UC-NRLF 
 
 111 
 
<--.v 
 
AND OTHER ADDRESSES 
 
 BY 
 
 JOHN COLLINS JACKSON, D. D. Ph. D. 
 
 LATE EDITOR OF THE AMERICAN ISSUE 
 
 Published By 
 
 THE AMERICAN ISSUE PUBLISHING COMPANY 
 WESTERVILLE, OHIO 
 
COPYRIGHT 1910 
 BY THE AMERICAN ISSUE PUBLISHING COMPANY 
 
Contents 
 
 Foreword ----------6 
 
 Grant s Strategy at Chattanooga - - - - 9 
 
 The Northern and Southern Armies of the 
 
 Civil War -- 39 
 
 Stephen, the Model Layman ------ 55 
 
 The Feast of Ingathering - - - - - 71 
 
 The Mediation of Character Between 
 
 Learning and Life ------ 89 
 
 The Dead Hand 113 
 
 The Man With One Talent 123 
 
 The Sermon on Number in Nature - - - - 133 
 
 Biographical History - - ----- 159 
 
 272299 
 
FOREWORD 
 
 In complying with the request of my deceased 
 cousin s wife, Mrs. Viola Chase Jackson, that I select 
 from her husband s writings, and prepare for publi 
 cation, enough articles of various kinds to constitute 
 a memorial volume, the embarrassment has mainly 
 been to decide among the competing merits of the 
 numerous productions he has left. I have endeavored 
 to reveal the diversity of his literary gifts and tastes 
 by combining here a few sermons, lectures, and ad 
 dresses. Want of space ruled out even one of his 
 several excellent stories, since it seemed fiction ought 
 to yield where so small a portion of his solid work 
 could be included. More than one volume could be 
 published from his sermonic lore which, I feel, would 
 rank with the best pulpit thought of our times. 
 
 It has been a pleasant task to traverse these 
 fields of study anew, many of which we had, at in 
 tervals, discussed together during our years of minis 
 terial commingling. Sons of fathers who were 
 brothers, and of mothers who were sisters, and both 
 bearing the name of our maternal grandfather, John 
 Collins, it was our fortune to be pupils together in 
 the same district school, and the same Sunday School, 
 to be reared and converted in the same little rural 
 
chapel, and finally to enter the same Conference, and, 
 for twelve years, to live and preach contempora 
 neously in the same capital city, Columbus, Ohio. 
 
 All of this happened, after my uncle s objection, 
 in my infancy protesting that I ought not to have 
 the same name as his son, as it would cause confusion 
 in years to come. To this my father is said to have 
 replied, laughingly: "Why, they may not be within 
 a thousand miles of each other when they grow to 
 manhood." In our childhood, our parents and their 
 two families, with ten children between them, spent 
 one entire winter together under my father s roof, 
 comfortably and happily, in a house with but eight 
 rooms including the kitchen. Let parents with but 
 one or two children, who feel cramped in modern 
 nine or ten-room houses, ponder this problem to their 
 profit. 
 
 Being two-and-a-half years my senior, my earliest 
 recollection of my cousin name-sake is that of look 
 ing up, with childish awe and admiration, to him, who 
 was the natural-born leader of the group of "the six 
 Jackson boys," as the neighborhood knew them, the 
 trio in each family ranging two and two in almost 
 identically corresponding ages. My cousin s native 
 abilities and energies maintained for him that primal 
 ascendency, in my estimation, thruout life. Tho 
 more than once we crossed swords in ardent the 
 ological or social combat, with strained relations en 
 suing temporarily, we never were enemies. Origin 
 ally he was progressive in theology, while I was con 
 servative; and he was conservative in temperance re- 
 
form where I was a radical. Both changed, 
 but neither retrogressed. I attained to his 
 advanced theological positions, and he abandoned 
 "regulation" for "prohibition" in social reform. What 
 he did in the latter field, after once breaking loose 
 from his old political moorings, the world will long 
 know. Reform became his ruling passion, and it was 
 strong even in death. 
 
 When I last visited him but a short time before 
 his decease, he was lying on his bed, in great suffer 
 ing, but writing away with an uncontrolable inten 
 sity. He told me his mind had never been so active 
 as then, and said : "I don t know whether this will 
 last five months more, or five weeks more, or five 
 days more ; but I intend to work the old machine for 
 all that s in it up to the last." Never was a grim reso 
 lution more rigidly kept. One year ago today, I 
 received a telegram at seven o clock announcing that 
 he had passed away at about five that morning. An 
 hour later I received a letter from him post-marked 
 eleven-thirty the preceding night. If there has been 
 a more intense and courageous personality than his, 
 it has not fallen within my knowledge. And now I 
 send forth this sample volume of his work, and feel 
 that thru it "he, being dead, yet speaketh." 
 
 JOHN C. JACKSON. 
 
 London, Ohio, June 5, 1910. 
 
Grant s Strategy at Chattanooga. 
 
 CHAPTER I. 
 The Situation Confronting Grant. 
 
 We take our stand in September, 1863, in imagina 
 tion, in the town of Chattanooga. To the eastward 
 about two miles and a half, and trending away to the 
 southwest, is Missionary Ridge, so called from an 
 Indian Mission established upon it at an early day. It 
 is a rugged range, about six miles in length and from 
 three hundred to eight hundred feet in height, scored 
 with gullies and covered with rocks and thin timber. 
 Coming up toward us from the south, about two 
 and a half miles away, is Lookout, a long mountain 
 running southward two or three miles, terminating 
 at the northern end near us in a sharp ascent about 
 two thousand feet high, and crowned with lofty 
 palisades of rock, which extend back along the crest. 
 From the summit there, you can look into seven 
 states. Down yonder in the southwest, Missionary 
 Ridge and Lookout Mountain come close together. 
 Through the opening between, called Chattanooga 
 Valley, goes the road to Chicamauga River the 
 "River of Death" in the Indian tongue where the 
 battle of that name was fought. On the southward 
 slope of Missionary Ridge it was that Thomas, "the 
 
10 Grant s Strategy at Chattanooga 
 
 Rock of Chicamauga," stood all that long afternoon 
 until the September sun amid flame and smoke went 
 down the coppery sky, and saved the day. One of his 
 aids tells me the only time he ever saw Thomas move 
 his horse out of a slow trot was that day when he was 
 rallying his men. And through that mountain gap 
 our army retreated to Chattanooga. Turning north 
 ward, from the far east, opposite the northern end of 
 Missionary Ridge, runs Walden s Ridge, extending a 
 mile or so away all along the north, clear away to the 
 west. Across Walden s Ridge winds a narrow, rocky, 
 mountain wagon-road to Stevenson, Alabama. Be 
 tween Walden s Ridge and Lookout Mountain, and 
 reaching far back behind Lookout Mountain, is Look 
 out Valley. Down diagonally through the green land 
 scape, from between Missionary Ridge and Walden s 
 Ridge, comes the Tennessee River, looking like a rib 
 bon of silver. It winds around the town four miles, 
 then takes a turn southward toward Lookout Moun 
 tain, and then northward, leaving a broad tongue of 
 land opposite Lookout, called from it s shape, Moc 
 casin Point, and then flows out at the western end of 
 Walden s Ridge. From the same quarter also comes 
 the Nashville and Chatanooga Railroad. It pierces 
 Missionary Ridge near the northern end at Tunnel 
 Hill, follows the Tennessee down by the City, on past 
 it between Moccasin Point and Lookout Mountain, 
 then on through Lookout Valley, and so at last to 
 Bridgeport, Alabama. This is a mighty frame for the 
 battle picture; Missionary Ridge to the east and 
 
Grant s Strategy at Chattanooga 11 
 
 south; Lookout Mountain coming up from the south, 
 along the west; Walden s Ridge on the north; the 
 Tennessee flowing down past the town and curving 
 around Moccasin Point; and the railroad coming 
 through Tunnel Hill down the stream, passing the 
 town, and going out at Lookout Valley. It is one of 
 the most magnificent views in America, a fit setting 
 for the mighty drama soon to be enacted within it s 
 mountain walls and along it s winding river. So grand 
 was it that General Sherman says : "Many a time, in 
 the midst of the carnage and noise, I could not help 
 stopping, to look across that vast field of battle, to ad 
 mire it s sublimity." 
 
 II. 
 
 What is the situation within this theatre that con 
 fronts the military genuis of Grant? It is now the 
 latter part of October, 1863. He is now at Washing 
 ton, and has lately been put in command of the Depart 
 ment of the Mississippi, over the armies of Burnside, 
 Hooker, Sherman and Thomas. Burnside is beyond 
 the mountains with his army at Knoxville. Hooker is 
 one thousand two hundred miles distant upon the Po 
 tomac. Sherman is down at Memphis. Thomas, 
 who has been put in command of the army which 
 he saved at Chicamauga, is cooped up in Chat 
 tanooga, starving. Famine, gaunt and desperate, 
 has his army by the throat. Ten thousand horses 
 and mules are dead of starvation, and thousands 
 more have been turned out to perish on the moun- 
 
12 Grant s Strategy at Chattanooga 
 
 tains. The only way of getting rations is by that 
 one road across Walden s Ridge, from Stevenson, 
 seventy miles away. With wagon trains raided and at 
 tacked all the way, and shelled by the rebel batteries 
 on Lookout as they come into the city. Since the 
 third week, the men have been on quarter rations, and 
 that only for breakfast. Once a day they have had a 
 piece of salt pork side meat, big as three fingers, made 
 into a sandwich with two halves of a hard-tack crack 
 er four inches square, called "the Lincoln platform," 
 and one pint of coffee. The rest of the day they get 
 what they can. Men followed the wagons in hundreds 
 picking up the crumbs of bread, and grains of coffee 
 and rice that rattled out into the dust. Guards had to 
 be set over the artillery horses as they ate, to prevent 
 the famishing soldiers from taking their corn. The 
 thirty thousand of Thomas army lifted their eyes and 
 beheld themselves enveloped by sixty-five thousand 
 of the enemy. From the northern point of Missionary 
 Ridge on the east, to Lookout Valley on the west, the 
 Confederates crowned the summits with their batter 
 ies and held the mountain passes with dense bodies of 
 infantry. They swarm upon the mountain sides like 
 masses of gray ants upon their hills. They thrust 
 themselves down the spurs and advance their works 
 toward the city. They fortify Orchard Knob, a hill 
 a hundred feet high, three-fourths of a mile away. 
 By day, ever since the fifth of October, the guns of 
 Missionary Ridge have been growling at our left. On 
 the right, great shells often come tumbling down from 
 
Grant s Strategy at Chattanooga 13 
 
 Lookout like meteors from the sky. On the center, 
 Thomas sends back shells from Fort Wood on the edge 
 of Chattanooga, shrieking like lost spirits in their flight, 
 which sweep men and horses from the Ridge. By night 
 the Confederate bands play "Dixie" on the mountains, 
 and the Union bands answer back from the plain with 
 "Hail Columbia" and "The Star Spangled Banner." 
 Bragg announces that in five days more he will have 
 the place; and his pickets boast they will spend the 
 Yankee Thanksgiving in it. But meanwhile, Grant has 
 telegraphed Thomas to keep Chatanooga at all haz 
 ards, and Thomas has replied: "I will hold the town 
 till we starve." Grant has ordered Hooker from the 
 Potomac, twelve hundred miles away, with twenty- 
 three thousand; and Sherman from Memphis, with 
 sixteen thousand men, and all are hastening as fast 
 as steam or their own legs can bring them. And on the 
 twenty-third day of October, Grant, a small pale man, 
 on crutches from a recent fall of his horse, has worked 
 his way into Chattanooga from Stevenson, and for the 
 first time surveys the military problem he was made 
 commander to solve. 
 
 III. 
 
 And now look at the problem set him, and his plan 
 for it s solution. The task is an appalling one. Briefly 
 it is to dislodge a veteran and victorious enemy, fully 
 equaling his own forces, from those apparently inac 
 cessible mountain-tops, surrounding the town on three 
 sides, and shutting it up on the fourth, to a river half 
 
14 Grant s Strategy at Chattanooga 
 
 a mile wide, which cannot be crossed under the guns 
 and attack of the foe, even if Grant had boats and pon 
 toons, which he has not. As I stood there afterward, 
 talking with Confederate soldiers, I said: "It seems 
 to me all the armies of the earth ought not to have 
 been able to get sixty-five thousand men out of these 
 mountain tops." Grant himself declares it w r as "a vic 
 tory gained under the most discouraging circumstan 
 ces of the war." What were the simple but matchless 
 tactics, conceived in a moment of inspiration on that 
 twenty-third of October, that did the work? Before 
 him stretched the Confederate lines upon those sum 
 mits, from Tunnel Hill, at the north end of Mission 
 ary Ridge on the east ; down the east ; down the south ; 
 up the south along the crest of Lookout, and over into 
 Lookout Valley; twelve miles long; sixty-five thous 
 and men of them; over five thousand to a mile. He 
 simply said: "I will attack that Army on it s right 
 with Sherman s army of the Tennessee; I will attack 
 it on it s left with Hooker s army of the Potomac ; I 
 will at the same time attack with Thomas army of 
 the Cumberland in the center. Somewhere, it will give 
 way; and then I will roll it together in confusion, and 
 sweep it from the field." 
 
 IV. 
 
 Let us next watch the execution of the plan. On 
 the twenty-third of October, we said, Grant got into 
 Chattanooga, and formed his scheme of attack. It was 
 now the twenty-seventh of October. The army of 
 
Grant s Strategy at Chattanooga 15 
 
 Hooker, twenty-three thousand strong, previously or 
 dered, had made it s twelve hundred mile run by rail 
 road, with all it s material of war, in the unexampled 
 time of seven days. It now stood ready to knock, with 
 iron knuckles, at Lookout Mountain, the Southern 
 gate of Chatanooga. But Sherman s army, hindered 
 by the enemy, was not up yet, and it s coming must be 
 awaited before the grand attack. Meanwhile, there 
 was preliminary work to be done. Grant saw that all 
 the batteries on the summit of Lookout pointed toward 
 Chatanooga. All the lines of intrenchments on the 
 mountain side, all the bastions far down on it s should 
 ers faced the same way. It would be madness to as 
 sail Lookout Mountain in front ; some point of advan 
 tage must be gained to assault it from the side or rear. 
 That point he saw as had also been pointed out by 
 Rosecrans, was Lookout Valley, extending far up be 
 hind the mountain. So a fight for this position of ad 
 vance was planned for the night of the twenty-seventh 
 of October. Lookout Valley was held by an entire 
 brigade of Confederates. They were to be attacked 
 at midnight at Wauhatchie, by a detail from Hooker 
 on the outside, and at Whitesides and Shellmound (all 
 stations on the railroad through Lookout Valley) by 
 details from Thomas on the inside. The young officers 
 met with Grant to receive their final orders just before 
 starting. They tarried afterward a little, expecting 
 some last words of caution or advice. It was an hour 
 big with importance, the time for the junction of 
 Grant s three armies. But he merely looked out the 
 
16 Grant s Strategy at Chattanooga 
 
 window, and remarked that if the rain kept on falling 
 as it was then, "it would be bad for the crops in Ten 
 nessee next spring." He felt no anxiety. At mid 
 night the attack was made at the three points. The 
 enemies positions were carried with a rush. The next 
 day, Longstreet, from the point of Lookout, saw the 
 result of our movement, appreciated it s danger to the 
 Confederate position, and asked permission to dis 
 lodge our men. His attempt to do so was made on the 
 night of the twenty-ninth, with desperate vigor. 
 Longstreet could be seen standing amid the glare of 
 his signal torches on Lookout Mountain, directing the 
 Confederate movements. But fortunately, we had 
 got the Confederate signal code some weeks before, 
 and his orders where to attack were all read, and 
 showed the Union troops where to mass for resist 
 ance. The result was that the men of Hooker and 
 Thomas jointly held Lookout Valley. The vantage 
 point Grant desired was gained. 
 
 Just afterward, Bragg, or Davis, or whoever was 
 responsible, made the mistake of his life by detaching 
 Longstreet to attack Burnside at Knoxville, thinking 
 to draw away Grant from the relief at Chattanooga. 
 It was the same tactics as when Lee detached Ewell 
 to move on Washington, when Grant was at Peters- 
 burgh to shake him off, and as signally failed. For 
 when Grant had once taken hold, he always held on 
 with the tenacity of a bull-dog. 
 
 Meanwhile, time moved on past the middle of No 
 vember. Sherman, after overcoming many obstacles, 
 
Grant s Strategy at Chattanooga 17 
 
 was at last upon the ground with his sixteen thousand 
 men. All things were ready for the grand attack. 
 
 And now, let us follow the events of the three 
 great days of battle, which I narrate in order. The 
 work of the first day is the clearing of the plain in front 
 of Thomas to the foot of the Ridge. That of the sec 
 ond is the joint attack of Sherman on the northern end 
 of the Ridge and of Hooker on Lookout Mountain ; and 
 Hooker s capture of Lookout Mountain. The third is 
 the combined assault of Sherman at Tunnel Hill, of 
 Hooker at the southern end of the Ridge, and of Thom 
 as in the center. It was all accomplished in accord 
 with the plan I have outlined; a plan of course kept 
 concealed from the army in general, and from the Con 
 federates. 
 
CHAPTER II. 
 Getting Into Action. 
 
 The clearing of the enemy from Thomas front to 
 the foot of Missionary Ridge, was assigned in the 
 mind of Grant as the work of the twenty-third. I have 
 told you the Confederate s fortifications ran out of this 
 side of the Ridge into the open plain, and embraced 
 Orchard Knob, a hill about one hundred feet high, 
 three-fourths of a mile from the city. Grant ordered 
 that in the afternoon, Thomas army of the Cumber 
 land should move out into the open space between our 
 front and the enemy s as if for dress parade. The 
 troops were to put on their best uniforms, to produce 
 that impression. At half-past twelve, the divisions of 
 Wood and Sheridan marched outside their intrench- 
 ments. Bragg, looking down from Missionary Ridge, 
 seeing that Hooker had come, said: "Now we shall 
 have a Potomac review." The sight was an inspiring 
 one. Thirty thousand men moved in line, and marched 
 and countermarched in front of the Confederate works. 
 Bands played, bayonets glittered and glanced in the 
 sunlight like showers of electric sparks. Drums rolled. 
 Howard, fresh from the East, cried: "Why this is 
 magnificent. Is this the way your western troops go 
 into action? They could not go on to dress parade 
 better!" The interested Confederates thought it was 
 
Grant s Strategy at Chattanooga 19 
 
 a dress parade. Their sociable pickets leaned on their 
 muskets, and the Confederate gunners climbed over 
 their works to see the spectacle. Groups of officers on 
 Missionary Ridge looked down as upon a pageant. 
 At half-past one, all our troops were in column march 
 ing parallel with the Confederate works, with company 
 front and company intervals, and company fifers and 
 drummers between. Suddenly the bugle for action 
 rang out from Fort Wood. Then came the sharp or 
 ders : "Musicians to rear ! Company, by right into line, 
 quick time, march !" then, next, "Charge, Bayonets ! 
 Forward, Guide Right, Double Quick, March !" Then 
 the whole long front rushed forward. Almost before the 
 Confederates could awake from their astonishment, it 
 was over their low works. The men in blue close in 
 on Orchard Knob ; they swarm up its slopes ; drive out 
 its garrison, and turn its batteries upon the fleeing 
 foe. The day s work has been done. Thomas front 
 has been swept clean to the Ridge by the broom of 
 fire and steel. 
 
CHAPTER III. 
 The Battle of the Twenty-Fourth. 
 
 We next come to the events of the twenty-fourth. 
 This is the day for Hooker s assault on Lookout Moun 
 tain and Sherman s attack on the northern end of 
 Missionary Ridge. All night long, Sherman s men are 
 moving up from Bridgeport, back of Walden s Ridge, 
 screened by it from the enemy s observation. Grant 
 has swept all that northern side of the river clean of 
 its inhabitants with his cavalry, so that no one should 
 give intelligence to the foe of what is going on. By 
 daylight the Army of the Tennessee has reached a 
 point just opposite Tunnel Hill, behind Walden s 
 Ridge. At eight o clock, Sherman is marching over 
 Walden s Ridge, attracting the entire attention of the 
 enemy, from Lookout to Tunnel Hill. Soon he is lay 
 ing his pontoons, and crossing the river, shielded by 
 the fire of fifty-six guns. Let us now leave him, and 
 turn our attention to the other end of the line. 
 
 In the camps of Hooker all is activity at day 
 light. A deep fog lies in Lookout Valley, and on the 
 sides of Lookout Mountain clear up to its palisaded 
 crest, hiding all below from the view of the enemy at 
 the summit. Ten thousand of Hooker s men in col 
 umn cross at Wauhatchie, and under cover of the fog 
 undiscovered by the enemy, march in silence up the 
 
Grant s Strategy at Chattanooga 21 
 
 western slope of Lookout, forming a line of battle from 
 its base to the palisades at its top. Then they begin to 
 sweep along its side, on the way to take the Confed 
 erate works upon its northern end, and on the eastern 
 side facing Chattanooga, in flank. All the time the 
 Confederates on the north, and east, and top, are 
 watching Sherman. They congratulate themselves 
 there will be no fighting for them that day. Confeder 
 ates that were on Lookout told me they were utterly 
 surprised by Hooker s movement, thinking Sherman 
 was to deliver the only blow. And Sherman s army 
 and Thomas men are of the same opinion, knowing 
 nothing of the attack by Hooker that was intended 
 from Lookout Valley. Suddenly, the Southern troops 
 on Lookout, are startled by a crash of musketry in 
 their rear. It is Hooker s line, rushing forward, driv 
 ing in their pickets. Instantly they knew they were to 
 have part in the mighty struggle, and awoke to action. 
 They file out of their intrenchments endwise, and hur 
 ry around the mountain to beat Hooker back. And 
 now old Lookout turns loose all its dogs of war. We 
 can hear the deep baying of the cannon boom ! 
 boom ! boom ! and the sharp, sustained bark of the 
 musketry, crack-crack-crack ! ! ! But steadily, the 
 army of the Potomac pushes on. Far down upon the 
 northern shoulder of the mountain, and on its eastern 
 side, stand Confederate bastions and breastworks, 
 built to command the railroad, and shell the wagon 
 road from Stevenson. They are standing there yet. 
 The Union troops of Osterhaus attack these in front 
 
22 Grant s Strategy at Chattanooga 
 
 and threaten to assault, to sheild Hooker s march upon 
 their flank. Our batteries on Moccasin Point, three 
 thousand feet across the Tennessee, open against the 
 Confederate batteries on Lookout. You can see yet 
 where their shells struck the palisades that day. 
 Meanwhile, on, over stones, around rocks, up right 
 under the guns of the crest trained at their lowest ele 
 vation, surging forward in a line from the palisades 
 to the base, come the men of Hooker, driving every 
 thing before them. Praises be to Heaven for the bless 
 ed fog! The great God, who hung Sinai with clouds 
 while his dread law went forth with lightnings and 
 thunders, hung Lookout with mist and clouds that 
 day, while He "wrote the fiery gospel" of salvation for 
 the Union across its bosom "in burnished rows of 
 steel." A captured Confederate Colonel declared that 
 if it had not been for that mist, their sharpshooters 
 would have slaughtered us like pigeons, and we would 
 have been left without a leader. But as God shielded 
 Israel from the Egyptians by a cloud, so he let down 
 a seamless mantle of vapor that protected our ad 
 vance. 
 
 By noon, the soldiers of Hooker have reached the 
 northern end of the mountain, and are rounding it. 
 There they were to stop. But the battle is going so 
 well that they drive ahead. As they turn the shoulder 
 of Lookout, the whole mighty panorama of Chatta 
 nooga, and its surrounding mountains and armies, 
 burst upon them, seen dimly through the eddying 
 vapors, boiling up from the valley, like the steam from 
 
Grant s Strategy at Chattanooga 23 
 
 a mighty cauldron. They caught their first glimpse of 
 the men of Thomas below, and of Sherman s advance, 
 and the twelve miles of the mountain lines of the Con 
 federates. And they in the plain first saw their broth 
 ers and helpers on the mountain. As I said awhile 
 ago, the troops of Sherman and Thomas had not known 
 that Hooker was also to attack. All forenoon they 
 could hear the sounds of conflict drifting down the 
 Lookout Valley, and now more clearly as they rolled 
 around the northern end of Lookout. Anxiety grew. 
 A great battle was fighting, and they could not see it. 
 It was like hearing voices from behind the curtains 
 of the unseen world. Further along on the eastern side 
 of Lookout the noise of conflict moved. Two o clock 
 came. Then a rift was made by the wind in the eddying 
 volumes of fog and smoke. As the veil of the Temple 
 was rent when Christ on the cross cried, "it is finished," 
 and His spirit passed into the unseen Holy of Holies, 
 so the curtain was parted on the mountains, and the 
 soldiers on the plain saw a flag going through. " What 
 flag is that?" they cried ; It was the flag of the Union, 
 blazing like a meteor on Lookout s bosom, in front of 
 Hooker s heroes, and the enemy were fleeing before 
 it. And now, Cheer, Army of the Cumberland! and 
 the cheers of the thirty thousand men arose and smote 
 against the face of the mountain. And the answering 
 roar of Hooker s ten thousand sounded back like the 
 shouting of the host of Gideon along the hills of Abie- 
 zer in Old Israel s day, and reached the men in the 
 valley below. 
 
24 Grant s Strategy at Chattanooga 
 
 Then the fog settles down again, hiding all from 
 their view, and the battle goes on. The ammunition of 
 Hooker s men gives out. Are they to be driven back 
 now for lack of it? For three hours they hold their po 
 sition with cold steel and wait. At five o clock, Carlin s 
 troops come on the run from the valley below, with 
 cartridge boxes filled, and one hundred and twenty 
 thousand rounds strapped upon their backs. They file 
 in front of their comrades, who take the cartridges from 
 their shoulders,and Carlin now leads the advance. The 
 plateau half way along the side of the mountain where 
 stands "The White House," and where the heaviest 
 Confederate works are, is speedily cleared. The Con 
 federate road down the face of Lookout toward Mis 
 sionary Ridge is threatened. Night comes on, and the 
 advance rests. That night the enemy on the sum 
 mit, seeing that the road would be taken the 
 next morning and their retreat cut off, take time 
 by the forelock and quietly file down, and cross 
 Chattanooga Valley to Missionary Ridge. Next 
 morning, the Mountaineers of the Union Eighth 
 Kentucky, hand over hand, clamber up the pali 
 sades, and take possession of the summit. There they 
 stand, and just at sunrise, from the crest of Lookout 
 unfurl the flag, and wave "Old Glory" in the face of 
 Alabama, and Tennessee, and Georgia, and North and 
 South Carolina. The great host below see it floating 
 aloft there, as the sun s first rays strike its folds, and 
 mighty cheers ring round the semi-circle of the three 
 union armies. "The sight of it did my soul good," said 
 
Grant s Strategy at Chattanooga 25 
 
 General Meigs. "What is it?" a war correspondent 
 writes of a wounded Union soldier, "What is it? Our 
 flag? Did I help put it there?" murmered the poor 
 maimed fellow, and died. 
 
 The ridiculous treads ever close upon the sublime. 
 Down low upon the mountain s northern end stood a 
 cabin, occupied that day by a middle-aged woman, of 
 that particularly long, lank, and snuff-seasoned de 
 scription with which all travelers in that region are 
 familiar. In the yard was a yearling calf, tethered to 
 the fence by a rope around its neck. As the battle 
 closed around, the calf pricked up its ears and tail in 
 absurd astonishment, which quickly grew to terror. 
 As shells began to burst above, it gave vent to its ag 
 ony in loud bleats. Then that woman, clad to all ap 
 pearances only in a long fluttering, flapping calico 
 dress rushed out to the rescue. Right under the 
 crossed and screaming shot from Moccasin Point and 
 Lookout Mountain, she seized the rope, and tried to 
 drag the calf out of danger. With the stupidity of its 
 kind, it braced itself, drew back, and refused to be 
 moved. The case admitted of no delay. Quickly she 
 dropped the rope, sprang and caught the creature by 
 the tail, "yanked" it around, and amid the cheers and 
 laughter of the soldiers, drew it backward, through the 
 door, and into the house, where she tied its feet togeth 
 er and thrust it under the bed. Tell me not of Joan of 
 Arc, of the Maid of Saragossa ! Don t talk to me about 
 Molly Pitcher at Monmouth, or Nancy Hart in the 
 Revolution ! I point to as brilliant an example of fe- 
 
26 Grant s Strategy at Chattanooga 
 
 male heroism in that lean mountain woman s rescue 
 of her calf from the devouring fires of battle. And her 
 strategy in taking the stubborn quadruped in the rear, 
 when the front attack had failed, was, in its way, equal 
 to Grant s rear movement on Lookout Mountain. 
 
 And now let us briefly return to Sherman. Hav 
 ing crossed the Tennessee to the northern end of the 
 Ridge, by ten o clock his guns are pounding away like 
 the beats of a great heart. It is the iron heart of the 
 Army of the Tennessee. Already the men are begin 
 ning to kneel in worship upon that rocky altar of death, 
 from which they shall not rise again. Straight on he 
 moves toward Tunnel Hill. The day is a succession 
 of desperate assaults and captures, and counter as 
 saults. There is not much room for strategy, but what 
 there may be is used. Loomis deploys along this 
 western side of the Ridge, to take the enemy on this 
 flank. Smith on the eastern, to attack on the other. 
 Corse is at the northern end, to make the direct assault. 
 Sherman s army comes on like a giant; one arm to 
 smite the foe on the right; the other, to smash in the 
 left; the body to crowd forward in front. Cross-fire 
 from both sides, direct fire in his face! Sherman s 
 cannon pound on, great hammer strokes upon the clock 
 of war. There is not such dramatic success here as on 
 our right with Hooker. The Confederates fight directly 
 under the eye of Bragg; are better led; and better 
 troops; and are not taken at a disadvantage. But by 
 
Grant s Strategy at Chattanooga 27 
 
 three o clock, Sherman has affected a lodgment at the 
 end of the Ridge, and he fortifies and stubbornly holds 
 his position. 
 
 So ends the twenty-fourth. As the sun went 
 down, the clouds blew off the mountains, the mists 
 rolled out of the valleys, and the night came on clear, 
 with the stars in the sky. It was a great night for the 
 Army of the Cumberland. For nine weeks they had 
 been buried in their trenches, save the clearing of the 
 ground in their front the day before. Now, they look 
 ed up and saw a sight to gladden their hearts and thrill 
 their souls. Away off to the right, and reaching sky 
 ward, Lookout Mountain was ablaze with the signs 
 of Hooker s men. The camp fires of the Union and 
 Confederate lines, still facing each other, looked like 
 streams of burning lava from top to bottom. Between 
 the flashes from the muskets of the skirmishers glowed 
 like great fireflies, and the lanterns of those that gath 
 ered the wounded and buried the dead shone with the 
 faint spark of glow worms. Off to the left, and far 
 above the Valley, the northern end of Missionary Ridge 
 was aflame with the lights of Sherman s army. The 
 great iron crescent that had with threatening aspect 
 long hung over the Army of the Cumberland and Chat 
 tanooga was beginning to vanish. The only thing that 
 dampened their enthusiasm was that the foe was being 
 destroyed on both flanks by other armies from a dis 
 tance, while they in the center seemed destined to sit 
 still and do nothing. 
 
CHAPTER IV. 
 The Storming of Missionary Ridge. 
 
 The twenty-fifth of November dawned bright and 
 clear, as the lines of the Blue and the Gray still faced 
 each other; the crowning day in this struggle of the 
 giants. There, looming in the vapors of the early 
 morning, still defiantly stood Missionary Ridge untak- 
 en, crowded from Chattanooga Valley to Tunnel Hill 
 with its unconquered Confederate hordes. All night 
 they had been marching, countermarching, and cor 
 recting their positions on its winding summit. The 
 troops from Lookout had been seen crossing and 
 marching, for the most part to face Sherman. The 
 semi-circular Federal front of the men of Thomas was 
 pushed well out toward the base of the Ridge, and now 
 included Orchard Knob. Early in the day Sherman 
 and Hooker were assailing both ends of the Confeder 
 ate line. All forenoon both flanks of the Ridge thun 
 dered and smoked like the furnaces of Tartarus. Sher 
 man could not make much advance; the pressure was 
 heaviest against him, and his force was lightest ; often 
 his men were fairly blown back by the fiery gust of the 
 Confederate guns, but he held the enemy on his front 
 with a grip like the vise of Vulcan. Hooker came on 
 from his end of the Ridge with a formation like that of 
 Sherman; flanking column to the front of the hill, 
 
Grant s Strategy at Chattanooga 29 
 
 another along its back, the main body assailing it 
 from the end. He did work that day that would have 
 immortalized the Old Guard of Napoleon. Thus the 
 struggle wore along, until far in the afternoon. It was 
 past three o clock. Then there came a lull. Sherman 
 stopped on our left ; Hooker had not got far in on the 
 right. The day was dying, and Bragg still held the 
 Ridge. The time had come for the final bolt to be 
 launched. The sun was only a handbreadth above 
 Lookout Mountain. Oh for a Joshua s power to stay 
 his descent! 
 
 There on Orchard Knob stood Grant, Thomas, 
 Granger, and their staffs. Directly above them on the 
 Ridge at the Confederate headquarters, were Bragg, 
 Hardee and Breckenridge, with their aids. Orders had 
 been sent to the men of Thomas to move out at a given 
 signal, and capture the rifle pits at the foot of the 
 Ridge. 
 
 The idea was to relieve the pressure upon Sher 
 man. The signal was to be six guns, with intervals of 
 two seconds between. It was now twenty minutes of 
 four o clock. Granger stands by Bridger s battery on 
 Orchard Knob. At Grant s order, he gives the sign 
 for starting: "Number I, Fire! Number 2, Fire! Num 
 ber 3, Fire !" and so on to "Number 6." At Number 6, 
 with a cheer that shook the earth, like thousands of 
 boys let loose from school, the Army of the Cumber 
 land sprang forth. Their nine weeks in the trenches 
 had not rusted them out. They go forward in line of 
 battle of brigades^ with reserves in mass. It is a mile 
 
30 Grant s Strategy at Chattanooga 
 
 and a half to the foot of the Ridge, every inch of it 
 played on by the enemy s cannon. Then comes the 
 first row of Confederate rifle pits, which they are to 
 take. And now the big guns at Fort Wood, and all the 
 federal forts around Chattanooga open at the Ridge 
 over the heads of the men, and the light artillery in the 
 valley takes up the chorus. The Confederates answer 
 back with all their lines from bottom to top of the 
 Ridge. The summit roars and smokes like a volcano, 
 sowing the ground with iron, and garnishing it with 
 the wounded and dead. But onward steadily sweep the 
 Union lines. At last, a final cheer and charge, and 
 over the Confederate works at the bottom of the Ridge 
 they go; and they are ours and fairly won. And now 
 comes the unexpected. As the men s.top there to take 
 breath, they begin to say to each other, "This 
 is a good day to finish up Chicamauga ; let us go to the 
 top !" Not an officer gave orders. The men that car 
 ried the muskets started. The officers followed, then 
 led. Oh, what a task they have set themselves ! It is 
 three hundred feet up the steep hill to the second line 
 of Confederate works, every foot under fire. When 
 that second line is taken, then comes three hundred 
 feet more of the same sort. Then the summit, with its 
 fifty pieces of artillery, and eight thousand infantry. 
 It was the strongest fortress that could be devised by 
 the art of man. The whole Union line is by this time 
 upon the move. Grant turns to Thomas angrily: 
 "Thomas, who ordered those men up the Ridge?" 
 Thomas replied in his slow, quiet way: "I do not 
 
Grant s Strategy at Chattanooga 31 
 
 know, I did not." Then Grant says to Granger : "Did 
 you order them up, Granger?" "No," said Granger, 
 "they started without orders; when those fellows get 
 started, all Hell can t stop them." Grant remarked: 
 "If it does not turn out well, somebody will suffer for 
 this." Still on they go. Sheridan out there on the line is 
 responsible for this thing. The orders sent out from 
 Orchard Knob were : "take the works at the foot of the 
 Ridge." He has given it to his men : "Take what is 
 before you." When he sees the men going up, the 
 rogue begins to hedge. He sends back to Grant to 
 know "whether he meant the works at the bottom or 
 the top?" Meanwhile the men climb on. Orders now 
 come from Granger to go ahead, crowd up all the 
 forces, and take the Ridge if they can. This is what 
 Sheridan wants. He waves his hand and in mischief 
 salutes Bragg and his staff upon the Ridge. Then two 
 cannon the "Lady Buckner" and the "Lady Brecken- 
 ridge." that stand by headquarters on the summit, 
 cut loose at him, covering him and his staff with earth. 
 "That s ungenerous," he cries ; "I ll take those guns for 
 that, here s at you," and rides like a fox hunter at the 
 hill. 
 
 Pandemonium seems broken loose. The struggle 
 is now for the second line of works. Bragg launches 
 his troops down from the top. He is rushing help to 
 the center from the right and left. The Confederates 
 can be seen coming on the run from up and down the 
 Ridge; all that can be spared from the ends. But 
 steadily onward, no longer in line, but in groups, by 
 
32 Grant s Strategy at Chattanooga 
 
 companies, or singly, now rushing- forward, now halt 
 ing, now gathering and climbing on, go the men of 
 Thomas. At last, here, there, foot by foot, fighting 
 desperately in many places with fixed bayonets and 
 clubbed muskets, they get over the rifle pits, and the 
 second line is won. Their mighty cheer sweeps up the 
 hillside, and the "rebel yell" derisively comes back. 
 The Confederates do not believe a single blue-coat will 
 ever reach the top and live. 
 
 And now the contest redoubles. The men in blue 
 start again. The Confederates have a perfect sweep 
 for their fire in front ; none of their own troops are now 
 in the way. The five batteries straight ahead on the 
 crest sweep every inch below them with grape and can- 
 nister and shot and shell. The side batteries wheel and 
 converge their fire, in great X s. The echoes roll back 
 from Walden s Ridge and Lookout, as if all the thun 
 ders of the year had tumbled from the clouds into the 
 valley. Still up go the men. Fifty-eight guns a min 
 ute are now playing on them, and eight thousand mus 
 kets. They climb forward in great V s, with the points 
 toward the enemy. At the point of each V flutters the 
 regimental flag, fourteen of them, or more, the flags 
 that waved at Shiloh, and Stone River and Chica- 
 mauga. Sometimes one flutters and reels like a hit bird 
 in air ; a dead Color Sergeant is there ! But they never 
 stop, for other hands seize and bear them on. They are 
 getting near the crest. The enemy s desperation in 
 creases. They lean over the works and yell at the 
 advancing line, with a scream like that of caged hyen- 
 
Grant s Strategy at Chattanooga 33 
 
 as, taunting, "Chicamauga ! Chicamauga!" They 
 work their guns with frantic energy, until the cannon 
 fairly leap from the quivering earth. They gather 
 handfuls of cartridges, and thrust them into the can 
 non. They light the fuses of shells and bowl them over 
 by hundreds. When they cannot train their guns down 
 low enough, they pick up rocks and hurl them in their 
 rage. It is a hand to hand conflict. At last, upon the 
 crest in six places go the Union flags. No one knows 
 which was the first; honor s self might have been proud 
 to follow the last. The Confederates break and stream 
 back, first from the center, and then from both the 
 wings. Bragg is riding in hot haste, not to Abraham s 
 bosom at Washington, but into the bosom of his be 
 loved Dixie. He said he would give the Federals five 
 days to get out of Chattanooga; they have only taken 
 three, and they are going out over Lookout Mountain 
 and Missionary Ridge, with him leading the procession 
 at a more than two-forty gait. 
 
 Meanwhile, the men of Thomas are coming up, 
 and crowding on the crest by thousands, and give 
 themselves up to wild rejoicing. They have done it! 
 In sight of the Army of the Potomac ! In sight of the 
 Army of the Tennessee! Some sit down upon the 
 ground and convulsively cry. Some laugh, and hug 
 each other. Some wildly dance and cheer. In the 
 midst of it all, Grant comes upon the summit, and the 
 uproar of gladness around him swells into a tempest. 
 They declare tears rolled down his cheeks that day. 
 "Soldiers," he said, "Soldiers, you ought to be court- 
 
34 Grant s Strategy at Chattanooga 
 
 martialed, every one of you. I ordered you to capture 
 the bottom, and you have taken the Ridge." An old 
 loyal Tennessean, who had got up there no one knows 
 how, was wildly rushing about among the men, shak 
 ing hands and crying: "I knew the Yankees would 
 fight ; I knew it, I knew it !" And Sheridan was there, 
 and his horse s heels were kicking up, as he was already 
 vanishing over the Ridge in pursuit of the enemy. 
 
 It took one hour to go from bottom to top. What 
 drove the Confederates out of that apparently impreg 
 nable position? Bragg said in his report, "No satisfac 
 tory excuse can possibly be given for the shameful con 
 duct of our troops, . . in allowing their line to be 
 penetrated. The position was one which ought to have 
 been held by a line of skirmishers against any assault 
 ing column. The enemy who reached the Ridge did so 
 in a condition of exhaustion, from the great physical 
 exertion in climbing, which rendered them powerless, 
 and the slightest effort would have destroyed them." 
 Elsewhere, however, he says it must have been the 
 moral effect of seeing such masses of Federal troops 
 for days in front of their own comparatively unseen 
 lines that caused them to give way. And curiously 
 enough, this is the reason the Confederate soldiers 
 themselves gave. I asked one of them "A Vhat made 
 you fellows run?" He answered: "Wei n v .t was 
 just this way. We uns could see all of yc ns i vn 
 thar, about thirty thousand of you, a parac r 1 ot- 
 in an drummin an wavin your flags about i /eek. 
 An we couldn t see our own men up here among the 
 
Grant s Strategy at Chattanooga 35 
 
 rocks and trees, only about a company on your right 
 and another on the left. An when you uns started up 
 the Ridge, it looked to us like as if the Yearth jest riz 
 up an got blue. But we uns fit and fit until it seemed 
 as if God himself was a Yank ; then we uns got skeart 
 an left." But I say they left also because they had 
 come to recognize the masterly strategy of Grant, in 
 his plan of attack, on right, left and center, and felt 
 that it was useless to. resist. 
 
 And that strategy was backed up by the devotion 
 of an army which sunk every personal fear of death 
 in an all absorbing determination to carry it out and 
 make it effective. General Howard tells how, after 
 the last charge, four men carried a sergeant to the 
 rear. "Where are you hurt?" kindly inquired Mr. A. 
 P. Smith, a member of the Christian Commission. He 
 answered: "Almost up, sir." "I mean in what part 
 are you injured?" He fixed his eye on the speaker, 
 and answered again, "Almost up to the top." Just 
 then Mr. Smith uncovered his arm, and saw the fright 
 ful, shattering wound f Jie shell which struck him. 
 "Yes," said the Sergeant, turning his eye upon it; "I 
 was almost up : but for that I would have reached the 
 top." The sergeant was bearing the flag when he was 
 hit. He died with the fainter and fainter ex^ 1 ~mation, 
 "almost up, almost up !" while his compa on the 
 
 heights he almost reached were cheering : j triumph 
 he would so much have enjoyed. It is Porting to 
 
36 Grant s Strategy at Chattanooga 
 
 hope that his faithful spirit attained the crest of high 
 er battlements than those which the living victors that 
 day reached. 
 
 Those three days of battle cost us nearly six thou 
 sand such heroes dead or wounded. That last assault 
 cut down one man in every four who started. It was 
 such self-forgetful devotion as this, joined to the 
 matchless skill of the general commanding, that gave 
 us the victory. I know of no battle in modern times 
 more strategically and tactically planned, or more per 
 fectly delivered. 
 
 Twice have I carefully gone over that battlefield 
 since the war. The last time was in the early fall a 
 few years since. The scene was Arcadian in its peace 
 ful beauty. The clouds chased each other in shadows 
 along the sides of Walden s Ridge; the grapes hung 
 purpling on the ridges enriched by the blood of heroes. 
 
 "Again I saw the mountain s blaze 
 In autumn s amber light; 
 Again I saw in shimmering haze 
 The valleys long and bright. 
 Old Lookout Mountain towered afar 
 As when in lordly pride, 
 It plumed its head with flags of war 
 The year our comrades died. 
 
 On Wooded Mission Ridge increased, 
 The fruited fields of fall, 
 And Chattanooga slept in peace 
 Beneath her mountain wall." 
 
Grant s Strategy at Chattanooga 37 
 
 From Lookout s summit, just where the Union 
 flag was first planted on those heights, my eyes wan 
 dered along the encircling mountain ridges for a hun 
 dred miles, and roamed at will over .states once sev 
 ered, but now dwelling in harmony. 
 
 "O Country, free, from sea to sea, 
 With Union blest forever, 
 Not vainly heroes died for thee, 
 Along that winding river." 
 
 Then I rode across to the National Cemetery, to 
 look upon the graves, and see what it all cost. Thir 
 teen thousand Union soldiers rest there, whose feet, 
 once beautiful within the halls of home, marched to 
 the call of duty, and halted only in death. The coun 
 try they saved, tenderly cares for those graves. And 
 then I went over to the Confederate Cemetery, over 
 grown with weeds and briars, with not a sign of a 
 mound. The only monument that stood there then 
 was put up by the charitable subscriptions of North 
 ern residents of Chattanooga, and bears the inscrip 
 tion, "To our Confederate Dead." A little piece away 
 stood the smouldering remains of the pine shaft which 
 the Confederates, in their poverty, had been able to 
 erect. It seemed a symbol of the decayed fortunes 
 of the government for which they lost so much. The 
 only individual mark I saw in all that burial ground, 
 where many thousands lie, was a little marble cross, 
 uplifting itself pitifully among the briars, with but 
 these sad words: "To my Darling: Slain at Chica- 
 
38 Grant s Strategy at Chattanooga 
 
 mauga." As I turned and went out through the barb 
 ed wires of the cheap fence, I saw a one-armed man 
 reading under a tree. He was an ex-Confederate from 
 Alabama, come to revisit the scene where he had been 
 wounded. We sat and talked amicably over the war 
 and its results. Upon my expressing regret for the 
 neglected condition of the Confederate Cemetery, and 
 contrasting it with that of the Federal, he mournfully 
 remarked, "Yes, there s a mighty difference betv n 
 whippin an bein whipped." Yes, there is. And n~xt 
 to the bravery of our soldiers, and the blessing of God 
 upon a just cause, nothing contributed more to make 
 that difference in our favor, than the Strategy of Gen 
 eral Grant. 
 
The Northern and Southern Armies 
 of the Civil War. 
 
 A Memorial Day Recollection. 
 
 There are many things of interest, statistical and 
 otherwise, connected with both the Union and the Con 
 federate armies during the great Civil War, which are 
 scarcely known to the present generation. Some of 
 them are here presented as suitable to be recalled 
 on Memorial Day. 
 
 One is that of the almost extreme youth of the 
 vast majority of combatants on both sides. No exact 
 figure : n this respect for the Confederates can be 
 fur ishc *- tit it was commonly said that they "had 
 raJ no ily the grave, but the cradle," to fill their 
 ran TV troops which fought our fleets from the 
 Coni ,>-j.t forts along the Gulf and around New 
 Orleans v;ere nearly all boys of from 14 to 18, the 
 home-guards of their respective cities. 
 
 Our government began to enlist boys down as 
 low as eleven years of age as powder-boys on men-of- 
 war, musicians, orderlies and the like. There were 
 twenty boys eleven years of age in our army. There 
 were one hundred twelve years old. Of those aged 
 thirteen there were seven hundred. Of those 14 years 
 old there were one thousand in the national army; of 
 
40 The Northern and Southern Armies 
 
 fifteen there were two thousand one hundred; of six 
 teen, twelve thousand five hundred; -of seventeen, 
 twenty-three thousand eight hundred. Then came a 
 vast host of four hundred and twelve thousand at 
 eighteen. The figures show that of the boys of 
 eighteen and under there were far more than twice as 
 many as of any other age in the Union army; at 
 eighteen or under there were over four hundred and 
 fifty-two thousand enlistments, while of the next 
 highest number, at nineteen, there were only two 
 hundred and twelve thousand not one-half as many. 
 
 The figures show that of the two million two hun 
 dred thousand more than-one half were of young fel 
 lows of twenty-two or under well might they, I say, 
 be called "boys in blue." There is a deeper signifi 
 cance than people think when the veterans call each 
 other "the boys" still. 
 
 It was largely an army of boys. We had hun 
 dreds of commissioned officers at eighteen. We had 
 some colonels not yet of age, and young generals just 
 over twenty-one. They were chosen because it was 
 found by the test of the battlefield they could do the 
 work. And yet the battle and service record of these 
 boy regiments shows that they fought the most des 
 perately and gave the most and best service of any in 
 the army. 
 
 On both sides were as heroic soldiers as ever met 
 in the shock of battle. Test the heroism by a com 
 parison of the regimental losses in modern European 
 battles with our own. The world has rung with the 
 
The Northern and Southern Armies 41 
 
 praise of the Charge of the Light Brigade at Ballac- 
 lava, when six hundred and seventy-three British cav 
 alry rode against the Russian batteries, and two hun 
 dred and forty-seven or thirty-six and seven-tenths 
 per cent, were killed and wounded a little over 
 one-third. But compare that with the mad rush 
 of Major Pat Keenan s Sixth Pennsylvania Cavalry 
 at Chancellorsville. In order to make time for a 
 battery to be gotten into place, they were ordered to 
 charge Stonewall Jackson s entire advancing corps. 
 They rode, and shot, and sabred, until there were none 
 left to ride, and shoot, and sabre any more; and the 
 boom of the battery that had been gotten into place to 
 save our army, was their death-knell. 
 
 Or take the heaviest regimental loss in the fiercest 
 battle of the Franco-Prussian war that of the Third 
 Westphalian at Mars La Tour forty-nine and four- 
 tents per cent killed and mortally wounded. I can 
 count sixty-four Union regiments that lost upward of 
 fifty per cent in a single battle, and the losses ran as 
 high as eighty-two per cent. And fifty-one Con 
 federate regiments have the same record. There is 
 not in the history of war reliable record of such 
 regimental losses as were suffered by both Union 
 and Confederate regiments not penned up in a corner 
 and massacred either, as Custer and his men were at 
 the Big Horn, but in open, stand-up battle. 
 
 Look at the Twenty-sixth Massachusetts at Cold 
 Harbor. When they were ordered to charge the Con 
 federate works, the men deliberately sat down and 
 
42 The Northern and Southern Armies 
 
 wrote their names on the back of envelops and bits of 
 paper, and pinned them on each other s backs, so that 
 their dead bodies might be identified. The officers 
 turned the peaks of their caps to the rear with the 
 ornament and marks of their rank on, so that they 
 might have a chance to live to lead the men. Then 
 three hundred and ten all told started on the charge 
 against the enemy s works, inside of which stood the 
 Confederate lines, solid, five deep, all the rear ranks 
 loading for the front ranks, and cannon to the right and 
 left pouring grape and canister. Three hundred and 
 ten Union soldiers went in. When they came out there 
 were just four officers and sixty- two men left to an 
 swer roll call, sixty-six out of three hundred and 
 ten one out of five. 
 
 Or take the case of the First Minnesota at Gettys 
 burg. It was the afternoon of the second day. The 
 Union line along the Emmittsburg Pike was broken 
 and retreating. Hancock was patching up a second 
 line. Re-enforcements for him were coming on the 
 dead run. But yonder, on the other side, Wilcox s 
 whole Confederate brigade was coming on the run 
 too, and they were the nearest. Something had to be 
 done to check them. Hancock turned to Col. Colville, 
 with his little skeleton First Minnesota, already 
 thinned by its battle losses to a shadow. 
 
 "Colonel, do you see those rebel colors? Take 
 them!" 
 
 Like a live thunder-bolt, the two hundred and 
 sixty-two officers and men of the First Minnesota 
 
The Northern and Southern Armies 43 
 
 drove right at the center of the Confederate brigade. 
 Two hundred and sixty-two went in. Two hundred 
 and twenty-four were killed and wounded. Just 
 thirty-eight came back; but they had the Confederate 
 colors ! The second line was ready, and the second 
 day at Gettysburg was won. Hancock said : "There 
 is no more gallant deed in history. I ordered those 
 men in there because I saw I must gain five minutes 
 time." He gained it, and saved the day. 
 
 And the brave Confederate regiments were foe- 
 men worthy of the Union steel. Tried by the test of 
 regimental losses, those ragged, gray battalions are 
 the bravest men that ever stood on the round earth in 
 the shock of open battle. 
 
 The Twenty-sixth North Carolina went in * 
 Gettysburg with over eight hundred men who an 
 swered the roll call. Five hundred and eighty-eight 
 men were killed and wounded ; one hundred and twenty 
 were missing nearly all killed and wounded. When 
 the battle was over, just eighty men of over eight 
 hundred were left. Captain Tuttle of that regiment 
 went into action with two other officers and eighty- 
 four men. All the officers and eighty-three of the men 
 were killed and wounded. One solitary man of the 
 entire company was left. 
 
 Even more striking was the record of the Eleventh 
 North Carolina. All there was left of it by the time it got 
 to Gettysburg was three officers and thirty-eight men, 
 consolidated to about one-half a company. In the 
 first two days fighting two of the officers and thirty- 
 
44 The Northern and Southern Armies 
 
 four of the men were killed and wounded. One cap 
 tain and three men were left. They charged with 
 Picket on the third of July a captain, two privates, 
 and the color bearer. The color bearer was shot dead ; 
 the captain and the two privates came back, the cap 
 tain carrying the colors. Three men left out of a 
 regiment. That was the kind of soldiers we had to 
 fight. Out of the whole military population of South 
 Carolina over twenty-three per cent were killed or 
 mortally wounded on the field of battle, not counting 
 those who were maimed for life or died of disease. The 
 Confederate armies lost in killed and mortally wound 
 ed ten per cent of their entire enrollment. The Union 
 armies lost five per cent, because hundreds of regiments 
 never made a battle record, their service being given 
 to garrison or guard duty. 
 
 More than one hundred and ten thousand Union 
 soldiers (one hundred ten thousand and seventy) were 
 killed or mortally wounded on the field of battle. Over 
 seventy-four thousand Confederates were killed or 
 mortally wounded. 
 
 Tried by the test of sacrifice of life, bravery in the 
 highest degree was shown by many who were non- 
 combatants. Eleven chaplains fell in action. Many 
 others, like Chaplain Bennett of the Thirty-second 
 Ohio, carried muskets and fought in the ranks during 
 the battles, earning the praise of the commanding 
 general. And many another, like Chaplain Moore of 
 my own regiment, enlisted as soldier, was detailed as 
 chaplain, and died of disease contracted in the line of 
 
The Northern and Southern Armies 45 
 
 duty. Forty surgeons were killed and seventy-three 
 wounded while at their work on the battlefield. Many 
 musicians fought, like the band of the Forty-eighth 
 Ohio at Shiloh, which laid aside its instruments, pro 
 cured muskets and lost two of its members slain. 
 
 Two thousand six ^hundred and eighty-fiye bat 
 tles were fought; sixty-seven thousand and fifty-eight 
 men were killed on the field of carnage; forty-three 
 thousand and thirty-two died of wounds ; two hundred 
 and twenty-four thousand five hundred and eighty- 
 six died of disease ; twenty-nine thousand seven hun 
 dred and twenty-five died in the prisons of the South, 
 or were "missing" and never heard of more, saying 
 nothing of a half million of men who were made crip 
 ples for life, nor taking into account the untold suffer 
 ing of mothers, wives, sisters, and daughters of the 
 men who endured the horrors of war that their nation 
 might live. It is safe to say four hundred thousand 
 Union soldiers lost their lives during the great Civil 
 War. 
 
 Here is an illustration of the power of song in the 
 Civil War. It was the evening of that awful day at 
 Spottsylvania, which is written in eternal letters of 
 fire and blood upon the brain of every veteran of the 
 Army of the Potomac. Major-General Rice had been 
 killed. Major-General Sedgwick, commander of the 
 second corps, idol of the whole army, had fallen dead 
 from the bullet of a Confederate sharpshooter. Gen 
 eral Hancock had made a tactical mistake in the battle 
 which everyone had recognized. Eighteen thousand 
 
46 The Northern and Southern Armies 
 
 men had fallen. The day was practically a failure. 
 Grant said: "We ve had hard fighting, and not ac 
 complished much. We ve lost a good many men and 
 the country will blame me." It was a gloomy time. 
 The air was thick with the low-hanging clouds of 
 cannon and musket smoke, and the western wind 
 drifted the sulphurous fumes across the woods to 
 where the field-hospital was established. On the 
 ground lay thousands of wounded, men with ban 
 daged heads, those who had lost an arm or a foot, 
 others with ghastly body wounds from which their 
 brave lives were flowing out with every heart-beat. 
 An army correspondent came along. The boys began 
 to question him: "How is the battle going? Are 
 they driving us? Will the boys hold them?" The 
 correspondent answered: "We re holding the lines; 
 we have a strong position; I don t believe they can 
 drive us." It was a word of cheer. Away out on the 
 edge of the crowd a soldier who had lost his left arm 
 from amputation, and was still sick and faint from the 
 chloroform and the shock, slowly staggered to his feet, 
 pulled off his cap, and began to sing that old army 
 song: 
 
 "We re marching to the field, boys, we re marching 
 
 to the fight, 
 
 Shouting the battle cry of freedom ; 
 And we bear the glorious stars for the Union 
 
 and the right, 
 Shouting the battle cry of freedom." 
 
The Northern and Southern Armies 47 
 
 "While we ll rally round the flag boys, 
 
 We ll rally once again, 
 
 Shouting the battle cry of freedom." 
 
 It was like the call of the bugle to those weak and 
 perishing men lying there. All around they began to 
 lift themselves on their elbows they with one leg 
 gone ; on to their feet those that had two, all swinging 
 their caps, and joining in the chorus: 
 
 "We ll rally round the flag, boys, 
 
 Yes, rally once again, 
 
 Shouting the battle cry of freedom." 
 
 The song drifted across the field, until the troops 
 on the line caught it up. On the dim edge of battle 
 amid the evening shadows, down in the thickets, un 
 der the overhanging pines with throats parched with 
 cannon smoke and mouths bitter with cartridge 
 powder, they sang it: 
 
 "We ll rally round the flag, boys, 
 
 Yes, rally once again, 
 
 Shouting the battle cry of freedom." 
 
 Far out on the front the Confederates heard it. 
 Strange sound! The Yankees singing after such a 
 day as that! And discouragement came upon the 
 Confederates regarding their ability to conquer such 
 men as those. Talking the matter over with a Con- 
 
48 The Northern and Southern Armies 
 
 federate not long after, he said : "When we uns heard 
 you uns a singin , we uns felt like as if it wa n t no use 
 to fight you uns, if you uns could sing after sech a 
 lickin as we uns give you uns that day at Spottsyl- 
 vania." 
 
 Of that Union army three-fourths were American 
 born, notwithstanding we used to hear in those times 
 it was made up of riff-raff of foreigners, mercenaries 
 and hirelings; forty-eight per cent of it were farmers. 
 How we used to sing in those heroic days : 
 
 "Along the Western prairies, where the glowing 
 harvests shine, 
 
 We may see the sturdy farmer boys fast falling into 
 line; 
 
 And children from their mothers knees are pulling at 
 the weeds, 
 
 And learning how to reap and sow against their coun 
 try s needs." 
 
 In those days, in many places, women who had 
 never done such work before, had to go into harvest- 
 fields to gather the crops, while the men and boys 
 were gone to the war; my own mother with my little 
 brothers did. Twenty-four per cent of that army were 
 mechanics ; sixteen per cent were laborers, and smaller 
 numbers from other occupations. 
 
 As for names, we could outclass any other army 
 ever mustered that history tells of. It was seriously 
 proposed at one time to form regiments of Joneses and 
 
The Northern and Southern Armies 49 
 
 Smiths and Browns. But it was abandoned because 
 there was no way of telling them apart. 
 
 But there were some names that nobody would 
 get mixed. We had a great many Indian soldiers, 
 among them three regiments from Kansas. Here are 
 the names of some of the captains : Captain Spring 
 Frog, Captain Eli Tadpole, Captain Dirt Throw Tiger, 
 Captain Daniel Grasshopper. 
 
 We had also: Lieutenant Juniper Duck, Lieu 
 tenant Redbird Sixkiller, and Lieutenant Andrew 
 Rabbit. 
 
 One of the things little known throughout the 
 North is the great revival of religion which swept 
 throughout the Southern armies just before the close 
 of the war. The work began in Stonewall Jackson s 
 corps. In coming to his command, Gen. Jackson 
 found that fully half his regiments were destitute of 
 chaplains, and that the chaplains already on the 
 ground were largely ineffective. He began to take 
 immediate steps for the remedying of these things in 
 the interest of religion. He summoned his old pastor, 
 Rev. Dr. White, in counsel. He called all the chap 
 lains of his command together and exhorted them to 
 religious activity. He urged the regiments without 
 chaplains to secure effective ministers as soon as 
 possible. He appointed the Rev. B.T. Lacy, in whom 
 he had great confidence, as a sort of director-general 
 of the chaplains and stationed him at the corps head 
 quarters. Rev. Dr. Palmer, an eminent minister com 
 pelled to come north from New Orleans, was invited 
 
50 The Northern and Southern Armies 
 
 to hold evangelistic services in the command. By 
 means of military discipline and the interest excited 
 by his own religious activity, a genuine spiritual in 
 terest began to spread throughout his corps. Great 
 booths of logs and trees were made by the soldiers 
 which would accomodate as much as an entire brigade, 
 and at regular intervals various portions of the army 
 were called to occupy them. A huge tabernacle in the 
 open field was prepared near Hamilton s crossing to 
 which Gen. Jackson removed his quarters soon after, 
 and there services for his entire command were held. 
 
 Prof. R. L. Dabney, his son-in-law, says in his 
 Life of Gen. Stonewall Jackson: 
 
 "Here on a bright Sabbath in the spring, might 
 be seen the stately head of the commander-in-chief 
 with a crowd of generals whose names have been 
 borne by fame across the ocean, of legislators and 
 statesmen who had come out from Richmond, bowed 
 along with the multitude of private soldiers in divine 
 worship, while the solemn and tender wave of sacred 
 emotion subdued the great and the unknown alike 
 before it. At these scenes which were so directly pro 
 duced by his instrumentality, Gen. Jackson was the 
 most unobtrusive assistant. Never since the days 
 when Whitefield preached to the mingled crowd of 
 peers and beggars in Moorfields has the sky looked 
 down upon a more imposing worship." 
 
 Dabney notes that Jackson by his influence se 
 cured that none but orthodox chaplains should be ap 
 pointed in the Confederate army. "There was not a 
 
The Northern and Southern Armies 51 
 
 single regiment in the army which showed a disposi 
 tion to introduce a minister who did not belong to an 
 evangelical and orthodox communion of their chap 
 lains except one or two priests of the Roman church." 
 
 As a result of all this preparation and preaching, 
 a great revival broke out in Jackson s corps. Dabney 
 thus continues : 
 
 "The effort thus begun in General Jackson s corps, 
 was imitated in the others. The movement was not 
 limited to the army of Virginia; but was also propa 
 gated in the south and west. Soon the General As 
 sembly of the Presbyterian Church, and the other ec 
 clesiastical authorities, encouraged by the advice 
 which the friends of General Jackson were permitted 
 to quote from him, began to take action on behalf of 
 the army; and a number of the most distinguished 
 ministers were sent to the different corps to labor with 
 the chaplains as itinerants, and to communicate the 
 wants of the army to the churches. The speedy fall 
 of the originator of the work rather gave new impetus 
 to it, than retarded it ; and the result was, that general 
 revival of religion in the Confederate armies, which has 
 been even more astonishing to the world, than the 
 herculean exertions of the Confederate states. A 
 wide-spread reform of morals was wrought, which 
 was obvious to every spectator, in the repression of 
 profanity and drunkenness, the increase of order and 
 discipline, and the good conduct of the troops in battle. 
 It was just those commands in which this work of grace 
 was most powerful, that became the most trustworthy 
 
52 The Northern and Southern Armies 
 
 in the post of danger. The brigade of Barksdale, for 
 instance, which had held its ground in Fredericksburg 
 with almost incredible resolution under the great 
 bombardment, was equally noted for its religious zeal. 
 Returning to their post of honor in the city, they oc 
 cupied one of the deserted churches as their chapel, 
 and maintained a constant series of nightly meetings, 
 attended by numerous conversions, for many weeks. 
 In short, the conversions in the various Confederate 
 armies within the ensuing year, were counted, by the 
 most sober estimate, at twelve thousand men. The 
 strange spectacle was now presented, of a people 
 among whom the active religious life seemed to be 
 transferred from the churches at home the custo 
 mary seats of piety to the army; which, among other 
 nations, has always been dreaded as the school of vice 
 and infidelity. Thus, the grief and fears of the good, 
 lest this gigantic war should arrest the religious train 
 ing of the whole youth of the land, cut off the supply of 
 young preachers for its pulpits, and rear up for the 
 country a generation of men profane and un-Christian, 
 were happily consoled; they accepted this new marvel, 
 of an army made the home and source of the religious 
 life of a nation, with grateful joy, as another evidence 
 of the favor of God to the afflicted people." 
 
 To him who believes in a supreme providence over 
 the affairs of men, the uses of this great revival were 
 several. In addition to its value in saving the souls of 
 men, by the impartation of sustaining grace, it en 
 abled the Confederate soldiers to endure their in- 
 
The Northern and Southern Armies 53 
 
 credible hardships during the last days of the war 
 without being utterly crushed. So reduced had their 
 numbers become, that often their poor little battle lines 
 were stretched out with not more than one man to 
 three or four feet, hardly heavier than our Union 
 skirmish lines. When our forces captured a company, 
 thin, ragged, and haggard, they all looked like old men 
 the faces of the very boys were black, wrinkled and 
 aged from starvation and hardship. But God had use 
 for these men yet, and their religion kept them. It 
 reached beyond and helped them through the sad days 
 of reconstruction, which, with, all the good intentions 
 of the North, were times of hideous calamity for the 
 South. And may we not also believe that the effects 
 of that revival have extended through all the days 
 since, producing that greater regard for morals and 
 religion characteristic of the South, and including as 
 part of its results, the temperance reform now gladden 
 ing our eyes in the former Confederate states? 
 
 It is well on these memorial days to recall the 
 things which throw more light upon the trials and 
 character of our southern brethren. 
 
 Old soldiers ask that the nation do not forget 
 them. New issues, new times, new armies have arisen 
 the sons of the Blue and Gray made the way to glory 
 during the Spanish-American war, and make by far 
 the largest part of the Memorial Day processions 
 but let none cease to remember the Old Brigades of 
 
54 The Northern and Southern Armies 
 
 the past. Let us enter at least into the spirit of the 
 aged veteran who is represented as musing on Me 
 morial Day: 
 
 "The new brigades are mighty fine, the boys are brave 
 
 and true, 
 An the gray is marchin side by side with them that 
 
 wore the blue; 
 
 I see em on the hilltops they re drillin in the glades ; 
 But we won t fergit the old boys who made the old 
 
 brigades. 
 
 "We won t fergit the fellers that fought on land an 
 
 sea, 
 An followed "Stonewall" Jackson, an charged with 
 
 old "Bob" Lee! 
 An Grant s an Sherman s fellers their mem ry never 
 
 fades ; 
 We won t fergit the old boys who made the old 
 
 brigades. 
 
 "They re thinnin out the old boys they re few now 
 
 on the sod; 
 They re crossin crossin over to the campin grounds 
 
 of God; 
 I see the young boys marchin on hills an fields an* 
 
 glades, 
 
 But we won t fergit the old boys who made the old 
 brigades." 
 
Stephen, the Model Layman. 
 
 "And devout men carried Stephen to his burial, 
 and made great lamentation over him." Acts, 8: 2. 
 
 The New Testament records of the early Christian 
 Church present us with every variety of Christian 
 character and excellence. Supremely above all, and 
 in all, shines the Christ. He is the peerless, central 
 sun, and source of all glory and all good. 
 
 Revolving around him are constellations of lesser 
 luminaries of every order and degree, shining by his 
 reflected light. There are holy apostles, such as John 
 and Peter, and Paul; setting the world ablaze with 
 their fiery zeal. There are zealous young ministers 
 Timothy, wise in the scriptures from a child; and 
 Apollos, matchless for eloquence and Alexandrian 
 learning. 
 
 There are godly women, like Mary and Lydia and 
 Dorcas; known and loved throughout the church for 
 their quiet, womanly virtues and sweet charities. 
 There are bold and stalwart "helpers" and traveling 
 companions Urbane, and the "beloved Onesimus," 
 and Tychicus. And there is a long galaxy of "brothers 
 and sisters in the Lord beloved," pastors, evangelists, 
 martyrs, apologists, servants and holy little children, 
 
56 Stephen, the Model Layman 
 
 all luminous some shining in the white light of a 
 peaceful life and death, and others encircled by the red 
 halo of a glorious martyrdom. As all this heavenly 
 host moves on amid the celestial spaces of the New 
 Testament, it fills them with a visible harmony. It 
 sheds a mingled radiance upon the world, which has 
 not waned, but waxed through nineteen Christian cen 
 turies. In this splendid firmament there are some 
 mighty spirits who dwell apart stars of the first 
 magnitude. If the Christian Church were asked today 
 to indicate its one pre-eminent, realized ideal of a 
 gospel minister, its suffrage would fall upon Paul, the 
 Apostle to the Gentiles. Would it command one, su 
 preme rule upon its ministry for the conduct of their 
 lives, it would bid them follow Paul, as Paul followed 
 the Christ. But did it wish to celebrate the most 
 transcendent example of distinguished excellence in 
 the illustrious ranks of its laity, it would pronounce 
 the name of Stephen, the first great martyr. We come 
 this morning to exalt him as the model layman of the 
 Christian Church of the ages. The times in which he 
 lived were prodigal in greatness. Their New Testa 
 ment records can afford even his biography but brief 
 space. Enough, however, whereon to base our esti 
 mates of his character is given in the clear sweep of 
 St. Luke s masterly outlines. They shall therefore be 
 our main dependence this morning. 
 
 Not much is certainly known of his history before 
 St. Luke s narration begins. But from his account, 
 much can almost certainly be inferred. His parents 
 
Stephen, the Model Layman 57 
 
 were Hellenistic Jews. They thus belonged to the 
 Hebrew Dispersion, scattered throughout the terri 
 tories of Greece. As Hellenists, they would be free 
 from the prejudices, the narrowness, and the greed of 
 the old Aramaic Jews. They would hold to Judaism, 
 but their cenceptions of it would be liberal and en 
 lightened. To the deep spirituality of their Hebrew 
 faith would be united the keener insight and classic 
 grace of the Greek culture. 
 
 With such parents, Stephen doubtless had a cor 
 responding training. Like every Jewish boy, at a 
 tender age he would be taught the "Shema" or the 
 Sun of the Law in Moses. He would learn to sing the 
 "Hallel" or the household praise from the Psalms of 
 David. He would be taught to pray by the fringes on 
 his garments. In the common schools he would gain 
 the rudiments of knowledge. At home and in society 
 he would hear and learn the language of Homer and 
 Pericles, and the thoughts of Plato and Socrates. 
 
 As he grew older, like every young Hellenist of 
 good family, he would go to the great University at 
 Alexandria. His chief study there would be that Alex 
 andrian Bible, from which he quoted in his defense. 
 There he would imbue his mind with that eclectic sys 
 tem of Oriental philosophy and Hebrew religion which 
 was the faith of the Hellenists. From Alexandria, he 
 would go to Jerusalem, and sit at the feet of Gamaliel, 
 the only Rabbi who taught in the language of the 
 Hellenists. Stephen s prominence and power in dis 
 putation proves him to have enjoyed distinguished 
 
58 Stephen, the Model Layman 
 
 advantages. In Gamaliel s school it is not unlikely 
 that he was a fellow student with Saul of Tarsus. 
 
 And since Jerusalem was now subject to Rome, 
 there he would come into contact with the thought 
 and customs of the Roman world. Finally, leaving 
 Gamaliel s school, he would almost certainly engage 
 in traffic, the special avocation of the Hellenist. He 
 belonged to a race even then the Pilgrims of Com 
 merce, the race which has furnished us in our own 
 time with the Montefiores and Rothschilds. He would 
 have his commercial training in Jerusalem, then one 
 of the world s chief marts. In her markets, where 
 Greek shrewdness, and Roman cupidity, and Jewish 
 thrift contended together for the supremacy, would he 
 gain his practical knowledge of men and business. 
 
 Thus, three civilizations contributed to his man 
 hood. The Jewish, the Grecian, and the Roman world 
 poured their best influences into his blood. It may be 
 said of Stephen, as of Saul, that "the books, and con 
 science, and inspiration of the Hebrews; the culture, 
 and philosophy, and poetry of the Greeks; and the 
 laws, and statesmanship, and power, of the Romans, 
 were all tributary to his development." With such an 
 equipment of heart and brain, he conies before us. 
 
 I. 
 
 We may call the first scene in which he appears, 
 "Stephen exemplifying the ideally trusty and ener 
 getic church officer." It is a time of trouble and dis 
 tress in the church at Jerusalem. Many are the desti- 
 
Stephen, the Model Layman 59 
 
 tute, the widows and the orphans. The second great 
 flood of persecution is about to dash its vast volume 
 upon the Pentecostal church. Already are the feet of 
 the believers in Jerusalem lapped by the bloody surf. 
 A practical communism of property is for the first and 
 last time in history established among the Christians. 
 Four thousand persons hold all their possessions sub 
 ject to all the claims of charity. The Hellenists com 
 plain that their widows are neglected in the daily dis 
 tribution. The apostles, overburdened, ask the church 
 to appoint seven deacons for this work. Stephen 
 heads the list, the first choice of the church, the first 
 lay official member! 
 
 And now, as he stands before us, let us look at the 
 man. He is chairman of the first Board of Stewards 
 the church ever had. What are his qualifications? 
 According to the apostolic requirement, he is a man 
 "of honest report, full of the Holy Ghost, and wisdom 
 for this business." So our Discipline directs that our 
 stewards be "men of solid piety, who both know our 
 doctrine and discipline, and of good natural and ac 
 quired ability to transact the temporal business." 
 
 The duty of the ancient deacons was "to collect 
 and expend alms, and money for the support of the 
 ministry and the poor, to search out the poor and apply 
 funds to their relief, and in general, to be helpers of 
 the apostles?" The Disciplinary duty of our stewards 
 is given in nearly the same words. "It is to collect, 
 apply, and account for money and provisions in the 
 church, whether for preachers, sick or poor; to seek 
 
60 Stephen, the Model Layman 
 
 the needy and distressed in order to comfort them; to 
 be the advisers of the preachers and people; and 
 to take charge of the temporal concerns of the socie 
 ties." Our stewards may comfort themselves as they 
 go about by thinking of Stephen in the same work. 
 The very name "Deacon" indicates the arduous char 
 acter of the office it is from dia and koris "through 
 the dust" and assuredly some deacons have much 
 dust to walk through. But though it was a humble 
 servant s part, doubtless this Stephen glorified it by 
 his faithfulness. 
 
 He is manifestly a man of marked business ability. 
 He would not otherwise have been called to the helm 
 of the church s temporal affairs. We may easily sup 
 pose him to have accumulated a competence, and now 
 to be the almoner of charities of which he has been 
 the chief founder. He rises before us, a man "not 
 slothful in business, fervent in spirit, serving the Lord." 
 The church needs such men. It is not the work of the 
 ministry "to serve tables." That church is below the 
 New Testament standard which compels them to 
 manage its finance. Division of labor works as well 
 inside the church as outside. We must have our 
 Stephens as well as our Pauls. 
 
 And happy is it when they like him, have not only 
 business ability, but also an "honest report." He was 
 no trickster no sharper no thievish Judas no 
 grasping Shylock. No business scandals, or odor of 
 questionable operations clung to his name. Sad is the 
 state of that church which must choose men of doubt- 
 
Stephen, the Model Layman 61 
 
 ful honesty to office ! Perhaps God saved the church 
 at Jerusalem from such a disgrace when he slew 
 Ananias who kept back part of the price and lied to the 
 Holy Ghost. The church of today would have been 
 kept from very deep shame had such men as 
 Winslow, the "Reverend" Boston forger; and Pond, 
 the Worcester embezzler; and Morton, the Philadel 
 phia railroad thief; and Aliger, the absconding insur 
 ance agent; and Gilman, the defaulter, never lived to 
 curse it. The church wants men who can make friends 
 of the "Mammon of Unrighteousness," but in Christian 
 ways. That long line of great bankers and commercial 
 magnates the Markoes, the Collins , the Budgetts 
 the Lycetts, the Woolmans, the Peabodys prove that 
 this is possible. Such men compel the god of this 
 world to pay tribute to the God of Heaven. They 
 solve the problem, "how to be a Christian in trade." 
 They renounce the hidden things of dishonesty. They 
 provide things honest in the sight of all men. They 
 carry business into religion, and religion into business. 
 They gain the life which now is, and that which is to 
 come. And the first factor of their grand success is, 
 that to a splendid ability they marry a splendid 
 honesty. 
 
 II. 
 
 The second model feature in Stephen s character 
 you may remember by this title, "The Christian of 
 Vital Godliness." Not only is the secular side of his 
 piety developed, but also the spiritual. He is "full of 
 
62 Stephen, the Model Layman 
 
 the Holy Ghost." The completeness of the earthward 
 half of his character, is rounded out by the complete 
 ness of the heavenward half into a perfect sphere. His 
 business duties are not performed at the expense of his 
 soul s higher exercise. He does not attend to church 
 finance and turn over the works of faith and power to 
 the apostles and the women. He knows that such a 
 course will be bad for the church, and worse for him 
 self. The Holy Ghost dwells in him so richly that he 
 is irresistibly impelled to tell its power. He feels as 
 Amos did, when he said "The Lord hath spoken, who 
 can but prophesy!" There is such an impulse in him 
 as there was in David when he cried "I cannot hide 
 thy righteousness within my heart. I must declare 
 thy faithfulness and thy salvation. I cannot conceal 
 thy loving kindness and thy truth from the great con 
 gregation !" Those who love God will confess Him. 
 And so the church sets Stephen apart for the office and 
 work of the ministry not indeed to travel abroad, as 
 the apostles, but to labor at home. 
 
 Stephen is the first local preacher. He makes full 
 and acceptable proof of his ministry. The report of 
 him is that "Stephen, full of faith and power, did great 
 wonders and miracles among the people." He 
 preaches the crucified Christ so mightily that in fair 
 conflict he overthrows the picked champions of 
 five synagogues. They suborn men to lie against him 
 and he is haled before the council. He is so full of the 
 Holy Ghost, that when the judges behold him, in the 
 beautiful Jewish expression of the Scripture, "They 
 
Stephen, the Model Layman 63 
 
 saw his face as though it had been that of an angel." 
 It is as though his countenance has caught the glow 
 of the Shekinah between the Cherubs on the Mercy 
 Seat! Or as if like another Moses, he has come from 
 communion with God in the mountain top ! 
 
 That "Solar Light," which according to one of 
 our keenest observers sometimes beams in the counte 
 nance of him in whom conscience sits regnant which 
 often glows in the face of the holy dying which 
 streamed from the person of the transfigured Christ 
 and which differs from all other light in this, that as 
 one of the Fathers says, in it God seems to terrify evil, 
 and overawe beholders, and rejoice this "Solar 
 Light" is now in Stephen s face in life s supreme and 
 final hour. "The judges, when they saw his glorified 
 countenance, might have remembered the super 
 natural shining on the face of Moses, and trembled 
 lest Stephen s voice should be about to speak the will 
 of Jehovah, like that of the great Lawgiver. Instead 
 of being occupied with the faded glories of the second 
 Temple, they might have recognized in the spectacle 
 before them, the Shekinah of the Christian Soul, which 
 is the living sanctuary of God." What marvel was it, 
 that during his presence with the church at Jerusalem, 
 "the word of God increased, and the number of the 
 disciples multiplied greatly"? Give the church an 
 officiary full of the Holy Ghost today, and the result 
 will be the same. Next after its presence in the minis- 
 
64 Stephen, the Model Layman 
 
 try, the spirit of God must dwell in their helpers. 
 Unless they are suns, radiating warmth and light, 
 they are icebergs, chilling to spiritual death the garden 
 of God. 
 
 III. 
 
 The third scene in his life we will entitle 
 "Stephen the Layman of Intelligence." He is not only 
 "honest," and of "good report," and "full of the Holy 
 Ghost," but he is also "full of Wisdom." Now he 
 stands before the counsel making his defense. His 
 plea is a wonderful specimen of keen dialectic skill 
 and philosophic breadth of culture. In those seventy 
 doctors of the Sanhedrin yonder, he has to face the 
 combined learning and prejudice of all Judaism. Not 
 Huss at Constance, not Savonarola at Florence, not 
 Luther at Worms had to face such frightful odds. He 
 is arraigned, prejudiced and foredoomed, on that old 
 fatal charge of blasphemy against the Temple and the 
 Law. He is as good as a dead man, and he knows it. 
 
 But see him standing there in the splendid courage 
 of his conscious grasp of every issue. He ranges the 
 whole domain of Jewish law. He constructs a philoso 
 phy of Hebrew history. He shows that its inevitable 
 logic is Christianity. He holds the Council in the grip 
 of his merciless argument. He impales them on the 
 glittering lance of his relentless logic. He goads them 
 into uncontrollable fury with his terrible reproofs. 
 He outfaces, and crushes and utterly humiliates the 
 whole Sanhedrin, until they have no answer but stones, 
 
Stephen, the Model Layman 65 
 
 and no argument but the wild yell of a brutal mob. 
 Only souls that have been down, down to the founda 
 tions of rock, can thus stand for God and truth. Only 
 those who are able to give a reason for the hope that is 
 in them can withstand the winds of opposing doctrine. 
 What a bulwark of strength to the church are laymen 
 so grounded in her principles! How safely she can 
 trust her doctrines in their keeping! What respect for 
 her does their cultured devotion secure ! 
 
 Saul of Tarsus sits there in the Council, with his 
 slight form, and splendid head, and Jewish face, and 
 hooked nose, and steady eye, intently listening. 
 Stephen burns some arguments into his unwilling 
 brain that he will remember, and use too, after awhile, 
 when he is come, in his turn, to stand before kings 
 and councils. Stephen makes his historic argument, 
 and Paul will repeat it at Antioch. Stephen affirms 
 his loyalty to the true Jewish faith, and Paul will use 
 almost the same words in his own defense before 
 Agrippa. Stephen declares that the Law came by the 
 disposition of Angels, but Grace and Truth by Jesus 
 Christ, and Paul will write those very phrases to the 
 Galatians. Stephen cries out that the Most High 
 dwells not in Temples made with men s hands, and 
 Paul will ring that sublime utterance again on Mars 
 Hill, at Athens, in the ears of the court of the Areopa 
 gus. 
 
 Saul sat before at the feet of Gamaliel. He is 
 sitting at the feet of a greater than Gamaliel now. 
 One of the chief of Spanish artists has painted a pic- 
 
66 Stephen, the Model Layman 
 
 ture of Stephen conducted to the place of execution 
 He has represented Saul as walking at his side with a 
 melancholy calmness. In his face is the shadow of 
 coming repentence. That shadow is a tribute to the 
 power of Stephen s wondrous words before the Coun 
 cil. It is enough, though one should die, to drive the 
 electric bolt of new convictions into the mind of Saul, 
 or such as Saul. Only to a royal mind, royally dow 
 ered with earthly and with heavenly wisdom, is such 
 achievement given. 
 
 Such a Christian layman was Stephen. In his 
 nature were combined all the elements of a model. 
 Not one was lacking. Give any man good natural 
 abilities, fill him with the Holy Ghost, and give all the 
 needed culture, and he will be a brilliant success as a 
 Christian and a man. And now let us look at the re 
 sults of Stephen s life, and especially of his defense 
 before the Sanhedrin. 
 
 IV. 
 
 The first result was his own death. "When the 
 Council heard these things they were cut to the heart, 
 and they gnashed on him with their teeth. But he 
 being full of the Holy Ghost, looked up steadfastly 
 into heaven, and saw the glory of God, and Jesus 
 standing on the right hand of God." As Dean How- 
 son eloquently observed, "The scene before his eyes 
 was no longer the Council hall at Jerusalem, and the 
 circle of his infuriated Judges; but he gazed up into 
 
Stephen, the Model Layman 67 
 
 the endless courts of the celestial Jerusalem, with its 
 innumerable company of angels, and saw Jesus in 
 whose righteous cause he was about to die." That 
 Saviour at God s right hand is not now seated on his 
 throne as he is usually represented; but as Chrysos- 
 tom has beautifully observed, he has risen, to receive 
 his faithful martyr. "And Stephen said Behold, I see 
 the heavens opened, and the Son of Man standing on 
 the right hand of God !" "Then they cried out with a 
 loud voice, and stopped their ears, and ran upon him 
 with one accord/ 
 
 The wild and tumultous mob drag him out of the 
 Council Hall, over the Via Dolorosa, along which his 
 Saviour s feet had walked at Calvary, on past the hall 
 of judgment where that Saviour was scourged, out 
 through one of the city gates which now bears 
 Stephen s name, rejoicing to suffer, like his Lord, 
 "without the gate," over the beetling crags of the 
 Valley of Jehosaphat, and down by the little brook 
 Kedron. And there, under the shadow of those sacred 
 cedars which to this day stand, close by that garden of 
 Gethsemane, upon whose tear-drenched sod his Saviour 
 had bowed all the long night of his agony; kneeling 
 beneath the missiles of his murderers; like his Lord, 
 praying that this sin be not laid to their charge; 
 Stephen "fell asleep." 
 
 The next result was a most violent persecution. 
 Stephen s defense, and dying prayer smote Satan as 
 with a spear, full in the teeth. The powers of Dark 
 ness howled with rage and rallied to his aid. By the 
 
68 Stephen, the Model Layman 
 
 recoil of the blow, the Church was scattered far and 
 wide. But, oh, wonderful, "God makes the wrath of 
 man to praise Him!" Wherever that scattered 
 Church goes, it goes preaching. Every word is like a 
 spark of fire in the dry grass of the autumnal praries, 
 and lo! the flames are flashing heavenward all over 
 Judea and Samaria ! When Stephen fell, it was as in 
 the Fable a Demi-god stamps the earth, and out of 
 it spring a thousand plumed warriors! 
 
 But there was another and still more marvelous 
 result. We saw Saul of Tarsus sitting by in the Hall 
 of Judgment. Into his proud, bigoted, persecuting soul 
 there is creeping the thought that Stephen may be 
 right. And now he sees his face shining, he hears 
 him speak of the opening heavens and the risen 
 Saviour. And now he stands by and sees him die. He 
 hears the martyr s prayer for his enemies, and that 
 drives the barbed arrow of conviction deep into his 
 inmost soul. And now, like some maddened creature, 
 he rages up and down throughout the land, "making 
 havoc of the Church, entering every house, haling men 
 and women, and committing them to prison," for very 
 anguish from the unbearable torment of a soul aroused. 
 Still goaded on by rankling darts, he turns towards 
 Damascus, "breathing out threatings and slaughter." 
 At midday he is smitten down by an intolerable 
 brightness above that of the sun, and hears a Voice, 
 saying what his conscience has all the while been say 
 ing, "Saul, Saul, it is hard for thee to kick against the 
 pricks!" Saul of Tarsus falls headlong, to rise up 
 
Stephen, the Model Layman 69 
 
 Paul, the great apostle of the Gentiles ! The Church has 
 lost Stephen, its first great layman, but it has gained its 
 first great apostle! And the most poignant arrow of 
 Paul s conviction he has confessed in his own words 
 "Lord, when the blood of thy martyr Stephen was 
 shed, I also was standing by and consenting unto his 
 death." Well has St. Augustine said that "if St. Stephen 
 had not prayed, the Church would not have had St. 
 Paul !" 
 
 The world might have learned that the policy of 
 persecution is so poor that it is no policy at all. All 
 attempts to stone a principle, or whip the right, or 
 behead justice, are against the nature of things, against 
 the law of the universe, and the very stars in their 
 course will fight against them. Persecution is an in 
 sane attempt to cheat nature, to make water run up 
 hill, to argue against gravitation, to make a rope of 
 sand.. Truth has an eternal life and cannot be slain. 
 Its fair image may be shattered, but, like that of the 
 good Egyptian goddess, the future will hunt up the 
 pieces and put them together again ! As well try to put 
 out the sun with a fire engine as to extinguish Truth. A 
 martyr cannot be dishonered. Every lash is a tongue 
 of flame. Every prison is a more illustrious abode. 
 Every burned book illuminates the world. Every 
 suppressed word vibrates from side to side. 
 
 Persecution of the ancient form has ceased, not be 
 cause the inclination to persecute has departed, but 
 because "the blood of the martyrs is the seed of the 
 Church." Every pillar in the temple of Truth stands 
 
70 Stephen, the Model Layman 
 
 on some martyr s grave ! In the mouth of two wit 
 nesses shall every evil be condemned. The dead speak 
 louder than the living. When the thunder went forth 
 from the lips of the dead Christ, and the dying Stephen, 
 then heathenism and Judaism were smitten with their 
 doom. Let a present day application be made of these 
 facts, by all who oppose and malign the apostles of 
 God s ever new gospel given in truth s revelations of 
 the 2Oth century ! 
 
 "And devout men carried Stephen to his burial." 
 That little funeral procession was a grander one than 
 any funeral train that ever followed earthly king or 
 conqueror. "And they made great lamentation over 
 him." Those few and simple words are brimming with 
 the tears of a weeping Church. They are a more 
 precious tribute than piled granite, or monumental 
 brass. In their hearts was a sorrow only felt when the 
 good man dies. But we may easily believe that with 
 the note of their sorrow there mingled a more tri 
 umphant strain. Their faith ascended above the plain 
 tive sound of the martyr s funeral hymn. They saw 
 him victor, crowned and palmed forever, in the 
 presence of his God. They beheld his fame imperish- 
 ably preserved in the records of scripture. They 
 knew him embalmed in the thought of the coming 
 universal Church, as the First Great Layman, and the 
 First Great Martyr. 
 
The Feast of Ingathering. 
 
 A Thanksgiving Sermon. 
 
 Exodus, 23, 16. "Thou shalt keep the feast of in 
 gathering, which is in the end of the year, when thou 
 hast gathered in they labors out of the field." 
 
 The "feast of ingathering" was one of the three 
 great annual festivals of the Jews. It fell toward the 
 latter part of what would be our month of October. 
 It was a season of gratitude and thanksgiving for the 
 ingathering of the harvest, a time of family reunions 
 and feastings and rejoicings, a time of personal, and 
 religious, and national interest. It was also called 
 the "feast of tabernacles," because the people at the 
 same time celebrated the journey through the wilder 
 ness by dwelling in booths and tents, to remind them 
 selves of that eventful sojourn. The whole occasion 
 furnishes, perhaps, the best prototype of our Ameri 
 can Thanksgiving. Let us, then, call this day our 
 "feast of tabernacles." Coming a little later in the 
 season, it is significant of the same truths and les 
 sons. 
 
 How excellent are all such acknowledgements of 
 God s love and care. "Be careful for nothing," is the 
 encouraging admonition of scripture, "but in every- 
 
72 The Feast of Ingathering 
 
 thing, with prayer and supplication, with thanksgiv 
 ing, let your requests be made known unto God." One 
 day in each year is none too much to be given to a re 
 hearsal, before God, of our gains and prosperities. 
 Israel s Thanksgiving lasted a whole week. And here 
 in our land, when the plow is laid aside and the toils 
 of the season are past; when all the autumn fruits 
 are safely housed under sure shelter, and the Indian 
 Summer is over; when the glorious, crisp frosts come, 
 rilling the veins with vigor and the steps with a more 
 elastic spring; then indeed it is a sight worth looking 
 at and admiring, to see a great people, summoned by 
 their Chief Magistrate, coming up devoutly to thank 
 a beneficent Creator for His patient care of them all. 
 It gives hope for the future. 
 
 The duty and beauty of thanksgiving seem to in 
 here especially in Christian character and Christian 
 peoples. Thanksgiving is peculiar to believers in the 
 Bible. Indians remember a friend or enemy for many 
 years, but the best observers say it only comes from 
 their instinct of self-preservation, as in the lower ani 
 mals. But Indians, I am told, never express thank 
 fulness. They take whatever is given them, from 
 good bread to bad whiskey, and appropriate it without 
 the slightest sign of gratitude. Missionaries report 
 the same characteristic of the natives of the islands of 
 the sea. Thanksgiving is largely a fruit of the Bible, 
 which teaches us that we are pensioners upon the 
 bounty of heaven. 
 
The Feast of Ingathering 73 
 
 So then, such a day as this is the first thing for 
 which we have to thank God. It is a national recog 
 nition of God. It could not exist under the theory of 
 materialism. That there be any reason in it, requires 
 that something be at the head of this universe more 
 than mere evolution, more than fate, more than blind 
 law, more than dead matter. It requires a personal 
 will on the throne of a moral government, ordering 
 this universe in the interests of His kingdom, even by 
 a general and a particular Providence. To thank 
 anything less than this Divine, personal, voluntary 
 Ruler would be a crime against the clearness of the 
 human intellect, against the instincts of the human 
 heart, and against the convictions of the human con 
 science. Thanksgiving Day is sound in philosophy, 
 sound in theology, sound in morals, sound in religion, 
 and sound in experience. It signifies much, then, to 
 have the nation render thanks to God. The public 
 conscience is not dead. 
 
 As we begin to cast about a little, how subjects 
 for gratitude multiply! To begin with, thank God 
 for existence itself. I lately read the biography of 
 Norman McLeod, that noble Scotchman, chaplain to 
 the Queen of England, and nothing in it strikes me 
 more forcibly than his frequent and hearty expres 
 sions of gladness that God has given him life and part 
 in this grand, beautiful world. We had no choice in 
 reference to existence, and yet who of us would not 
 wish to be? To whom, having his right mind, is the 
 earth so dreary a place that he would wish never to 
 
74 The Feast of Ingathering 
 
 have come into it? Thank God today that you are, 
 and that he made you ! Your whole physical struc 
 ture, adjusted so nicely, equipped so admirably for 
 service, made so noble, so alert, fashioned so delicately 
 and yet so strongly, standing up before the gaze of 
 angels and of men, a masterpiece of mechanism God 
 made it. That wonderful thought-power of yours 
 wandering through the ages backward and forward 
 diving to the depths and soaring to the heights of 
 eternity darting quicker than an arrow s flight that 
 inventive, wonder-creating, earth-astonishing, heaven- 
 admiring thought-power God gave you ! These wills, 
 the masters of your souls, lording it over them with 
 imperial sway, seizing the helm and tossing the vessel 
 whither they will these wills God gave us. The 
 whole man, from center to circumference, the man, 
 known and unknown, God has made for our own hap 
 piness, which is His glory. Life as it is, notwithstand 
 ing all its toils and troubles, diseases and disappoint 
 ments, griefs and graves, sorrows and sighings, we 
 feel to be desired rather than non-existence. Thank 
 God for being. 
 
 Then He has given us our being in a land of liberty 
 and Christianity; bless Him today for that. We do 
 not see a woman here yoked with a donkey in a 
 leathern harness, drawing a plow through the fur 
 rows, as you can in that country where Jesus stilled 
 the tempest from His place in the boat. It is because 
 this is a Christian land, while that is not. You will 
 not see a man driving his own wife yoked with a cow, 
 
The Feast of Ingathering 75 
 
 the two pulling a heavy harrow over the plowed 
 ground, as you can in the old land of the Pharaohs. 
 You do not hear men apologizing here for having to 
 mention such a thing as a wife or a daughter in decent 
 society, as you can in Turkey. When a little child is 
 born here, they do not bring in a tub of water and hold 
 a family council whether it shall be drowned or not, 
 as they do in China. Our religion makes the difference. 
 
 Look around you and see how Christianity 
 touches with its beams the darkest lots in life, and 
 makes them brighter. Go into our great cities and 
 little cities, and even country places, and see our 
 Gospel benevolences! Homes of kindness and plenty 
 for incurables and cripples; infirmaries for the helpful 
 treatment of the eyes, the ears, the limbs, the de 
 formed; hospitals for old men and old women; re 
 formatories for delinquents, for wandering girls and 
 homeless boys; for Magdalens and drunkards; for 
 those diseased in mind and distressed in body. It 
 might be said that every one of these institutions is a 
 child of Christianity in some form of its working. A 
 few years ago I walked with a returned missionary 
 through the halls of one of our spacious asylums for 
 the insane. "There is no such native institution as 
 this in all India," said he. 
 
 There is nothing Christianity does not brighten 
 even the very presence of death itself. Go out into our 
 beautiful Greenlawn cemetery yonder. There is a 
 group of mourners standing round a new hillock. A 
 man stands in their midst. He is a minister. He is 
 
76 The Feast of Ingathering 
 
 telling those broken-hearted men and women to look 
 down into the grave, and see the opening on the other 
 side of it, through which Christ passed when he broke 
 the bars of death and led captivity captive. And he is 
 telling them that those who sleep He will bring with 
 Him when He comes again, and that eternal life shall 
 have the victory over death. 
 
 So everywhere ; the religion of Jesus brightens all 
 our land and lives. Faith stands holding up a torch 
 like that great bronze figure of Liberty in New York 
 harbor, with its prodigious light for every one that 
 passes out toward the ocean through the Narrows 
 so Faith stands, flinging its illumination forth upon 
 the silent ships that are sailing over deeps of existence 
 as yet to us unknown. 
 
 The fact is, my friends, we are not half thankful 
 enough for the common blessings of existence, let 
 alone the greater blessings of our Christian religion. 
 I was reading something a while ago from the 
 "Thoughts of Marcus Aurelius," the grandest stoic of 
 the old pagan Roman emperors, that puts one to the 
 blush, and that I fear shames us all. He knew of no 
 Christ, no future life, no heaven ; and yet hear his 
 gratitude for some of the great common blessings 
 which we so often forget. "To the gods I am in 
 debted," he says, "for having good grandfathers, good 
 parents, a good sister, good teachers, good associates, 
 good kinsmen and friends, nearly everything good. 
 Further, I owe it to the gods that I was not hurried 
 into any offense against any of them, though I had a 
 
The Feast of Ingathering 77 
 
 disposition which, if opportunity had offered, might 
 have led me to do something of this kind ; but through 
 their favor, there never was such a concurrence of cir 
 cumstances as put me to the trial. Further, I am 
 thankful to the gods that I was subjected to a ruler 
 and a father who was able to take away all pride from 
 me. I thank the gods for giving me such a brother 
 who was able by his moral character to rouse me to 
 vigilance over myself; that my children have not been 
 deformed nor stupid; that I did not make more pro 
 ficiency in rhetoric, poetry and the other studies, in 
 which I should perhaps have been completely en 
 gaged if I had seen that I was making progress in 
 them; that I received clear and frequent impressions 
 about living according to nature, and what kind of 
 a life that is, and that I was helped by the gods to 
 live such a life, though I still fall short of it through 
 my own fault, and through not observing the admoni 
 tions of the gods; that my body has held out so long 
 in such a kind of life ; that though it was my mother s 
 fate to die young, she spent the last years of her life 
 with me; that I have such a wife, so obedient, and so 
 affectionate, and so simple-hearted; that I had abund 
 ance of good masters for my children," and so he con 
 tinues. 
 
 Those words are written, he tells us, while he is 
 leading his armies in a campaign against the bar 
 barians of Northern Europe penned in his diary after 
 days of battle. We can imagine that we see him 
 "seated in his tent, on the borders of some gloomy 
 
78 The Feast of Ingathering 
 
 Pannonian forest, or Hungarian marsh; through the 
 darkness the watchfires of the enemy gleam in the 
 distance; but both among them, and in the camp 
 around him, every sound is hushed, except the tread 
 of the sentinel outside; and in that tent, long after 
 midnight, sits the patient emperor by the light of his 
 solitary lamp; and ever and anon, amid his lonely 
 musings, he pauses to write down" those words that, 
 after eighteen centuries, reprove the thoughtless in 
 gratitude of thousands of Christians far more privi 
 leged than he. 
 
 Cannon Farrar declares in his "Seekers after 
 God," concerning this same pagan emperor, that "a 
 nobler, a greater, a purer, a sweeter soul a soul more 
 fitted by virtue, and chastity, and self denial to enter 
 into the eternal peace, never passed into the presence 
 of its Heavenly Father." And I have no doubt that 
 his habit of thanksgiving, of which I have given you 
 but a single instance out of many, contributed largely 
 to the formation of his lofty character. Thanksgiving, 
 cultivated into a habit, enlarges the whole man. 
 
 It is a means of grace to the soul. It is not diffi 
 cult to change the entire current of religious experi 
 ence by the exercise of this virtue. You can pass 
 from misery to joy, or from joy to misery, by the way 
 you look at the same happenings. Try it! Think how 
 little you have, compared with what you desire; how 
 little you have, compared with some of your neighbors ; 
 how your plans have failed and your work been 
 vain, and your hopes been blasted; how much your 
 
The Feast of Ingathering 79 
 
 friend is allowed to enjoy while you grope in sorrow. 
 Try that, and see how bitter you become. Your heart 
 dies within you ! You feel like murmuring, "God does 
 not treat me as he does others, He is a hard Master." 
 All this comes out of your mode of thinking concerning 
 God s treatment of you. 
 
 Now reverse the order. Look at the bright side. 
 How many things you have that you do not deserve! 
 How much you are blessed above the blind beggar 
 standing in the street in front of your house, waiting 
 for the tardy penny of charity! How much more you 
 have than the poor creature on the hospital cot more 
 than the unfortunates that fester in tenement houses ! 
 Think how wonderfully God has blessed you in the 
 experience of knowing the Bible and the Saviour. 
 You are an heir of God ! You are a candidate for im 
 mortality! You are going to an eternal throne. You 
 have the divine chart to guide you, an accessible mercy- 
 seat to strengthen you, an open heaven to inspire you, 
 angels to accompany you, an Almighty Providence to 
 protect you, the Holy Ghost to comfort you, the Son 
 of God to pass you by all the guards and sentinels, 
 outposts and gates of Glory. And you have God 
 Almighty to be your Father! Surely God has treated 
 you better than you deserve ! How your breast warms 
 up, and you feel as if it was a boon to receive such a 
 life! 
 
 Thanksgiving is a means of Grace ! This day 
 render unto God thanksgiving! If for nothing else, 
 thank Him that He has not punished you for your 
 
80 The Feast of Ingathering 
 
 sins as you deserve; but instead of judgment has re 
 membered mercy. If the sun should fold up his beams, 
 and shut them up in his own bosom, he would die out 
 of the universe. Pour out your gratitude to the Giver 
 of all good, and shut not up your heart, lest it die 
 within you, and there be none to deliver you from the 
 body of this death ! 
 
 How manifold our reasons for thankfulness to 
 God today! We have not yet wearied His patience, 
 nor exhausted the fulness of His grace. Although some 
 of us have been carried far out, we have not yet 
 crossed the great ocean of infinite love. Its depths no 
 plummet of ours has sounded. Has pestilence walked 
 in darkness, we have escaped it; has destruction 
 wasted at noonday, it has not come nigh us. We have 
 slept unharmed while many have waked in pain. We 
 have fed to the full, while many have lacked. Our 
 hunger has been supplied from the animal kingdom, 
 by large demands from the harvest-fields, by contribu 
 tions from heavy-laden orchards, and from the wealthy 
 caverns and winding caves of the mighty deep. 
 
 For our poverty, earth has opened her varied 
 treasures ; and for our sickness, all her healing powers. 
 Sorrows have been sanctified. Losses have not crushed 
 us utterly. We have been supported in trials, rescued 
 from dangers, and kept from the power of temptation. 
 The Almighty arm has undergirded us continually. 
 His hand withdrawn, we perish! Therefore, "Return 
 unto thy rest, O my soul, for the Lord hath dealt 
 bountifully with thee. What shall I render unto the 
 
The Feast of Ingathering 81 
 
 Lord for all his benefits toward me? I will take the 
 cup of salvation, and call upon the name of the Lord. 
 I will offer to thee the sacrifice of thanksgiving, in the 
 courts of the Lord s house, in the midst of thee, O 
 Jerusalem. Praise ye the Lord." 
 
 There are those of us who are in the prime of life. 
 Thank God today for the opportunity we have of strik 
 ing strong blows for the right. There is much evil in the 
 world, but the Lord is giving us a chance to beat it 
 down. That which the old pagan Roman soldier re 
 joiced in as he struck the enemies of his country 
 the gaudium certamenis the joy of battle is ours. 
 Thank God, we have not yet been smitten dead upon 
 the field, or invalided to the hospital; but with the 
 heart s pulses leaping full high, and arms nerved to 
 might by the infallible assurance of victory, we follow 
 where the Son of God goes forth to war. 
 
 The season of the year is suggestive of change. 
 We have passed the glory of the dying autumn. The 
 forests, which a month ago were burning with the 
 gold and crimson of the oak and maple, are stripped of 
 their beauty. Some days there may yet be when 
 autumn, loath to leave, will seem to linger and mingle 
 again her warmth with winter s outward look, but the 
 coldest weather of the year is at hand. The familiar 
 voices of birds in field and grove are hushed, and sum 
 mer songsters, like fair-weather friends, are gone. 
 The fruits and corn are gathered, and the ripe grain 
 
82 The Feast of Ingathering 
 
 stands in lordly stacks around well-filled barns and 
 granaries. The season is that wherein the husband 
 man enjoys the fruit of past labors. 
 
 There are those here today in life s autumn time 
 verging well on toward the winter whose early 
 snows that never melt, have already fallen on their 
 heads in their autumn time of reward and enjoyment. 
 You have labored faithfully for your master, and now 
 he is rewarding you. You are in the Beulah Land of 
 rest and foretaste. You are veterans in His service 
 who have fought and almost won. Battles have been 
 many, but God has brought you through them all. 
 Trials have marked your pathway, but God has sanc 
 tified them to you and purified you by them. His hand 
 has held every cross. His love and wisdom has dic 
 tated, or permitted, every trial. Deep waters have 
 not overflowed you. Many sorrows have subdued and 
 sanctified your spirits, and you are only watching and 
 waiting on the further shore of life for the mystic 
 passage across the tide. We who are younger take 
 courage by your example, and thank God for a sanc 
 tified old age, and its beautiful lessons of victory and 
 trust. We repeat with reverence, as we stand in the 
 presence of you who are in the autumn-time of life, 
 "The hoary head is a crown of glory, if it be found 
 in the way of righteousness." 
 
 As with the Jews with their "feast of ingathering," 
 so with us ; today is the great household festival of the 
 year. All over the land today, great numbers of fami 
 lies will go out from the cities to the old home in the 
 
The Feast of Ingathering 83 
 
 country, or come to the town-home of some favorite 
 son or daughter. The little ones will be there of 
 course, but it is chiefly "the old boys and girls," 
 whose age is multiplying upon their frosty heads, but 
 whose hearts are young nevertheless it is chieflly 
 those who will be in their glory. 
 
 How the domestic graces will be cultivated at 
 these family gatherings. How the old affections will 
 be revived! How this festival mingles religion with 
 our best home sympathies. Gather around the old 
 fireside! Talk over old times and new times. Give 
 your opinions of things and listen to what the old folks 
 say, if they are with you yet, even though they should 
 criticise some of our new fashions somewhat. It is 
 just possible that, with all our progress, in some 
 things, they are nearer right than we are. 
 
 Cultivate family love now! Reconcile family 
 jars ! 
 
 I would not trust the man, who, without awful 
 cause, suffers himself to remain estranged from those 
 brothers of his, who in childhood slept with him in the 
 room upstairs, under the rafters next the sky, and 
 heard in the winter frost, as each told his stories be 
 fore going to sleep, the weird crackling of the beams 
 overhead. I do not see how he could hope that the 
 starlight, shinging on the other side of the roof, could 
 ever shine upon him again in benediction. 
 
 And as for casting off a child, no matter how bad 
 it became, I would follow it in its lowest fall, and up 
 against the back-door of hell, before I would do that. 
 
84 The Feast of Ingathering 
 
 God gives men these sensibilities, and woe to him that 
 hurts his noblest nature in checking them ! Let us get 
 together, if we can, and keep together God willing 
 for many and many a faithful, fond year yet ! 
 
 As we celebrate our "feast of Tabernacles" today, 
 some hearts and some households will be filled with 
 conflicting emotions. There is a feeling of sadness as 
 we think of the changes which have taken place with 
 in the year. Old associations have been broken into by 
 death. Some that have mingled with us in many such 
 annual reunions, today are absent from us, and on the 
 other shore, waiting for a better reunion. Softly and 
 tenderly be their names whispered in our heart of 
 hearts, who have gone to dwell with the immortals, 
 beyond the flood of years. "Good bye" is one of the 
 saddest of words, spoken across a chasm of days 
 or months, but there are some here who have spoken 
 it across that wider chasm which separates time and 
 eternity. Let us be thankful that it is not spoken for 
 ever. 
 
 Our departed came, with us, out from the bosom 
 of God, the source of all life. By disease or slow decay, 
 by accident, or sudden death, when it was better, He 
 removed them higher to Himself, in some other sphere 
 of being. We cannot understand it we do not need 
 to, or He would have told us. But since He is good, 
 and rules the universe for good, we doubt not it was 
 for the best. Just what is before us, where they have 
 gone, we know not, but we trust and follow on. 
 
 Just how it is with them yonder we know not, but 
 
The Feast of Ingathering 85 
 
 we have all faith that the Infinite love which was over 
 them here is over them still, and that as God led them 
 the best way here, so He will there, for He is the same 
 in all worlds. 
 
 "And nothing walks with aimless feet ; 
 And not one life shall be destroyed 
 Or cast as rubbish to the void, 
 When God has made the pile complete." 
 
 And some day, when God sees it is best, we will go 
 and be with them again. It is a very frail and thin 
 curtain that divides us from them. Perhaps even now 
 invisible fingers are drawing it aside, that some of us 
 may pass within. 
 
 So we all celebrate our Thanksgiving with joy: 
 for life and its attendant blessings; for a Christian 
 land; for health and the comforts of home; for pros 
 perity and the blessings of friendship and love; for 
 pleasant reunions with old friends; for the grace of 
 the spirit given to us under temptation; for all the 
 promises of God which have failed not in affliction 
 and bereavement; and for the good hope of a better 
 life to come. 
 
 The leaves in this autumn time have drooped 
 and died, not because the life of the trees is ceasing, 
 but because it is getting ready for another spring. This 
 feast of Tabernacles tells us of an eternal feast be 
 yond. As we look thither, our hearts swell with hope 
 and emotion. No enclosed garden, or circumscribed 
 
86 The Feast of Ingathering 
 
 forest, or lake, can uplift and enlarge the soul like the 
 onreaching stretch of the mighty ocean, or the bound 
 less plain. No view of even the greatest possible good 
 in the earthly years to come, will surcharge the soul 
 with feeling like the thought of the future life. 
 
 Today, we look beyond the material, beyond the 
 finite, beyond this earthly prison-house. "We know 
 that if our earthly house of this tabernacle were dis 
 solved, we have a building of God, a house not made 
 with hands, eternal in the heavens." Toward that 
 eternal dwelling place of the soul, our minds imagin 
 ings sometimes go out with strong desires. 
 
 "The City s shining towers we may not see, 
 With our dim, earthly vision, 
 For death, the silent warder, keeps the key, 
 That opes those gates Elysian." 
 
 "But sometimes, when adown the western sky, 
 The fiery sunset lingers, 
 The Golden gates swing inward noiselessly, 
 Unlocked by silent fingers." 
 
 "And while they stand a moment half ajar, 
 Gleams from the inner glory 
 Stream brightly through the azure vault afar, 
 And half reveal the story." 
 
The Feast of Ingathering 87 
 
 God help us all to reach that better land that 
 "land of untrodden distances" the "land that to the 
 flesh is very far off" but to the spirit very near. And 
 there, when time has gathered its ripe fruits and 
 poured them into the lap of eternity when earth has 
 garnered its harvests in the granary of heaven there, 
 at that "feast of Tabernacles," the everlasting "festival 
 of Ingathering" the marriage supper of the Lamb 
 we shall hold Thanksgiving forever. 
 
The Mediation of Character Between 
 Learning and Life. 
 
 i. 
 
 It is, I suppose, the theory of an Alumni Address, 
 that a class which has been out in the world twenty 
 years trying its ideas, ought by this time to have learn 
 ed something worth saying to young men. I accept 
 this theory; and propose as a thought of value, The 
 Mediation of Character between Learning and Life. 
 
 II. 
 
 One word preliminary, which is also a word of 
 encouragement. We have learned that College studies 
 are "practical." About this time in the year, look for 
 such advice as the following to College Graduates, 
 which I condense from a late number of the Milwaukee 
 Journal : "You are now going into work you know 
 nothing about. Burn your diplomas; they are of no 
 more value than last year s almanacs. Forget all you? 
 have learned in College as soon as you can ; it is only 
 an expensive fertilizer applied to your brains to get 
 them ready to receive the seeds of practical knowl 
 edge." 
 
 Now, in the name of the Class of 70, I wish to 
 brand all that sort of stuff as unmitigated bosh. We 
 got our Mathematics yonder; we have found them 
 
90 The Mediation of Character 
 
 practical; we have not had to forget them. We got 
 our Science there, and our Language, and our Ethics, 
 and they have staid with us; our only regret is that 
 we did not get more. These things have been our 
 foundations; a little more widely built out afterward, 
 perhaps, and somewhat higher up, I trust, but still, the 
 bases upon which we have wrought, no more to be re 
 moved from us than a man can travel away from him 
 self. 
 
 Mr. Andrew Carnegie has also lately been giving 
 a great deal of comfort to callow thinkers by saying 
 that he was "unable to see that College men had any 
 influence in affairs." Perhaps Mr. Carnegie does not 
 look upon the business of governing the country as an 
 affair of any importance. But in 1888, Senator Ingalls 
 pointed out that thirty out of seventy-six senators had 
 received a classical education; and one hundred and 
 eight, out of three hundred and thirty-three represen 
 tatives and delegates. In other words ; about two hun 
 dred thousand men out of sixty-six million have fur 
 nished one-third of the house and half of the senate of 
 the nation. 
 
 III. 
 
 No, young Gentlemen, your studies are not un 
 practical ; and they do not unfit you for real life. But 
 the question now is : By what means shall you make 
 what you know most available in every-day affairs? 
 For there is, after all, a popular idea, which is pretty 
 well founded, and which is related to the notion just 
 
The Mediation of Character 91 
 
 quoted from the newspaper and from Mr. Carnegie, 
 that there is naturally a kind of distance between 
 learning and life. The two may not always have 
 been thus apart. The Hebrew tradition seems to 
 teach that there was a time primeval when knowl 
 edge sprang up spontaneously within the bosoms 
 of men, in the midst of affairs, according to their 
 needs, without study, as when Adam instinctively 
 named the beasts according to their nature. But 
 if this were true once, it is so no longer. Learning and 
 life are now separate from each other, as Calpe and 
 Abyla, the twin Pillars of Hercules at the entrance of 
 the Mediterranean. 
 
 "They stand aloof, the scars remaining, 
 
 Like cliffs which have been rent asunder; 
 
 A dreary sea now flows between. 
 
 But neither heat, nor frost, nor thunder, 
 
 Shall wholly do away, I ween, 
 The marks of that which once hath been." 
 
 And, although parted by the sounding strait, they 
 feel the ground continuous beneath them; they know 
 their former relationship. Therefore it is the practic 
 al problem of our lives, as College men, to bring them 
 together again. And the method by which we are to 
 do this, the way in which we are to make our acquire 
 ments most practically valuable, is by uniting knowl 
 edge with characters of manliness and rectitude, of 
 high devotion to Truth and Justice. Thus will we 
 
The Mediation of Character 
 
 import learning into life, and project it into usefulness 
 among men by the dynamic influence of right person 
 ality. Milton, writing of Bradshaw, that upright, con 
 scientious and heroic Republican who presided over 
 the court which tried Charles I, says: "John Brad 
 shaw appears like a consul, from whom the fasces are 
 not to depart with the year; so that not in the tribunal 
 only, but throughout his life, you would regard him as 
 sitting in judgment upon Kings." 
 
 It is of such character that I speak; and when I 
 set forth its mediation between learning and life, I 
 am not vaunting a mere fanciful conceit. Mediation is 
 everywhere a law of the universe. The teacher medi 
 ates knowledge to the child. The actor mediates the 
 play to the audience. Music mediates to us youth, 
 and hope, and love ; books, all human experience. Na 
 ture is the mediator to us of all material good things, 
 as was recognized by the Persians when they named 
 the sun, which gives us light and heat and life, Mith 
 ras, or, The Mediator. And, last and highest of all, this 
 law of mediation is carried out between man and man, 
 in all the blessings which we bestow upon each other; 
 and between man and God, through Jesus Christ, the 
 great Mediator of every spiritual gift. 
 
 IV. 
 
 The mediation of character between learning and 
 life: What is character? Novalis said it was "a per 
 fectly educated will." And, verily, such a will has 
 power. When the wife of Concini was asked what 
 
The Mediation of Character 93 
 
 means she had used to coerce Mary of Medici, her 
 answer was : "Only that influence which every strong 
 will has over a weak one." Carlyle goes farther, and 
 teaches that character is heroism; meaning, by hero 
 ism, sincerity; and he therefore exhorts all to be 
 heroes, since all can be sincere. Luther, he says, was 
 "a true hero," because he was a sincere "son of nature 
 and of fact." And Carlyle shows us that the reason 
 we feel one man s presence, and do not feel another s, 
 is simple enough: "Truth is the summit of being: 
 Justice is the application of it to affairs ; and all indi 
 vidual natures stand upon a scale and influence us 
 according to the purity of these elements in them." 
 Less particular, but still more largely inclusive, is 
 Emerson s definition of character: "A reserved force, 
 which acts directly by presence and without means." 
 Johnson said of Burke: "If a man were to go by 
 chance at the same time with Burke under a shed to 
 shun a shower, he would say, this is an extraordinary 
 man. If Burke should go into a stable to see his 
 horse dressed, the ostler would say, we have had an 
 extraordinary man here. But if Foote had gone into 
 the stable, the ostler would have said, here has been 
 a comical fellow, but he would not have respected 
 him." Such men as Burke conquer us by force of 
 superior personality, and not by mere eloquence or 
 arms. We recognize their quality without requiring 
 proof, even as the Greeks said the higher gods could 
 be known under all disguises. "O, lole, how did you 
 know that Hercules was a God?" "Because," answer- 
 
94 The Mediation of Character 
 
 ed lole, "I was content the moment my eyes fell upon 
 him. When I beheld Theseus, I desired that I might 
 see him offer battle, or at least guide his horses in a 
 chariot-race; but Hercules did not wait for a contest; 
 he conquered whether he stood, or walked, or sat, or 
 whatever thing he did." There is nobility in the voice 
 of right character. Plato said it was "impossible not 
 to believe in the children of the divinities, although 
 they spoke without probable or necessary arguments." 
 There is an ethical character in their form and gait. 
 When the Eastern sage would test the merit of Zara- 
 thustra, he looked upon his approach and at once cried 
 out : "This form and this gait cannot lie, and nothing 
 but truth can proceed from them." But beyond speech, 
 and form and gait, charater is an incomputable force 
 which we can feel, but not describe, and which to at 
 tempt to define is like trying to paint the lightnings 
 with charcoal. Character is in the man ; that is all any 
 one can tell you about it. Nay, rather; character is 
 the man himself; see him, and you will know why he 
 succeeds, as easily as you might understand the vic 
 tories of Napoleon by looking upon him. His triumph 
 rests mathematically upon his substance; upon his 
 quality and his quantity. 
 
 V. 
 
 It comes to this, then; that, in order to proper 
 influence of learning upon life, a man must be greater 
 than that which he knows. This is what Theremin 
 means by saying that eloquence is virtue ; and Cicero, 
 by declaring it is beauty of mind. 
 
The Mediation of Character 95 
 
 Look at the miserable failure of a man who was 
 absolutely enormous in his knowledge, and yet had 
 neither virtue of character nor beauty of mind I refer 
 to Lord Bacon. You remember his Essays, his In- 
 stauratio, his Novum Organum, his writings on 
 English Law, his whole enormous philosophic labors 
 all that vast erudition which made him not the star, 
 but the risen sun in its strength, shining its splendors 
 from mid-heaven upon the closing age of the great 
 Elizabeth. You have read also the titles of his civil 
 dignities, the rounds up which he climbed the ladder 
 of fame to a place only below the King: Member of 
 the House of Commons, Knight, King s Counsel, So 
 licitor General, Attorney General, Privy Counselor, 
 Lord Keeper of the Seal, Lord High Chancelor Baron 
 Verulam, and Viscount of St. Albans. But you know 
 that other wretched record; how he ungratefully 
 turned upon the Earl of Essex, his friend and bene 
 factor, and hunted him to his death and after death; 
 how he racked the aged and venerable clergyman, 
 Peacham ; trying for the last time in a British court 
 to torture from him an admission of treason, of which 
 Bacon knew he was innocent; how, at last, he wrote 
 with his own hand twenty-three separate instances in 
 which, as judge, he had taken bribes to pervert English 
 justice ; and how he was degraded and sentenced for 
 his intolerable corruption. And then you recall Pope s 
 terrific couplet on him, impaling and holding up to 
 scorn forever mere intellectual greatness without cor 
 responding moral dignity: 
 
96 The Mediation of Character 
 
 "If parts allure thee, think how Bacon shined, 
 The wisest, brightest, meanest of mankind." 
 
 The magnitude of his knowledge but lent weight 
 and swiftness to his fall ; it was the millstone about his 
 neck that drowned him in the depths of the sea. And 
 it was from this same lack of moral greatness of char 
 acter that Danial Webster, the great expounder, be 
 came the great compounder. Ah, young gentlemen, 
 what we are, is of more significance than what we 
 know! 
 
 VI. 
 
 A person must be greater even than what he does. 
 The impression which all really great men make upon 
 us is that they are larger than their deeds of which we 
 are told. There is not enough in the recorded acts of 
 Washington to account for his influence upon his time. 
 What Carlyle tells us of Mirabeau, in his History of 
 the French Revolution, does not justify his estimate 
 of the great orator s genius; there was something 
 about Mirabeau that could not be put into history. 
 Riemer, the biographer of Goethe, tells of the benevo 
 lence of Goethe s character; and then, in proof, brings 
 forward a list of his benefactions so much money to 
 this one, so many good deeds to that. Germany 
 laughed at Riemer, for it felt that Goethe s benevo 
 lence could not be measured in that thumb-and-span 
 way ; his nature was .larger than his gifts were, or 
 could be as all true benevolence is. But let a small 
 
The Mediation of Character 97 
 
 person try to do a large deed ; he does not measure up 
 to it. It bankrupts him, and we see that he is inade 
 quate to the performance. Or let him try to say a 
 great thing; the execution is worse at the breech of the 
 gun than at the muzzle; there is not propulsive force 
 enough in the man to send the word clear of him. 
 
 VII. 
 
 If you want to move men, bring them into touch 
 with a great personality. You recollect that medieval 
 legend of the discovery of the True Cross in the time 
 of the Empress Helena. Her searchers unearthed three 
 crosses upon Mount Calvary; how should they know 
 our Saviour s? They brought a corpse, and stretched 
 it upon the first, and then upon the second; but still 
 no pulse started in the wrist and no flush kindled in its 
 cheek. But now they laid it upon the third; and at 
 once the pulse began to flutter, the blood mounted to 
 the cheek, and they knew they had found the True 
 Cross, because life had come out of it. The story is 
 but the invention of a too credulous age, and yet there 
 is in it the suggestion of truth. Bring a dead soul, a 
 dead nation, into contact with a mighty personality, 
 and it will start into life and power. Yonder is ancient 
 Israel, educated through her misery in the college of 
 her wrongs, but apathetic under her woes, until she is 
 touched by the flaming spirit of Moses. Then she 
 arises and marches through the Red Sea and howling 
 wilderness to her Canaan. There are the scattered 
 tribes of the desert, holding in common the doctrine of 
 
98 The Mediation of Character 
 
 the one God. But they are uninspired by it until Mo 
 hammed comes. His zeal enkindles theirs, and they 
 carry their conquering crescent westward, until it is 
 placed upon the spires of Cordova and lights up half 
 of continental Europe. Or again, see all Europe, com 
 pelled by the personality of Peter the Hermit, rushing 
 headlong to the land of the Saracen to rescue the Holy 
 Sepulcher. General Garfield said that to have Presi 
 dent Mark Hopkins on one end of a log in the woods, 
 and a boy on the other, was equivalent to a university 
 course. Of one of our college presidents, an acute ob 
 server remarked to me not long since : "It is a liberal 
 education to have a boy under that man s shadow for 
 four years." 
 
 VIII. 
 
 It really matters little what dogma a man holds if 
 he manifest a right character. John Wesley teaches 
 absolute Free Will; and John Calvin, absolute Divine 
 Sovereignty. Their doctrines are perfectly irrecon 
 cilable ; but both Wesley and Calvin alike are uplifting 
 men. Ignatius Loyola, the Catholic, and Martin 
 Luther, the Protestant, preach squarely into each 
 other s teeth ; but each puts a leverage under the age 
 that elevates it. Yonder in New England was Theo 
 dore Parker ; discarding Revelation for his intuition of 
 the Divine, of the just and right, and of the immortal ; 
 teaching a system of doctrine like nothing that has 
 been seen before or since in the heavens, or earth, or 
 waters under the earth ; and yet a man of moral recti- 
 
The Mediation of Character 99 
 
 tude and earnestness; "courageous and ever ready to 
 defend the weak against the strong, and to run to the 
 rescue of suffering humanity," as McCosh says; and 
 therefore a savor of life unto all with whom he came 
 in contact. And there, too, was William Ellery Chan- 
 ning; utterly unorthodox according to "my doxy;" 
 careless of the scholastic theology; unable to 
 
 " * * * distinguish and divide 
 
 A hair, twixt south and south-west side." 
 
 But he so stood for the slave when chicken- 
 hearted evangelicals trembled and hid, he so shined 
 forth in the brightness of a noble character in all his 
 life, that he raised the Christian temperature and con 
 sciousness of half a continent. 
 
 I heard a great preacher in revival meetings last 
 winter. He crossed almost every line of our traditional 
 evangelical doctrine in his sermon ; and yet, at its close, 
 forty men sprang to their feet in response to his appeal 
 to them to live a better life, moved thereto by the bet 
 ter life before them. 
 
 Will you tell me wherein has consisted the pe 
 culiar power of Jesus Christ upon men? It is not 
 especially in His words ; you can duplicate nearly all 
 He said from other and earlier sources ; and as for re 
 ducing it to a great intellectual system, you may all 
 but print it upon the fly leaves of one of your cate 
 chisms. His power dwelt in what He was, rather than 
 in what he said. "And I, if I be lifted up" not my 
 
100 The Mediation of Character 
 
 teaching first of all; not my system, pre-eminently 
 "And I, if I be lifted up, will draw all men unto Me." 
 And therefore it is, as Richter declares, that the nail- 
 pierced hands of him who hung on Calvary have lifted 
 the kingdoms from their hinges and turned aside the 
 stream of centuries from its course. It is of him that 
 Emerson (to whom I am much indebted in this ad 
 dress) writes: "The history of those gods and saints 
 which the world has written and then worshipped, are 
 documents of character. The ages have exulted in 
 the manners of a youth who was hanged at the Tyburn 
 of his nation, who, by the pure quality of his nature, 
 shed an epic splendor around the facts of his death, 
 which has transfigured every particular into a uni 
 versal symbol for the eyes of mankind." And I think 
 that if you were to bring and place here, just below 
 Jesus, the great religious leaders of the world Moses, 
 Buddah, Confucius, Zoroaster, you would see men who, 
 while they utterly contradict each other in dogma, 
 have yet uplifted mankind by the force of true charac 
 ter. You might even set in the eye of men a person of 
 such mental idiosyncrasy that, if possible, he should hold 
 that 2 plus 2 equals 20,000; and yet with due moral 
 greatness, he would move the world unto himself and 
 bold it there, as gravitation binds the stars upon the 
 bosom of God. 
 
 IX. 
 
 This is not belittling correct belief. If we were 
 asked to account for the true character of certain of 
 
The Mediation ot Character 101 
 
 these men who held false doctrines, we might say that 
 men are hardly ever logical beings ; and that, there 
 fore, the heart may be all right and the head all wrong; 
 but a larger and better way would be to say that the 
 great Spirit of all truth surrounds us on every side, and 
 finds inlets into honest souls through many a way be 
 side clear intellectual perception. Of all the mistakes 
 that flit like poisonous flies around the head of "Star- 
 eyed Science," there is none worse than to suppose 
 that knowing and feeling and willing can be separated, 
 and that we can obtain knowledge by the dry light of 
 discursive thought alone. Even ministers, whose 
 business it is to know better, sometimes fall into this 
 error. A distinguished Boston preacher some years 
 ago said: "If I could present truth as clearly as the 
 Holy Spirit, I could convert souls as easily as He." 
 It is not true. Man does not live by bread alone, and 
 he does not know by brain alone. Knowledge comes in 
 by the instincts, by the sympathies, by the desires, by 
 a kind of endosmose and exosmose through every pore 
 of our spiritual being. The human soul it not a shut 
 building, with only one entrance and that a skylight; 
 it is a vast cathedral, with many windows of stained 
 glass ; and through each, truth pours, being colored ac 
 cording to the place of entrance. A man s mind is not 
 to be separated into several different sections, and 
 such a process allotted to this; and such, to that. 
 Rather, like Milton s Spirits, that 
 
102 The Mediation of Character 
 
 * * cannot but by annihilating die, 
 
 ***** 
 
 "All heart we live, all head, all eye, all ear, 
 All intellect, all sense." 
 
 I would rather trust the instinct of a pure woman 
 to teach me what is pure, than a Socrates, sitting at the 
 feet of Aspasia. I would rather rely upon the heart of 
 a saved spirit in Heaven to tell me what is holy, than 
 all the intellects of earth. Men do not believe in God 
 because He is the outcome of a syllogism, but because 
 He is the satisfaction of the soul s hunger; and one 
 process brings just as legitimate knowledge as the 
 other. It is the miserable mistake of a mole-eyed 
 philosophy, that has just now burrowed up into the 
 sunlight, out of the ages of a defunct paganism, to in 
 sist that true knowledge can be acquired only in the 
 complete isolation of the intellectual process from all 
 feeling, volition, and choice, and so, to exalt the specu 
 lative intellect at the expense of the moral, the aesthetic, 
 the religious, and the practical, in man. Into all sin 
 cere and honest souls, the great God himself comes. 
 Through them He shines out. All such spirits may 
 say whatever their intellectual creed, 
 
 "There is an inward center in us all 
 
 Where truth abides in fulness; and to know 
 
 Rather consists in opening out a way 
 
 Whence the imprisoned splendor may escape, 
 
 Than in effecting entrance for a light, 
 Supposed to be without." 
 
The Mediation of Character 103 
 
 The intellectual creed has neither made the man, 
 nor is it the full exponent of what a man is, nor even 
 of what he believes. He really believes what he is; 
 and what he is, shows forth in his character, and has 
 been derived from a hundred sources. 
 
 X. 
 
 So my report to you, young gentlemen, is, that 
 you will yet find the plain, old-fashioned virtues of 
 common rectitude quoted at par in the world s market. 
 It is a splendid generalization of modern science that 
 all the forces which move onward the physical universe 
 are, in their last analysis, spirit forces. Physical 
 causation is the will, physical law is the habit of God. 
 It is an equally magnificent generalization that all the 
 workings of this universal will are to the one end of 
 righteousness among men. Janet, for example, in his 
 epoch-making work on "Final Causes," does but adopt 
 the conclusion of every respectable school of modern 
 thought when he declares that the great purpose in 
 nature is morality. And society does, more and more, 
 either consciously or unconsciously fall in with this 
 tendency, and goes forward in the groove which has 
 been made for it by the Author of all things. The 
 strongest forces that operate in its bosom are moral 
 forces, evoked from the deep profound of man s 
 spiritual nature, and moving on ever toward righteous 
 ness. I know that among a certain clique of babblers at 
 this time there is much uncertainty what the real bases 
 and sanctions of this righteousness shall be; and so, 
 
104 The Mediation of Character 
 
 great doubt as to whether there is any other righteous 
 ness than mere conventional utility. They have struck 
 at the old basis, that of revealed religion ; and in deny 
 ing the validity of our knowledge of God, they have 
 also torn away the foundations of any knowledge 
 whatever. Therefore, frightened by the confusion 
 wrought within their own minds, they are groping 
 about in a pitiful condition of uncertainty as to what 
 they shall believe, or teach. Matthew Arnold is the 
 Jeremiah of this small agnostic clique whose noise, 
 like that of the prarie wolves of the west, is much 
 greater than we could expect from their numbers. He 
 comes to the old Monastery of La Chartreuse. He 
 views its monks as the relics of a supernatural faith 
 that is dead, and himself as the despised prophet of 
 something yet to come he cannot undertake to say 
 what, and thus he utters his lachrymose complaint : 
 
 "Wandering between two worlds, one dead, 
 The other powerless to be born, 
 
 With nowhere yet to rest my head, 
 
 Like these on earth I wait forlorn. 
 
 Their faith, my tears the world deride ; 
 I come to shed them at their side." 
 
 "Achilles ponders in his tent; 
 
 The kings of modern thought are dumb; 
 Silent they are, though not content, 
 
 And wait to see the future come. 
 They have the grief men had of yore, 
 
 But they contend and cry no more." 
 
The Mediation of Character 105 
 
 But I have to pronounce this story that the old 
 foundations of the faith are gone all a fa^lse alarm. 
 The true Achilles he of theistic faith unshaken is 
 not pondering in his tent; he is out on the field of 
 battle, brandishing his victorious weapons, and making 
 all the shore resound as never before with his trium 
 phant shouts. It is the agnostic Hector who is doing 
 the pondering just now; for he realizes that he has re 
 ceived his death stroke at the hands of Achilles, and is 
 about to be dragged by the heels around the walls of 
 Troy. The real kings of modern thought are not 
 dumb. Upon the contrary, any intelligent survey of 
 the situation for several years past will convince one 
 it is only a set of pretended kings that are dumb ; and 
 their mouths are shut, except to groans, because the 
 real kings have discredited their pretensions, and have 
 shown the trustworthiness of the old knowledge, and 
 the old revelation, and the old righteousness, by which 
 the world is running and will continue to run. The 
 great masters in philosophy in Europe and America 
 are not of Arnold s despondent mood. They are still 
 living by those 
 
 " * * * Truths that wake 
 To perish never," * * * 
 
 and which, despite the lament of a half-hearted, super 
 ficial, temporary fashion in thought, 
 
 "Are yet the fountain light of all our day, 
 
 Are yet the master light of all our seeing." 
 
1% The Meditaion of Character 
 
 Therefore I say unto you : "Strengthen ye the 
 weak hands, and confirm the feeble knees. Say to them 
 that are of a fearful heart, be strong, fear not." We 
 young men sometimes get our noses down into our 
 books, and almost wonder if there is any truth. Such 
 weak doubts need not long exist. It so happens that 
 my home is seventeen miles inland from the ocean. 
 Sitting shut up in my study, I might in sickly mood 
 persuade myself that the ocean has dried up into a 
 stagnant pool. But when I go down to the seashore 
 and feel the thunderous crashing of the breakers on 
 the beach, or when I ascend the Ramapo Mountains 
 just back of the city where I dwell, and looking east 
 ward, behold the Atlantic still rolling onward its three 
 thousand miles of brine against the Jersey shore as it 
 always has done since creation s dawn, I realize that 
 the "great and wide sea" is there yet. And so, when 
 our souls are perplexed by the jangle of vain voices, 
 or our brains beclouded with the fogs that will some 
 times arise from overmuch study, when we doubt if 
 the spiritual verities are still abiding, let us go down 
 in experience to where we can feel across our souls 
 the wash of billows from off the shores of the unseen 
 and eternal ; or, ascending the heights of clearer 
 thought, above the mists that rise within the troubled 
 brain, let us look out ; and lo ! there rolls the all-com 
 prehending ocean still! 
 
 "So in a season of calm weather, 
 Though inland far we be, 
 
The Mediation of Character 107 
 
 Our souls catch sight of the immortal sea 
 
 Which brought us hither, 
 Can in a moment travel thither, 
 
 And see the children sport upon the shore, 
 And hear the mighty waters rolling evermore." 
 
 Young gentlemen, believe in those everlasting 
 verities the everlasting right, the everlasting true, 
 the everlasting good. Trust your lives to them! 
 Shape your characters by them! Otherwise you will 
 find many a plain, unlettered man walking off with the 
 world s prizes before you, because he has gained the 
 world s confidence. For what we want in our leaders 
 is not, first of all, ability and learning, but the power 
 to make talents and acquirements trusted. In the 
 long run, men will appoint no one to represent them, 
 whom God has not already appointed, in virtue of His 
 sterling worth, to stand as the embodiment of truth 
 and righteousness. 
 
 XL 
 
 You may tell me that genius is one thing, and 
 rectitude quite another; that talent is able to make its 
 own way in the world; that it is a law unto itself, as 
 Byron, Shelley and Poe thought ; and that decency and 
 morality will do for common people. Yes ; and the lo 
 comotive is one thing, and the track quite another; 
 but if the locomotive does not run upon the track, it 
 will go to smash ! Ability is one thing, and morality is 
 quite another; but if ability does not run upon the 
 
108 The Mediation of Character 
 
 track of morality, it will go to smash, as Byron, Shel 
 ley and Poe did! And it ought to go to smash; and 
 thank God, for the world s sake, when it does ! If a 
 man will set himself in opposition to the welfare of 
 society, and take arms against the nature of things, 
 and dash against the thick bosses of the buckler of the 
 Almighty, the best thing the universe can do is to 
 turn and crush him. 
 
 There is a great picture by Jerome, named "Thirst." 
 A vast, barren desert stretches away from the fore 
 ground, far as the eye can reach, until it blends with 
 the distant horizon. There is no tree, no shrub, nor 
 any green thing. Above is the white heat of the quiver 
 ing air and the brazen sky. In the front, just up 
 against the spectator, is a huge, gaunt lion, lying on 
 the sands by the side of what was a pool of water, 
 but is now dried away into a fetid puddle of slime. 
 That lion has once ravaged the desert and the forest; 
 at his roar all the beasts hid themselves. Now he lies 
 there; old, toothless, starving, dying of thirst by that 
 putrid slough; his tongue lolling forth and licking the 
 foul mud, in a vain effort to find one cooling drop. 
 Aesop s ass might come and kick at him; already the 
 desert eagles gather to his death. It is a parable. That 
 dying brute is but the symbol of those animal pas 
 sions and forces, which, uncontrolled by the moral 
 nature, sometimes for awhile seem to bear everything 
 gentler and better in the world down before their 
 roaring onslaught. But at last, they lie prone beside 
 the exhausted pools of passion which the heat of lust 
 
The Mediation of Character 109 
 
 has burned dry, and there perish in misery; calling, 
 like Dives in Hades, for one drop of water to cool 
 their thirst. That is the fate of high ability dominated 
 by the lower nature. It dies of its own fever ; men are 
 glad, and the world is better when it is gone. 
 
 XII. 
 
 Here, then, in Ihis breach between learning and 
 life, in this sounding strait between Calpe and Abyla, 
 we college-bred men are to take our stand. We are 
 not simply to form part of that eternal flow of duration 
 and events which, according to the old Greek Sophists, 
 endlessly goes on, having man for one of its mo 
 mentary phenomena: 
 
 "In the tides of life, in the storms of motion, 
 I toss up and down, 
 I wave hither and thither, 
 Birth and the grave, 
 An eternal ocean, 
 A waving and flowing." 
 
 These lives of ours are more than mere transient 
 apparations of The All; more than "little breezes," 
 which, 
 
 * * * dusk and shiver, 
 Through the wave that runs forever." 
 
 No, taught by our intuition of an abiding person 
 ality which is God s tuition, we may know, instead, 
 that we remain, separate from this transitory current. 
 
110 The Mediation of Character 
 
 "Yes; in the Sea of Life enisled, 
 
 With echoing straits between us thrown, 
 
 Dotting the shoreless, watery wild, 
 We mortal millions live alone. 
 
 The islands feel the enclasping flow, 
 
 And then their separate bounds they know." 
 
 And, being divided by personality from the ever- 
 flowing tide of time and circumstance, we will not yield 
 to that debasing suggestion of materialism, either, that 
 we are of the same grade of being as the mere brute 
 beasts, dominated by forces within us and without, 
 over which we have no control. In the consciousness 
 of free will, we cry with the great dramatist: 
 
 * * * I ll never 
 
 Be such a gosling as to obey mere instinct, but stand, 
 As if a man were author of himself, 
 And knew no other kin." 
 
 Nay ; even among the throng of human personali 
 ties, we will assert ourselves as individuals : 
 
 "One soul against the flesh of all mankind." 
 
 Here, then, I say, we college men are to find our 
 position ; by right character interpreting learning into 
 terms of life, and making them one. 
 
 Thus, as we have seen, we do but fall in with a 
 great law of the universe, the law of mediation, which 
 runs through monads up to men, and on through 
 Jesus up to God. We employ that incalculable force 
 which resides in just personality; which makes a man 
 
The Mediation of Character 111 
 
 greater than what he knows, or does ; which by its own 
 dynamic touch lifts other men, even though we be 
 faulty in our teaching character, which is just, not 
 withstanding occasional intellectual error, because 
 that into the Holy of Holies of the human soul, by 
 many another entrance than the brain, goes the Sheki- 
 nah of the God of Truth, dwelling with him that is of 
 an humble and contrite spirit a character which draws 
 its strength, in spite of the pale negations of doubt, 
 from firm belief in the eternal right, and true, and 
 good these imperishable verities which, as in all the 
 past, forevermore endure realities to be felt within 
 our souls by experience ; and always to be seen from 
 the uplands of clarified thought, if we do but trust our 
 power of knowing. 
 
 And we will be "practical" men. We will accept 
 the test of utility ; agreeing with Milton, 
 
 "That not to know at large of things remote 
 From use, obscure and subtle ; but to know 
 That which before us lies in daily life 
 Is the prime wisdom." 
 
 And, as "practical" men, we will believe that the 
 law of universal good-will, the first principles of truth 
 fulness, justice, and benevolence, are settled beyond 
 dispute. 
 
 "The primal duties shine aloft like stars ;" and we 
 will give ourselves to their practice; thus mediating 
 learning to life by character. 
 
The Dead Hand. 
 
 Sermon Preached at Wesley Chapel, Columbus, Ohio, 
 
 1896. 
 
 II Samuel xxiii, 10, "And his hand clave unto the 
 sword." 
 
 Eleazar was one of the three mighty men of King 
 David. With the other two he one day defied the army 
 of the Philistines, fought them, stampeded them, and 
 all that the army of Isreal had to do was to go after 
 and gather up the spoil. After the fight it was found 
 he had clenched such a grip on the sword handle, and 
 had held it so long, not daring to loose it in the hot en 
 counter, that his hand had stiffened in that position; 
 circulation and sensation had ceased; it could not let 
 go ; it was practically a dead hand. "His hand clave 
 unto the sword." Soldiers often see similar things on 
 the battlefield. Cavalry horses gallop out of the can 
 non smoke with dead riders sitting bolt upright in the 
 saddles, with one dead hand still grasping the saber, 
 and the other the bridle rein. The English officer who 
 led the charge of the Six Hundred at Balaklava came 
 back from among the Russian batteries that way. 
 
 We see something like this in other directions, and 
 it is of them that I want to speak. I am reminded of 
 
114 The Dead Hand 
 
 the grasp of the dead hand by the way some rich peo 
 ple hold onto their money in this world. They have 
 taken such a grip upon it during their years of health 
 and activity that they apparently cannot let go of it in 
 their years of senility and old age. Even sickness and 
 approaching death does not loosen their grasp. A 
 certain English minister was called to pray with a 
 dying man. He tried to take the man s hand in token 
 of their agreement in offering united prayer, but the 
 sick man withheld it, keeping it beneath the bed cov 
 ering, and the minister prayed without it. In a little 
 while the sick man died, and then they found why he 
 kept his hand under the clothes. He was holding in it, 
 with the grasp of death, a key. It was the key of the 
 safe where his money was kept. 
 
 A newspaper in Lewiston, Me., published some 
 time ago a similar story about a man in the town of 
 Durham, in that state. The man was very penurious 
 and determined. He died at an advanced age. On his 
 deathbed he kept his hands closely clasped. As he drew 
 his last breath he tightened his hold. Everybody knew 
 what he had in that hand. It was the key to the chest in 
 which he had kept his gold. As his nerveless clasp un 
 closed, the key dropped from his fingers and clattered 
 against the bedside. As if to hold it even after he was 
 dead, the miser had tied the key about his wrist by a 
 strong cord, which he grasped as long as life remained. 
 He could not take his gold with him, but he kept the 
 key. They buried him just as he was, with the key to 
 his money chest tied about his wrist. And what be- 
 
The Dead Hand 115 
 
 came of the gold? Oh, the heirs took care of that all 
 the same. They split open the chest with an ax, and 
 divided the money, and let the miser keep the key tied 
 about his wrist. He is mouldering in the grave and 
 the key is resting beside him. It was the grasp of the 
 dead hand. 
 
 Browning says he hears some men begin to doubt 
 the truth of Christianity. He has a strong argument 
 for its truth it teaches natural depravity. 
 
 The only way it can be broken helpfully for our 
 selves is to begin to break it during life and health. 
 The Christian farmer who found, under a searching 
 sermon, that he was growing too penurious and who 
 cast all the considerable amount of money he had with 
 him into the collection and then cried, "Now squirm, 
 old nature," was on the right track. The only way to 
 keep our nature from at last getting a stereotyped, 
 habitual set in penuriousness that it will carry into the 
 grave beyond is to systematically make "nature 
 squirm" by free-handed liberality until nature learns 
 to give with open-hearted generosity without squirm 
 ing. 
 
 Sometimes rich men design their money for some 
 charity but hold on to it so long that they defeat their 
 own object. They leave it to some executor by will 
 for certain purposes. Then the will is broken and the 
 purpose defeated. Men tie up their bequests some 
 times by conditions that become impossible, or invalid, 
 or foolish by the lapse of time. 
 
116 The Dead Hand 
 
 Would-be benevolent people seem often possessed 
 with the idea that all wisdom and all honesty will die 
 with them ; and so out of their graves they still reach 
 the dead hand, damaging the community with money 
 that should have been left to the enlightened and liberal 
 control of the living. 
 
 Parents sometimes try to control all their property 
 as long as they live, and then they entail it, so that 
 neither their children nor the community can get hold 
 of it. Sometimes this is a device to keep a worthless 
 set of children up in the world that ought to be al 
 lowed to go to their own place. Families are thus 
 perpetuated that are a social stench and abomination 
 in the nostrils of the community. Nature provides 
 that her carrion shall be resolved back to its original 
 element and thus benefit somebody. Men provide 
 that theirs shall be preserved to curse mankind. I 
 know of children who, left to themselves, would long 
 years ago have found their natural and appropriate 
 level in the penitentiary, who are sustained as a reek 
 ing pestilence in a certain town by their father s en 
 tailed money the power of the dead hand. 
 
 Occasionally a parent wants to found a family and 
 perpetuate his wealth as its basis, and for this reason 
 entails it. 
 
 I am glad that the constitution of Ohio prohibits 
 the entailing of property. It goes on the theory that 
 while a man is a member of society here, and account 
 able to law on earth, he has some vested rights; but 
 that it is contrary to public policy to allow beings 
 
The Dead Hand 117 
 
 who have passed into the realms of spirits and own no 
 earthly jurisdiction to control the world still. At that 
 rate the dead could soon crowd the living off the earth. 
 Men who have been "bosses" while on. earth are not to be 
 permitted still to "boss" us from heaven or the other 
 place. Occasionally the dead hand becomes an instru 
 ment of revenge. People want to wreak their spite up 
 on somebody and their hatred smites in their will, or an 
 old man or woman indulges in some senile whim or 
 freak that is utterly wrong. 
 
 I do not see why the command that we avenge not 
 ourselves does not apply to dying men as well as to 
 living men. I cannot help but think that injustice 
 framed and perpetuated by a will that cannot be al 
 tered when we are gone will damn deeper than injus 
 tice perpetuated while we are here where it may be 
 corrected. But perhaps the chief sphere in which the 
 dead hand has attempted to maintain its grasp is in 
 matters of religion. Money and religion are the two 
 greatest concerns of men ; one sums up all that pertains 
 to this world, and the other all that relates to the world 
 to come. Accordingly we see that one of the chief 
 tendencies of men is to keep their money for them 
 selves as long as they can and then control it after they 
 are dead if possible. But there is a still stronger pro 
 pensity to try to make other people accept their re 
 ligion while they are here and then to enforce it some 
 way upon mankind when they are gone. 
 
 Our chief method of doing this is by arranging to 
 fasten our creed upon the generation following. So, 
 
118 The Dead Hand 
 
 incorporated with their creed and church organization 
 and tenures of property and privilege, is some provision 
 that their theology shall never be changed; that any 
 body who does not accept it just as the fathers held it 
 must leave that church, must forsake the associations 
 of his childhood, must relinquish those rights of in 
 heritance which are ours in virtue of being born into 
 this world and must become a heretic and an alien. 
 
 Now, the direct consequence of such an entailed 
 creed and church is that in the next generation we 
 find a larger number of the most intelligent ministers 
 and church members who have to sophisticate their 
 understandings and consciences a little in order to 
 remain in the communion. 
 
 We find outside also in the community a large 
 class whose affections or interests have not bound 
 them quite so closely to the church of their fathers, 
 and they have drifted away because of these antiquated 
 doctrines. Some of them have had a less flexible con 
 science, or greater intelligence, than many who have 
 remained and they are outside the church because of 
 the very height of their moral development. 
 
 Then we have still another section who are trying 
 to interpret the ancient symbols in modern fashion, 
 and to bring about revision of the creed. 
 
 It will be perceived that all I have said applies only 
 to entailed churches and systems of theology. I trust 
 I have sense enough to see that systems of theology, 
 more or less complete, are necessary as a basis of 
 church organization and fellowship. A church can no 
 
The Dead Hand 119 
 
 more erect itself in society without a creed either 
 human or divine than a body can stand upright with 
 out bones. What I object to is having my grand 
 father s skeleton handed down to me to build myself 
 up around; and then if I don t like it, being told that 
 I can get out of the house and leave all my family 
 rights behind. I contend I have a right to stay in the 
 old home and to grow my own bones. I claim that 
 every generation ought to be left free, under the spirit 
 of enlightenment from heaven, to make its own the 
 ological formulas, according to the progressive de 
 velopment of God s plan of the ages. I hold that divine 
 truth is not such a rickety thing that it has to be thus 
 propped and guarded by hands reached up out of 
 graves, where their owners mouldered back to dust 
 centuries ago. 
 
 One of the chief obstacles to pure and undefiled, 
 practical Christian religion today in Christendom, is 
 the mass of effete theological dogma that has been 
 entailed by the inordinate self-conceit and blind dis 
 trust of God and man in the future which our an 
 cestors felt. This mass of dogma has gathered about 
 itself vested interests and church propetry and a vast 
 and complicated ecclesiastical machinery. It has power 
 to raise the man up who will yield to its power, and to 
 cast him down who protests. 
 
 Another form of this dead hand s grasp is seen 
 in the creation of theological seminaries which are 
 
120 The Dead Hand 
 
 committed in advance by the terms of their foundation 
 to the perpetual advocacy of a certain philosophy or 
 theological theory. 
 
 I have nothing to say against the study of philos 
 ophy or theology. It is the noblest pursuit of man, 
 next to going about doing good, as our Savior did. A 
 theological seminary left free and untrammeled to find 
 and teach the true doctrine as it is in Christ Jesus, is, 
 to my mind, one of the best things in existence. 
 
 What I object to is the erection of buildings and 
 faculties that are sworn, in advance to the advocacy of 
 some dead man s doctrines to time s latest generation. 
 Theological seminaries ought to be left free to ascer 
 tain and publish truth. I cannot have confidence in 
 the findings of professors whose "bread and butter" 
 depends upon their finding in accord with the will of 
 the founder. 
 
 It is a very significant fact that Professor Henry 
 P. Smith, with whom the Presbyterian church at Cin 
 cinnati had so much trouble because of his advocacy 
 of the higher criticism, was an independently rich man 
 by marriage. 
 
 It is further a very significant fact that Professor 
 Briggs, who was so sharp a thorn in the sides of the 
 ultra-conservative orthodoxy in New York, was in a 
 theological seminary and in a chair that did not depend 
 upon the Presbyterian church for support. 
 
 In connection with the course of these two finan 
 cially independent men, I saw it stated in the journal 
 of that church that it was always a dangerous thing 
 
The Dead Hand 121 
 
 for a professor to have means enough to support him 
 self. There was no telling whether he would teach 
 according to the creed of his church or not. 
 
 A judge in our courts cannot sit in any case where 
 his own financial interests are involved. Should the 
 judge in the courts of spiritual truth, where the case is 
 far more delicate, and the interests far higher, be made 
 any more subject to temptation? 
 
 A congressman will not legislate in a matter which 
 directly involves his own private concerns. Should 
 ministers and professors, who practically set the re 
 ligious beliefs of Christendom, be compelled to do this 
 difficult and onerous work under the direct influence of 
 self-interest? 
 
 This age needs emancipation in every way from 
 the grasp of the dead hand. In financial matters and 
 in spiritual, the children should be left free to work 
 out their own destiny. 
 
The Man With One Talent. 
 
 Sermon Preached at Wesley Chapel, Columbus, O., 
 
 1896. 
 
 Matt xxv, 25, "I was afraid, and went and hid thy 
 talent in the earth. Lo, there thou hast that is thine." 
 
 I never heard a word of praise in a sermon in 
 my life for this one talented man. He seems to have 
 few friends and has received but little sympathy. 
 But there is some good in every man, however de 
 praved, if we only stop to find it; and there is some 
 good in this man. He had at least one redeeming trait 
 of character. He did not spend his Lord s money upon 
 himself. He did not waste it in riotous living, or put 
 it in his purse for himself. He hid it away carefully in 
 the earth so that it might not be lost; and then when 
 the Lord returned he was honest enough to bring it 
 back just as he received it. 
 
 Everybody who has had trust funds embezzled, 
 or been swindled out of his money by rascals, or who 
 has ever suffered from friends who borrowed and for 
 got to pay back, will think more highly of this man if 
 he only consider his case. It is true that he says he 
 was afraid ; but then it is a mark of grace sometimes to 
 
124 The Man with One Talent 
 
 be afraid to do wrong; and this man was ahead of 
 many in these times, who seem not to be afraid of God, 
 man, or Satan. 
 
 There are worse men than this man was. Many 
 a, man would have squandered the money at once for a 
 little selfish gratification. Others would have put it 
 out at interest and when the time came for settlement 
 would have tried to bring in a bill for something or 
 other that would have eaten up both principal and in 
 terest. Thousands of the people who throw stones at 
 this man live in glass houses themselves. Of course, 
 we cannot wholly excuse him, because our Master does 
 not; but in condemning him we should be careful we 
 do not pronounce sentence upon ourselves. 
 
 Many of us cannot help feeling a good deal of 
 sympathy for this man of one talent. We have a per 
 sonal acquaintance with him; the fact is, we have 
 known him all our lives. When we undertake to say a 
 few words in his defense we are not wholly disinterest 
 ed, but are trying to buoy up our own sinking spirits. 
 
 To begin with : The man of one talent is the very 
 man who has the strongest temptation to bury his 
 talent. He is overcome by the sense of his own insig 
 nificance. He feels that he amounts to so little, that 
 if he does bury his talent, there will be no great loss. 
 So far as he can see, anything worth attaining is 
 wholly beyond his reach. He is completely cast into 
 the shade by the man with the five talents, who easily 
 makes his mark, steps to a high position of honor and 
 usefulness, and carries off the laurels. Whatever the 
 
The Man with One Talent 125 
 
 man of ability does is grandly done, and receives recog 
 nition, and it is very easy for one to use one s talents 
 under such circumstances. A hero has a hero s inspira 
 tion. But what stimulus has the man of medium en 
 dowments, when he knows that what he does is of 
 very small account, and though he may try ever so 
 hard, and do his "level best," his work will not be 
 noticed. Poor man ! If he could only become the 
 founder of a great philosophical school, or endow a 
 college, or thrill a multitude with eloquence, he would 
 then have something to inspire him to a life of activity. 
 As it is, he feels crushed and disheartened, and goes 
 and buries his poor talent with a sigh, or perhaps a 
 groan of despair. 
 
 We see this one-talented man go to a religious 
 meeting with his mind made up to honor his Master by 
 a few words of public testimony. But before he has 
 had an opportunity to do so, another man has gained 
 the floor, and with oft glowing, brilliant speech tells 
 of the goodness of God and the rapture of a religious 
 experience, until the whole assembly is touched and 
 melted. How can the man of weaker endowments 
 summon the courage to speak after listening to such 
 words? His halting, hesitating speech would only 
 wear the good feeling of the meeting; and so he yields 
 to the tempetation to keep his seat, and bury his poor 
 talent. 
 
 Or perhaps he has been induced by the persuasion 
 of friends to take charge of a Bible class, and he really 
 feels that he would like to become an efficient teacher. 
 
126 The Man With One Talent 
 
 Howbeit, after several trials, he sees that his efforts 
 are futile ; one member after another drops out of the 
 class, while those who remain are sacrcely able to dis 
 guise their listlessness and dissatisfaction. But no 
 sooner has he given up his class than some man of 
 greater ability, but with no more true devotion, ac 
 cepts the position and does the work with ease and 
 acceptance. The temptation to bury his one talent for 
 ever out of sight becomes almost irresistable with the 
 man who failed, and if any one needs help and sym 
 pathy, he does. 
 
 However, in every experience, be it ever so sad 
 and disheartening, there are some complications ; and 
 the life of the one-talented man is not wholly devoid of 
 them. Here is one: He is spared certain peculiar 
 temptations that assail every man of brilliant abilities. 
 It is difficult for such a man to keep his motives pure. 
 The praises of men are apt to turn his head, and before 
 he is aware of the fact, he is seeking their plaudits 
 rather than the approbation of God. Constantly he 
 finds himself looking for the applause of the crowd, 
 and if it does not come vigorously his heart sinks and 
 his courage fails. Many a man has been wrecked 
 morally on the shoals of popular appreciation, and has 
 come to regard the voice of the people as the voice of 
 God. The man of slender ability escapes these tempta 
 tions. 
 
 Not only so, but he is spared a great deal of 
 damaging criticism that comes to his more brilliant 
 contemporary who occupies some conspicuous position. 
 
The Man With One Talent 127 
 
 Doubtless many a public man who has received scath 
 ing criticism from his enemies looks with envy upon the 
 man whose name is not mentioned outside the narrow 
 circle of his acquaintances. The five-talented men 
 are not to be envied. The applause they get is always 
 qualified by some invidious criticism or comparison 
 that stings and rankles in the mind, spoiling every 
 moment of triumph. It should be remembered, too, 
 that the responsibilities of the man of one talent are 
 not so great. For "to whom little is given, of him little 
 is required." 
 
 Another thing ought to be a source of great com 
 fort to persons of meager talent and that is that almost 
 all of the five-talented men who have ever amounted to 
 anything have also been tempted to bury their talents. 
 Moses tampered with the napkin, and had already 
 wrapped his talents in it and was about to bury them 
 in the wilderness, when God commanded him to be 
 come the deliverer of Isreal. Moses plead a thick 
 tongue and inexperience, "Who am I, that I should go 
 unto Pharoah?" The same is true of Jeremiah. When 
 God said unto him "I have ordained thee a prophet 
 unto nations," he replied, "Ah, Lord God, behold I 
 cannot speak, for I am a child." He, too, had the nap 
 kin in his hand and wanted to bury his talent. 
 
 The fact is that the cowardice which the one-talented 
 man pleads is not felt by him alone, but is felt by 
 Moses and Jeremiah, and by all men alike, with almost 
 no exceptions. Nearly all public speakers are affected 
 with it, and the more efficient they are as public speak- 
 
128 The Man with One Talent 
 
 ers generally the more they are so affected. The very 
 nervous susceptibility which makes them acutely sen 
 sible of fear is the highest equipment for public ad 
 dress without it a preacher or teacher or lecturer 
 never succeeds, for he lacks the power to strongly feel 
 what he says and to make others feel it. 
 
 We are to bear in mind that God does not look 
 with kindly regard only upon the splendid achieve 
 ments of genius, but also upon the most humble serv 
 ice, if it is done sincerely. A cup of cold water offered 
 in Christ s name, a secret prayer, a few alms given in 
 private, none of them shall lose their reward. When 
 the Pharisees came to the treasury and threw in of 
 their abundance it elicited no remarks from the 
 Master s lips, but no sooner had the poor widow 
 deposited her gift in the treasury than it caught his at 
 tention and won a golden tribute of praise. Remember 
 what Christ said to his disciples, "He that would be 
 greatest among you let him be the servant of all." God 
 does care for little, seemingly insignificant things. Not 
 a sparrow falls to the ground without his notice. He 
 made the mighty planet which swings through space ; 
 but he also made the tiny blade of grass in the meadow, 
 and with wonderful delicacy of touch painted the petals 
 of the rose and of the modest violet. And so H> cares for 
 the sweet, unobtrusive bloom of the humblest service. 
 
 So be content to seem what you are and to give 
 Him the very best service you can as you are. As 
 Beecher said some years ago : "If God made you half a 
 fool it is better that you should seem to be half a fool 
 
The Man With One Talent 129 
 
 than that you should make believe that you are wise. 
 All sorts of animals are willing to seem what they are. 
 A donkey is always willing to be thought a donkey, 
 and he honors God in it. An owl is always willing to 
 be thought an owl, and he fulfills the function given 
 him, even if he does look wiser than he is. And a man 
 should be willing to be just what God has made him. 
 Not that he should not desire to increase, to augment 
 his talents ; not that he should not put his money out 
 at interest, but a man who is ignorant had better admit 
 himself to be ignorant. A man who is not a genius 
 had better hot think himself a genius. A man who is 
 poor had better think he is poor. A man who is un 
 skilled had better admit that he is unskilled. Whatever 
 you are, while you strive for greater excellence, stand 
 on that which is true and right, and do not make your 
 self out to be more than you are. Do not attempt to 
 put on guises and pretenses in the vain hope of winning 
 praise." 
 
 It ought to be a comfort to recollect that the 
 greatest part of the world s work is done by ordinary, 
 comfortable, jog-trot sort of people after all, whom God 
 must love most of all, as Abraham Lincoln used to 
 say, because he has made so many of them. "For our 
 own part," as a writer in The Tribune, speaking on the 
 state of the times, declared, "we are willing to ac 
 knowledge in these feverish days a great yearning to 
 ward commonplace people, who write no poetry an l 
 are content with life s everyday duties. Depend upon 
 
130 The Man With One Talent 
 
 it, to this kind is the world indebted for whatever 
 happiness it may secure from wrecked hopes and dis 
 appointed ambitions." 
 
 Wordsworth was right. A woman may be too 
 bright and good for human nature s daily food. Her 
 irritating restlessness may grow to be a bother. Her 
 elegant sentimentalities may lead to nerves. She may 
 expect an impossible happiness from marriage and 
 grow morbid with disappointment. And what we say 
 of her, we may say with equal propriety of him. 
 Happy both if God vouchsafes to them the inestimable 
 blessing of obscurity and the mild lot of the majority. 
 After all these variations of natural ability, what 
 is the end of our human life? 
 
 The end of life is not to do good, though a vast 
 number f Christians think so. It is not to win souls, 
 though many say so. The end of life is to do the will 
 of God. That may be in the way of doing good or 
 winning souls or making a name, or it may not. The 
 maximum achievement of any man s life, as Professor 
 Drummond says, after it is all over is to have done 
 the will of God, be it in a high place or a low place. 
 No man or woman can have done any more with his or 
 her life ; no Luther, no Spurgeon, no Wesley, no Me- 
 lancthon, can have done any more with his life, and a 
 dairymaid or a scavenger can have done as much. 
 Therefore, the safest principle upon which we have to 
 run our lives is to adhere, through good report or ill, 
 through temptations and through prosperity or ad 
 versity, to the will of God for us. 
 
The Man With One Talent 131 
 
 The use of even a very humble order of talent may 
 be full of all blessing to our fellow-men and bring us 
 blessings from them. I am convinced that the hap 
 piness and prosperity of mankind depends far more up 
 on the one-talented people who cook our food and make 
 our beds and fashion our clothes than upon any other 
 class. We could do without the great generals and ora 
 tors and statesmen far better than we could do without 
 them. And once in a while, the doing of some com 
 monplace duty faithfully and steadily is the way to 
 the highest honor. When we are willing to put our 
 one talent to use then God sees to it that it shall 
 sometimes have a marvelous increase. 
 
The Sermon on Number in Nature 
 
 Sermon, Wesley Chapel, November 15, 1896. 
 
 Rev. J. C. Jackson, sr., delivered an interesting 
 lecture at Wesley Chapel last night. His theme was, 
 "Number in Nature," and his text, Isa., xl, 26: "Lift 
 up your eyes on high and see who hath created these, 
 that bringeth out their hosts by number." Dr Jackson 
 said: (Ohio State Journal). 
 
 The prophet bids us look upward into the skies 
 on a clear night and notice the order and proportion 
 in the movement of the heavenly bodies for a proof 
 of the existence of God. One of the chief agnostics 
 of the present time a few years ago advised those 
 who believed in God to stick to the argument from 
 design, as it was their best hold with men of common 
 sense. In the spirit of the two-fold injunction of 
 Isaiah and Professor Huxley I propose to speak of a 
 few examples of number in nature as an evidence of 
 creative wisdom and design. I believe it is easy to 
 point out such remarkable mathematical proportions 
 in the make-up of the commonest things about us that 
 the impression upon the natural, healthy, unbiased 
 mind will be irresistible that it is a Divine Creator 
 who has brought forth all by number. 
 
134 Number in Nature 
 
 God has indeed made all things by weight and 
 measures. The waters, the air, the earth, the rocks 
 and the stars have all been combined by the infinite 
 mind in definite proportions, as by a wise master 
 builder. Let us see how this is so and thus increase 
 our sense of God s being and wisdom and order. The 
 sacred writer declares that His eternal power and 
 Godhood may be plainly seen from the things that 
 are made. 
 
 First Let us begin with chemistry. In nature 
 there are some sixty or seventy so-called elementary 
 substances. Out of these all the compound substances 
 are built up. A compound substance is one that is 
 made up of two or more elementary or simple sub 
 stances. Salt or salt-petre or water are compound 
 substances. 
 
 Now all these elementary substances go into the 
 compound substances in exact proportions. Just as a 
 good cook in making bread takes the same proportion 
 of flour, yeast, salt and water every time, so does God 
 in making anything. Thus water is always eight 
 parts, by weight, of oxygen and one of hydrogen. This 
 is what chemists call the law of constant proportion. 
 In Kamschatka, in the tropics, on the summit of Chim- 
 borazo, water is always built up that way. And so 
 of everything else; always one way. With God there 
 is no variableness, neither shadow of turning. 
 
 But there is another thing still more remarkable. 
 It is the way He mixes two or more simple substances 
 
Number in Nature 135 
 
 in different proportions to form a whole series of en 
 tirely different compound substances. 
 
 Thus He makes oxygen and nitrogen, and makes 
 out of them nitrous oxyde, or laughing gas. Then He 
 uses different proportions, and gives us nitric oxide. 
 Then, dipping in His hand again, and bringing out 
 another combination, He gives us nitrous acid. An 
 other turn, and another proportion, hypo-nitric acid. 
 And then, finally, by still another proportion, nitric 
 acid, the powerful substance that will eat almost any 
 metal up the substance that Jewish pawnbrokers 
 try gold with, and that one of the illustrated papers 
 not long since pictures a Jew pouring on the pavement 
 of the new Jerusalem to see if it was really the 
 precious metal. 
 
 Five substances out of the two, by different pro 
 portions. But now comes the marvelous thing. These 
 five different substances are not made out of the two 
 at haphazard or random; as if the Infinite Chemist 
 should take three parts of one and three of the other 
 to make the first thing, and five of one and six of the 
 other to make the second thing, and seven of one and 
 eight of the other to make the third thing. No; into 
 every one goes 14 parts of the first; then, of the 
 second, he takes proportions that are obtained by dif 
 ferent multiplications of eight. In the first combina 
 tion it is fourteen and eight; in the second, it is four 
 teen, and twice eight, or sixteen; in the third, it is 
 fourteen and three times eight, or twenty-four ; in the 
 fourth, it is fourteen and four times eight, or thirty- 
 
136 Number in Nature 
 
 two; in the fifth nitric acid, it is fourteen and five 
 times eight, or forty. This is the law of multiple pro 
 portions that is, that as God builds up the higher 
 product of things, he always does. so in proportions 
 that are obtained by multiplying one or more of the 
 lower elements. So we have, first, the law of con 
 stant proportions, according to which the ingredients 
 of the different substances never vary; and, second, 
 the law of multiple proportions, according to which 
 the constant proportions go forward into the higher 
 products by a series of exact multiplications of the 
 lower ones. 
 
 And do you have any sort of an idea that God, 
 who is so careful about fixing the particles of nitrogen 
 and oxygen in just the right proportions, so that not 
 one of them is too much or too little, will not care for 
 you, oh ye of little faith? Ye are of more value than 
 a whole world full of nitric acid! 
 
 There is a third law, which to my mind is more 
 wonderful still. It is a little harder to follow than the 
 last, but by close attention, I think all can see it. It 
 conies out in this way : 
 
 Suppose God is going to make by the hands of a 
 chemist, some sulphurous acid. He takes sixteen 
 parts of sulphur by weight and eight of oxygen. That 
 gives us sulphurous acid what all the bleaching es 
 tablishments use to bleach straw, wool, silk, and the 
 like, that would be injured by chlorine. So, our first 
 
Number in Nature 137 
 
 fact is, that sixteen parts of sulphur and eight of oxy 
 gen will combine exactly with each other into a useful 
 substance. 
 
 But now suppose that some iron ore is to be made, 
 to be stored away in the earth for ages for the use of 
 man, twenty-seven parts of pure iron are mixed with 
 eight of oxygen. This is fact No. 2. 
 
 Now for No. 3. We saw that eight parts of 
 oxygen combined with sixteen of sulphur to make 
 sulphurous acid. And eight of oxygen combined with 
 twenty-seven of iron to make oixde^of iron. Now, 
 will the sixteen parts of sulphur and the twenty-seven 
 of iron, that each combines with the eight of oxygen, 
 combine with each other? In other words, can we 
 find something in chemistry that is like the law in 
 mathematics, that two magnitudes that are each equal 
 to a second magnitude, are equal to each other? Will 
 that principle hold good here? It will. For the four 
 teen of sulphur and the twenty-seven of iron go to 
 gether and make iron sulphide, which is the source of 
 sulphuretted hydrogen, of such great use in extract 
 ing metal from the ores. It is also the source of cop 
 peras, of use in dyeing. 
 
 Here, then, is what I may call a kind of triangular 
 possibility of combination of substance, each useful in 
 itself singly, and then affording new possibili 
 ties of usefulness when taken two and two a permu 
 tation of contrivance and usefulness. And any good 
 chemist can point out scores of these triangular ar 
 rangements, and show that all chemistry is built up 
 
138 Number in Nature 
 
 on the most exact laws of mathematics, and that these 
 combine and recombine, and then make cross-combi 
 nations, until the finite mind is lost in the maze of 
 calculations needed to follow the mathematics of the 
 Almighty. 
 
 Let me make a little divergence here, from which 
 the return will show that it is related to my subject. 
 The higher criticism is modifying many of our former 
 conceptions of Scripture. Scholars, theologians and 
 ministers who are abreast with the times, and bishops 
 and college presidents tell us we will have to change 
 many of our ideas as to the way in which the Bible 
 was produced and the nature of its contents. It is 
 none the less an inspired book; it is as valuable and 
 authoritative as ever for a guide in faith and morals. 
 But we are to come at its inspiration from a different 
 approach and learn the same lessons in faith and 
 morals in a different way. 
 
 Coal was none the less valuable because scien 
 tists discovered that instead of having been mixed up 
 in the crucible of nature as mortar is mixed in a vat 
 and poured into a bed prepared for it, it grew through 
 ages by the slow compacting of innumerable layers of 
 plants and trees and leaves, and that there were in it 
 lignite and stones and other substances not yet turned 
 to coal. 
 
 So with the Bible. It has grown up by leaves 
 from the Bibles of more ancient religions, edited by 
 inspired men, such as Moses and others. By the 
 blending and collating of various accounts, by addi- 
 
Number in Nature 139 
 
 tions from later hands, by successive ages contribut 
 ing their portion. God is none the less in it and over 
 it than he was in the making of coal according to the 
 new method instead of the old. For, if we are theists, 
 not to speak of being Christians, we must believe in 
 a God who is in all, through all, over all, and by 
 whom are all things, and for whom are all things; 
 blessed be His name forevermore! 
 
 But here in chemistry, in nature, is a Bible that 
 no higher critics can change our ideas of. Its mean 
 ing is plain. It is as clear as mathematics and micro 
 scopes and eyes can make it. And it spells out intelli 
 gence, design, will, wisdom, in every line, with no sub 
 tractions to be made from admixture of human error. 
 
 Second Look again at the systems of numbers 
 we discover in crystallography. 
 
 When we come to deal with mineral substances, 
 we are not handling mere unorganized lumps of dirt; 
 we are looking upon objects as regular as geometry 
 and mathematics can make them. As Davy says, "We 
 are not dealing with pebbles of pretty shapes and 
 tints, but with objects modeled by a Divine hand; and 
 every additional fact becomes to the mind a new 
 revelation of His wisdom." We find to use an ex 
 pression of Plato "God geometrizing." 
 
 In the mineral kingdom God builds up everything 
 by systems of crystallization. We have found a stone 
 in a field covered, it may be, with regular-shaped, dia 
 mond-like little bodies. Those are quartz crystals. 
 In Licking county there is a place called Flint Ridge, 
 
140 Number in Nature 
 
 where all the stones are covered with quartz crystals; 
 the farmers gather them in their yards for ornaments, 
 a heap of them in the morning sun is one of the most 
 brilliant objects you can look upon. Now, if you 
 were to be able to take apart any mineral substance 
 whatever, you would find that God had put it together 
 of a greater or less number of these regular, geometri 
 cal shaped little bodies. And each kind of mineral 
 has its own particular shaped crystal. You will not 
 find quartz-shaped crystals in iron. Iron has its own 
 shape. And so of every material. There are six great 
 systems of crystallization. They have as their base 
 or type six different geometrical figures, and each 
 system is built of crystals of that figure. And the re 
 markable thing is that these six different systems, 
 while each having an almost infinite number of per 
 mutations and varieties in itself, never runs over into, 
 and mixes up with another system, any more than 
 roses are mixed up with pinks. God is not the author 
 of confusion. Each system works into itself and com 
 bines with itself and perpetuates itself in almost end 
 less variety, but never crosses over into another any 
 more than horses cross over into cows. 
 
 Let me now give you one illustration of this 
 wonderful geometrizing of the Almighty. I went up 
 one day to the department of mineralogy in the State 
 university and asked the curator to gather me together 
 all their specimens of the mineral called fluor spar. 
 When I began to study fluor spar I discovered some 
 marvelous facts. 
 
Number in Nature 141 
 
 A perfect crystal of fluor spar has one hundred and 
 fourteen different faces or facets. Split it in any 
 way you please and you come upon some regular 
 geometrical figure. Keep on splitting it and you dis 
 cover the figures that are called for in, I know not 
 how many, demonstrations in Euclid. For example, 
 cleave off in succession one hundred and eight of its 
 one hundred and fourteen facets and you come to a 
 solid figure, a regular cube, or perfectly square figure. 
 
 See now, how singularly this cube will cut. The 
 boys who have studied geometry may recall that the 
 first proposition on the I5th Book of Euclid, is "How 
 to inscribe a regular tetrahedron in a cube," and they 
 may recollect the hours they spent in trying to do 
 that thing. But you hold this cube of fluor spar in 
 your hand and strike it a sharp blow on its edges 
 with a knife held at exactly the proper angle, and 
 your tetrahedron will come out. You will have a 
 visible demonstration right from the hand of God, 
 how to build a tetrahedron inside of a cube. 
 
 Or perhaps you have cudgled your brains in vain 
 over the third proposition of the i$th Book of Euclid: 
 "How to inscribe an octahedron in a cube." Just put 
 back on your cube certain regular sections that you 
 have removed by chipping, and you have it the Di 
 vine Mathematician s demonstration of "How to in 
 scribe an octahedron in a cube." I do not know of 
 anything anywhere out of which I can get a better 
 
142 Number in Nature 
 
 argument for a God than out of this piece of fluor 
 spar in my hand. Mind, or chance, had to contrive 
 that, and chance never did it. 
 
 And God carries out these systems of crystalliza 
 tion everywhere; in the very blood of all living 
 creatures. Columbus has been made known through 
 out the learned world by its Professor Wormley 
 were he speaking to you tonight, he would tell you 
 that the Great Creator has made even the blood of the 
 guinea pigs that our boys keep in cages, to crystallize 
 in tetrahedrons, and that of the squirrels in the state- 
 house yard in six sided plates, and that of the rats in 
 our back yards in octahedrons. God s laws of crys 
 tallization enables the chemist to tell whether the 
 blood on a knife is the blood of a beef or of a man, and 
 thus, it may be, to detect a murder. 
 
 ThirdWith one more line of illustrations of 
 number in nature, I will close. We will take it from 
 botany : 
 
 "A pleasant writer tells of a Texas gentleman who 
 had the misfortune to be an unbeliever. One day he 
 was walking in the woods reading the writings of Plato. 
 He came to where that great writer uses the phrase, 
 God geometrizing. He thought to himself, If I 
 could only see plan and order in God s works I could 
 be a believer. Just then he saw a little Texas star 
 at his feet. He picked it up and thoughtlessly began 
 to count its petals. He found there were five. He 
 counted the stamens and there were five of them. He 
 counted the divisions at the base of the fltfwer; there 
 
Number in Nature 143 
 
 were five of them. He then set about multiplying 
 these three fives to see how many chances there were 
 of a flower being brought into existence without the 
 aid of mind, and having in it these three fives. He 
 found the chances against it were one hundred and 
 twenty-five to one. He thought that was very strange. 
 He examined another flower and found it the same. 
 He multiplied one hundred and twenty-five by itself 
 to see how many chances there were against there be 
 ing two flowers having exactly this relation of num 
 bers. He found the chances against it were thirteen 
 thousand six hundred and twenty-five to one. But all 
 around him were multitudes of those little flowers 
 and they had been blooming there for years. He 
 thought this showed the order of intelligence and that 
 the mind that ordained it was God. And so he shut 
 up his book, and picked up the little flower and kissed 
 it and exclaimed, Bloom on, little flowers; sing on, 
 little birds; you have a God, and I have a God; the 
 God that made these little flowers made me. 
 
 Or consider the leaves of plants. They are not 
 scattered over the stem at hap-hazard ; they are ar 
 ranged symmetrically. You take our Indian corn; it 
 is always made so that the leaves come out opposite 
 each other, as also in the honeysuckle. Then, the 
 second set are made to come out over the intervals of 
 the first ; that is, if the first extend east and west, the 
 second will extend north and south. The third set 
 will be east and west again. So there are tw*o ranks 
 
144 Number in Nature 
 
 of leaves up and down the stem. This is called the 
 two-ranked arrangement. And corn and honey 
 suckles are always that way. 
 
 Now, suppose God is going to make a stock of 
 sedgegrass. A leaf comes out on the east side; a little 
 further up, one-third around the stem, the second; a 
 third, two-thirds around, and a little higher or three- 
 thirds around, the whole way, the fourth leaf, or di 
 rectly over the first. So the leaves of sedgegrass go 
 marching up the stem in three rows. 
 
 Well, now, take an apple tree twig. How are the 
 leaves set on? To make a long story short, it takes 
 five leaves set on, each a little above the last, until 
 the sixth leaf comes over the first, so that they go 
 marching up in five ranks. 
 
 Then there is an eight-ranked arrangement, as in 
 the common plantain, that is such a nuisance in our 
 yards. Then there is a thirteen-ranked arrangement, 
 as in the houseleek. And so they go on; next twenty- 
 one rows, then thirty-four rows, as in the pines. 
 
 But what have I been saying to you? Two ranks, 
 and three and five and eight, thirteen, twenty-one, 
 thirty-four? Do you detect the relations between 
 those numbers? Each is made up of the sum of the 
 two preceding. Two pins three equals five. Three 
 plus five equals eight. Five plus eight equals thirteen. 
 Eight plus thirteen equals twenty-one. Thirteen plus 
 twenty-one equals thirty-four. This lets us in to the 
 law that you can always determine the number of 
 
Number in Nature 145 
 
 ranks of leaves in any order of plants above the two 
 rank and three rank arrangement, by taking the sum 
 of the ranks in the two orders next below it. 
 
 Now, if you think these facts over, you will find 
 that you have also a law by which God has determin 
 ed how many leaves should be in each turn around the 
 stem. The sum of the number of leaves in a turn 
 around the stem of any two successive orders gives 
 the number of leaves in a turn around the stem in the 
 next higher order. 
 
 If you look still further you will find that the same 
 law God determined should give the number of turns 
 around the stem in every order before one leaf should 
 get above another. 
 
 Still further, you will see that the same law which 
 He adopted settled the angles at which the leaves 
 should be set in the spiral line around the stem when 
 compared with a line that ran horizontally around it. 
 
 Still further you would notice that considering 
 that light and rain must come from above, since the 
 plants are to stand closely together side by side, the 
 number of leaves, and number of turns, and the width 
 of the leaves, and the angles, are all mathematically 
 correct in order to give the plant the most light and 
 rain. You will find this true, from the broad leaved 
 corn plant, with its few leaves, and turns, and ranks, 
 and angles, to the pines with their narrow leaves, etc. 
 
 And you would find that the botanists had suc 
 ceeded in summing up the mathematics of the plants 
 in a wonderful series of fractions, in which we may 
 
146 Number in Nature 
 
 think the thoughts of God after Him, viz: One-half, 
 one-third, two-fifths, three-eighths, five-thirteenths, 
 eight-twenty-firsts, thirteen-thirty-fourths, and so on 
 the sum of each two numerators giving the next 
 higher numerator, and representing the number of 
 turns around the stem; and the sum of each two suc 
 cessive denominators giving the sum of the suceeding 
 denominator, and representing the number of leaves in 
 each turn. 
 
 We may sum it all up, as Professor Gray has done 
 in his botany: 
 
 "So the place of every leaf on every plant is fixed 
 beforehand by unerring mathematical rule. As the 
 stem grows on, leaf after leaf appears in its predes 
 tined place, producing a perfect symmetry; a sym 
 metry which manifests itself not in one single monot 
 onous pattern for all plants, but in a definite number 
 of forms, exhibited by different species, and arithme 
 tically expressed by the series of fractions, one-half, 
 one-third, two-fifths, three-eighths, five-thirteenths, 
 eight-twenty-firsts, etc., according as the formative 
 energy in its spiral course up the developing system 
 lays down at corresponding intervals two, three, five, 
 eight, thirteen or twenty-one ranks of alternate 
 leaves." (p. 75.) 
 
 And there is to me a still more amazing thing. 
 If you go down into the lowest orders of animate crea 
 tion, as distinguished from plants, the polyps in the 
 deep sea, that are so closely related to the plants that 
 we can scarcely tell them from plants the polyps, that 
 
Number in Nature 147 
 
 God seems to have evolved from a plant by putting 
 just a spark of animate life into it the polyps, that 
 down in the deep sea depths get their living by wav 
 ing their tenacles around in the food-laden water just 
 as the plant waves its leaves around in the food-laden 
 air, you will find that the branches and tentacles of 
 the polyps are set on the same great law that governs 
 the plants. 
 
 And then in the great family of spined sea- 
 creatures, the echinodermata, that correspond, on the 
 one hand, to our cactus plants and other prickly plants 
 below them on land, and to our porcupines above 
 them;*you find the spines set around them according 
 to the same laws of regularity which governs the 
 plants. 
 
 So, even in the spined fishes, which seem to be a 
 higher evolution still in what the boys call the 
 "swell-doodle" for example, along the Atlantic coast, 
 a ridiculous fish which swells itself up when pursued 
 by an enemy into a creature many times its true size, 
 with its "stickers" pointing out all over it you can 
 trace the same mathematical laws which govern the 
 plants of number in nature. 
 
 If "an undevout astronomer is mad," surely also 
 is he bereft of reason who can look into all these ex 
 amples of number in nature and account for them in 
 any other way than as the work of an intelligent, con 
 triving mind. 
 
Second Sermon on Number in Nature 
 
 Dr. J. C. Jackson, Sr., preached to a large audience 
 at Wesley Chapel last evening on "Number in Nature." 
 His text was : "Who hath measured the waters in the 
 hollow of his hand, and meted out heaven with the 
 span." Isaiah xl,i2. (Ohio State Journal). 
 
 Dr. Jackson said in substance: In the former 
 sermon on this topic we noticed a few of the exact 
 numerical relations discoverable in chemistry, mineral 
 ogy and botany. These were adduced as evidence of 
 a God of creative intelligence and wise design. Taking 
 up the theme where it was left off, we bring forward 
 a few more instances of number in the plant world, and 
 then pass on to other branches of the subject. 
 
 How many persons present know whether the 
 rows of kernels of corn on the cob are odd or even? I 
 have examined many ears to find out. I never found, 
 and I never knew of anybody who had found an ear of 
 corn with anything but an even number of rows of ker 
 nels upon it. There is corn with four rows, eight rows, ten 
 rows, twelve, fourteen, sixteen and even twenty-four 
 rows; but the botanists say that there is no cob that 
 has on it naturally five rows, or seven, or eleven, or 
 thirteen. Now, how does it happen, that in billions of 
 ears of corn that grow all over the fields of the United 
 
Number in Nature 149 
 
 States, there is never one with an odd number of rows? 
 When you see the two rows of buttons up and down a 
 coat, you say they did not happen to take that arrange 
 ment by chance. You declare that somebody put them 
 on regularly thus, and that a man would be a fool who 
 said they got on any other way. Is he any less a fool 
 who declares that all those myriads of even rows of 
 corn grains "just happened so?" 
 
 We cannot tell why there should tie an even num 
 ber; for all we can see, corn would be just as useful 
 and perfect with an odd number; but whether the 
 rows run straight up and down the cob, or are twisted 
 around it by some mishap to the ear, the even number 
 is always there. God reckons, and counts, and puts 
 those rows of corn on even for some reason no man 
 knows, in accord with exact mathematical laws. 
 
 But to be perfectly fair, I have seen a statement 
 that there is a nine-rowed variety of corn, but I cannot 
 substantiate it. But even supposing this were true 
 which is very doubtful, what would the existence of 
 an exceptional variety of corn that always invariably 
 had nine rows of kernels prove? It would establish 
 what is shown by the never-changing numbers of rows 
 on all other varieties, namely, that God makes each 
 sort in an unvarying way, and plants every kernel 
 mathematically, which proves our point. 
 
 But now, leaving the cornfield, let us make our 
 way towards the planets. Suppose that as we do so 
 we should pass again under the branches of the apple 
 tree of which we spoke last Sunday evening. As we 
 
150 Number in Nature 
 
 stop and look upward we are reminded of some things 
 that will help us to see the mathematics of God among 
 the stars. 
 
 As I stand and look at the apple tree twig I am 
 reminded of one of the famous geometrical problems 
 of the ages : thousands of years ago, geometers busied 
 themselves with the problem of drawing a pentagon, 
 or five-sided figure, inside of a circle. Like squaring 
 the circle, or expressing in figures the relation of a 
 diameter to a circumference, it sounds easy enough; 
 but let anyone do it in figures if he can. The only way 
 a pentagon can be inscribed in a circle is by a compli 
 cated process in what is called "extreme and mean 
 ratio," which is too difficult for me to make plain to a 
 popular audience, and will not be attempted. By that 
 process we can establish five approximately equi-dis- 
 tant points on a circle, and from point to point we 
 can draw our pentagon. 
 
 Now this method of using extreme and mean ratio 
 had been known for thousands of years among math 
 ematicians; but it was not suspected to have been 
 used in nature until 1849. Then, for the first time, it 
 was noticed that the leaves of the typical apple tree 
 were set on, normally and ideally, as I told you last 
 Sunday evening, around the stem of five exactly equi 
 distant points. Then in an instant it flashed upon the 
 minds of botanists that God had considered before 
 hand the principles of the pentagon inscribed in the 
 circle, and had divided the leaves upon the obscure 
 principles of extreme and mean ratio. 
 
Number in Nature 151 
 
 But this is not the point upon which I especially 
 desired to arrest your attention, to which we must now 
 come. I showed you last Sunday evening how to get 
 the number of turns around a stem before one leaf 
 came exactly above another, making a row or rank. 
 You had to take the sum of the turns in the two orders 
 or species below it; and in order to find the number 
 of leaves in such a complete turn around the stem you 
 were to take the sum of the leaves in such a turn in 
 the two orders next below. And we saw that the 
 botanists had expressed these ratios in a series of 
 fractions one - half, one-- third, two - fifths, three 
 eighths, five-thirteenths, eight-twenty-firsts, thirteen- 
 thirty-fourths, and so on. The singular thing was 
 that each numerator and denominator was the sum of 
 the two preceding numerators and denominators. 
 
 Now comes the astonishing thing. Long ago 
 astronomers, following the lead of Copernicus, estab 
 lished that the sun was the center of our solar system, 
 with the planets revolving around it in order. Then 
 they began to measure the distances between the orbits 
 of the several planets, and the times of their revolu 
 tions ; that is, how far it was from the path of one to 
 the path of another around the sun, and how many 
 days it took each to get around. Making due allow 
 ance for imperfect instruments and observations, and 
 the difficulties of the case, they found that Neptune 
 revolved around the sun in sixty-two thousand days; 
 Uranus revolved around the sun in thirty-one thou 
 sand days; Saturn, ten thousand three hundred and 
 
152 Number in Nature 
 
 thirty-three days; Jupiter, 4 thousand one hundred 
 and thirty-three days; the Asteroids, one thousand 
 five hundred and fifty, days; Mars, five hundred and 
 ninety-six days; Earth, three hundred and sixty-five 
 days and a fraction ; Venus, two hundred and twenty- 
 five days and a fraction; Mercury, eighty-seven days 
 and a fraction. 
 
 Now, the astounding fact about this series of 
 times of planetary revolution is that, starting from 
 Neptune, with its revolutions of sixty-two thousand 
 days, and going down to the smallest, Mercury, with 
 its revolution of eighty-seven days, you find by figur 
 ing that you can express the relations of these num 
 bers by the same series of fractions that we use with 
 regard to plants, and that these fractions are made up 
 in the same way as those that tell the method of God s 
 putting on the leaves. 
 
 Starting from the sixty-two thousand days of 
 Neptune, the time of Uranus is one-half that; and of 
 Saturn, the next, one-third of Uranus. Then the sum 
 of the half of Saturn and the third of Uranus (I do 
 not mean the numbers, but the fractions), gives two- 
 fifths of the time of Saturn, which is the time of 
 Jupiter. And so on clear down to Mercury, which is 
 thirteen-thirty-fourths of the time of Venus. The 
 sum of each two fractions among the stars gives the 
 fraction expressing the time of the next star. 
 
 In other words, I can go out into my back yard 
 tonight, and on the twig of the apple tree there, I may 
 
Number in Nature 153 
 
 read the law by which God makes the eternal stars 
 turn around the sun. 
 
 The great God. when he bowled forth the worlds 
 from his hand and set them to spinning round the sun 
 in space used just the same principles that he did when 
 he set the little leaves to marching around the stem of 
 the plants. The same series of figures do for both. 
 
 I showed you last Sunday night how that same 
 law went down to about the lowest organized forms 
 of animal life, the polyps beneath the deep sea waves, 
 and gave us the mathematical formulas by which their 
 branches and tentacles were set on; and how it ranged 
 on up, through the echinodermata; and then through 
 the fishes ; and then out into some of the land animals, 
 regulating their spines; and if I had time I could have 
 shown you how it doubtless plants the very hairs on 
 our heads, so that they are all numbered, and feathers 
 out the little sparrow s wings. 
 
 And now I have shown you tonight how the same 
 law mounts up into the region of the stars, and gov 
 erns the solemn march of the planets around their 
 central sun. 
 
 The leaves are marching round the stems, and 
 the stars are marching round the sun at the same 
 mathematical rates. The leaves on the stems, consid 
 ering their size and distance and angles, are at just 
 the right distances to get the sunlight ; and the planets, 
 at just the same proportionate distances, according to 
 their size and relations, are placed in the same mathe 
 matical way to best get the light of the sun. And yet 
 
154 Number in Nature 
 
 there are stark, staring fools who can tell you they 
 think all this "just happened so" "there is no God." 
 I will guarantee my friend, Dr. Richardson, has no 
 worse lunacy than that in his asylum yonder. 
 
 When we come to think of it, it is not so strange 
 that the plants in their leaving and the stars in their 
 revolving should keep time and step with each other. 
 All are parts of one great system in the Infinite mind. 
 All vegetation depends on the heavens in a way we 
 cannot fully fathom; there are subtle interrelation 
 ships between the earth and the stars relationships 
 which science as yet but guesses at, and which form 
 the slight basis of facts underlying the superstitions 
 of astrology. Everything on the world and in the 
 skies fits into something on this or that side, like the 
 parts of some great machine. What if one part were 
 left out? 
 
 There is only one possible idea I can think of, or 
 have ever read of, that really gets rid of God. It is an 
 idea that was suggested by some of the old atheistic 
 pagan philosophers, and was more recently worked 
 out by the French skeptic, Maupertuis. It is really 
 only a thinly disguised form of the doctrine that 
 everything comes by chance. It is simply this in es 
 sence, that if you set an infinite number of atoms to 
 tumbling about in infinite time, they would keep mov 
 ing on until they happened to hit into a system which 
 had in it the element of permanence, and then they 
 would stick there and go on in that system forever. 
 
Number in Nature 155 
 
 But when we look at this idea, which has doubt 
 less occurred to some of us also in our mooning hours 
 of revery, it vanishes into nothingness. Who started 
 that tumbling among the atoms? You have to assume 
 your atoms and your tumbling at the outset, which 
 begs the whole question of a God. As Martineau 
 says: "You have to crib causation and then deny the 
 debt." 
 
 And then there is this additional fallacy, there is 
 no necessity that the atoms tumbling to all eternity 
 should ever fall into a coherent shape. It is conceiv 
 able that there is a mathematical possibility they 
 might, but the merest tyro in that branch of philos 
 ophy knows that mathematical possibilities never 
 prove actual possibilities. It is a mathematical possi 
 bility, as Cicero shows in his discussion of the sub 
 ject, that a sufficient number of Greek letters shaken 
 together in an urn and tossed out might fall so as to 
 form the Iliad of Homer, but it is an eternal impossi 
 bility when tried by common sense. And so, while 
 chaos theoretically might happen to fall into the shape 
 of the universe, practically chaos don t work that 
 way. It goes on forever being chaos ; unless mind and 
 power get hold of it, as the Bible says God did, and 
 put it into shape. 
 
 And then there is this further fallacy in the no 
 tion of Maupertius. Supposing that chaos did happen 
 to fall into shape, what power is there in chaos to put 
 the clamps down on the tumbling atoms and hold 
 them in their place in the system? If they did acci- 
 
156 Number in Nature 
 
 dentally take that shape one instant they would fall 
 out of it the next, as everything does the moment God 
 lets go of it. There is inconceivably more sense in 
 the idea that a woman, by setting a lot of batter to 
 whirling in a crock, might have a perfectly-formed 
 baked sponge cake come out, all fluted along the 
 edges, just as though she had used a proper cake pan 
 and oven without employing them at all, than there 
 is sense in the idea that the tumbling atoms should 
 take the shape of the universe and stay in it without 
 the help of a God. 
 
 That such a cake should come out of a crock of 
 whirling batter is mathematically possible, but not 
 possible to the thought of anybody blessed with ordi 
 nary judgment. 
 
 (Other instances of number in nature, based upon 
 the number seven in the Bible, were given, and Dr. 
 Jackson closed as follows) : 
 
 When a boy in college, number in astronomy did 
 more to establish me in a belief in God than any other 
 thing. I trust the facts which I have brought forward 
 in these two evenings may contribute to a like end 
 with you. For my own part, with Lord Bacon, I 
 would infinitely rather believe all the fables of the Tal 
 mud than that this universal frame of nature, shot 
 through and through with the most surprising sys 
 tems of numbers, was the product of anything else 
 than an all-wise, all-contriving, all-ruling God. To 
 that God our whole being should bow. So far as we 
 can discover Him through nature or revelation, to His 
 

 Number in Nature 
 
 157 
 
 service should our lives be given. And then may we 
 be sure that in this and all the universe of worlds 
 ruled by the great One, it will be well with us in time 
 and in eternity. To Him be all glory and praise for 
 ever and ever. 
 
Biographical History. 
 
 By Mrs. Viola Chase Jackson. 
 
 My husband, John Collins Jackson, was born in 
 a plain country home near Lancaster, Ohio, February 
 8th, 1848. He was the oldest of six children having 
 three sisters and two brothers. His family on his 
 mother s side was of the Collinses of Maryland, of 
 good repute in the civic and religious history of that 
 state, and running back to before the Revolutionary 
 war. His grandfather, John Collins, was a captain in 
 the War of 1812. His great grandmother, Sarah An 
 derson, was converted to Methodism about 1782, by 
 the preaching of Freeborn Garrettson from the win 
 dow of the old jail in Cambridge, Maryland, where he 
 was imprisoned for being a Methodist. From that 
 time on the three generations were most of them 
 Methodists. 
 
 My husband s parents both having been teachers, 
 the household was accustomed to books, and became 
 possessed of a considerable library of standard works 
 in history, science, literature and theology. The at 
 mosphere of the home was religious and intellectual 
 in an unusual degree. He received his early education 
 in the country school, and owing to his love for books, 
 
160 Biographical History 
 
 he was much in advance of the average boy of his age. 
 
 When only fifteen years old, much against his 
 mother s wishes, he enlisted in Company H, I59th 
 Ohio Volunteer Infantry, as a musician, for one hun 
 dred days, May 2, 1864, and was honorably discharged 
 August 22, 1864. Serving for a time as a drummer 
 and fifer, he was next given a gun, and his record as a 
 soldier, through brief, was good. His regiment was 
 assigned to hold fortifications whose garrisons were 
 sent to the front. In a letter which he wrote to his 
 mother, as he was recovering from measles in the 
 hospital at Paterson Park, Baltimore, Maryland, he 
 said: "Mother, I know I will be protected, and taken 
 care of, for God has promised, and His promises are 
 true." In another letter which he wrote to his brother, 
 he said, "Now, Clark, while I guard the rebels away 
 from here, you and Elmer must be men and guard the 
 corn as it grows, and work in the hay and wheat. 
 Remember that you are just as useful as I am; while 
 I hold a rifle, you hold a pitchfork, or hoe, or plow, and 
 that it is just as honorable as my big Enfield is to me." 
 
 He returned from the service broken down in 
 health, and according to his physician s report, it was 
 thought he could not live long; but in that weak body 
 there was still a bravery and patriotism which ever 
 remained with him. One incident before he enlisted, 
 characteristic of his patriotic nature , I particularly 
 recall. It was related to me by his name-sake cousin. 
 The Confederate general, John Morgan, had invaded 
 Ohio, and the farmers of Fairfield county were ordered 
 
Biographical History 161 
 
 out to serve as militia. In the hay-field, where these 
 boys were working, was a man who immediately be 
 came too feeble to obey the government s summons. 
 This was an unpardonable sin, in my husband s esti 
 mation, and he declared, "So-and-So is a coward!" 
 The word was quickly carried to this man s son, about 
 the same age as my husband. He came around, and 
 supposed he would get an apology for his father by 
 saying: "Pap s a coward, ain t he, John?" But in 
 stead of embarrassing the accuser, me apology he got 
 was this : "Yes, he s a coward, and you r the son of a 
 coward!" That ended the affray. 
 
 After returning from his term of military service, 
 my husband s energy and ambition moved him to 
 have an education. He entered college at Athens, 
 Ohio, and during his years of college life he was con 
 tinually pursuing various alleged health means to 
 build himself up physically. At the age of twenty- 
 three he graduated : his record was among the highest 
 in his class. He was converted while in college, and 
 felt impressed that his life-work should be devoted to 
 the saving of souls, and the uplift of his fellow men. 
 After graduating he entered the Ohio Conference, and 
 his first appointment was at Alexandria, then a half- 
 station. He began at once, with his church-work, to 
 study for an honorary degree, and after some years 
 he received the degree of Doctor of Philosophy, from 
 the college at Evanstown, Illinois. Then another 
 course of study for the degree of Doctor of Divinity, 
 
162 Biographical History 
 
 was taken up, and in a few years he received that de 
 gree from the Ohio University, at Athens. 
 
 September I4th, 1875, he was married to Viola A. 
 Chase, youngest daughter of the late Rev. Ira Chase, 
 then a member of the Central Ohio Conference. From 
 this union, came three sons and one daughter to 
 grace and cheer the home. The oldest son, Frederick 
 Chase, had a brilliant mind, grew to manhood, gradu 
 ated from medical college when only twenty-one, went 
 to the Philippines as a lieutenant, then as captain- 
 surgeon. How proud we were of him! But Sep 
 tember 3oth, 1902, at the age of twenty-six, our 
 Heavenly Father saw fit to take him from us, and 
 when it seemed a little more than we could bear, the 
 Angel gently whispered to us and said: "Be re 
 signed, 
 
 Bear up, bear on, the end shall tell, 
 The dear Lord ordereth all things well. " 
 May I be permitted a few personal remarks in re 
 gard to my husband s character and home-life? Re 
 ferring to a past which is so dear to me, and one upon 
 which I love to think, it is not an easy task after the 
 companion of one s life has been taken away; but of 
 that noble husband and father, as brave a character as 
 lived, it may be said. He could only be appreciated 
 fully by those who knew him best and were nearest 
 and dearest to him. He was very reserved. To the 
 closest friend he had, he did not often unbosom him 
 self. He did not let even his best friends know what 
 he knew about himself. He was proud, but not vain. 
 
Biographical History 163 
 
 He never flattered any one ; he had no hypocrisy or af 
 fectation ; he had a brilliant and constructive imagina 
 tion, and a wonderful memory. In his home he was 
 tender and unselfish; his devotion as husband and 
 father will ever linger in the memory of us who are 
 left. There is a comfort and cheer that comes to us, 
 as we think of the many years we were permitted to 
 live with one so noble and brave. 
 
 My husband was pastor of some of the prominent 
 Methodist churches in the Ohio Conference, and in 
 the Wisconsin, and the Newark, N. J., Con 
 ferences. He was then transferred back to his home 
 Conference, and stationed at Wesley Chapel, Colum 
 bus, Ohio. From this church he entered into the work 
 of the Anti-Saloon League, and soon after became the 
 editor of its official organ, "The American Issue/ 
 which position he held until the day of his death. 
 
 He was a man of great courage, and knew no such 
 word as defeat. In his ministry and reform work he 
 was a firm and fearless defender of everything that 
 was right. He had a push and energy that became 
 contagious and inspired earnestness among his people. 
 It was his strong will and determination to live that 
 prolonged his life. After he was forty years of age r 
 his health continued to improve until 1905, when ex 
 cessive labor induced heart-weakness. This was 
 farther aggravated in the winter of 1908, when he was 
 taken ill with a carbuncle on his neck from which he 
 recovered only by the use of the knife, and months in 
 a hospital. His health from this time on was seriously 
 
164 Biographical History 
 
 impaired, and only his wonderful grit kept him up and 
 at work during the last ten months of his life. He was 
 not afraid to die, but wanted to live to see some farther 
 results of the great reform-work in which he was en 
 gaged, and which lay so near his heart. 
 
 Since his college days, his life had been full of 
 labor for the benefit of his fellow men. His sermons 
 always showed earnest study and great resourceful 
 ness. He was a natural reformer, and believing in 
 the work of the Anti-Saloon League, he devoted the 
 last years of his life to that cause. Up to the second 
 day before he passed away, he sent out enough edi 
 torials for three weeks to come. His brain was never 
 more active, and it was a source of great comfort to 
 him that until the last he was able to help uplift 
 humanity. 
 
 He had talked much of death and the future dur 
 ing the last months of his illness, and when the call 
 came, it seemed like not a leaf had been left unturned. 
 The day before he passed away, he felt that our 
 separation was near, and as I held his hand, and 
 smoothed his brow in the twilight, he remarked that 
 we had lived together as husband and wife nearly 
 thirty-four years, but said he felt that our time to 
 part had about come. I asked, "My dear, are you 
 ready?" and his answer was: "Yes; if I die tonight 
 I am ready; my work is done; the gospel I have 
 preached to others for almost forty years has been the 
 power of God to my own salvation." And at the dawn 
 of day, on the following morning, his spirit passed 
 
Biographical History 165 
 
 into the Great Beyond, from whence no traveler re 
 turns. This little poem best expresses the very great 
 sorrow and loss which we as a family have sustained : 
 
 "It singeth low in every heart, 
 
 We hear it, each and all 
 A song of those who answer not, 
 
 However we may call ; 
 They throng the silence of the breast, 
 
 We see them as of yore 
 The kind, the brave, the true, the sweet, 
 
 Who walk with us no more. 
 
 Tis hard to take the burden up 
 
 When these have laid it down; 
 They brightened all the joy of life, 
 
 They softened every frown; 
 But, O, tis good to think of them 
 
 When we are troubled sore; 
 Thanks be to God that such have been, 
 
 Though they are here no more. 
 
 More homelike seems the vast unknown, 
 
 Since they have entered there ; 
 To follow them were not so hard, 
 
 Wherever they may fare; 
 They cannot be where God is not, 
 
 On any sea or shore; 
 Whate er betides, Thy love abides, 
 
 Our God, forevermore." 
 
A Book of Facts 
 
 ANTI-SALOON LEAGUE YEAR BOOK 
 
 This volume is a real encyclopedia of Facts 
 and Figures relating to the Liquor Problem. 
 
 IT IS A WORK OF REFERENCE 
 
 For the minister, teacher, student, campaigner 
 and others interested in the temperance reform. 
 
 256 PAGES OF VALUABLE DATA 
 
 Containing seventy " wet " and " dry " maps; 
 reports of conditions in every state; facts and figj 
 ures from the reports of the United States Com 
 missioner of Internal Revenue; general Political, 
 Economic and Historical Aspects of the Problem. 
 
 PRICE POSTPAID 
 Paper 35 Cents Cloth 60 Cents 
 
 Send orders to auy state headquarters of tne 
 Anti-Saloon League, or to 
 
 THE AMERICAN ISSUE PUBLISHING CO., 
 
 WESTERVILLE, OHIO. 
 
JUST OFF THE PRESS 
 
 MORAL LAW and CIVIL LAW 
 
 PARTS OF THE SAME THING 
 
 BY 
 
 COL. ELI F. RITTER 
 
 of The Indianapolis Bar 
 
 Judge Noah Davis, of New York City, Ex-Chief Justice of 
 the New York Supreme Court, says of this great book : 
 
 "I have preached and tried to practice for jnany years both 
 on and off the bench the great truth so well expressed in your 
 title, for nothing can be truer than that Moral Law and Civil 
 Law are "parts of the same thing." Yet, I must say that in no 
 book or paper, or published document or judicial opinion have 
 I seen that simple axiom so well expressed, so clearly defined 
 and so admirably proved as in your book. The strength of your 
 argument lies in its clearness and simplicity, and no man can 
 read it without being convinced of its truth and soundness. 
 The strength of all human law lies in its morality, lacking that 
 it has no just element of force and is therefore no law. Law 
 commands what is right and forbids what is wrong, and when 
 it undertakes to declare that what is wrong is right and lawful, 
 the attempt fails and the right prevails." 
 
 PRICE, POSTPAID 
 Paper, SO Cents Cloth, $ 1 .OO 
 
 PUBLISHED BY 
 
 THE AMERICAN ISSUE PUBLISHING CO 
 
 WESTERVILLE, OHIO 
 
LITERATURE 
 
 The American Issue Publishing Company, at 
 Westerville, Ohio, is rapidly becoming 
 
 THE WORLD S HEADQUARTERS 
 
 for literature of all kinds, dealing with every phase 
 of the liquor problem. Special attention given 
 " hurry orders " for special campaign purposes. 
 
 Cartoons! Charts! Maps! Posters! 
 
 Nothing is more striking or more effective in 
 no-license campaigns, than well-drawn cartoons, 
 maps and general posters, which present to the 
 eye of the casual observer, an important truth at a 
 single glance. 
 
 The American Issue can furnish all such ma 
 terial, on short notice, in any quantity at reason 
 able prices. 
 
 Books! Pamphlets ! Tracts ! 
 
 The great presses of the League Publishing 
 House are constantly turning out large quantities, 
 books, pamphlets and tracts of various descrip 
 tions and sizes, which have to do with the tem 
 perance reform. 
 
 Catalog price lists will be gladly furnished on 
 application. 
 
 The American Issue Publishing Co., 
 
 WESTERVILLE, OHIO. 
 
UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA 
 LIBRARY 
 
 Due two weeks after date, 
 
 
272299 
 
 UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA LIBRARY