admitted to the honor and 
 fellowship of the " Grand Army of the Eepublic." 
 
 A marked characteristic in Mr. Knapp was a 
 happy disposition and a buoyancy of heart, which I 
 cannot recall as ever once abating in an affectionate 
 intercourse — first as pupil and teacher — extend- 
 ing over nearly fifty years. Under the burdensome 
 presence of cares, in personal disappointments, or 
 when suffering from sharp illness, that peculiar 
 buoyancy of spirit seems never to have failed him. 
 That, with his singularly kind and sympathetic 
 temper, made a strong point in the personal influence 
 which he brought to bear on anything he had once 
 set his heart upon. When a student in college, he 
 did a thing which it was said at the time no other 
 person could possibly have done, — that is, to build, 
 by willing subscription of all sorts and conditions of 
 men, a neat and much-needed church, without debt. 
 
FREDERICK NEWMAN KNAPP. 119 
 
 in Walpole, N. H. : no other one made, as he did, 
 the living link between the strong, remarkable, and 
 influential family connection, to which he belonged 
 by birth, and the many whom he won by the charm 
 of his infinite good-humor, and his unaffected interest 
 in all that made for the general good. I remember 
 that it was said of him in those clays, in testimony 
 of his quick intelligence, — and it is confirmed to 
 me now by the best of testimony, — that he knew 
 by face (as Oriental shepherds are said to do) each 
 individual sheep of the two hundred that made his 
 father's flock. 
 
 In college, by his remarkable facility in mathe- 
 matics, he at once took rank in a group of three in 
 his own class, their chief being one of the most 
 accomplished men of science in the country, Presi- 
 dent Thomas Hill, with whom his relations were 
 those of close affection, — for I do not think he ever 
 dreamed of rivalry with anybody. It is something 
 not quite explained to me, that with this brilliant 
 promise and versatile intelligence he had always 
 contented himself so easily in the most modest 
 sphere and the quietest lines of service. After the 
 strain of war-time he was content to undertake for 
 a while the modest toil of raising cranberries ; while 
 his chief and most durable success was perhaps as a 
 teacher of boys. Not long after the war, he under- 
 took the difficult enterprise of the school at Eagle- 
 wood, N". J., but the military methods and traditions 
 of that school were hardly congenial to him ; and, 
 after a short stay in Yonkers, he " carried on his 
 home school a few years at Sutton, Mass., then 
 
120 SOME YOUNGER MEMORIES. 
 
 moved it to Plymouth. In fact, he was a teacher 
 from the time he took Theodore Weld's Easflewood 
 school at Perth Amboy till death, only combining 
 with it preaching for a brief time at Yonkers and 
 for a longer time at Plymouth." A hand guided by 
 a gentler, braver, and more patient spirit than his 
 never laid down its appointed task ; and the day of 
 his burial was a day of public mourning. 
 
 The death of President Hill, on the 21st of No- 
 vember, 1891, took from us one of the most marked 
 and remarkable men, if we consider the special 
 qualities of his many-sided intellect, that we have 
 ever known among the members of his profession. 
 It is possible that his withdrawal, of late years, to 
 local activities and into secluded ways, 1 may have 
 made his name less familiar among our younger 
 men than it eminently deserves to be. His presence, 
 however, has been constantly and powerfully felt 
 in the field of education : it was fitting that the 
 flags were displayed at half-mast on the city schools 
 of Waltham the day of his funeral ; and it is very 
 much to be regretted that long before the sum- 
 mons of increasing years came to him (for his age 
 was still a little under seventy-four) his life was 
 almost that of a recluse from the wider companion- 
 ship of his own profession. As it was my joy and 
 
 1 He had been for eighteen years minister in Portland, Me., 
 having served for fourteen years in Waltham, Mass., till his ap- 
 pointment as President of Antioch College, Ohio, in 1859, and 
 subsequently six years (1862-68) as President of Harvard Univer- 
 sity. In 1871 he accompanied Professor Agassiz on his voyage to 
 the Pacific Coast. 
 
THOMAS HILL. 121 
 
 privilege, many years ago, to know him in some 
 relations of very elose intimacy, and as I have since 
 received from him mental instruction and stimulus 
 in some directions more than from any other com- 
 panion or teacher, I desire to do what I may in 
 these few memorial words to make him a very little 
 less a stranger than I fear he is to the memory or 
 the sympathies of many among us, — who certainly, 
 if they had known him, would have gained much 
 from the extraordinary wealth of his accurate knowl- 
 edge, his clear and positive judgment, and his rare 
 capacity of intellectual companionship and help. 
 
 It is nearly sixty years since he first appeared 
 in Cambridge, — a sturdy unpolished youth of 
 twenty, of rustic training, dimly conscious of grow- 
 ing powers, " a born Unitarian" (as he said of him- 
 self), though brought up among unpropitious 
 surroundings, — modestly, simply, and eagerly de- 
 siring to enter the Divinity School. Wholly a 
 stranger here, he went straight to seek advice of 
 perhaps the only man whose name had a sound of 
 welcome to him, Professor Henry Ware, Jr., who 
 was not long in detecting his rare qualities of mind, 
 and who urged him to begin at the beginning, and 
 gain the benefit of the entire college course. 
 
 Taking this encouragement gladly and thank- 
 fully, he was fortunate in spending a little time 
 with Kev. Eufus P. Stebbins, in Leominster, and 
 then, by his advice, something more than a year 
 as a student in Leicester Academy, where his 
 faculty brightened and expanded rapidly in the 
 landscape of those bold hills. Here he studied (as 
 
122 SOME YOUNGER MEMORIES. 
 
 he afterwards explained to me) the lights, distances, 
 and atmospheric effects, as well as the commoner 
 field of wild plants and song-birds, 1 with the same 
 curious precision which marked all his observation 
 of nature. " His knowledge of all natural objects," 
 writes the Kev. Samuel May, "was most notable 
 while here, chiefly of plants, etc., wherein even then 
 — an apparently raw, awkward youth — he showed 
 a surprising exactness of knowledge. He seemed 
 to us to knoiv everything about plants and flowers ; 
 could answer every question raised at school or 
 elsewhere." In college he was easily the first man, 
 intellectually, in his class, which included several 
 distinguished names ; in particular, he was chief in 
 a group of three classmates, of rare mathematical 
 talent, one of them afterwards his connection by 
 marriage, Frederick Knapp, with whom his associa- 
 tion through life was peculiarly close and tender. 
 
 It was in good part by our common acquaintance 
 with this dear friend that I came quite early in his 
 college course to know him somewhat nearly ; and 
 this led, a little later, to a season of close personal 
 intimacy, which entitles me to recall some traits of 
 his character not (I think) very generally known. 
 I refer, in particular, to a quality likely to be hidden 
 from most, not only by the natural modesty and 
 self-respect of a self-respecting man, but by the 
 highly characteristic intellectual self-reliance, or 
 
 1 An anecdote told me by Dr. Hedge relates that he first at- 
 tracted the interest of the man afterwards most influential in nomi- 
 nating him for his post at Harvard by his singular skill in imitating 
 the warble of one of our native song-birds. 
 
THOMAS HILL. 123 
 
 self-assertion, which accompanied it. I mean, along 
 with a vein of deep personal piety, a humility of 
 spirit equally profound, an almost morbid sensitive- 
 ness as to some forms of moral evil, or peril, and 
 a keenness — almost agony — of self-reproach, such 
 as men of his bold intellectual temperament rarely 
 betray. This was, so far as one could see, purely an 
 inward experience of the soul : his life, I am very 
 certain, was as pure as a child's ; but his is the 
 single example I recall, among the companions of 
 my earlier years, of that desponding conviction of sin, 
 which is at the heart of so much religious biocrra- 
 phy, and gives their vein of pathos to so many 
 Christian hymns. It is rarely, in these days of 
 more balanced emotion, that we hear one seriously 
 accuse himself of deserving the wrath of an Al- 
 mighty Judge, and the agony of being cast into 
 outer darkness forever, in remorse at some imagi- 
 nary guilt. Yet why not that, as well as some 
 men's preposterous claim of a clear title to celestial 
 joys forever ? 
 
 This may probably have been only a passing 
 mood (though a genuine one) presently outgrown. 
 As I think, it was a mood of that deep awe with 
 which, through life, he habitually thought upon 
 the Infinite and Eternal ; I might call it a reflec- 
 tion of that phase of experience from the deep 
 background of the awakened Conscience. And it 
 seems not at all unlikely that this was part of the 
 same mental habit that kept him from entering, 
 in later life, into some of those radical forms of 
 thought which have attracted most men of his 
 
124 SOME YOUNGER MEMORIES. 
 
 mental calibre in the present generation. The topics 
 which they discuss he discussed also, — freely, famil- 
 iarly, copiously, — but always within what we may 
 call, by comparison, the lines of the old theology. 
 Paley's Horce Paulinoe, which had his absolute 
 esteem in the days when I knew him best, remained 
 (I think) to the last his type of the most convincing 
 treatment of the Christian evidences ; and he 
 adhered, not blindly but with clear critical intelli- 
 gence, to Agassiz's interpretation of the law of 
 organic development, in opposition to anything that 
 might possibly be construed as a quasi-mechanical 
 evolution, under conditions of a scientific determin- 
 ism. He was, it is possible, too much a stranger 
 to the habit of thought characteristic of our time ; 
 at any rate, his plea against it lacks the force that 
 might have been given by accepting it first pro- 
 visionally, and being (so to speak) baptized into the 
 spirit of it, till he should, as has been elsewhere 
 expressed, have " come out on the other side." 
 Thus, as if in a certain distrust of what an un- 
 fettered run of speculation might lead to in a mind 
 of so rare activity and self-reliance, he kept himself, 
 theologically, close moored to the anchorage and 
 held by the fastenings of his earliest faith. This, 
 it may be, weakened his influence with a large class 
 whom it was eminently to be wished that his mind 
 might reach ; but doubtless he felt it to be better 
 for his mental peace, while it certainly helped and 
 widened his true work in the larger community 
 outside. 
 
 His logic, withal, in dealing with such matters, 
 
THOMAS HILL. 125 
 
 was in some directions very bold and radical. Thus 
 he was so positive in referring the operation of 
 natural laws to the direct act of the Almighty that 
 he would not admit that God could create an 
 elastic substance, — that is, one which would react 
 by its own energy : the rebound was the immediate 
 push or pull of a celestial will : nay, every wavelet 
 of light or heat was (so to speak) fabricated from 
 instant to instant by the same voluntary act of 
 God ; or, if you brought up the cases of poisons, 
 contagions, or hereditary malady, he would reply 
 that God had so bound himself by the laws which 
 he has made that we by our own act can compel 
 him to exert his power in this or that way, and in 
 no other. That is, he would serenely accept this 
 result of his logic, whatever one might suggest to 
 the contrary. On the other hand, nothing could 
 be more beautiful and instructive than the illustra- 
 tions he was fond of giving, out of the wealth of his 
 knowledge of natural things, — as in the arrange- 
 ment of leaf-buds on the twig of a plant, or from 
 the laws of celestial mechanics, — to show with 
 what infinite forethought and skill the working out 
 of all natural phenomena has been pre-arranged to 
 solve, as we may say, the problem of the greatest 
 advantage with the least expenditure of force. And 
 he liked to tell how Professor Peirce, who had pub- 
 lished a college text-book on " Curves, Functions, 
 and Forces" altered the title to " Curves, Functions, 
 and Motions" recognizing that " force " is a " theo- 
 logical term " : there is no other Force but God. 
 It illustrates the eager and restless mental ac- 
 
126 SOME YOUNGER MEMORIES. 
 
 tivity already spoken of, that the conversation I 
 most distinctly recall in which that mood of con- 
 trite emotion asserted itself led directly (by what 
 channel I cannot call to mind) to a discussion of 
 the elementary grounds of mathematics and physics, 
 which beguiled of sleep the whole of a long winter 
 night, till his accurate reading of the stars startled 
 us with the warning that it was near six o'clock. 
 And it shows, too, the tenacity of his mental habit 
 that long years after, when suddenly called to 
 address a convention of teachers in Michigan, he 
 took up the argument of this same discussion and 
 expanded it into a scheme, or method, of general 
 intellectual training (afterwards published) ; giving 
 credit, also, to the circumstances under which it 
 had arisen, in the meditation of the night-watches 
 upon our bed, so that the assembly, in its vote of 
 thanks for the lecture, included its gratitude for 
 "Aunt Harriet's cup of tea," whose potency, he 
 averred, had nerved us to the debate. 
 
 While I am upon this point, I will add that his 
 peculiar genius in mathematics had no more charac- 
 teristic expression than in his favorite opinion — not 
 only that the forms of the universe, including in 
 them all types of living organism, are throughout 
 the loci of mathematical formulae known to and con- 
 structed by the Divine Mind, but that every formula 
 which contains a mathematical truth has (presum- 
 ably) its actual realization in existing fact. He has 
 given a very interesting exposition of this as touch- 
 ing the square root of negative quantities (the so- 
 called impossible or imaginary quantities, involving 
 
THOMAS HILL. 127 
 
 the mysterious factor ^/— 1), in a paper published 
 in the "Christian Examiner," 1 showing how it appears 
 in certain laws of reflected light. But a still more 
 curious example is shown in his investigation (or, 
 as he called it, " inventing ") of Curves, which I will 
 illustrate by an anecdote. Calling upon him one 
 day at the President's office, I found him engaged 
 for some few minutes, and, to while away the time, 
 he asked me to contemplate the following formula, 
 p = ar, 2 and see what I could make of it, — which 
 was, naturally, nothing. He then explained the 
 formula, showing how, by assigning different arbi- 
 trary values to a, a wonderful variety of curves 
 could be developed, some of them extremely intricate 
 and beautiful. He fully believed that the organic 
 world was made up (so to speak) of the realizations 
 of such curves, in infinite variety, from a like 
 formula existing (if I may so express myself) in the 
 mind of God. And he told me how Benjamin Peirce, 
 that prince of mathematicians, in whom imagination 
 and reverence kept pace with all the movements of 
 his thought, found him once engaged in these con- 
 structions, and, being fascinated by the theory, 
 brought in Agassiz to see ; and Agassiz, his eye 
 being caught by one of the forms, exclaimed, " Why, 
 that is the very shape taken at one stage of its 
 growth in the nerve-cord of a crab ! " The explorer 
 was delighted with this confirmation of so dear a 
 
 1 In March, 1858, article on "Physical and Celestial Mechanics." 
 
 2 Here p signifies the radius of curvature at a given point, and 
 r the distance of that from a given fixed point. Thus, if p = r (or 
 a = 1), the curve will be a circle. 
 
128 SOME YOUNGER MEMORIES. 
 
 theory. And it is possible that some of my readers, 
 who remember President Hill's criticism on the 
 Darwinian doctrine, given at Springfield in 1877, 
 may be interested in the illustration here offered of 
 his way of thinking upon these things. 
 
 His study of nature, too, was aided by a faculty 
 of observation singularly balanced and keen. He 
 once had charge of a magnetic observatory tempo- 
 rarily set up in the college yard, where I spent many 
 a summer vacation evening with him ; and I remem- 
 ber his telling me that he could in a clear sky see 
 the satellites (or a satellite) of Jupiter with his 
 naked eye. I have mentioned his precision of ear 
 for the melody of song-birds ; and with this was 
 joined a theory that every melodious phrase, or 
 sequence of notes, has its precise meaning to the 
 thought interchangeable with no other, — as he has 
 illustrated in the Christian Examiner 1 by a very 
 curious series of experiments made with the aid of a 
 friend, whose musical organization was equally sen- 
 sitive, but in a wholly different way. And this 
 should dictate strictly, he held, the uses to which 
 any musical phrase might be put. It was falsehood 
 and profanation, for example, to turn a tender oper- 
 atic melody, like " Batti, batti" to pious use as 
 " Smyrna." " That is not a hymn tune," said his 
 respondent (who was perfectly ignorant of music) : 
 " it is the billing and cooing of two lovers," — which 
 is, in fact, what Mozart meant it for. Under this 
 theory, he composed a tune himself, which (as he 
 intended it should) carried back his sister's memory 
 
 1 September, 1855, in an article on "Church Music." 
 
THOMAS HILL. 129 
 
 to some rural scene of their childhood, not by any 
 association of sounds, but by the thought thus 
 spelled out in the dialect of music. 
 
 With the same precision he would turn his hand 
 to almost any form of manual, even artistic skill, 
 sculpture and painting included ; and a little before 
 he set out with Agassiz upon their voyage to the 
 Pacific, his first word of salutation, when I went to 
 say good-by, was to bid me take a posture for the 
 photographic apparatus he had set up for practice in 
 his barn at Waltham. Still more interesting is the 
 story of his " Occultator." Discussing with Professor 
 Peirce the very intricate problem (to pure mathe- 
 matics) of the moon's path among the stars, he had 
 maintained that this could be represented by me- 
 chanical apparatus accurately enough to be of service 
 in the calculation of eclipses, determinations of time, 
 and thereby the fixing of geographical positions. 
 The professor, knowing his mechanical aptness, gave 
 it him as a task to put the mechanism of it into 
 shape. This lay in his mind for two or three weeks, 
 without his giving much thought to it, till one 
 morning, waking at four o'clock, he decided to invent 
 it then and there ; and did it so effectively that a 
 couple of hours later, on getting up, he whittled a 
 model of his " Occultator " out of a shingle, accurately 
 enough to give the time within (I think) about a 
 minute. Some years after, wishing to give a young 
 student the means of some vacation earnings, he 
 perfected the instrument, which was used to great 
 advantage in hundreds of observations made by 
 direction of the "Nautical Almanac" for surveys 
 
 9 
 
130 SOME YOUNGEK MEMORIES. 
 
 in the Western Territories, which would, it was 
 said, have been quite impracticable — at any rate, 
 quite too costly — without this mechanical aid. 
 
 He was, withal, keenly sensible at times of one 
 mental lack, — the gift of clear, fluent, and effective 
 literary expression. These things go by comparison, 
 and it is not likely that the readers of his well- 
 reasoned, plain, and instructive papers ever thought 
 of the lack. But sometimes the indescribable quality 
 we call style is the only thing needed to the wide 
 and brilliant reputation which by every other quality 
 one seems sure of attaining. He probably under- 
 rated the merits of his own literary art, — though it 
 is certain that we have rarely known a cultivated 
 man in whom mere skill of expression bore so low a 
 ratio to the general mass of mental power. Still, 
 he was a scholar of no mean accomplishment in 
 purely literary fields. Many of his brief poems 
 have original melody, as well as fancy ; he delighted 
 in reproduction of the ancient lyric measures in 
 sufficiently melodious English ; and he was confident 
 (as he told me once) that, if he chose to give his 
 mind to it, he could translate the great chorus of 
 the Agamemnon line for line and accent for accent, — 
 in which feat he would probably have shown (as 
 Lowell said of Browning) that " the study of Greek 
 had taught him a language far more difficult than 
 Greek." I speak of it here only as an illustration 
 of the curious versatility and self-confidence which 
 accompanied his great mental gifts. 
 
 In this slight sketch, mostly made up from mem- 
 ories more than forty years away, I have attempted 
 
THOMAS HILL. 131 
 
 to give a hint of those qualities in which he was 
 individualized, and different from any other whom 
 I have equally well known. And I cannot express 
 too strongly the impression that in general wealth 
 of understanding, in clear, precise, and classified 
 knowledge of natural facts in the greatest variety of 
 fields, with power both to grasp them as a whole 
 and to group them in intricate, subtile, and instruc- 
 tive combinations, I have not known any that could 
 be fairly called his equal : our friend Calthrop, of 
 Syracuse, is the only one I can easily compare with 
 him ; and in him this quality is joined with an eager 
 and buoyant temper, a hearty alliance with the 
 spirit of the latest science, and a faculty of brilliant 
 exposition, or improvisation, which make him our 
 best interpreter on many of the same lines of thought 
 with those I have here dwelt upon. 
 
 But I cannot refrain from adding here, as espe- 
 cially characteristic of President Hill, the supreme 
 value which he set upon pure mathematics, as the 
 best groundwork of mental training, as well as the 
 surest guide to the interpretation of the material 
 universe. I have heard him tell how the eye of a 
 pupil visibly brightened from month to month, and 
 the intelligence ripened, under the fine tonic of this 
 mental discipline, — an experiment the more inter- 
 esting to me, since it was told me to encourage a 
 parallel experiment I was just then making, which 
 had a similar result. But these words are not meant 
 for biography or eulogy, only to bring freshly into 
 memory some traits of one of our men worthiest to 
 be remembered. 
 
132 SOME YOUNGER MEMORIES. 
 
 Died in Madison, Wisconsin, December the ninth, 
 1889, William Francis Allen, Professor of History 
 in the State University, at the age of fifty-nine. 
 
 When a child, I do not suppose that any one 
 ever thought of my brother as precocious, though 
 (as it usually does) the scholar's vocation clearly 
 showed itself in him as early as five or six. In 
 fact, his intellectual maturity was of slow growth, 
 and he was twenty-six when he took his first per- 
 manent position, as classical instructor in a private 
 school. His boyhood would have been described, 
 though sufficiently athletic and vigorous, as grave 
 and gentle rather than robust ; and he would be 
 remembered as one whose candid soul repelled evil 
 (to copy Goethe's phrase) as a duck's back sheds 
 water, — while those inevitable touches leave with 
 most of us a stain that seems, it may be, only skin- 
 deep, but costs the pain of half a lifetime before 
 they are quite washed out. But he certainly 
 lacked neither vigor nor cheer : his interest in the 
 people and affairs of his native town was healthy 
 and keen ; and afterwards, in Gottingen, he de- 
 lighted his companions by throwing in fair wrestle 
 (which he had learned on the village green) an 
 English visitor rejoicing in his strength, who had 
 ventured to jeer at the lack of manly sports in our 
 Yankee schools. He was, for that day, rather late 
 in college, graduating at twenty-one, above medium 
 rank, but not among the first. But he was not 
 personally ambitious, and he had a noble and dis- 
 tinguished group of classmates, among whom the 
 intimacy through life has been uncommonly strong, 
 
WILLIAM FRANCIS ALLEN. 133 
 
 affectionate, and tenacious. Few can have been 
 more deeply indebted, or in more ways, to college 
 companionship. 
 
 A life of three years, after leaving college, as 
 private tutor in a New York family of rare in- 
 telligence and refinement, added a phase of experi- 
 ence which in the large variety of posts he has 
 since filled proved of great value to the country- 
 bred youth. A natural diffidence was absorbed 
 (so to speak) in that unobtruding suavity of manner 
 which remained characteristic of him. In particu- 
 lar, however, it was of service in giving him the 
 leisure — from lack of which many of us suffer 
 through our lives — for weighing with great delib- 
 eration his convictions, purposes, and capacities, so 
 as to lay out clearly his plan of life. His first 
 choice would have been the study of theology and 
 the Christian ministry ; but the theological temper 
 w T as less tolerant among us then than now, liberal- 
 ism was still weathering the raw air of controversy, 
 and he gave up the thought, reluctantly, — partly, 
 perhaps, because he doubted his aptitude for the 
 hardiness of public speech, but chiefly because his 
 honest thought was too " radical " to suit that 
 temper which he would neither conciliate nor as- 
 sail. He had, as I remember, serious thoughts of 
 the law, which shaped his reading for a time ; but 
 he had neither the forensic temper nor the vigor of 
 eyesight (slightly impaired by illness in childhood) 
 to justify in his own view his choice of that ardu- 
 ous profession. And it was distinctly with the 
 feeling that he accepted something less than his 
 
134 SOME YOUNGER MEMORIES. 
 
 first or perhaps his second choice, that he told me 
 his decision to make a vocation of classical and 
 historical study, which, he modestly thought, might 
 make a useful and a needed service. 
 
 Having made this election, he spent two years as 
 a student in Europe, finding there some of the 
 most eminent of instructors, — among them the 
 scholar historian Mommsen, — and including in 
 his field of study Germany, Italy, and Greece. 
 There, too, the great privilege attended him, of the 
 best and nearest of mental companionship, not only 
 of those who were his fellow-students here, but of 
 some (as of two friends whom he visited afterward 
 in Basel and in Ghent) who have placed themselves 
 in the very first rank as authorities in their own 
 field. In these pleasant student days there oc- 
 curred, too, a curious evidence of his happy gift to 
 win the confidence of all sorts and conditions of 
 men ; for once, when by a break of correspond- 
 ence I had failed of an appointment with him at 
 Martigny, and had passed by on the other side, he 
 not only was forced to leave his hotel bill unpaid, 
 but, by a miracle of mutual assurance which aston- 
 ishes me to this day, borrowed money of his Swiss 
 landlord, and went cheerily on, to complete his 
 journey. Kome and Athens were not so familiar 
 ground to scholars then as now ; and the opportun- 
 ity of them both, with the delightful companionship 
 of his classmate Professor Goodwin, gave him an 
 advantage which he always felt, in the particular 
 task he had set himself, — the interpretation of 
 antiquity into life. 
 
WILLIAM FRANCIS ALLEN. 135 
 
 His course since has been publicly and suffi- 
 ciently told: the course, mainly, of a patient and 
 successful teacher for three-and-thirty years, with 
 the break of two years' service with the Sanitary 
 Commission during the War, and with the inci- 
 dental tasks of editorship and literary criticism. 
 Engaged in such tasks, he may almost be said to 
 have died, like so many great scholars, pen in 
 hand ; since, only a few hours before his last sleep, 
 he dictated with great precision certain changes to be 
 made in the final proof of a work then going through 
 the press. For he had set his heart strongly, years 
 before, on accomplishing two scholarly tasks, — a 
 student's edition of the Annals of Tacitus, an author 
 and work that especially attracted him, and a school 
 History of Eome, in which he gathers very com- 
 pactly, and sets forth with singular clearness, the 
 results of intelligent study begun under Mommsen 
 thirty-five years before, and never lost sight of since 
 as his most important single task. 
 
 For several years he had been the senior and the 
 most trusted officer of his own university, and con- 
 sequently most looked to for outside work. Of 
 what that outside work meant to him, I venture 
 to give the following hint, copied from a letter 
 written a few days before his death : — 
 
 i( I have been unusually busy this fall with two 
 sets of proof-sheets in addition to my regular work, 
 and my duties as church trustee, director of the Free 
 Library, curator of the Historical Society, president 
 of the Academy, and superintendent of the Sunday- 
 school. Then, besides, I found there was nobody 
 
136 SOME YOUNGER MEMORIES. 
 
 just at this juncture who could be president of the 
 Benevolent Society except myself. Affairs were in 
 a delicate and somewhat critical stage, the process of 
 transformation from a committee of our church to a 
 general charity having been practically, but not com- 
 pletely, accomplished. It seemed that there was no 
 one who could conduct the last stages of this process 
 (or so they said) excepting me ; so I took the place 
 rather than see any failure in the work. I had to 
 appoint a lot of committees from all the churches, 
 and got it successfully done, — every church being 
 now well represented, and the society in good run- 
 ning order. To add to this, I was appointed on the 
 Faculty committee to investigate the hazing disturb- 
 ance, and this has taken a great deal of time [some- 
 times as many as three meetings in a day, and once, 
 the whole of Saturday]. Fortunately, all these jobs 
 are coming to an end." 
 
 It was, indeed, on coming home from the last 
 of these meetings, that he lay down utterly wearied, 
 — as it proved, with symptoms of a return of pneu- 
 monia, from which he partly rallied, but only to 
 pass away gently, a few days later, as it were in 
 sleep, without a sigh or pang. I will copy, too, 
 these words received from Madison, written three 
 days after his burial : — 
 
 "I suppose without coming out here one could not 
 imagine the feeling towards him, and if any expres- 
 sions should seem superlative, you may be sure they 
 are not the slightest exaggeration. His special re- 
 finement and courtesy to every one has made a most 
 deep impression among these western people. From 
 the President and all the leading men down to. the 
 
SAMUEL LONGFELLOW. 137 
 
 poor German woman who brought her three little 
 children to say she was going to take them up to the 
 funeral, all seem to have idolized him." 
 
 I give these words not merely as testimony of 
 the personal traits that have left a memory widely 
 beloved, but to add what was equally characteris- 
 tic, — that with this suavity of manner was joined 
 a judgment true as steel and hard as flint on all 
 matters of political or ethical concern ; and that, 
 with all his devotion to constructive religious work, 
 especially in his later years, he never forgot his 
 early experience, but remained just as inflexibly, 
 almost resentfully, opposed to anything that seemed, 
 ever so remotely, to narrow the Christian name or 
 fellowship. 
 
 Samuel Longfellow, again, is best known to the 
 present generation as a leader in the front line of 
 religious radicalism. He even discarded in the 
 later edition of his " hymns " those tender lines 
 composed by his brother for his own induction 
 to the preacher's office, beginning 
 
 " Christ to the young man said," 
 
 because he would not, by that one name, disturb 
 the simplicity of his faith in the one Source of the 
 soul's higher life. And yet, for some time after he 
 left the Divinity School in 1845, he still held, in 
 the devoutest spirit, what would now be called 
 a very conservative form of Unitarian theology. 
 Among his later essays and addresses are passages 
 reflecting upon phases in the political or social 
 
138 SOME YOUNGER MEMORIES. 
 
 conflict of their day, strong with ethical heat and 
 the eloquence of an indignant conscience ; yet, 
 almost to the years of full intellectual maturity, one 
 would have said that his temper was that of a 
 somewhat dreamy piety, and a poetic optimism 
 abhorrent of all revolutionary strife. His con- 
 victions of truth and righteousness were spoken in 
 a tone that lacked nothing to be sturdy and robust ; 
 while his physical constitution, though no way de- 
 void of a healthy vigor, seems especially to have 
 craved " seasons of retreat " oftener than can com- 
 monly fall to the man of a busy profession in our 
 day. The mountains, the seaside, the , Azores, a 
 series of long holidays in Europe or elsewhere, all 
 went to the repose and ripening of his mind ; to 
 say nothing of the rare privilege, as it proved, that 
 less than fifteen years of settled ministry, all told, 
 were unevenly divided among three congregations 
 so different, yet each in its way so helpful, as those 
 in Fall Kiver, in Brooklyn, and in German town. 
 His " Lords of Life " seem to have known that he 
 needed a widely varied and a somewhat delicate 
 training. 
 
 In respect to the quality of his religious discourse, 
 we may call it a very pure and single-hearted pre- 
 sentment of the " Transcendental " faith, in its more 
 positive and masculine type, as it was evolved under 
 the pressure of the controversies that, in their 
 gravest but gentlest form, made part of his life in 
 its shaping period. His expression of that faith 
 is singularly free from any intrusion of a spirit 
 properly critical : it is little, if at all, modified by 
 
SAMUEL LONGFELLOW. 139 
 
 the results of historical or economic study. He 
 seems never to have felt the pressure of that scien- 
 tific drift, by some called " positivist " and by some 
 "agnostic," which has so powerfully moulded a 
 later mood of thinking ; he seems never even to 
 have been seriously tried by the logical conflict 
 between his own buoyant optimism and those 
 wrongs in political or social life against which his 
 ethical judgment was so sternly matched. A hap- 
 pier mental temperament it would be difficult to 
 imagine, in carrying on the actual task it was given 
 him to do, particularly in administering those offices 
 of consolation and cheer which made a frequent and 
 a most blessed portion of it. 
 
 The first impression one gets from his published 
 essays and discourses is, perhaps, that of a too 
 predominating gravity. We miss the play of fancy 
 we might have looked for, and welcome as relief the 
 rare though felicitous illustration from travel or 
 works of art. The tone of their plea for religious 
 idealism and an exalted ethics we might almost call 
 a monotone. From first to last they are (to copy 
 his own phrase) an "appeal" in behalf of those 
 phases in the higher life, and of the realities they 
 assume in the spiritual sphere, which it was his 
 particular mission to set forth. To set against this 
 sustained and even elevation, we needed the very 
 abundant selections given in the " Memoir " from 
 his correspondence, especially that with Samuel 
 Johnson, his nearest friend of forty years. Here 
 we find the brighter, kindlier, and more playful 
 moods of mind which we knew to be equally native 
 
140 SOME YOUNGER MEMORIES. 
 
 in him. In these the tone and phrase are often 
 what we might call boyish. This temper happily 
 continued with him to the last, and was in happy 
 keeping with what was perhaps his most unique 
 and characteristic gift, — his rare sympathy with 
 boys, even rude and naughty boys, which gave him 
 a joy in their company, and a moral hold upon 
 them such that we cannot easily recall a parallel. 
 When some dear little girls asked him once why 
 he was not quite so kind to them, his answer 
 was, "Perhaps because I never was a little girl 
 myself ! " 
 
 The name of Edmund Burke Willson, if not so 
 widely known as it deserves, brings with it associa- 
 tions of a singular modesty, purity, and manliness 
 that have endeared it to a wide company of friends. 
 
 I first met Mr. Willson when we entered the 
 Divinity School together in the summer of 1840 ; 
 and while years have done much to color, warm, 
 and deepen the first impression, they have done 
 nothing, I think, to alter it. Candor, modesty, and 
 clear intelligence were traits as plainly written 
 then on that winning face of his, as we have read 
 them there in all the years since. Some circum- 
 stances brought us especially near together, — 
 though not, perhaps, in the very confidential in- 
 timacy that generally comes to one as a sort of 
 surprise. In age we were only six days apart : he 
 was by so much the elder. And our fathers were 
 country ministers, somewhat widely separated in 
 the same county, each having a share, not very 
 
EDMUND BURKE WILLSON. 141 
 
 unlike, in the liberal religious movement of their 
 day. In some degree he had the advantage of a 
 certain grave maturity of character ; and this was 
 perhaps favored by training in a rural academy, 
 which in some points may compare to advantage 
 with the hothouse culture some immature natures 
 undergo in college life. Again, while he was of 
 seemingly vigorous health and of very companion- 
 able temper, he lacked something of the physical 
 hardihood and robustness common at that period 
 of life. At least, I do not remember that either in 
 long walks, rough fun, or athletic sports he showed 
 the energy of some of his companions. If it were 
 so, it may possibly have been due to some delicacy 
 of organization, such as we easily associate with 
 moral purity like his, though we might not suspect 
 it in a young man of his ordinarily excellent health. 
 An incident of this time may serve as an indication 
 of what I mean. One morning he came into my 
 room suffering from a swollen eyelid, caused by a 
 blow or a sting, — I forget which ; and, touching it 
 lightly to describe the swelling, he fainted instantly 
 away. This did not appear to be due to any sudden 
 or acute shock of pain ; and it seemed to reveal a 
 degree of nervous susceptibility that, perhaps, made 
 a part of his physical or even moral temperament. 
 
 On the other hand, when I think of him in the 
 little group of eight, which included two men of 
 such very marked and diverse quality of genius as 
 Charles Henry Brigham and John Weiss, it is 
 most interesting to remember how, with his rare 
 modesty, candor, and constitutional self-distrust, 
 
142 SOME YOUNGER MEMORIES. 
 
 he always held his own steadily at all points ; so 
 that there was probably not one in the class who 
 so uniformly kept the moral confidence and intel- 
 lectual respect of us all. As a student he was 
 patient, faithful, and diligent, — especially faithful, 
 I should say, in what might seem the dryer and 
 more formal tasks of study, rather than enthusiastic 
 or brilliant in any one line. On his feet in actual 
 debate (a severe test to most men of that age) he 
 was what we have always known him who have 
 heard him, too infrequently, in later years, — cool, 
 easy, self-possessed, never in the least confused in 
 argument, clear in statement, with a quiet decision 
 of speech that counts as a far greater force than 
 emotional rhetoric or boisterous declamation. In 
 literary taste I doubt whether refined fancy, splen- 
 dor of imagination, or intellectual depth ever 
 weighed as much with him as what came nearer 
 home to his grave but genial and sunny temper. 
 One might envy him the hours of innocent fun 
 he found in " Pickwick," a new book then ; while 
 some of us were victims rather to the sentimental- 
 isms of " The Old Curiosity Shop." And I do not 
 think that he was ever drawn (as most of us were, 
 sooner or later) into the transcendental yortices of 
 " Sartor Besartus." 
 
 One would not do justice to the rare intellectual 
 quality which has been recognized in Mr. Willson 
 through his more than fifty years of uninterrupted 
 public service, — eight in Grafton, seven in West 
 Eoxbury, and thirty-six in Salem, including a brief 
 episode as chaplain in the War, — without knowing 
 
EDMUND BURKE WILLSON. 143 
 
 something of his still rarer humility of spirit, and 
 the deep self -distrust that saddened some of his more 
 confidential communications. His mental tempera- 
 ment was sound rather than robust, and he was not 
 easily persuaded of the real strength which was his 
 to put forth if he would. Devout by habit and con- 
 viction, he felt more keenly than most men some of 
 the changing phases of belief that we have witnessed 
 during those fifty years, as they touched moments 
 and moods of his personal experience. That his 
 own faith remained what it was, — calm, strong, 
 even radiant, — through all the changes here implied, 
 lay not so much in any positive or aggressive quality 
 of his thought, but rather in an unusually clear, 
 firm, serene, and steadfast reliance on moral princi- 
 ple, chastened (as I think) by an unusually humble 
 as well as sincere and living piety. This candid 
 grace of soul, which all men saw in him, was the 
 root of his great and real strength. 
 
 Willingly as he gave forth that strength in the 
 accepted lines of duty, and readily as he assumed 
 any responsibility which this might enjoin, it was 
 hard to persuade him, sometimes, to stretch out his 
 hand for a success or an influence outside that well- 
 defined range, which yet might seem easily within 
 his reach. To say that he lacked courage or ambi- 
 tion might not be quite correct ; but there was, what 
 many might fail to suspect, a hidden root of self- 
 distrust. The courage he showed at an emergency 
 was sheer moral courage, though carrying with it a 
 fine intellectual capacity, which he was too slow to 
 admit. I never knew, for example, what he was 
 
144 SOME YOUNGER MEMORIES. 
 
 capable of in the way of forceful literary expression 
 till I read a sermon of his on " Bad Friday," preached 
 after the surrender of Burns in 1854; when I wrote 
 to him at once to persuade him (as I hoped) to more 
 effort in that direction, — purely in regard of the 
 fine, clear, manly eloquence of style in which he had 
 shown himself a master. Another instance was on 
 one of the very few occasions when he stood in a 
 post of special interest or dignity in his own pro- 
 fession, addressing the " Berry Street Conference " in 
 a discourse of " reminiscences " of rare beauty and 
 instruction, — a discourse which, I think, was never 
 given to the wider public. Again, the one literary 
 opportunity of his life seemed to come to him when 
 our classmate Charles Brigham left him, with Dr. 
 A. A. Livermore, in charge of a copious mass of 
 papers, the labor of a busy lifetime, with an under- 
 standing that some sort of a memorial volume would 
 be published. He consulted me — naturally, since 
 I had just been following up Mr. Brigham's lines of 
 work in Ann Arbor — as to his own share in the 
 joint task, which was the biographical, sending me, 
 among other papers, a very unique, curious, and 
 detailed diary, in which our friend had written out 
 in private hours the story of his early life, — espe- 
 cially his Divinity School years, with incidents, 
 confessions, and resolutions, such as to throw a very 
 interesting light on his real experience. This rich 
 and too abundant material seemed to overpower Mr. 
 Willson's modest estimate of his own ability to cope 
 with it. I vainly urged the lines on which I thought 
 what was valuable in it might be preserved ; and, to 
 
EDMUND BURKE WILLSON. 145 
 
 my great regret, a form and scale of memorial were 
 determined on — as I suppose, by judgment of the 
 publishers — which shrank the proposed biography 
 to a scanty and pallid outline, greatly disappointing 
 to those who knew something already of its subject, 
 and wholly inadequate to portray that vigorous, 
 versatile, energetic, restless, busy, and somewhat 
 wayward intellectual manhood. To do that well 
 required not a less delicate and discriminating, but 
 something of a bolder, hand. 
 
 Further, with his great moral sincerity and cour- 
 age, and his singularly clear, common-sense convic- 
 tion on points of practical judgment, Mr. Willson 
 was diffident of urging his own opinion against the 
 opposing view of his associates. He preferred to 
 accept their decision, but himself to retire from the 
 field. Such, at least, was the account he gave to me 
 of his partial inaction, in later years, in matters of 
 denominational policy as to which he might be sup- 
 posed to carry weight. Where, on the other hand, 
 the question turned on points of principle rather 
 than practice, there was no man whose word — clear, 
 placid, firm, generous, serene — was more readily 
 given, or was listened to with more uniform, affec- 
 tionate, and venerating delight by his younger breth- 
 ren, of whom I was always glad to count as one. 
 No one who knew him but esteemed him worthy of 
 the highest conventional honors of his profession, 
 and probably anticipated them for him. If there is 
 one thing we could regret in such a life.it is that its 
 entire strength was not put forth in some more 
 widely conspicuous field. But this is also its best 
 
 10 
 
146 SOME YOUNGER MEMORIES. 
 
 praise and truest victory, — that that entire strength 
 was given, with perfect fidelity and without any 
 stint, to the particular work he had chosen ; while 
 its highest reward was found in the loving appre- 
 ciation and perfect confidence of those whom he 
 served in it. 
 
 With Octavius Frothingham's death passed away 
 the most brilliant and interesting figure — except- 
 ing one — of those who were the younger liberal 
 leaders of the last generation. His services to our 
 common life of thought were so many, and his con- 
 tribution to it was so rich, that it is not easy at 
 first glance to fix upon a point of view for seeing 
 it as a whole. Happily, he has given us the hint 
 of what we seek in the title of the hymn written 
 for his graduation from the Divinity School, — that 
 by which most of us, it is likely, know him best : 
 " The Soldiers of the Cross." This militant phrase 
 strikes the key-note which seems most readily to 
 bring that instrument of many strings into clear 
 harmony. The invocation it addresses to the Al- 
 mighty is that valiant Hebrew one, " Thou Lord of 
 Hosts." The hymn itself is the very finest idealized 
 conception of the holy war that summons the faith- 
 ful and brave. Its imagery is of the arming, the 
 vigil, and the vow of a young knight, to whom the 
 crusade he embarks in is a glorious thing, for 
 the joy of conflict it offers, no less than for the 
 nobility of the cause it fights for. And, then, the 
 proud humility of the knightly temper ! for, with 
 all his militant quality, no one ever saw or listened 
 
OCTAVIUS BROOKS FROTHINGHAM. 147 
 
 to our friend without being chiefly impressed by the 
 knight, not the mere soldier, that was in him, — 
 the consecration of an austere vow, the sweetness 
 and courtesy of a perfect gentleman. 
 
 In his eight years at Salem, we who knew him 
 at a little distance thought of him, perhaps, as one 
 especially fitted for the thoughtful, refined, and 
 cultivated companionship which is easiest found 
 — by a stranger, at least — in little provincial capi- 
 tals, where life has already grown mellow, and is 
 even, it may be, slightly touched in spots with gray. 
 It is probable, however, that these were not merely 
 years of preparation for the wider, noisier field, 
 but that just then his mind more craved solitary 
 study than many companions in his thought. 
 Among his clear-cut recollections of one who was 
 the best of companions, John Weiss, he speaks of 
 that goodly fellowship known to the initiated of 
 that day as the " Hook and Ladder," — an associa- 
 tion of something less than twenty, which included 
 such names as Dr. Hedge, Starr King, William B. 
 Greene, Charles T. Brooks, John Ware, Charles H. 
 Brigham, Thomas T. Stone, Dexter Clapp, George 
 W. Briggs, Nathaniel Hall, John Merrick, and (I 
 think) David A. Wasson, of whom only three re- 
 main. But, if I can trust my memory here, what 
 he appeared to seek in it was personal acquaintance 
 rather than discussion of opinion. It is as a cheery 
 and bright presence I recall him, as one who seems 
 in the retrospect during those years to have held 
 his forces in reserve. 
 
 It had something, accordingly, like the ring of 
 
148 SOME YOUNGER MEMORIES. 
 
 a declaration of independence, or the manifesto 
 of a fresh career, when we heard that the wave of 
 the antislavery conflict had reached him in those 
 troubled days, lifted him from his moorings in that 
 quiet haven, and set him afloat upon a wider and 
 lonelier voyage. In the five years that followed, 
 of his residence in Jersey City, he sometimes gave 
 expression to a somewhat forlorn sense of solitude, as 
 if he either did not find the field of work congenial, 
 or else had come to feel that no constructive and sat- 
 isfying outside work was to be done in it ; so that 
 it is easy to imagine that the experience was some- 
 thing like an experience of exile. Still, they were 
 years possibly the most needed and fruitful of all, 
 to save him (if ever there were danger) from grow- 
 ing into a mere man of letters or a mere platform 
 orator, — years that made him, instead, a conse- 
 crated scholar, a well-equipped as well as eloquent 
 interpreter of advancing thought in many of its 
 higher ranges. Of the evidences of this growth, 
 among the first and ablest was his exposition, in 
 1858, of the great critical work of Baur, which gave 
 the earliest clear indication of the ground he held 
 firmly, ever after, in the disputed province of his- 
 torical criticism. Here, too, in a series of note- 
 worthy papers, he first proved his mastery of the 
 extraordinary fluency, ease, vigor, and brilliant 
 touch which marked his literary handling of topics 
 that in most men's hands lie quite outside the pale 
 of literature. 
 
 The large opportunity of his life and the full 
 assertion of his powers came with his removal to 
 
OCTAVIUS BROOKS FROTHINGHAM. 149 
 
 New York in 1860. The story of his work here 
 should be told by some one who knew face to face 
 that remarkable group in which he was the chosen 
 leader, and could report first-hand of a movement 
 that will be better understood and more significant 
 as years go by. The personal qualities he brought 
 to bear in it were described by Mr. Chadwick in 
 well-chosen words in the funeral address. I venture 
 to add to this estimate only a few points suggested 
 to me at a much greater distance ; for during those 
 years I saw little of Mr. Frothingham personally, 
 and heard only a single address of his in the actual 
 scene of his ministration. It was such an address 
 as he is well known to have been a master in, — 
 clear, ready, self-possessed, carefully studied, but 
 extemporaneous in delivery; forcible, but not impas- 
 sioned or in the least declamatory; rather broad 
 than vehement or especially vigorous in grasp ; about 
 an hour in length; in substance an exposition of 
 what Comte's " Eeligion of Humanity " really means, 
 at once comprehensive, critical, and sympathetic. 
 It seemed to imply a movement of positive or con- 
 structive rather than merely critical theology, and 
 in this view was perhaps a fair example of his 
 ordinary address. If so, it was quite too purely 
 intellectual, too destitute of appeal to feeling or even 
 to imagination, to do more than hint, in the range 
 of practice, the possibilities of a far-off future. It 
 might even react, in some minds, toward a certain 
 despondency and sense of helplessness. I wrote 
 to him once, expressing somewhat warmly my ap- 
 preciation of what he was doing, and of his own 
 
150 SOME YOUNGEK MEMOEIES. 
 
 quality as a leader in such high paths ; and the 
 first words of his reply were, " What good angel 
 inspired you just then to write just that letter ? " 
 implying that it had helped lift him out of a black 
 pit of self-distrust and sense of failure. The " thin 
 sheet of ice," he lamented to his friend Chadwick, 
 was too effective a non-conductor to the rays of 
 common sympathy. 
 
 It was very likely some expression of this feeling 
 that led to the report, when he left New York, that 
 he confessed his effort there to have been a failure, 
 even if he did not react into a conservative shrink- 
 ing from it as something false and wrong. There 
 is no reason whatever to suppose that his mind as 
 to these matters was altered in the least. Of course 
 he understood that the period he worked in was a 
 " drift period in theology," — a phrase (by the way) 
 sent him, as title and text, by me when editor of 
 the " Christian Examiner," and wrought by him 
 into one of his most characteristic essays ; and, 
 naturally enough, a drift period is not just the time 
 to find firm standing-ground. But it sets its own 
 preparatory task, nevertheless. And that task, in 
 his hands, was honestly and ably done, not needing 
 (we may hope) to be repeated ; while the conviction 
 that it had to be done may well have deepened the 
 sense of weariness that comes in looking back on 
 the patiently trodden way. It may, too, have 
 deepened the grateful sense of relief and repose 
 with which one reverts at sixty to tasks more quiet 
 and genial, better suited to his advancing years 
 than to those when he courted the stress of battle. 
 
OCTAVIUS BKOOKS FROTHINGHAM. 151 
 
 To the wearied soldier the furlough was well 
 earned. 
 
 'The work of these later years speaks pleasantly 
 for itself. The wonder was that the hand we 
 thought tired out was still so diligent, deft, and 
 swift ; that the faculty we feared was permanently 
 lamed was still so prompt and adequate to whatever 
 might be required. I had occasion once to suggest 
 his name as biographer and editor of the unfinished 
 record left by our dearly honored friend David 
 Wasson, not knowing that he was (probably) the 
 one living man competent to that task. Such a 
 memorial as that, or as the Life of William Chan- 
 ning ; such a pair of thick, genial, and readable 
 volumes as those .which tell his recollections of 
 Boston Unitarianism and Unitarians ; such a series 
 of papers as those appearing within these years, 
 giving no hint that they were years of partial 
 retirement and frequent invalidism, — these might 
 well make an ample record of a literary life in its 
 best noontide, not in its lingering afternoon. 
 
 A word might here be said to tell how good and 
 how pleasant was the companionship of these later 
 years. And this word might include mention of a 
 trait which his friends have noted with perhaps as 
 much admiration as any achievement of his robuster 
 years, — the untiring and perfect courtesy of his 
 presiding, through many an hour that must have 
 been unspeakably weary, in sessions of the Free 
 Religious Association, whose very title seems to 
 invite what is most formless and weary of all 
 modes of human speech. If any such quality ever 
 
152 SOME YOUNGER MEMORIES. 
 
 did appear in those debates, I am sure that no one 
 could have been more keenly sensitive of it than 
 he, though that fine dissimulation let no one else 
 suspect it. For his judgment of persons as well 
 as of things was swift, keen, inevitable. By that 
 bright rapier the dearest friend or the dearest foe 
 was sure to be touched in the one vulnerable spot. 
 No emotional heat ever spoiled the temper of 
 his shining blade, or warped its straightforward 
 thrust. 
 
 This group of contemporary names would be 
 greatly incomplete if it lacked that of David Atkins 
 Wasson. The record of his life has been so fully 
 given in his own words and in Mr. Frothingham's 
 memoir that little needs to be added here. His 
 early training, "in extreme seclusion, in a rocky 
 peninsula town of the coast of Maine," was widely 
 different from those yet named. We heard of him 
 first as the young, ardent, poetic "pastor of an 
 Evangelical Church in Groveland, Mass ; " but 
 presently, in part under Theodore Parker's influ- 
 ence, he became a liberal of the liberals, and was 
 abruptly dismissed in 1852. He was a man of the 
 strenuous quality we soon learned to honor. If I 
 were to give in a single phrase our thought of him, 
 it would be that, in the very finest and highest 
 sense, he was our example of a Christian Stoic. 
 But what this means, I must let him show in his 
 own words, taken from two letters written in the 
 autumn of 1876: — 
 
DAVID ATKINS WASSON. 153 
 
 " Our people must have such a deal of hoping ! 
 Would not a little plain and cheerful courage serve 
 for a change ? Oh no, we are to hope so much that 
 there shall be no place for courage. The truth is 
 that the American appetite for sweets has got into 
 the American mind. If one does not Offer us spirit- 
 ual pastry and cake, we think ourselves shabbily 
 treated. A diet of turnips would be better for a 
 while, until we got back to an appetite for simpler 
 things. I thank the provider who sets before me 
 a liberal repast of plain dishes, neither peppered 
 with sarcasm, soured with misanthropy, nor sugared 
 with optimism. . . .One's words should have that 
 rim of gracious not-saying. His thoughts should 
 be like the words on a printed page, with a margin 
 of white silence about them. There are so many 
 whose speech not only has no margin, but slops 
 quite over the page and spills itself into vacuity ! " 
 
 "Your statement of the recent and existing ten- 
 dencies of thought is, so far as I am qualified to judge, 
 not only just as an indication of direction, but in the 
 rarest degree adequate and felicitous. Of course, I 
 can see what C. means in saying that it is ' not 
 cheerful reading.' He is partly right. The fact 
 described is not, in every aspect of it, and in every 
 mood of the observer, a cheerful one. I don't per- 
 ceive that you at all tried to dress it up, and make 
 it look cheerful. But you cheerfully confronted it, 
 and saw and said what it is. I confess that to me 
 the universe, as one must now see it, seems at times 
 appallingly cold, and I look back with a half -regret 
 to the old fireside view of the world, so snug and 
 warm, with its good Father providing for every want 
 
154 SOME YOUNGER MEMORIES. 
 
 and soothing every distress, and its divine or semi- 
 divine 'major-domo aiding with infinite tender care 
 to make things comfortable. But this view is no 
 longer possible ; and besides, I am clearly of opinion 
 that it has become nearly valueless as a means of 
 moral support. At any rate, I must bear testimony 
 for myself that the more of such belief I spare, the 
 more I find myself morally braced. Take the belief 
 in personal immortality, for example. I no longer 
 lean upon it, and find it wholesome not to do so. I 
 do not deny it, but must plant the foot upon what 
 now is, not upon what may be hereafter. Indeed, my 
 experience constantly teaches me more and more the 
 virtue of abstinence in such matters. I speak only 
 for myself ; the case may be different with others. 
 And yet, with the doctrine of immortality run into 
 spiritism, who can help doubting its use in the imme- 
 diate future ? It may one day be re-born and come out 
 better than new. In the mean time, duty and work are 
 enough ; and I find the simple diet invigorating. 
 
 " It seems to me, then, that you have stated the fact 
 as it is ; and I vote with you for the ' cold bath.' " 
 
 Mr. Wasson had labored for some years on what 
 should have been the monumental task of his life, a 
 treatise or essay of political ethics, of which the 
 earlier chapters were published with Mr. Frothing- 
 ham's memoir. An increasing severity of judgment, 
 and perhaps the lack of buoyancy of spirits, — an 
 effect of his invalidism, — prevented the completion 
 of this work, to the great disappointment of his 
 friends. The languor, and the disposition to look 
 for a more favorable season, characterizing the weary 
 but delusive disease of which he died, also prevented 
 
DAVID ATKINS WASSON. 155 
 
 — what they urged upon him more than once — the 
 gathering of his rare but choice productions in verse 
 into a single volume. The last work of his pen, 
 executed with great difficulty and delay by reason 
 of partial blindness, was a review of Mr. Adams's 
 "Emancipation of Massachusetts ;" and, as to this, 
 1 happened to know that he felt more than once 
 unequal to the effort, and even begged a friend to 
 take the sheets of the book and complete the task 
 for him. His writings have appeared in various 
 journals ; some of the best, I should suppose, in the 
 " Eadical ; " but the finest of his essays I can recall, 
 in thought and style, are a series in the " Christian 
 Examiner," published during or near the time of the 
 War. His title, " The Sword in Ethics," and a re- 
 view of the career of Wendell Phillips, may perhaps 
 recall to some persons these brilliant and strong 
 essays. In a letter of March, 1863, he says : " If I 
 write three hours a day for three days in succession, 
 I am utterly prostrated. I have to read lying down, 
 and must pay for every hour of work or play with 
 more than an hour of extreme pain. Therefore I 
 am slow." But that effort was the one great privi- 
 lege, for which no cost was too dear. 
 
 The physical affliction from which he suffered 
 through most of his life has been rightly stated to 
 be due to an injury to the spine in his early youth. 
 But, as false tales have been circulated as to what 
 occasioned it, — one of them, told in print, that it 
 was the cruelty of a shipmaster under whom he 
 served, — it seems fit that the correct account should 
 be given. 
 
156 SOME YOUNGER MEMORIES. 
 
 I called upon him about three months before his 
 death, and found that he had suffered for about a 
 month from an attack which severely affected his 
 lungs (as was, indeed, very evident), so that his 
 family were apprehending then the rapid decline 
 that followed. When I asked him of his condition, 
 he said he thought it was " the old trouble," not 
 knowing the judgment of the physician. I then 
 said I had heard a certain " myth " as to the cause 
 of that trouble, and asked him how much of it was 
 true. He answered, None at all. The real cause 
 was this : He was, at the age of seventeen, though 
 not large in person, very vigorous and athletic, and, 
 in particular, an alert and powerful wrestler. It 
 chanced that, at some local gatheriu gin the political 
 campaign of 1840, he was challenged to " try a fall " 
 by a powerful young fellow, over six feet tall, of a 
 quarrelsome clan ; and, knowing the folly of it, at 
 first refused. Under great pressure, he at length 
 consented, on condition of having the usual advan- 
 tage yielded to the smaller man, — putting both 
 arms below those of his antagonist, — which was, 
 however, denied. Then, for more than an hour, he 
 submitted manfully to the taunts of the crowd, till 
 it was offered that the two should stand as cham- 
 pions of their respective parties, when, in an evil 
 moment, his better resolution gave way. Two falls 
 out of three would give the victory. His opponent 
 at first, as he expected, tried by leaping on him to 
 crush him by sheer weight ; but he " knew a trick 
 worth two of that," and brought him in an instant 
 to the ground. Then they grappled ; and, clasping 
 
DAVID ATKINS WASSON. 157 
 
 his hands behind Wasson's back, the other tried 
 to bend him double. It was a desperate struggle. 
 But, by a violent effort, our young David foiled his 
 big antagonist, and threw him a second time to the 
 ground, — as he believed at the time, at the cost of 
 his own life ; and, indeed, for a fortnight after he 
 could not so much as turn himself in bed. 
 
 The life-long consequences of this terrible wrench, 
 and its effect, in particular, in crippling that bril- 
 liant and vigorous career, seem to justify the telling 
 of this story in detail. The suffering and illness, 
 however, did not prevent many a sturdy display of 
 force in the exacting labors of public oratory, any 
 more than the patient and resolute tasks he set him- 
 self as writer and thinker. Indeed, no very serious 
 alteration in health was manifest till within some 
 six years, or thereabout, when his increasing blind- 
 ness brought its special symptoms of infirmity. An 
 operation for cataract, in the spring of 1881, was 
 very successful in restoring the vision of one eye, 
 which was, however, imperfect, having been hurt by 
 the stroke of a cow's born in boyhood, so that it 
 seemed expedient to repeat the operation on the 
 other eye. This, most unfortunately, resulted in 
 the destruction of the organ and a summer's sickness 
 with much suffering, and a permanent lowering of 
 his general health. It was under these infirmities 
 — with the alleviation of friends, books, and the 
 skilful culture of his little vineyard — that the last 
 victories of his life were won. He died on the 
 twenty-first of January, 1887. 
 
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 OUR LIBERAL MOVEMENT 
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 HEBREW MEN AND TIMES 
 
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 New Edition, with an Introduction on the results of recent Old 
 Testament criticism. Chronological Outline and Index. i6mo. 
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 Topics, i. The Patriarchs; 2. Moses; 3. The Judges; 
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 pendence of scholarly thought, along with the temper of Christian faith ; 
 that should not lose from sight the broad perspective of secular history, 
 while it should recognize at each step the hand of t Providence as manifest 
 in Israel.' Such a want as this the present volume aims to meet." 
 
 Rev. O. B. Frothingham in the Christian Examiner. 
 
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 crowded and too few, will throw light on many things which must be utterly dark 
 now to the unlearned mind ; they will also revive the declining respect for a ven- 
 erable people, and for a faith to which we owe much more than some of us suspect. 
 For, however untrammelled Mr. Allen's criticism may be, his thought is always 
 serious and reverential. And the reader of his pages, while confessing that their 
 author has cleared away many obstructions in the way of history, will confess also 
 that he has only made freer the access to the halls of faith. There is no light or 
 loose or unbecoming sentence in the volume. There is no insincere paragraph. 
 There is no heedless line. And this perhaps is one of the greatest charms of the 
 book ; for it is rare indeed that both intellect and heart are satisfied with the 
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 Outline of Christian History. 
 
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 By JOSEPH HENRY ALLEN, 
 
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 tions in the larger type, — in which the general scheme or course of events 
 are clearly stated, — after which particular periods may be studied in more 
 detail. It is a very valuable epitome, not a history, and will be found a 
 useful guide to more extended study of Christian history. The topics 
 selected as lessons are the Messianic Period, the Martyr Age, Age of Con- 
 troversies and Creeds, the Church and Barbarians, the Church and Feudal- 
 ism, Dawn of the Modern Era, the Reformations, Wars of Religion, the 
 English Puritans, Modern Christianity, the Nineteenth Century, and an 
 Index of Topics and Names. — Journal of Education. 
 
 The little work, as its title indicates, is designed as a manual for class 
 instruction on the origin, growth, and principles of Christianity from its 
 foundation to the present time. It consists of twelve chapters, and each 
 chapter is devoted to one particular epoch of Christian history. It is one 
 of the most carefully and skilfully compiled volumes of religious history we 
 have yet seen, and will be found invaluable to students, old as well as 
 young. — Saturday Evening Gazette. 
 
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 manual, but it is happily and ably accomplished by Mr. Allen. His 
 three or four historical compendiums of ecclesiastical events are, well known. 
 The present handbook forms an admirable text-book for a class of young 
 people in ecclesiastical history, and will afford to any reader a good idea of 
 the progress of the Christian Church, with its most noted names and de- 
 nominational families, during the whole period from the first century down 
 to our days., There seems to be a marked fairness in the condensed sketches 
 of men of different sects and their special religious movements. It is cer- 
 tainly a useful little manual. — Zion^s Herald. 
 
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 POSITIVE RELIGION. 
 
 ESSAYS, FRAGMENTS, AND HINTS. 
 
 By JOSEPH HENRY ALLEN, 
 
 Author of " Christian History in its Three Great Periods," 
 " Hebrew Men and Times/' etc. 
 
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 Among the subjects treated may be noted the following, viz. : 
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 The subjects are discussed, as one will indeed plainly see, by a learned 
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 at three score and ten years. They treat of the growth of religion ; of relig- 
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 of pain, of immortality and kindred topics. The author is among the best 
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 modesty of statement and ripeness of judgment, give the book a charm not too 
 common in religious works. The literary style is also pleasing. — Advertiser. 
 
 This little volume of 260 pages contains much that is fresh and interesting 
 and some things which are true only from a Unitarian standpoint. It is 
 always delightful to read an author who knows what he is writing about, 
 and can present his thoughts in a clear and forcible manner. His intention 
 is to exhibit religion not so much "as a thing of opinion, of emotion, or of 
 ceremony, as an element in men's own experience, or a force, mighty and 
 even passionate, in the world's affairs." Such an endeavor is highly lauda- 
 ble, and the work has been well done. — Christian Mirror. 
 
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 him in his love of goodness and truth, and in his contention that religion finds 
 its complete fruition in the lives rather than the speculative opinions of men.— 
 N. Y. Tribtme. 
 
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 we must not, and must make an arbitrary end. Yet not without a word of 
 admiration for the splendid force and beauty of many passages. These are 
 the product of no artifice, but are uniformly an expression of that humanity 
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